Ted Zeff on Highly Sensitive People

Summary

Ted Zeff explains highly sensitive people as an inborn minority whose nervous systems process stimulation, emotions, and subtle information deeply. The discussion explores the strengths and challenges of sensitivity, cultural attitudes toward it, and ways to build resilience through self-acceptance and supportive environments.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What does it mean to be a highly sensitive person?
• How can highly sensitive people manage overstimulation and stress without losing their sensitivity?
• Is high sensitivity an inborn trait or something that can be developed?
• How do family and cultural attitudes affect highly sensitive children and adults?
• What strengths are commonly associated with high sensitivity?

Key takeaways

• High sensitivity is an inborn trait found in about 20% of people.
• Sensitive people often process experiences deeply and notice details others miss.
• Sensitivity can support creativity, intuition, empathy, spirituality, and a strong sense of justice.
• Cultural expectations can shame sensitive people, especially boys and men.
• Self-acceptance and practical coping strategies help turn sensitivity into a strength.
• Supportive childhood environments can help sensitive people become especially well adjusted.
• Every highly sensitive person has a different pattern of triggers and strengths.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been over 360 of them now, and if you would like to check out previous ones, go to www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, click on the Past Interviews menu, and you’ll see them all categorized in various ways.

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My guest this hour is Ted Zeff, Ph.D. Ted is the author of The Highly Sensitive Person’s Survival Guide, The Highly Sensitive Person’s Companion, The Strong Sensitive Boy, and The Power of Sensitivity. In other words, he’s into sensitivity.

Elaine Aron, Ph.D., who’s an old friend of mine and also the author of The Highly Sensitive Person, has written the foreword to his books about sensitive people. Dr. Zeff’s books have sold more than 75,000 copies and have been translated into eight languages. He has more than 25 years’ experience counseling sensitive children and adults.

He currently teaches workshops and consults internationally on coping strategies for highly sensitive children and adults, and has given presentations around the world, in various countries and in the United States.

You might wonder why I’m interviewing Ted about this topic. One reason is that I think that—and we’ll hear what Ted has to say about this in a second—among spiritual people, the types of spiritual aspirants and people interested in spirituality, nonduality, and so on, and the types of people who would be watching this show, there’s probably a higher incidence of high sensitivity.

In fact, I was just at a conference in San Jose, the Science and Non-Duality Conference, and everyone was echoing what my experience was: We were all very overstimulated by the atmosphere. It’s a highly charged spiritual atmosphere, and there’s all this talking, and you’re running into all these people, and you’re going to all these things, and you get in bed at night and you’re buzzing, hoping you can get to sleep.

People were all resorting to melatonin and hot baths and whatnot. In any case, I think that maybe a lot of viewers of this show will relate to this topic, and Ted will have some practical advice about how to deal with being highly sensitive.

It’s not a curse; it’s a blessing.

There are all sorts of nice traits associated with it, so it’s good if you are that way, but there are ways of lessening the downside of it. So thanks, Ted. Here we are. How did you get onto this topic in the beginning? I presume you yourself are or were highly sensitive, and that’s why you got interested in it, right?

How Ted discovered high sensitivity

Ted: Absolutely. Elaine Aron, in 1996, coined the term “highly sensitive person,” and it was a term waiting to happen. Twenty percent of the population has the trait of high sensitivity, and before she coined the term, people thought there was something wrong with them because they didn’t fit in with the 80 percent majority of people.

I think it was about 2002 when I read her book, and there’s a questionnaire. You can go to Elaine’s website, hsperson.com, fill out the questionnaire, and see where you rate. Basically, I answered yes to virtually every one of the qualities of being a highly sensitive person.

I remember talking to my niece and saying, “You know, this is what I’ve been dealing with my whole life. I should write a book on this subject.” And she said, “Yeah, you should.” I said, “I think I will.”

Elaine’s book was the first one. She’s written many books as well. The Highly Sensitive Person—even in 2004, when my first book came out—had sold well over a million copies. Now it’s probably way over two million. I mean, it’s unbelievable.

On Amazon, there’s a ranking, and it’s always ranked in the top. People are just buying it because 20 percent of the population has this trait, and they always thought there was something wrong with them.

So I figured out, I said, “Well, gee, I have this trait, and I’ve been dealing with it my whole life.” My first book was called The Highly Sensitive Person’s Survival Guide. How do you cope with it?

When I wrote my book, I had met Elaine, and she wrote the foreword to it, which was some kind of great timing. Now, if you go to YouTube or Amazon and put in “highly sensitive person,” there are literally hundreds of people picking up and running with the highly sensitive trait.

But I do want to caution people right up front: Anybody who doesn’t know much about the trait of high sensitivity will come up with their own advice, and you should make sure you’re listening to someone who has some kind of qualifications, because everybody’s just doing YouTube videos about it and writing books about it.

Rick: So you write in your book that there are four facets that people who are highly sensitive have in common. Do you want to enumerate those facets for us?

Ted: Well, one thing I want to start off saying is that every highly sensitive person is different. One sensitive person might have a hard time with noise, and another sensitive person may not be bothered by it but may be bothered by job stress.

Another person can have trouble with too much overstimulation, like you mentioned at a conference. Other sensitive people can cope with it better, so everyone’s different.

Rick: Just before you start to get to those qualities, I have friends who are hypersensitive to Wi-Fi, and they can really tell when the Wi-Fi is on. They have to have it turned off.

Me.

Irene, for one.

Ted: I’ve been getting emails since my first book came out—what’s this, like 12 years ago?—saying, “I always thought there was something wrong with me. Now I know there isn’t; I just have the trait of high sensitivity.”

I’ve gotten many emails from people who have trouble with Wi-Fi and electronics, and sensitivity to anything of that nature. So again, everybody’s different.

Rick: Imagine there’s a sliding scale. There might be people who are ultra-sensitive, if we want to use that term, and others who are sort of sensitive, and others who are tough as nails. It’s not all black and white.

Ted: No. Actually, Elaine Aron says that even if you only have four of the characteristics, but they’re very profound in you, you can consider yourself to be highly sensitive.

There is a real distinction, and because I’ve been working with the trait for so long, I can usually tell, if I’m in a room with someone or interacting with someone for even just a minute, whether they have the trait or not.

Rick: Do I?

