The Highly Sensitive Parent

WHAT DO I MEAN BY PROCESSING DEEPLY? When people in general are given a phone number and have no way to write it down, they will probably try to process it in order to remember it by repeating it many times, finding patterns or meanings in the digits, or noticing the numbers’ similarity to something else. If you don’t process it in some way, you know you will forget it.

Highly sensitive people (HSPs) simply process everything more—not only to remember it, but to relate and compare what they notice to their past experience, as if seeking new routes through a maze. This is the essence of their survival strategy, which evolved far back among all animals. Whether we’re looking at fruit flies, fish, crows, or orangutans, the sensitive ones process (register and respond to) sensory input more than others of the same species, constantly and automatically.

Here’s a familiar human example. (We’ll stick to Homo sapiens parents from now on.) A new HS parent seeing a baby stroller go by might have literally dozens of thoughts about it: The likely cost, the various features (cupholder, sunshade), what would happen if it tipped over, details about the person pushing the stroller, and a lightning-fast comparison with other strollers. If she already has one, she may still make comparisons and wonder if she bought the right one. A non-HS parent might not even notice the stroller.

Two of the statements on our survey to which HS parents agreed more often than not was “Decisions about parenting (school, child-related purchases, etc.) have driven me crazy” and “I think I have made good decisions as a parent.” There it is.

HSPs don’t always agonize over a decision. After all, if we observe situations carefully and apply those observations next time, we may know in a new situation what to do before others do. And sometimes we just have a “gut feeling” and decide something without knowing how. That’s called intuition, and HSPs have good (but not infallible!) intuition. Intuition is the result of subconscious depth of processing. In the part of the survey where parents could write comments if they wished, HS parents often commented on their intuition. On the survey itself, a statement they agreed with more than those without the HS trait was “I tend to know what my child needs even before my child lets me know.”

Another result of depth of processing is conscientiousness. You’re likely to think more about the consequences of your behavior—for example, what would happen if every parent left a dirty disposable diaper under a bush, or if everybody picking up their child double-parked in front of the school? You probably notice more than most when other parents are being inconsiderate. That is, those parents have not considered (noticed, reflected on, processed, etc.) the problem they are creating for others. But your ability to process information deeply makes you more likely to do what is right.

RESEARCH ON DEPTH OF PROCESSING

Studies comparing the brain activation of HSPs against those without the trait while performing various perceptual and information-processing tasks have supported the idea that HSPs process more deeply. In the first and perhaps most important study, done by a team at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, headed by Jadzia Jagiellowicz, HSPs were found to use more of those parts of the brain associated with “deeper” processing of information, especially on tasks that involve noticing subtleties. In a subsequent study by a team at Stanford led by my husband, Arthur Aron, subjects were given perceptual tasks that were already known from prior research to be more or less difficult (i.e., in a brain scanner, one sees more or less brain activation) depending on the type of culture (“interdependent” or “independent”) a person is from.

However, when HSPs of both types of culture (in this case East Asian and European Americans) were given these tasks while in a magnetic resonance imager, the results were surprising. The brain activity of those without this trait was as expected. It showed they were having a harder time due to their culture. But it was fascinating to see that this greater activity due to culture was not true for HSPs. This implies to me that whatever their culture, they found it easy and natural to look beyond their cultural expectations to how things “really are.”

All parents raising children are subject to the influence of their family members and culture. Many sensitive parents, however, mentioned being troubled by the advice of others and ultimately ignoring it when they saw that their child needed something not culturally typical. I am not saying that I agree or don’t agree with them, but some told me they put their infants in bed with them when they slept, ignoring current guidelines about sudden infant death syndrome. Some tried alternative medicine, such as homeopathy or acupuncture, when other medications were not working. They chose unusual schools, or they chose to homeschool. They taught values that other children were not receiving. Of course, many parents who are low on HS do these things also, but I have the strong impression that HS parents do them more. It is as if, like the sensitive subjects in the magnetic resonance imager, HS parents are able to rise above culture as they thought through their parenting choices. For example:

Robert, an HS parent who had researched pregnancy and childbirth thoroughly, raised his children in China. His wife had a difficult birth. She needed rest afterward, but their newborn needed physical comfort and contact. So when Robert had to go out, he put the baby in the baby sling Chinese women normally use and went around town. At that time, Chinese men never carried babies this way. Robert did it not to be a rebel but because it seemed to him to be the best solution. And it wasn’t long before Chinese fathers in the neighborhood were following Robert’s example. He really was literally ignoring cultural norms in order to parent the best way he could.

