Steve Templin, DOM

As a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) myself I’m intimately aware of how challenging this trait can be. In my case, in addition to being highly sensitive, I’m male, and introverted (50% of HSPs are male and 70 % are introverts). What made growing up as a sensitive, introverted boy and young man even more challenging was that no one, including me, understood the trait.

While Sensory Processing Sensitivity is often viewed in terms of emotional or behavioral disruptions, its biological and general health implications are profound. Physical symptoms such as headaches, back pain, GI disturbances, or a variety other diverse chronic issues that often defy medical diagnosis or treatment are common patterns seen in HSPs. 

My personal experience of suffering from the symptoms just mentioned and more, and a lack of meaningful support from conventional medicine, lead to my personal search for healing and eventually a career as a Doctor of Oriental Medicine. Today, I’m retired from that profession but continue to teach self-regulation skills online. These are the brain and emotional balancing skills, gathered and refined over three decades, that have supported me and my patients over the years.

I commonly see two sides to this challenging issue.

First is the burden of having a brain that’s wired to experience life and emotions more intensely. Life experienced this way can easily become exhausting, overwhelming, and disheartening. There’s just too much to process, too much to carry. And adding to emotional overwhelm we can add the additional burden of judging ourselves harshly for being so different from others (80-85% of people are not highly sensitive).

The second side involves how we’re influenced by how others see and relate to us. At best, we’re not understood.

For example, a common HSP need is to require more downtime for our system to recover from being overstimulated. We may enjoy spending the day at an amusement park with friends but then have to refuse an invitation for dinner because we’ve just had enough stimulation for one day. We’re done. While the non-sensitive extrovert is recharged by an evening of conversion, the HSP can be exhausted and overwhelmed by the same activity.

Different needs, in this case the need for more recharging time, are easily misunderstood by others. The spectrum of misunderstanding the needs of the highly sensitive can range from them being simply a source of confusion, to criticism, or shaming, and bullying in the extreme. A hurtful comment that’s heard all too often by many HSPs is ‘don’t be so sensitive’, or ‘you should toughen up’.

So, the trifecta of an overly sensitive and reactive brain and nervous system, self-judgment, and the judgement or even ridicule or mistreatment from others creates stress-related brain circuitry and autonomic nervous system imbalances that can be responsible for any form of metal, emotional, or physical dysfunction. These conditions are commonly called MindBody Syndromes, or more technically, Psychophysiologic Disorders, for which conventional medicine often has few answers. Many, if not most chronic conditions are now understood to fall into this category.

Looking at pain and illness through the prism of a highly sensitive nervous system gives us a fresh perspective on what’s causing suffering and how to take responsibility for healing ourselves. Learning to view illness as a function of nervous system programming gives us new options for healing that is often impossible by medical standards. More about that below.

You’ve probably heard the expression that we teach what we most need to learn. That’s certainly true in my case. I’ve spent the last four decades overcoming a variety of physical and emotional challenges, including back pain, migraines, gastrointestinal issues, allergies, sleep disturbances, anxiety, and even panic attacks.

I share this personal information with you to let you know that we’re all in this together. Virtually everyone, highly sensitive or not, is vulnerable to these stress-induced Mindbody Syndromes.