Ted: You know, it’s interesting, you saying that. When I was doing the initial research, I interviewed a friend of mine who’s very New Age and is into trying to be the new kind of man, being caring and sensitive. He was actually trying to say, when I asked him one of the questions, “Well, no, I guess I’m sensitive to that.”

When you either have a lot of the characteristics or you don’t, most of the people who consider themselves to be highly sensitive will say yes to about 80 percent of them. Noise bothers them; they have trouble with people watching them; if they hear noise somewhere, they can’t concentrate; they have trouble with job stress; they are sensitive to smells; they can’t be around anyone who has perfume on; they’ll jump in the air if a siren goes by; they can’t stand to be around violent movies; they feel pain very deeply; and they just have to have their downtime.

They can’t go nonstop. They have to have quiet time every day. They can’t just keep going.

Rick: So chances are we’re not going to find a highly sensitive person running for president anytime soon.

Ted: No.

Rick: Too bad.

Ted: Corporations tend not to be highly sensitive. Traditional allopathic medical doctors usually aren’t, although I have a friend who’s an MD, and he said it was excruciating for him to go through residency and internship.

Many, if not most, alternative healers would be highly sensitive. Therapists, writers, actors, and artists are highly sensitive in large numbers. One of the characteristics of an HSP, a highly sensitive person, is being very creative.

They also have very deep spiritual experiences. In the olden days, they would be considered the shaman or the priestly adviser. People would recognize these individuals as being able to tune into higher levels of consciousness easily.

Psychics—people who tend to be psychic and pick up on people’s energy—are highly sensitive.

🕊️ Sensitivity, spirituality, and resilience

Rick: Yeah, and these four facets you mentioned—thinking deeply, being easily overstimulated, feeling emotions, pain, and empathy so intensely, and noticing subtleties others miss—are interesting.

As I started reading this, and as I was preparing to have a discussion with you about Amma, I thought of the fact that highly spiritual people, especially extraordinarily spiritual people like her, have all those qualities. They pick up on all sorts of things the average person misses, and yet somehow have incorporated a strength along with their sensitivity that makes them impervious to pressures that even your corporate CEO or politician wouldn’t be able to bear.

How would you characterize that? Ideally, would you say that high sensitivity can and should be counterbalanced by a kind of strength that offsets the vulnerable quality it might otherwise imply?

Ted: Well, that’s what my whole first book was about. In fact, for my book The Power of Sensitivity, I collected 44 stories from people in 10 different countries about how they grew up feeling there was something wrong with them because of their sensitivity.

Through a process of either therapy or creating their own plan—for example, so they could sleep better, since a lot of people have trouble falling asleep—they were able to use it to their benefit.

There was one medical doctor from Sweden who wrote about how she could intuit what was going on with a person rather than just writing down notes such as, “Oh, you have this symptom; you have that symptom.”

I remember there was a man who wrote that he was a pilot, and because of his high sensitivity he could feel the vibration of the plane and know whether it was functioning correctly.

So there are many, many advantages, but it’s a question of being able to manage the trait of sensitivity in a society like the United States, which holds high sensitivity in very low regard, while other cultures don’t.

For example, when I wrote my book The Strong Sensitive Boy, in which I interviewed 30 men from five different countries, the men from India and Thailand—and even though it’s more subtle in Denmark, the men there as well—were not bullied or humiliated for being sensitive like the men who grew up in Canada or the United States.

There’s actually an interesting study that showed that in China, the most sensitive children were the most popular, whereas in North America, the most sensitive children were the least popular. So it’s all very culturally based in terms of how people regard the trait of sensitivity.

Rick: Interesting. Why do you suppose that is? Why do you suppose it’s different? You know, I noticed that too, in a way, when I came back from India one time. I’d been over there for about four months, and I’ve also been to the Philippines and lived there for nine months. There was a certain sort of sweet quality to the people—very gentle, very emotional, easily upset by things that the average American wouldn’t be upset by.

When I came back to the States, there was a kind of crudeness that immediately hit me when I landed, basically. There was this feeling of crudeness, which is, of course, generalizing in both cases. But why do you suppose it is that some cultures are characterized by more sensitive people than others?

Ted: Well, I think you have to look at each culture differently. In my first book, The HSP Survival Guide, I wrote about who came to America initially. These are people who wanted to say, “Let’s fight the Indians. Let’s conquer the wilderness. Let’s go out there.”

Well, a lot of people in Europe were staying there, painting great masterpieces and composing great sonatas. And I think also in Australia, which is kind of a very macho, hard culture, you had the same kind of people going there, saying, “Let’s be tough and fight.”

Rick: It’s colonized by criminals.

Ted: Criminals. I was going to say that. I didn’t want to offend any Australians.

But I think you have to look at each culture. Now, I just got back last week—a week and a half ago—from Copenhagen, where I gave a workshop about highly sensitive males. It’s interesting: Danish society, and a lot of Scandinavian cultures, are very egalitarian. It’s a very quiet country. It’s actually ideal for a sensitive person, because even where I stayed, on a busy street, you could hardly hear anything. People are bicycling and they talk quietly. It’s a very calm, peaceful place.

So a lot of it is just whatever the culture grew up in. But yet, it was more of a subtle discrimination in countries like Denmark that are a little bit more progressive. They weren’t as crude as you said, like in American culture, where if a boy shows some sensitivity, he’ll get humiliated or beaten up.

What I noticed is interesting is that there’s a study that showed infant boys are actually more reactive than infant girls. But by the time a boy reaches the age of four or five, he’s learned to repress every emotion except anger, because anger is the only emotion that’s allowed for males to express in the United States.

Picture a little boy who says, “I’m afraid,” and then he’ll have a dad or a teacher say, “Come on, be a big boy. Boys aren’t supposed to cry. Boys aren’t supposed to be afraid.” Or, “I’m sad.” You’re not supposed to show sadness. All those T-shirts with signs like, “Being strong and tough. I can handle everything.” That has had a profound, detrimental effect on our society.

The only hope for saving this planet is for more people to adopt the trait of high sensitivity, or some of its characteristics.

My belief is that the only hope for saving this planet is for more people to adopt the trait of high sensitivity, or some of its characteristics. You’re not going to see any terrorists running around with bombs strapped to them if they’re highly sensitive. You’re going to see highly sensitive people caring deeply about the environment and about the welfare of people.