More evidence for HSPs’ greater ability to process information deeply also comes from a study by Bianca Acevedo, in which people were shown pictures of their romantic partner or a neutral face. I will talk more about this study later, but what matters here is that the research on deeper processing of perception was found again. Moreover, compared to those without the trait, HSPs had more brain activation in an area called the insula or insular cortex, a part of the brain that integrates moment-to-moment experience and that some have called the seat of consciousness. This is exactly what we would expect of HSPs.

Your Strong Emotional Responses, Empathic Connection, and Delicate Attunement

I felt instant connection with both of my children.

I could feel my children’s emotions, and it allowed me to nurture them exquisitely.

I can read all of my son’s facial expressions, even the slightest ones no one else notices.

Even in the first studies my husband and I conducted in 1997, we found that HSPs reported that they felt things more strongly. In a 2005 experiment, we gave students the impression that they had done very well or very poorly on an aptitude test. The sensitive students were strongly affected, while those without the trait were barely fazed.

In 2016, Jadzia Jagiellowicz, the same researcher who did the first study of the brains of HSPs, conducted an experiment in which subjects were shown photos known to create strong reactions in most people (things like snakes, spiders, or garbage for negative reactions and puppies or birthday cakes for positive). HSPs reported stronger emotional reactions to both negative and positive pictures and decided more quickly how they felt about each one, but especially to positive images. This effect was also found in brain scans. Interestingly, this was even truer if their childhood had been good.

Of course, as a sensitive parent, you are not responding to puppies or birthday cakes but to another human being. In the study by Bianca Acevedo and her colleagues that I mentioned before—in which HSPs and those without the trait looked at photos of both strangers and loved ones expressing happiness, sadness, or a neutral feeling—when there was emotion in the photo, HSPs tended to show more brain activity than when there was neutral feeling. Some of this activity was in what is called the mirror neuron system,, which helps humans and other primates learn through imitation and is involved in empathy as well. Given this research, it seems that this system especially helps HSPs know others’ intentions and how they feel. This was most true when looking at the happy faces of loved ones, but also when viewing all sad faces, whether those of loved ones or strangers. It also appears that HSPs’ greater emotional responsiveness is based on more elaborate emotional processing, not simply being “more emotional.”

WHAT ABOUT BEING OVERLY EMOTIONAL?

Clearly, the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes is a good trait to have, particularly as a parent. But you may also wonder whether being more emotional than others makes us less rational and clearheaded.

I have some good news. Recent scientific models have placed emotion at the center of thinking and wisdom. Emotion motivates us to think about something. We study harder (especially as HSPs) and remember more when we know we will be tested. That is, the main role of emotions is not simply to make us act, but to prod us to think. In that sense, HSPs actually require being more emotional to process information more than others.

It is true that emotions do sometimes cause people, HSPs included, to act without reflection, and sometimes in irrational ways. If your home burned down or you were shamed in front of the class for not knowing an answer in the past, you are likely to become anxious in a present-day situation that is even remotely like the original traumatic one—a whiff of smoke, or being asked to answer a question in front of a group. As an HSP, you react more to both positive and negative experiences. If you have had many negative ones, your continuing reactions to them can interfere with rational thought part of the time—but certainly not all of the time.

Here is something important to keep in mind: For most HSPs, parenting is a new experience and not strongly associated with anything traumatic, even if childhood was. We found them to report that their experience of parenting now was no more affected by their own childhood than those without the trait. Maybe parenting is actually healing for HSPs, giving them a new area of confidence and joy.

More important, several of the studies we have discussed indicate that HSPs appear to be even more affected by pleasant experiences or success compared to negative experience. This is true more for HSPs than those without the trait, so we probably seek to repeat these good experiences more than others. That is, HSPs are more motivated than many other people to be aware of opportunities and take advantage of them.

For example, HS parents might apply early for what they consider to be the best preschool. (Preschool is a term you may not use in your country, but in the United States and some other countries, it refers to early childhood education, which may be lacking, included in, or different from child care or day care, depending on activities.) HS parents are motivated because they are anticipating how pleased they will be to have their child accepted into the one they wanted. Another example: An HS parent might remember a positive experience of playing in the snow with their child the previous winter and be especially likely to plan more snow play again this winter.

Further, most of us as HS parents think broadly about what happiness is (a good character, good relationships, something more than having fun or making good money) so that we can steer our child wisely. Even more than other parents, we plan well for our children because seeing them happy and thriving makes us feel so good, and we tend to be sensitive to everything positive, even if some days it doesn’t seem that way.

Here is a story about how strong emotions were present for an HS mother throughout her (reasonably positive) divorce. The story is summarized from Nancy’s narrative.

