The Highly Sensitive Person Quotes

“Overall, brain activation indicating empathy was stronger in HSPs than those without the trait when looking at photos of anyone’s face showing strong emotion of any type (and even more so for people close to them than strangers) and more for happy than unhappy expressions.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Fortunately things got clearer when the authors of the study looking at all twenty-nine uses—plus another study designed to look specifically for one factor versus three—concluded that yes, there are three factors within the measure, but there is an overarching basic trait measured by the overall scale. With such varied items—from sensitivity to pain, to caffeine, and to hunger to a rich inner life and conscientiousness, there were bound to be factors that clumped similar items together. But that is simply the nature of your trait! It affects everything about you. It is your “style.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Further, although the measure suggests that the trait has some similarities and associations with introversion or neuroticism, after considering these and a number of other personality variables, the results of many studies lead to the conclusion that these other measures of personality explain no more than one third of the “variance” on the HSP Scale. How you score on it is not very affected by how you might score on other personality tests. That is, knowing about your sensitivity makes a unique contribution to knowing about you.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Again, when you can only watch behaviors, sensitivity is not easy to separate from shyness, fearfulness, or in young children, just plain being difficult.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“The first published studies my husband and I did generated the self-test you have in this book and a slightly different version especially for research, called the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) Scale. This research was also intended to demonstrate that high sensitivity is not the same as introversion or “neuroticism” (professional jargon for a tendency to be depressed or excessively anxious).”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“I should add that concepts very much like sensitivity are being studied by other researchers. If you are interested in this work, you can look up terms such as biological sensitivity to context (authors will be Thomas Boyce, Bruce Ellis, and others) and orienting sensitivity (the main authors will be David Evans and Mary Rothbart).”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Second, there is now a simple, comprehensive description of the trait, “DOES,” that expresses its facets nicely. D is for depth of processing. Our fundamental characteristic is that we observe and reflect before we act. We process everything more than others do, whether we are conscious of it or not. O is for being easily over-stimulated; if you are going to pay more attention to everything, you are bound to tire sooner. E is for giving emphasis to our emotional reactions and having strong empathy, which among other things motivates us to notice and learn. S is for being sensitive to all the subtleties around us. I will say more about these four aspects of sensitivity when I discuss the research.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Psychologists have asked me (and I’m sure more only thought but didn’t ask), “How could you have discovered an entirely new trait?” The answer is that sensitivity is not new at all but just difficult to observe by watching how people behave, which is usually how psychology proceeds.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“There is the documentary Sensitive: The Untold Story and the feature film, Sensitive and in Love. There have been twice-a-year HSP Gathering Retreats, frequent international research conferences, and numerous seminars and webinars for the public on the subject in the U.S. and Europe, plus YouTube videos, books, magazines, newsletters, and websites, and all sorts of services exclusively for highly sensitive persons—most good and some, well, not as good.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“One way is to seek the point where the path directed by our greatest bliss crosses that directed by the world’s greatest need—that is, what it is willing to pay for.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Or maybe you just want to read, travel, study, or talk until you figure out the meaning of human life on this planet. It takes both types to make a world.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“unless people have some emotional reason to learn something, they do not learn it very well or at all.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“of everything that escaped others, and given you great joy and appreciation of the smallest beauties in life. As your sensitivity encountered a bigger world, it also probably gave rise to new “unreasonable” fears and phobias. Fears can increase at this age for many reasons. First, there is simple conditioning: Whatever was around when you were overaroused became associated with overarousal and so became something more to be feared. Second, you may have realized just how much was going to be expected of you, how little your hesitations would be understood.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Finally, stay in good contact with many kinds of other people, at work and elsewhere, accepting that no one person can relate to all of you. Indeed, accepting the loneliness that goes with giftedness may be the most freeing, empowering step of all. But also accept its opposite, that there’s no need to feel isolated, for everyone is gifted in some way. And then there’s the opposite truth: No one, including yourself, is special in the sense of being exempted from the universals of aging and death.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Of all the topics I cover in my seminars, vocations, making a living, and getting along at work are the most urgent concerns of many HSPs, which makes sense in some ways, since we don’t thrive on long hours, stress, and overstimulating work environments. But much of our difficulty at work, I believe, is our not appreciating our role, style, and potential contribution. This chapter therefore deals first with your place in society and your vocation’s place in your inner life. Impractical as these may sound, they actually have great practical significance. Once you understand your true vocation, your own intuition will begin to solve your specific vocational problems. (No book can do that as well for you because none can address your unique situation.) “Vocation” Is Not “Vacation” Misspelled A vocation, or calling, originally referred to being called to the religious life. Otherwise, in Western culture one did as is done in most cultures: what one’s parents did. In the Middle”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Survive and Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Or as one friend of mine put it, 'In the first twenty years we are given our curriculum. In the next twenty we study it.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“And while a difficult past may seem at first to hamper our living our life's purpose, sometimes it serve the purpose, too. Or it is the purpose—to fully experience and understand a certain kind of human problem.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“The world needs to coax more such folks into public positions. But if they don't coax us, we had better volunteer now and then.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“[…] How will you feel going to your grave without having tried?”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“But now you know the specific cause of your difficulty with [certain tasks] and can explore ways around the overarousal they create. So there's really very little that you can't do if you find a way to do it in your own style.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Think about the impact on you of not being ideal for your culture. It has to affect you—not only how others have treated you but also how you have come to treat yourself.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Much of the suffering of sensitive artists could be prevented by understanding the impact of this alternating of the low stimulation of creative isolation with the increased stimulation of public exposure...”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“Everyone has a limit as to how much information or stimulation can be taken in before getting overloaded, overstimulated, overaroused, overwhelmed, and just over! We simply reach that point sooner than others. Fortunately, as soon as we get some downtime we recover nicely.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Finally, being sensitive to the discomfort, disapproval, or anger of others probably made you quick to follow every rule as perfectly as possible, afraid to make a mistake. Being so good all the time, however, meant ignoring many of your normal human feelings—irritation, frustration, selfishness, rage. Since you were so eager to please, others could ignore your needs when, in fact, yours were often greater than theirs. This would only fuel your anger. But such feelings may have been so frightening that you buried them. The fear of their breaking out would become yet another source of “unreasonable” fears and nightmares.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“anxious HSPs almost all had troubled childhoods. Non-HSPs with troubled childhoods do not show nearly as much depression and anxiety.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Survive and Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“As you saw in chapter 2, in Rotherbart’s description of how we develop, adult humans are capable of directing attention, using willpower, and deciding to overcome a fear. If your envy is strong and you decide you want to do something, you probably can.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“selfishness, rage. Since you were so eager to please, others could ignore your needs when, in fact, yours were often greater than theirs. This would only fuel your anger. But such feelings may have been so frightening that you buried them. The fear of their breaking out would become yet another source of “unreasonable” fears and nightmares.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Most people’s feet may be tired at the end of a day in a mall or a museum, but they’re ready for more when you suggest an evening party. HSPs need solitude after such a day. They feel jangled, overaroused.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Erityisherkät voivat tiivistää kaikki etikettisäännöt kolmen sanan sääntöön: vähennä toisen ylivirittyneisyyttä. (Tai kahteen sanaan: ole ystävällinen.)”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“These women had had upsetting sexual experiences—Marsha with her brothers.”
― Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person