Of course, one of the detriments is that the empathy is so strong. I frequently hear parents saying, “Oh, my five-year-old son or six-year-old girl will get so upset if they see another classmate being upset.”

Rick: Yeah, I’m laughing because I’m thinking about that movie The Birdcage, where Robin Williams was trying to get Nathan Lane to behave in a more manly fashion because he didn’t want their son’s parents to realize that they were a gay couple. So he’s trying to get him to act like John Wayne, and Nathan Lane is marching back and forth at this restaurant with this hat on, trying to act like John Wayne—the whole thing. Did you ever see that movie?

Ted: I did, a long time ago.

Rick: Totally hilarious. Worth watching.

Ted: But this is one misconception that’s very bad: when boys start expressing their emotions, or anything that may seem feminine, they’re immediately ostracized, humiliated, and put down as being, “What are you, a girl? What’s wrong with you?”

In my research, 90% of all the men I interviewed were heterosexual. Many gay people say, “Well, gay people are highly sensitive.” And you think of—not to sound discriminatory at all—a lot of gay people going to bars where there’s a lot of noise and stimulation. With gay people I’ve known, there’s no correlation, is what I’m saying, between your sexual preference and that inborn trait of high sensitivity, which is neurological and related to the nervous system.

Rick: So you think it’s still 20% in the gay community?

Ted: I do.

Rick: Although qualities such as appreciation of décor and things like that, and the finer sorts of sensitivities or sensibilities, are sometimes associated with gay people.

Ted: But yet there are many gay people who are macho athletes, so you can’t stereotype. And even though some might be doing that, again, it might just be people going along with it, even if they aren’t. I just think every single person—gay or straight, sensitive or nonsensitive—is an individual, and you can’t really stereotype.

Is sensitivity inborn?

Rick: Okay. So, if we read more of the qualities of high sensitivity here—creativity, intuition, spirituality, a strong sense of justice, conscientiousness, loyalty, appreciation of beauty, art, and music; Irene’s saying, “God, that’s me”; awareness of potential danger; creating positive changes in the environment; kindness, compassion, enthusiasm for life—it really seems like something one would like to have.

And so, the question is, is it something one can cultivate, or are you born with it? Certain attributes we’re born with—we can’t really develop them; they’re wired in.

Ted: Wired in. You’re born with it. It’s just the way you’re born.

You could have two siblings in a family—let’s say two brothers—and one is a non-HSP and one is an HSP. The fortunate thing is that if a sensitive person had a very supportive environment growing up, where their family, parents, and teachers were saying, “Oh, this is great that you’re sensitive and kind, that you have a sense of justice, that you care about people, and that you express your emotions,” they turn out not only emotionally adjusted, but usually even more adjusted than a non-HSP.

But let’s say there are two brothers, one a non-HSP and one an HSP, and they have an abusive parent who beats them or screams at them and humiliates them. The non-HSP brother might say, “Oh, this person is crazy.” It would affect him, but he wouldn’t take it in on such a deep level.

Meanwhile, the HSP child who is humiliated, beaten, and hurt by peers, teachers, or parents takes it in deeply, and you can end up having PTSD because it’s so traumatic.

Building resilience without losing sensitivity

Rick: Well, let’s consider a couple of questions here. We’ll take them one at a time. I’ll say them both, and then we can deal with them separately.

One is: What can the HSP do to become more impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without losing his or her sensitivity? That’s question one.

Question two is: Someone who is not very sensitive, and who rather laments that—who would like to be more sensitive, who feels like they’re kind of a clod—what can they do?

Ted: Let’s do one question at a time.

Rick: Yeah, that’s what I want to do. I just want to lay them both out, and then we’ll take them one at a time.

Ted: Okay, so say the first question again, please, Rick.

Rick: So the first one is: A highly sensitive person has a lot of difficulties because they’re so sensitive. They don’t want to lose their sensitivity, but at the same time they want to toughen up a bit so they can deal with the stresses at work or with the vicissitudes of life. So how do you bring in greater resiliency or an ability to deal with difficulties, yet not lose your sensitivity—and perhaps even enhance it, become even more sensitive?

Ted: Okay, so you’re not going to lose any other inborn trait, so you don’t have to worry about losing your sensitivity.

Rick: But doesn’t the buffeting of life sometimes blunt our sensitivities?

Ted: Okay, so wait a second. One thing I want to say that is very important is that people are shamed, especially in this culture, for being sensitive. As you’re growing up, even on a subtle level—even in Denmark, when I talked there a couple of weeks ago—people were saying it was more subtle, but they still felt shamed.

My feeling is that the best way to deal with negativity toward your sensitivity from insensitive, nonsensitive people is to love your sensitivity.

I’m going to give a very personal example from my life. I wrote the book The Highly Sensitive Person Survival Guide in 2004, and people then were saying, “You’re writing a book about sensitivity? But you’re a man. I don’t get it. Huh? Oh, that’s weird.” I felt shamed because it triggered all the sensitivity in my whole life of being shamed for being sensitive.

My publisher set me up with all these interviews with radio talk-show hosts, and Elaine Aron also verified that she had the same experience. When there were men interviewing me about the trait of sensitivity, they could not handle it, especially if there were two men saying, “You’re sensitive, yeah…” and making jokes. They couldn’t handle it.

So, with my last book, which came out a year and a half ago, The Power of Sensitivity, I have totally transformed myself. I love the fact that I’m a sensitive man. I am proud of it, and anyone who thinks otherwise and makes fun of it—there’s something wrong with them.

How did I get that?

Rick: And they’re asking for a knuckle sandwich.

Ted: Yeah, high-sensitivity boxing.

But basically, the bottom line is that for sensitive people, the more you read books on the trait, follow Facebook and Twitter, participate in social media groups, join the Yahoo chat group, attend an HSP gathering—which happens twice a year in the United States—and take part in sessions about this, the more you start accepting your trait, the more confident you’re going to become, and the less it will bother you.

So, the whole thing about how you toughen up with it: If someone humiliates me for being sensitive, there’s something wrong with them, as opposed to 14 or 15 years ago. If someone humiliated me for being sensitive then, it would re-stimulate all the humiliation I had experienced for being too sensitive as a boy growing up.

