Being sensitive means you sometimes overinterpret or overreact to perceived criticism or judgment. It is normal to be attuned to the emotions and behaviors of others. Being too sensitive, however, can hinder your ability to function normally in your daily life.
If you tend to be a highly sensitive person, you are more likely to sense social threats. But with this high sensitivity comes increased reactivity, which might cause you to misread signals from others.
You might look for ways to avoid feeling hurt if you are overly sensitive.
Managing your sensitivity effectively can help you remain empathetic and attentive without taking things too personally.
Some ways to be less sensitive include:
Building your emotional regulation skills
Practicing mindfulness
Writing about your feelings in a journal
Not taking things personally
Accepting yourself for who you are
Becoming better at tolerating distress
The Ways to Be Less Sensitive:
Emotional regulation is the ability to control your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Having this ability allows you to manage feelings of distress and disruptive emotions. Strengthening this ability can help you feel less sensitive and put feelings in perspective before acting on them.
Mindfulness is a practice that involves learning how to focus fully on the present moment without worrying about the past or future. Evidence has found that mindfulness can have a beneficial effect on conditions that are characterized by emotional dysregulation
Journaling about your emotional experiences can be a great way to gain more insight into how you feel and respond to the events in your life. By writing down your feelings, you can better make sense of what you are experiencing.
Personalization is a cognitive bias that can often contribute to heightened sensitivity. This bias causes people to take everything personally, blaming themselves for things that are not their fault.
Highly sensitive people are also sometimes highly self-critical. By learning to be more self-accepting, people can combat the inner fear that always has them looking for signs of criticism, judgment, or rejection.
While you cannot eliminate all criticism, there are strategies you can use to improve your ability to tolerate the sting of it.
Good distress tolerance, on the other hand, would help you manage these feelings in the moment so that you can look at them with a greater perspective later on. Instead of getting upset, you might tell yourself that your friend is busy and that you’ll ask again some other time.
Tactics that can improve your distress tolerance when you are feeling overly sensitive include:
Staying busy to distract yourself from distressing emotions.
Focusing your attention on someone else instead of ruminating on negative thoughts and emotions.
Participating in an activity you enjoy to help soothe and give yourself comfort.
Doing something to inspire opposing emotions, such as watching a funny movie or reading an exciting book.
While being “too sensitive” is often viewed negatively, sensitive people have both strengths and challenges. They are good at sensing the emotions of others so they can be deeply empathetic. However, this emotional intelligence can sometimes cause them to feel overwhelmed by the feelings of others.
