Quotes About Awareness

When we decide without knowing how we came to that decision, we call this intuition, and HSPs have good (but not infallible!) intuition. When you make a decision consciously, you may notice that you are slower than others because you think over all the options so carefully. That's depth of processing too.

sensory processing sensitivity

Individuation is, above all, about being able to hear your inner voice or voices through all the inner and outer noise.

If someone caring for you became angry or dangerous, the conscious mind buried that information as too awful to acknowledge

It was as if [highly sensitive subjects] found it natural to look beyond their cultural expectations to how things "really are.

Because you're more sensitive, you don't need extra discomfort or stress around you. A situation may have been deemed safe but still be stressful for you. Likewise, others may have no problem with fluorescent lights, low levels of machine noise, or chemical odors, but you do. This is a very individual matter, even among HSPs.

A study of highly sensitive parents found that they were more affected by the level of chaos in their homes than those lacking their degree of sensitivity. Interestingly, the ratings of observers who came to each home agreed with the sensitive parents, while the less sensitive parents were apparently not experiencing the chaos as much. Maybe they were fortunate, but they were also not as able to see objectively the nature of their environment.

HSPs know all about being "too tired to sleep." They are actually too frazzled to sleep.

But what does this system really do? It takes in everything about a situation and then automatically compares the present to what has been normal and usual in the past and what should be expected in the future. If there is a mismatch, the system makes us stop and wait until we understand the new circumstance. To me this is a very significant part of being intelligent. So I prefer to give it a more positive name: the automatic pause-to-check system.

This greater awareness of the subtle tends to make you more intuitive, which simply means picking up and working through information in a semiconscious or unconscious way. The result is that you often "just know" without realizing how.

Often we can get used to stimulation. But sometimes we think we have and aren't being bothered, but suddenly feel exhausted and realize why: We have been putting up with something at a conscious level while it was actually wearing us down. Even a moderate and familiar stimulation, like a day at work, can cause an HSP to need quiet by evening. At that point, one more "small" stimulation can be the last straw.

parents to read, since even highly sensitive parents will

You are also bothered by things others may hardly notice, such as the sound of children chewing with their mouth open, jangling keys in your partner's pocket, or a bit of a whine added to a request.

It means you are aware of subtleties in your surroundings, a great advantage in many situations. It also means you are more easily overwhelmed when you have been out in a highly stimulating environment for too long, bombarded by sights and sounds until you are exhausted in a nervous-system sort of way.

Once we do notice arousal, we want to name it and know its source in order to recognize danger. And often we think that our arousal is due to fear. We do not realize that our heart may be pounding from the sheer effort of processing extra stimulation.

You have probably learned to take downtime when you need it, which is more often than others do, and avoid overstimulating environments, but only people close to you see this side of you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been extremely pleased to support the Trust's work in the Lupus Unit ever since. Personal experience also motivated me to become involved to help raise the awareness of the disease and hopefully thereby improve the speed of diagnosis.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.