Rick: Good. Before we get on to the second part of it, which is how insensitive people become more sensitive, I want to throw in something that I bet Elaine Aron will remember if she watches this interview, which is something from physics called the Meissner effect.

The Meissner effect is a situation in which a superconducting material, which means it’s usually brought down near absolute zero and becomes a superconductor, is capable of becoming impervious to magnetic flux. In other words, it has this sort of invincible armor around it, as it were, where a magnetic flux or field can’t penetrate it.

And I’m using that as an example, thinking of someone like Amma, who has become superconducting, so to speak. She’s reached a level of coherence and attunement with cosmic intelligence, if you will, where she is, on the one hand, probably one of the most highly sensitive people you’ll ever meet, and on the other hand, able to handle it—kind of impervious to all the intensity that characterizes her life, 24/7, year after year.

So, I think that in a way, perhaps, if one cultures a deeper spirituality, one is culturing this kind of quality of being able to retain one’s sensitivity and yet take things in stride. And there are even physiological correlates to this we could talk about, in terms of the way the brainwaves work, things like galvanic skin response, where if you’re more accustomed to being open to higher consciousness or deeper consciousness, your whole physiology is less susceptible to stress. Any comments on all that?

Ted: Yeah. Well, first of all, Amma—you can’t compare Amma to anything, since you’re her sensitivity…

Rick: Well, she’s the ultimate case in point, but we don’t have to go that far.

Ted: Yeah, that’s not comparable. And when I mentioned culture a little earlier, I think of a friend of mine who’s highly sensitive and who’s from India. He was raised in an environment that, for those of you who have been to India, is extremely overstimulating. You can’t get into a culture that’s more overstimulating. The noise, everyone’s honking their horns, they’re playing the speakers at full volume, and there are the crowds, the pushing, and the smells.

So what’s interesting is that this friend of mine from India, who’s highly sensitive, was raised in that environment. The noise and all the things that would bother someone coming from the West, from a quiet environment, didn’t bother him. When he would go back to India—he lived in America—he had that memory of, “That’s how it was, so it was okay.”

Now, to answer the second part of your question, you can be very sensitive to justice, to helping the downtrodden, to caring about your relatives, your spouse, and your children—being very sensitive—but not have a finely tuned nervous system.

So, not to get political, but I think of Bernie Sanders, who is fighting for everything from justice for Native Americans to climate change, to helping people who are being abused, poor people, Black Lives Matter. He embraces all of it, and he’s not an HSP; he does not have a sensitive nervous system.

And I think of my dad, who’s passed away, who was one of the most liberal, caring, loving people. But when we’d sit in a room and a siren would go by, I would jump in the air, startled. I’d say, “Didn’t that bother you?” He’d say, “I didn’t hear anything.”

So you can be a very sensitive person but not have a neurological system that is wired that way. And in my first book, The HSP Survival Guide, I say, “Don’t become an insensitive highly sensitive person, demanding that the whole world make changes to support your sensitivity.”

Because you’ll get some people saying, “Oh, you need to go over here. This doesn’t smell good here. Oh, this noise—you need to turn everything off. I want total quiet.” So, again, you don’t want to become an insensitive, sensitive person.

Rick: Yeah, there are a number of restaurants in Fairfield, Iowa, that have been ruined by people just complaining about the spices: “Oh, I can’t eat garlic. I can’t eat onions. I can’t have curries.” So they end up with this bland food in the restaurant, and it goes out of business.

❤️ Compromise and relationships

Ted: So this brings me to another very important point, which is compromise. Elaine Aron is highly sensitive; Art Aron, her husband, who’s a researcher who collaborates with her, is non-HSP. And so, likewise, the whole key for relating to someone, whether it’s in a work situation, a partner situation, with children, anyone, or friends, is compromise.

For example, I frequently tell couples about a man I met in Copenhagen who just wrote a book about the highly sensitive family, about this Danish family where he’s totally non-highly sensitive, but his wife, his son, and his daughter are. And so they would just do things differently.

For example, you go on vacation. The HSP person, who needs their downtime, instead of immediately landing in a new city, as you could do, and starting to go to workshops, needs to stay in their room for a couple of hours and just meditate, read, or relax.

And so you’re always having to negotiate. There’s a party: okay, so you take two cars, and then the HSP can go from nine to ten and leave, while the other person can stay until one in the morning.

You go to a restaurant and compromise. You go to an early restaurant where it’s not so noisy. You don’t go to a blockbuster movie the weekend it comes out; you go to a matinee during the weekday.

So you’re always negotiating and compromising in a living situation, in a home. You want to watch TV or a DVD, so you do it with headphones so I don’t have to watch TV. Got it?

Rick: I’m laughing because that’s what we do. Not that Irene is watching something stressful, but a lot of times I’m reading spiritual books and she’s watching something with headphones.

Ted: Yeah, so you’re always compromising.

Downtime, sleep, and managing overstimulation

Rick: Yeah. Here’s a couple of questions that have come in, one from Irene and one from Dan in London. Maybe I’ll ask Dan first. He says, “I’m extremely sensitive to other people’s emotions, to the point where any slightly negative emotions from other people I often find painful. Sometimes this causes issues in my relationship because I feel it deeply if my wife is even slightly impatient or dismissive, and I find it difficult. She means nothing by this, and it’s sometimes her way of dealing with everyday issues—for example, giving less emphasis to the interaction with me and more to a practical issue such as feeding the baby or cooking food. Do you have any advice on this?”

Ted: Yeah. So first of all, I was just in London a week and a half ago, and Barbara Williams has this HSP group in the south of London. She goes all over the country, the UK, to give workshops.

I’m doing a Skype interview, actually, with a man named Andy Mort who’s an HSP. I forgot the city; it’s about 100 kilometers northeast of London, and he gives workshops. So I highly recommend, if you’re in London, that you just Google “highly sensitive person England UK” and join some group in your area where they meet. That can really help you get support.

Again, I go back to the more you accept your trait, the easier it will be for you to speak up. That’s the other big key: speaking up. HSPs are frequently humiliated for having their trait when they’re younger, and so they’re ashamed to speak up and say what they want.

For example, if your wife is doing something, don’t be ashamed to say how you’re feeling. Again, the more you start feeling confident in yourself, the easier it will be for you to deal with whatever the issue is in the relationship.