Nancy, as well as Hal, worked full time in a demanding job, and they found they had no time for anything besides discussing parenting. Nancy in particular found that keeping up with work, being a mother, and being a wife on top of that left her exhausted, unhealthy, and depressed—in short, “on the brink of a nervous breakdown.”

The two eventually chose to divorce, which ironically solved the problem for both of them because now Nancy had their son during the week, giving Hal a break, and he took the boy on the weekends, giving her that time to herself. [Side note: I know—why can’t couples do that without divorcing?!] These parents have remained good friends and have a “respectful co-parenting arrangement,” as Nancy puts it, even taking their son, Dan, on a birthday trip to Disney World together.

There at Disney World, she had a profoundly emotional moment. After settling into her hotel room, she came down to the lobby to meet Dan and Hal. She saw them standing in the distance, looking at her with huge grins—and she felt tremendous joy. Even though they were no longer a traditional family, she felt intense satisfaction that “we had made it through to the other side and had a bright future of happiness and thriving ahead of us. Dan would have two happy parents.” Seeing a glow around the three of them, there in that Orlando hotel lobby, she knew she would never forget that day. “My sensitivity has etched it in my brain,” she says. Certainly, all three benefited from her being so open to this positive experience, this deep joy.

Your Greater Awareness of Subtleties

HS parents often proudly relate how attuned they are to subtle stimuli:

My second child was thirteen weeks early and had a tracheostomy. She had no vocal capability, so she could not be heard when she cried. Thanks to my sensitivity, I was so attuned to her needs that she never ended up crying unattended.

We toured so many college campuses, wanting to help our son choose the right one. I couldn’t help but notice the little things—how the student tour leaders walked, talked, and dressed; how well the plants were doing; the expressions and tone of voice of anyone we spoke with. In the end, I just provided my observations, and he decided. He didn’t choose the big-name school, but the one that carefully tended things. Our son was well guided there, right through to being admitted into his first choice of medical school.

HSPs tend to be much more aware than others of subtle sensory information from their environment. This makes them unusually effective with living things that cannot speak for themselves: plants, animals, the very old and very young, and anybody (or any body) with problems difficult to diagnosis, not to mention foreign visitors who don’t speak the language. It is obviously a huge advantage when dealing with infants and children (also with teenagers, who can talk, but sometimes just won’t).

In HSPs, our awareness of subtleties is intertwined with emotional responsiveness and our ability to process things deeply. That’s why the depth of processing studies cited earlier in this chapter also looked at the subjects’ ability to notice subtleties. In the first study comparing the brains of HSPs and those without the trait, done by Jadzia Jagiellowicz, subjects had to decide quickly which photo of a landscape was the same when compared to the one they had seen a moment before. Sometimes, the differences between other photos and the two matching photos were easy to see, but some had just a minor difference—an extra bale of hay in a row or one extra fence post. The HSPs’ brains definitely had more activity in them than the brains of the other subjects when the pictures had minor differences.

Another study, done in Germany, compared HSPs and those without the trait on a standard laboratory task of picking out Ts from Ls in various positions within a larger pattern of horizontal and vertical lines. The HSPs were faster and more accurate.

To some of you, this aspect of your sensitivity is the most obvious. You notice every little thing. This can be whatever is especially nice, such as the sweet smell of an infant’s skin, the sound of your child’s soft breathing at night, or the way the sun strikes your teenage daughter’s hair. 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.

Still, although we do get easily overwhelmed when we have too much to process at once—a subject we turn to next—sensitivity is not primarily about being distressed by high levels of stimuli. Very loud noise can be annoying, but HSPs generally can tolerate it, which is less the case for persons with disorders involving tolerance of stimulation.

In my case, my own awareness of subtle stimuli saved my family’s life:

When my son was very little, we were living in a cabin on an island in British Columbia. One autumn, all three of us had the flu at the same time. It was chilly outside, so we kept stuffing more wood into our woodstove without having the energy to perform a chore that was new to us: cleaning the chimney pipes. Dirty chimney pipes are full of creosote, which can catch fire, overheat the stovepipes, and then ignite any wood they come into contact with.

That is just what happened—in the middle of the night, when we were all deep in feverish sleep.

But I heard something. Or maybe I smelled something. Whatever it was, it startled me awake. I could see through cracks in the ceiling the glow of light where it shouldn’t be in the crawl space under the roof. I leaped up, knowing immediately what had happened. I woke my husband, grabbed our son from his crib, and we escaped. I didn’t have words for it then, but I know now that my sensitivity to that subtle light, sound, and smell saved our lives.

