Emotional sensitivity, or neuroticism, refers to how easily negative emotions are triggered for you. If you’re on the higher side of this trait, you likely react more strongly to stressors and take longer to calm down afterward. You’re probably well-versed in anxiety, sadness, guilt, and frustration, and these emotions may interfere with how you pursue your goals.
For example, strong anxiety might stop you from stepping outside your comfort zone in your career and personal life, or prevent you from making decisions for fear that you’d choose poorly. Sadness might drain your motivation, making it harder to follow through on plans. Guilt can keep you stuck overanalyzing past decisions or prioritizing other people’s needs at the expense of your own, whereas frustration might lead you to give up too quickly when things don’t go as planned, or react in ways that strain your relationships.
Despite these consequences, experiencing intense emotions doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, I’m on the more sensitive side and it helps me to be a more empathetic therapist and friend. If you want someone to be offended on your behalf when you tell them the critical comment your mom made, I’m your girl.
So, if feeling your emotions strongly isn’t the problem, what is?
Why am I more sensitive than other people?
Feeling your emotions strongly is partially based on your genetics – about 30% to 50% of your propensity for negative emotions is passed down through families. However, the most important factor in influencing your negative emotions is the most flexible: how you respond to them when they come up.
Most of the people I work with who wish to reduce their anxiety, guilt, and frustration are hard on themselves for having strong reactions to stressors. They find their emotions uncomfortable (“I hate this feeling,” “I can’t stand it when my heart rate increases, consider it weak to experience strong feelings (“I’m overreacting,” “people will think I can’t handle myself”), or think that anxiety and/or sadness will get in the way of your performance (“I’ll lose my train of thought during this presentation,” “I’ll be such a wet blanket at the event, I shouldn’t bother going.”)
If you’re judgy about the emotions you’re feeling, it makes sense that you’d try to avoid situations or activities that bring them up. The completely unfair truth is that pushing away your feelings actually backfires in the long term. There is a large body of research that tells us that when we try to escape or stuff our emotions, they come back more frequently and intensely. And, given that emotional sensitivity is literally defined as frequent and intense negative emotions, chronic emotional avoidance maintains or even increases this trait.
How Do I Break the Cycle of Negative Emotions?
The best way to reduce emotional sensitivity is to approach or welcome your emotions instead of avoiding them. In other words, you have to literally get cool with feeling your emotions as they come up.
I know that sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. When you encounter a situation that results in feeling a strong emotion, you have the potential to learn important information about your ability to cope. For example, if you were to get started on an anxiety-provoking project right away instead of procrastinating, you might see that the intensity of his anxiety decreases within the first five minutes since, for most of us, getting started is the hardest part! You might also learn that your anxiety doesn’t interfere with your ability to do your job effectively.
Thus, by facing your emotions directly, you’ll learn that they’re temporary experiences and that having a strong reaction doesn’t automatically mean something bad will happen. The next time a strong emotion comes up, you might not view it quite as negatively and be less inclined to push the feeling away because you now have data on your ability to cope.
And, when you stop pushing away emotions, you’re no longer subject to the rebound effects in which they boomerang back more intensely.
As you become more willing to feel your feelings – even the uncomfortable ones – you will, paradoxically, decrease the overall frequency and intensity of your negative emotions. In other words, you’ll lower your emotional sensitivity to a level where you can harness its benefits – like empathy and situational awareness, with overwhelm.
Want Science-Backed Tools to Work With Your Emotional Sensitivity?
If you’re ready to stop fighting your emotions and start using them to your advantage, I created The Personality Edit.
This program translates more than 15 years of my research and clinical experience into a structured process for helping people work with their emotional sensitivity, not against it. You’ll learn exactly how to approach your feelings rather than avoid them, so you can lower the frequency and intensity of negative emotions over time, while keeping the benefits that come with being attuned and empathetic.
Learn more about The Personality Edit here.