Rick: Okay, here’s Irene’s question: “Do highly sensitive people do better if they spend more time alone than most people?” She says, “I have all the characteristics of high sensitivity and find being alone helps me to cope and feel happier. It depends on the person, but often I am too keenly aware of what they are feeling and thinking, and it is not enjoyable or may be upsetting. Also, the general stimulation of being around people is just too much, particularly at night.”

Ted: Yeah. First of all, it’s not a symptom, because “symptom” may sound like it’s a disease; it’s a trait. So I would say the characteristics. You have the characteristics of being an HSP.

And yes, I tell my clients—I do interviews all over the world, Skype and phone consultations with people—you need your downtime every day, and especially in the evening.

Let’s say you can interact a little bit in the early evening, but then you’ve got to turn off all the electronics: the iPhone, the iMac, the iThis, the iThat, the iPad. Just let go of everything, especially if you’re sensitive to Wi-Fi. Turn off all electronic equipment and do things like reading spiritually uplifting books, maybe watching something that’s spiritually uplifting, a DVD, taking a warm bath, meditating, journal writing, or doing an art project.

At least an hour before going to bed, just be by yourself, doing things to relax. And every day—I tell people, and it’s hard for a lot of young couples with young kids—you need to have downtime.

The man from London sounds like he and his wife have a baby. But I tell people, if you’re working all day in an overstimulating office and you go home, there’s a man I’m working with now who’s actually the CEO of a big corporation. He’s working at a very high pressure all day. He goes home, and he’s got, I think, three stepdaughters, his daughter stays there part-time, and there’s his wife. He says there’s just no break.

I tell him, “You need to tell your family that when you get home, you’ll be more present for them if they give you a half hour to an hour of just downtime, where you’re in a room by yourself and doing something quiet. Then you’ll be recharged and centered and able to deal with all the stimulation of being with other people.”

Also, I have a CD you can download called The HSP Healing CD, and I have two visualizations. In one, you visualize armor—a white light protecting you, with nothing getting in. And I have a grounding one where you visualize roots, like the roots of a tree, growing from the bottom of your feet to the center of the earth.

Doing different activities like that to help center you is very important. And besides daily downtime, however much you can really work out, you need to spend at least once or twice a month in retreat, going into the woods. It could be for the day. It could be not in the woods, but to a lake or the ocean—somewhere where you’re in nature and quiet, at a cabin somewhere.

If you can’t get away for a full overnight, two-day weekend, at least try to spend the whole day without any electronic equipment and without interaction. I mean, you can go with a partner or friend, whatever, but agree to be in silence for most of the time.

The best exercise for a sensitive person is a walk in silence in nature.

And, by the way, the best exercise for a sensitive person is a walk in silence in nature.

Rick: Sounds good. Yeah, I mean, any kind of meditation that works should be really helpful, I should think. In my own case, having been meditating for a long time, if things are really busy, you just feel rejuvenated, refreshed, and replenished, and a lot of the fatigue and stress of the day washes away. You kind of get a fresh start. Even a lot of what you’ve been experiencing is washed away.

So, speaking of meditation again, we’ve talked about the 20 percent thing. Did I ask this? I don’t think I did. It would seem to me that with people who would be defined as spiritual people—people who are into meditation and that kind of thing—the percentage must be higher than 20. Is it?

Ted: I think so, only because one of the characteristics of having a sensitive nervous system is that you’re more open to energy. Part of the energy you’re open to is spiritual energy. People who are sensitive have very deep, profound dreams, kind of like from a Jungian perspective. As I said earlier, they’d be considered shamans, because they can tune into energy, like psychics.

You’re going to see people with a sensitive nervous system, and that’s why, actually, at the Amma programs, they used to sell my book. They have so many books now, I don’t think they… I think you can still buy some through the Amma bookstore, but they sold so well because so many people who go see Amma, who are on a spiritual path, have the trait of high sensitivity. You’re open to new energies as opposed to someone who is a non-HSP.

But I’d still say at least half, if not the majority, of the people who come to see Amma are non-HSPs. And people are very surprised that I can deal with coordinating Prasad and being among all these people. I want to give Prasad time. I want to do this and that, being in this crowd of people all the time. But I’ll tell you how it works: I go to bed early after the bhajans end. I don’t stay late. I get up early in the morning and meditate, and I try to take a break during the day and just go somewhere quiet, close my eyes, and be quiet for a while.

Rick: Yeah. In other words, getting enough sleep is important. In fact, you have a chapter in your book called “Sleep and the Highly Sensitive Person.” Taking care of yourself and getting enough rest is probably an important thing for highly sensitive people.

Ted: Absolutely. I actually used to have a lot of insomnia, and a lot of sensitive people do, because it’s correlated in Ayurveda with the Vata constitution, where the mind just goes very fast and goes all the time. Turning it off is hard.

So, in all my research while doing my doctorate, I came up with a plan for ways to calm the nervous system down so you can sleep. I’m happy to say that when I was a kid, a teenager, and even in my twenties, I had severe insomnia and trouble sleeping. Now, if I travel internationally or maybe even within the United States, maybe I’ll have a little trouble falling asleep the first night, but 98 percent of the time I fall asleep right away and have a good night’s sleep.

Rick: That’s interesting, because generally people in their twenties can sleep like a log, and people who are your age are starting to have trouble sleeping as they get older. So, it’s kind of cool that you turned it around.

Ted: Well, read my chat. On my website, drtedzeff.com, I have a whole thing about healing insomnia if you’re interested.

Ayurveda and the sensitive nervous system

Rick: Yeah. Speaking of spirituality and high sensitivity, and you were mentioning people coming to see Amma, I have seen real tough-looking types, football-player types, come up to her still looking tough and then burst into tears when they have their darshan with her, like something melts.

Ted: Yeah. As a matter of fact, the New England Patriots quarterback got darshan from Amma.

Rick: Oh, nice.

Ted: So, you get athletes, you get movie stars, you get all sorts of people.

Rick: Yeah. I once instructed the center for the Green Bay Packers in meditation.

Ted: How did he do?

Rick: He did well. He liked it.

Ted: I don’t think you’re going to get many highly sensitive football players.

Rick: Not too many. Joe Namath was a meditator too. I don’t know if he was highly sensitive or not, but he was into it.