Putting It All Together—Fortunate You and Fortunate Child

The D, E, and S of DOES give you huge advantages: the ability to process things deeply, to be emotionally responsive, and to be aware of subtle stimuli working together in a lovely way. (The negative side, that pesky O, we will get to in the next chapter.)

These aspects of sensitivity continue to work for us as parents in the early school years, when reflection, empathy, and awareness of the little things—especially around when to be firm and when to let something go, when to encourage independence and when to allow your changing son or daughter to go back to being a dependent little child for a while. For example, separation fears are normal, and with our greater emotional responsiveness, we HS parents are often especially sad for our children when they cry about being left somewhere. Knowing, however, that the child will benefit from developing some independence, we are often especially adept at spotting subtle cues in those tears and words regarding when it is okay to leave even while crying—or better yet, how to prevent these scenes.

As Laurie, HS mother of two young boys, said about her more difficult one:

My highly sensitive nature means that I know exactly how my son is feeling and can anticipate issues before they arise. I work hard to explore the issue, look for solutions, and then communicate with him and the wider family about the coping strategy that we will use. On the whole, my instincts about the children are correct, and I have more and more confidence in trusting them.

Here’s how Julie’s high sensitivity helped her:

I would often know when either child was getting sick before they actually showed symptoms that anyone else noticed.

Her husband, without the trait, thought she was imagining things, but then Julie would be proven right when the symptoms developed.

Over time my confidence as a parent grew, and I came to trust my instincts more and more because of my previous successes.

With older children, the contributions of HS parents may be subtler. For example, Don, an HS father with older children, wrote about one of the results of the deep relationship he shares with them:

They are connected to their feelings, which I think is a result of my talking often to them, asking them to tell me about their feelings and thoughts.

High Sensitivity as an Ancient Survival Strategy

I said at the outset that this trait is found in many other species, always in the minority. This trait has to be an advantage because otherwise it would have disappeared.

So why are sensitive individuals always a minority?

Partly this is because, yes, it is “expensive” biologically and personally to be highly sensitive. You are like a Porsche or a Jaguar, not a rugged Chevy truck. Your nervous system is finely tuned, which makes maintenance more costly.

Further, in many situations, there is nothing to notice that will give you any advantage. (After all, there’s no use noticing the color the jockey is wearing when trying to decide on which horses to bet.) Still, at certain times, as we have seen, your special equipment gives you and your children a giant edge.

There is another reason, however, that we are in a minority.

To study how this trait might have evolved, biologists working in the Netherlands set up a computer model comparing various scenarios. Imagine patches of grass in the forest that vary widely in how nutritious they are. Also imagine that only certain deer notice that fact. Now imagine that Deer A by nature pays attention to everything about each patch, learning as she goes along which patches are best. Deer B does not by nature bother to pay attention, but grazes wherever she finds any grass at all. If the grass varies a great deal, Deer A has inherited the better strategy. If she is a mother, her offspring will benefit from her noticing. If the grass varies very little, Deer B has the better strategy. But how often is there really no variation at all in how good something is?

Hidden in this is the real reason why we are always a minority group. If all the deer noticed which patches of grass were best, they would all go to them and gobble them up. There is no advantage to any one of them, so the trait is not passed down.

As a parent, suppose you have a sense of the layout of your town, including all the side streets, because you’ve driven around and you’ve noticed. This knowledge could even be unconscious, “intuitive” (knowing things without knowing how you know them). Or, maybe like me, you take a curious pleasure in looking at maps even when you don’t need one. At times, you might feel that you have no particular use for this information. A non-HS friend might say you are being “OCD,” obsessed with details. You may even feel that this kind of paying attention wears you out—that this survival strategy, in other words, comes at a cost.

Now, suppose there is a traffic jam on the main road out of town. Or, to make it worse, there’s been a disaster, and you have to get you and your kids out. Maybe cell phones and traffic apps are not working. Before this disaster, most people, unbothered by a little traffic, have driven the main drag. Maps always bored them. So you and a few other HSPs get out of town while the others sit in traffic.

The key here is that if everyone had known about your shortcut, you would all be sitting in traffic on all the various routes. (Yes, GPS gives everyone the best routes, but I suspect HSPs more often consider whether, if everyone checks their device and uses the suggested detour, it may end up being just as slow.)

Of course, people do figure out eventually what we have learned, often by imitating us. For example, many HS parents pay close attention to nutrition theories and research, worry about toxins in the home, or avoid poorly designed toys that might injure their child. Often, what you notice turns out to be so important that others imitate you or laws are passed about it.