Quotes from Elaine N. Aron

hours with their eyes closed without worrying if they are actually sleeping. Since 80 percent of sensory stimulation comes in through the eyes, just resting with your eyes closed gives you quite a break.

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.

In the first twenty years we are given our curriculum. In the next twenty we study it." For some of us that curriculum is the equivalent of graduate study at Oxford!

Whatever advice you read or hear, remember that you do not have to accept how the extraverted three-quarters of the population defines social skills—working the room, always having a good comeback, never allowing "awkward" silences. You have your own skills—talking seriously, listening well, allowing silences in which deeper thoughts can develop.

HSPs with a troubled childhood are more at risk of becoming depressed, anxious, and shy than those with a similar childhood who are not highly sensitive. But HSPs with good-enough childhoods were no more at risk than others. Another study the same year by Miriam Liss and others found the same result, mainly for depression.

It may be best not to advertise it, but keeping yourself healthy and in your right range of arousal is the first condition for helping others.

The idea of a persona goes against North American culture's admiration of openness and authenticity. Europeans have a far better grasp of the value of not saying everything that one is thinking. Yet

It is true that even when exhausted you still are providing something to those you serve. But you are out of touch with your deepest strengths, role-modeling self-destructive behavior, martyring yourself, and giving others cause for guilt. And in the end you will want to quit, like Greg, or be forced to by your body.

Business can also be seen as a work of art requiring an artist, a task of prophecy requiring a visionary, a social responsibility requiring a judge, a job of growing requiring skills like those of a farmer or parent, a challenge of educating the public requiring skills like those of a teacher, and the like.

under stress, HSCs can return to the behaviors and problems of a younger age, and when feeling good HSCs can act older than their age, so the advice for an age that your child is not may still apply right now;

Also outside of work should be the relationships that offer the safe harbor from the emotional storms created by your sensitivity. Don't look for that among your colleagues, and especially not from your supervisors. You're just too much for them to handle, and they may decide there's "something wrong with you.

In other words, expand your use of your giftedness beyond producing the most noticed ideas at work. Use it to attain greater self-insight and to gain wisdom about human beings in groups and organizations.

Stimulation is even more complicated because the same stimulus can have different meanings for different people. A crowded shopping mall at Christmastime may remind one person of happy family shopping excursions and create a warm holiday spirit. But another person may have been forced to go shopping with others, tried to buy gifts without enough money and no idea of what to purchase, had unhappy memories of past holidays, and so suffers intensely in malls at Christmas.

This book may even increase your annoyance a bit as you begin to appreciate that you are a minority whose rights to have less stimulation are generally ignored.

HSPs can be instantly aware, whether they wish to be or not, of the mood, the friendships and enmities, the freshness or staleness of the air, the personality of the one who arranged the flowers.

since any music increases stimulation, use it only when it seems to soothe you. Its purpose is to distract you. Sometimes you need to be distracted; at other times, you need to attend carefully.

Following the thinking of Carl Jung, I see each life as an individuation process, one of discovering the particular question you were put on earth to answer.

Couples in the better relationships understand the perpetual problems differently; they dialogue about them rather than fighting over them.

Many children born very sensitive are pushed hard by parents, schools, or friends to be bolder. Living in a noisy or crowded environment, growing up in a large family, or being made to be more physically active may sometimes reduce sensitivity, just as sensitive animals that are handled a great deal will sometimes lose some of their natural caution, at least with certain people or in specific situations. That the underlying trait is entirely gone, however, seems unlikely.

anxious HSPs almost all had troubled childhoods. Non-HSPs with troubled childhoods do not show nearly as much depression and anxiety.

Because people without the trait (the majority) do not understand that, they see us as timid, shy, weak, or that greatest sin of all, unsociable. Fearing these labels, we try to be like others. But that leads to our becoming overaroused and distressed. Then that gets us labeled neurotic or crazy, first by others and then by ourselves.

For HSPs, the toughest task of all may have nothing to do with renouncing the world but involve going out and being immersed in it.

when being watched, timed, or evaluated, we often cannot display our competence. Our deeper processing may make it seem that at first we are not catching on, but with time we understand and remember more than others.

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.