So, there are a lot of different topics in your book, and people can read the book to really go into a lot of detail. I could start asking you little bits and pieces from various chapters, but I also want to make sure that if anything comes to your mind as we’re going along, and I’m not asking a question about it, you just bring it up if there’s something you feel is important.

One thing you mentioned was Vata. If people are familiar with Ayurveda, which many listeners to this show will be, there are three doshas: Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. Are you implying that high sensitivity is a characteristic of Vata types?

Ted: Absolutely.

Rick: As opposed to Kapha people, who tend to be more like—

Ted: You know, it reminds me of Deepak Chopra once saying, “A Vata,” which is like a highly sensitive person, “can have half a cup of coffee in the morning and won’t be able to fall asleep.” He’s a Kapha, and he said he could have three cups of black coffee before bed and sleep like a baby.

So, yeah, it’s correlated with Vata, and a lot of the information I give in my first book, The HSP Survival Guide, is very similar to what you would do for a Vata constitution in terms of calming down the nervous system.

Rick: Yeah, so that actually brings up an interesting point: if a person has high sensitivity, they might look into Ayurveda, and there are all sorts of Vata-pacifying things that Ayurveda offers.

Ted: Yeah, and diet. I say that in my book.

Rick: Diet, oil massage, all kinds of things like that.

Ted: Yeah, diet. Sensitive people should eat heavy, warm, moist food, especially in the winter, and not have sprouts or cold salads, because that makes you more off-center. But if you have pasta or heavy soups, that’s grounding food.

Rick: That’s good advice, because somebody might be a spiritual person and highly sensitive, and they want to do everything they can. They might think, “Oh, a raw-food diet—that’ll be just right for me,” but it may not be at all. They can really exacerbate things if they push ahead doing something that’s inappropriate for them.

Ted: Exactly.

🩺 Health, exercise, and work

Rick: Okay, let’s see here. There are some interesting topics here: friendship for the HSP, healing shame and addiction for the HSP, highly sensitive… Go ahead.

Oh, Irene has a question. You want to—

Ted: No, go ahead.

Rick: Go ahead and ask it. Do highly sensitive people tend to have more physical health problems than the average person?

Ted: You know, that’s a very good question. My experience is that they do. Other researchers felt they didn’t. I think they do, because don’t forget, sensitive people tend to feel pain more deeply than others, and they can’t tune out the pain the way a non-HSP can.

I think you’ll find more of a sense of this with chemical sensitivity. When you’re sensitive, you’re picking up energy, and that alone can be stressful. I think something like 95 percent of the people I interviewed said that stress on the job affects their health. They’re absorbing this energy, and it’s stressful. Of course, the more stressed you are, the greater the chances are that you’re going to get some kind of physical disorder. So, I would say yes.

Rick: Yeah. Related to Irene’s question, in terms of Ayurveda, there are certain diseases and health problems associated with each dosha. There are certain Vata disorders, Pitta disorders, Kapha disorders, and so on. So, probably you also see health problems in someone who is Kapha, but there are certain ones you would see. It wouldn’t be due to high sensitivity; it would be due to other imbalances.

Ted: No, the Kaphas tend to be pretty healthy. I remember I studied years ago with Dr. Lad, and there was a guy who smoked, ate meat, and drank alcohol, and he was one of the few people who had a totally balanced constitution. We said, “How could that be?” And Dr. Lad went, “He’s Kapha. What are you going to do?”

Then you get these Vata people coming in, who are highly sensitive, and they would do everything right. They’d take 20 or 30 supplements a day, have the perfect diet, meditate, do oil massage—everything—and they’d still have all these physical issues. So, what are you going to do? It’s just the way the—

Rick: The way you’re wired.

Ted: The way the cookie crumbles.

Rick: Interesting. But, as you said in the beginning, it is a blessing in a way. It is an asset. There are so many good qualities associated with it, and you just need to learn to take care of yourself in various ways.

Ted: And also not to compete with non-HSPs. For example, when I counsel parents of sensitive children, group sports are very big. Sensitive people, especially in this country growing up—can you imagine trying to catch a baseball with 17 people looking at you in the outfield? The pressure is going to be so strong.

I’ve counseled sensitive men. There was a guy who was a really good soccer athlete in high school, but he said whenever he went to a tournament, he wouldn’t do that well. Likewise, if you’re playing tennis with one other friend who knows you and respects you, you do well. But if you play doubles with some macho-acting guys who say, “Oh, we’ll beat you,” then you don’t do as well, because you don’t perform as well under pressure.

It’s very important for everybody to exercise, but most sensitive people should do things that work for them. Most sensitive people would prefer biking, walking, swimming, running, individual sports, going to the gym by themselves, or using a machine, as opposed to group sports where there’s a lot of pressure.

Although, I had one man I interviewed who was a hockey player in high school and played varsity ice hockey in college. I said, “That sounds strange for a sensitive man, because of the violence.” He said, “Well, I didn’t focus on the violence. I just focused on the finesse.”

In the movie, I’ve got to mention, there’s a movie called Sensitive, directed by Will Harper, a well-known Hollywood director. It came out a year ago in September. If you Google sensitivethemovie.com, you can watch the movie.

Will Harper interviewed the top researchers in sensitivity throughout Europe and the United States. It’s a very exciting, well-done movie, with docudramas to illustrate certain points. The point I was going to make is that in Copenhagen, there was a star athlete, a sensitive teenage boy, who was a star athlete playing in a group game. But he said he still felt different from the other guys in terms of how they would hang out and so forth.

I got that also from the men I interviewed who even played group sports. They said they always felt kind of different from the other guys in their class. I highly recommend Sensitive, the movie. If you have any interest in the topic, you’ve got to watch it. It’s a phenomenal movie.

Rick: It’s on Netflix or something?

Ted: No, you can’t get it on Netflix, but if you go to sensitivethemovie.com, you can rent it or download it for $4.99 or $9.99. It’ll give you—and anybody you know, if you’re sensitive, living with someone who is, or know a relative or someone you work with who isn’t sensitive—the best understanding of what the trait is about.

Rick: Talking about sports, and since you also have a chapter on highly sensitive children, I remember when I was a kid in my neighborhood, I’d be real confident. I was a pretty good baseball player, and I’d run around and feel really outgoing, kind of extroverted and confident.

But when I got to school, it was like I had schizophrenia or something. I switched to this different personality where I was very inhibited and not good at any kind of sports-related thing. I remember my mother once—as I said, I was a pretty good baseball player for kids my size—took me to Little League to join it, and I wouldn’t get out of the car because I was just too intimidated by all the kids I didn’t know and everything.

So, I guess maybe we could talk about highly sensitive children a little bit. It seems like confidence and security are important in order for them to flourish in what they’re doing.

Ted: Well, that’s really good news that you said that, so you might have some part of you that is highly sensitive.

Rick: Once you get to know me, I’m a softy.

Ted: Because that’s one of the characteristics. So, I tell parents of sensitive children, when the child is very shy and going into a classroom in kindergarten or nursery school, whatever, the worst thing a parent could do is say, especially to a boy but even to a girl, “Oh, don’t be a little baby. Just get in there and play with the other kids.” That will destroy the child. The parent needs to be there and let the child slowly integrate.

There’s a marvelous story in my book, The Power of Sensitivity, that so illustrates it. It’s about a woman from Denmark who moved to Canada and had a sensitive boy. At the age of six, he was overwhelmed in gym class, the PE class, because of all the kids and the teacher explaining the rules. He couldn’t understand how to play the game, and he started withdrawing the way you said you did. He sat on the bench and wouldn’t participate.

Well, you know, it starts early, and if the mom didn’t intervene, he’d probably end up on the bench his whole life, feeling terrible about himself. So she went to the school and started playing this game with the other kids, and then it gave him the confidence to join in. He joined in and saw that he was a good athlete. He had fun, and now he plays all the time.

So, the parent of a sensitive child has to put in the extra effort to help the child, to avoid that child getting humiliated and shamed. I remember I had a session with a parent, this guy who was kind of non-HSP, and he didn’t like the fact that his boy didn’t want to play football and other sports. He wanted to send him to this school where he was getting teased. He said, “Well, I went to that school. I went to parochial school,” whatever, private school.

I said, “You have a choice right now. You can keep doing what you’re doing to your son and make sure that he has a miserable life, that he’s humiliated, gets PTSD, and is shamed, or you can start supporting him and intervene at the school. If the school won’t make exceptions for his sensitivity, send him to a Montessori or a Steiner or a progressive private school, or have him homeschooled. It’s your choice, because what happens in elementary school is going to affect that sensitive child for the rest of his life.”

What happens in elementary school is going to affect that sensitive child for the rest of his life.

I get emails all the time and have consultations with sensitive adults who were just devastated, and it’s devastated their entire lives, by being humiliated for having the trait of sensitivity.

Rick: I’m remembering Dead Poets Society, where the kid wanted to be an actor and his father wanted him to be a lawyer or something. His father ended up ruining his plans to be an actor and his acting activities at school, and the kid ended up killing himself. I’m sure there are many tragic stories like that. So, you really have to recognize each person for who they really are and not try to force them to be something else.

Ted: The parent absolutely has to intervene. My niece’s daughter is highly sensitive, and my niece is in there intervening, making sure that when her daughter is overstimulated, she has a timeout room she can go to. When she’s playing in a PE class and gets afraid being in the center of all the kids around her, the PE teacher knows that she can be on the outside. If she’s feeling too overstimulated in an assembly, she can get up and sit down by herself.

It’s so important for parents to intervene in a school situation because school is actually one of the worst places for a sensitive child, with all the noise of other kids screaming and pushing, overhead fluorescent lights, and all the pressure to get good grades. It’s very difficult, so parents absolutely have to make sure it’s a calm environment.

The child has to bond with the teacher. The teacher needs to understand the trait of high sensitivity, and the parent needs to explain it to the teacher. If the teachers are not amenable to it, then they have to go to the principal. If the principal isn’t, then they need to look for another source of education for their child.

High sensitivity and diagnosis

Rick: What relationship, if any, is there between HSP and autism and things that are somewhat related to autism?

Ted: I have an article I wrote that talks about the difference between someone who has agoraphobia and sensitivity and just doesn’t like to go outside in big crowds; the difference between being depressed and being able to cry a lot; and the difference between those things and having a diagnosed disorder.

Frequently, children are misdiagnosed as having, for example, ADHD or autism spectrum disorder, because in school they can’t concentrate because of all the overstimulation. They can’t focus. But that same child, if he’s home, or she’s home, in a quiet environment, does fine.

You can have a diagnosed disorder like Asperger’s or autism and be highly sensitive, but they’re not mutually exclusive. You can be highly sensitive and, of course, not have a disorder. So, it’s very easy for people to misdiagnose people who are sensitive as having a diagnosed disorder, but you can have a diagnosed disorder and have the trait of high sensitivity.

Rick: Do you see a problem where it seems like, a lot of times these days, drugs are prescribed all too readily? Like you said, there could be a misdiagnosis; high sensitivity can be mistaken for ADHD or something. Do you see that a lot of highly sensitive people, especially kids, are being given drugs where there really should be a much more natural intervention of some kind?

Ted: I don’t have statistics on it, but I can tell you that, in the huge majority—90-plus percent—of highly sensitive children, if they’re in the right environment, they don’t need any medication to calm them down.

Rick: I’m afraid that that’s probably misrecognized all too often, and there are all sorts of sad cases where people are just dumbed down with drugs and their sensitivity is blunted rather than being dealt with properly. Okay, so what else is important to tell people about?

Work, creativity, and meaningful lives

Ted: Jobs and careers are important. I think any sensitive person in the right environment, where their coworkers and supervisors are accepting and understanding of the trait of high sensitivity, can do fine.

But, of course, there are certain job situations that are not good for highly sensitive people. I remember a man working in a corporate environment. He had all these suggestions, and he said his supervisors didn’t want to know about any creative ways of dealing with the job. He was very competitive with the other men and was passed over for promotion.

He was physically getting headaches, digestive disorders, and insomnia. He was physically falling apart in that work environment, which was very competitive. Elaine Aron talks about linking rather than competing, and not competing with non-HSPs.

Basically, he couldn’t take it anymore. He quit the job and started his own business. I think he had a background in bookkeeping or accounting, where he had his own little office. He was self-employed, and all of his physical problems went away because he managed the stress in his work environment.

It’s very easy for the work environment to become a reenactment of the family of origin, where you’re humiliated and feel you don’t deserve better than having a boss or coworkers who mistreat you.

The ideal job for a sensitive person would be self-employment, because they control the physical environment and who they interact with. The only downside is that they can tend to be a little too alone, so you need to make sure that you interact with other people in your profession.

Being in a job where your creativity is acknowledged is important. HSPs do not function well if the job is drudgery: “Oh, I have to go to work.” They have to have a meaningful work life.

Rick: Yeah, something creative. You mentioned taking walks in the woods and stuff like that as being really valuable for HSPs. I would suggest, and you can comment, that some kind of really good exercise routine—not one that would aggravate Vata, but one that would really just ground you and get your blood moving and your lungs pumping—would be valuable because there’s plenty of research on how that makes you much less susceptible to stress. What do you say to that?

Ted: Oh, yeah, anything where you’re getting the endorphins going makes you feel better. But again, it has to be an exercise that you enjoy doing and not one that’s going to create more stress, like playing on a group team, for most HSPs.

I actually recommend that sensitive children learn self-defense. It sounds strange because sensitive children don’t like violence, so you don’t necessarily send them to a big class with people punching each other. It could be an individual class where someone is just teaching them one-on-one, but it’ll give them self-confidence.

See, what happens is sensitive children get teased a lot because the bully is looking for a weakness, for a reaction, and sensitive children are going to react. That’s just what the bully wants.

So, if the sensitive child has some self-confidence—and the best way to deal with bullying, when they’re younger, is to have a group of friends or a teacher intervene—then the bully will stop. This is what bullies look for: a reaction. So, as long as there’s no reaction, and they have a group of other kids who support them, that will be enough.

And by the way, sensitive people, especially boys—I wrote the book about sensitive boys—most boys hang out in packs. You said that when you played baseball as a kid, and did things in groups, that’s hard for sensitive boys because of all the boy teasing and stuff.

So, as long as the sensitive child has one good friend, that’s enough. They don’t need lots of groups of friends in the neighborhood, necessarily. Sensitive parents who are worried that their child is alone can arrange playdates with other children who are respectful, and it’s fine for a sensitive child to be friends with a nonsensitive child, as long as the other child is respectful of the sensitive child.

A more sensitive culture

Rick: Yeah. If sensitivity is correlated with spirituality, as you suggested it might be, and if there’s a sort of spiritual renaissance going on in the world—which I kind of feel like there might be, given the number of people who are waking up and getting more and more interested in spirituality, yoga, meditation, and all that sort of thing—then it may be that this whole issue of high sensitivity will become more and more germane, more and more relevant, and prominent in people’s awareness.

I mean, you can think of cultures a few hundred years ago where burning people in a town square was a weekly entertainment and everyone seemed to be fine with it. Now everyone would recoil from that sort of thing. That kind of thing still happens in ISIS circles and so on, but I would like to think that society at large could become highly spiritual and highly sensitive, and that it would be a comfortable and welcome atmosphere for people regardless of their nature. Particularly, those who are very sensitive would not have to encounter all the challenges and insensitivities that they often do now.

Ted: Yeah, so, for example, the men I interviewed from India and Thailand were never teased growing up.

Rick: Yeah, there you go.

Ted: As a matter of fact, there was a man from Thailand who said he was always elected class president because he was such a caring person. The ideal in that society was the person who was the most caring and helpful—the person they respected the most.

Likewise, even in species like wild horses, researchers found that the horse everybody followed was this highly sensitive horse because it could spot danger first. I actually make a joke sometimes: “Why don’t HSPs ever get Lyme disease?”

Rick: Why?

Ted: Because they’ll feel the tick crawling on their body before it can bite them, so they never get Lyme disease.

Rick: That’s pretty good.

Ted: I don’t know if it’s true, but I think there’s a correlation: “I can feel a tick on my body and get it off before it bites me.” So there’s a huge advantage in animals and in humans to being very aware. I mean, the sensitive person will go into a theater and know where all the fire exits are before anybody else.

Rick: Interesting. Yeah, the thing about some cultures, with the popular kids being the most sensitive ones, is kind of interesting. In our culture, the hero is the fastest gun in the West, or the guy who can kickbox his way out of a tough situation—the tough guy. But perhaps we’ll see more and more instances of sensitivity being the hero in movies.

Ted: Well, it used to be more that way with Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Rick: That’s true.

Ted: Humphrey Bogart, too. They were more about standing up for justice and not being full of steroids and looking ridiculously out of proportion to the average person.

I remember this guy from India saying, “Bollywood, not Hollywood. In Bollywood, the male movie stars—you would never see the Hollywood male movie stars acting that way. The Bollywood movie stars could be kind of like good-looking hero types, and then all of a sudden they’ll go into song and dance and start showing their more feminine side or their gentle side.”

Rick: They always do in Bollywood movies.

Ted: You could never see Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger going into song and dance when they’re in a Terminator-type movie.

Rick: That’s true.

Ted: Or Rocky 15, or whatever.

Closing thoughts and resources

Rick: Well, this has been good. I think we more or less covered the topic. I’m sure that you’ve written four or five books on it, and Elaine’s written books, so there’s certainly a lot more that can be said. But hopefully we’ve piqued people’s interest. Maybe many people listening—perhaps more than 20 percent—are in that HSP category and will have found this valuable. They can get in touch with you for more information, perhaps read your books, or even do a consultation with you. And your books do contain some good practical advice, don’t they?

Ted: Absolutely.

Rick: So it’s not just psychological theory or something; there are some steps one can take.

Ted: It’s all specific advice on how to manage the trait of high sensitivity, and for children, too.

Rick: Cool. Well, thanks for talking to me about it, Ted. I’ve been speaking with Ted Zeff, PhD, about high sensitivity, as anyone who’s still listening knows. As usual, I’ll have a page on BatGap.com where I link to his books and his website on the topic, and people will be able to get in touch, find out more, and interact with you in some way. So, thanks for participating.

Ted: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Rick: And for those who are listening now, I’ll just say that I’ve just come back from the Science and Non-Duality Conference in California and taped a bunch of interesting things. So there’ll be a greater-than-usual flurry of activity on BatGap for the next few weeks as I post those talks and recordings. Thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one.

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