The Highly Sensitive Man

How can we all make sure that we remind ourselves of this more often?

John: “Free yourself from society’s expectations.”

I think John is a particularly good role model for highly sensitive men because as well as being a highly sensitive man, he is also a highly successful attorney in a professional field that we usually associate with traditional masculine attributes and behaviors. He also talks about how he has tried to free himself from society’s expectation that a man should want to be sexually promiscuous. Interestingly, this is a subject that many highly sensitive men, whether gay or straight, have discussed with me.

When and how did you first notice you were highly sensitive?

That fact that I was more sensitive to stimuli than my peers began to crystalize when I was in my late teens. Looking back now, my first sense was that I couldn’t “endure” activities that were typical for people my age, like going to parties and clubs, because I was too sensitive to noise. It wasn’t until I was a student, around twenty-two, that I started to think that other people might feel the same way and I started to do some research and read around about it. That’s when I came across the concept of high sensitivity.

What are the advantages and the disadvantages of being highly sensitive?

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, and high sensitivity seems to trigger specific characteristics that—depending on the situation—can be helpful or unhelpful. It means that you have an intense sensory perception, an intense life and experiences. But I could do without the intensity of experiencing acute overstimulation.

Looking back, what sort of messages or feedback would have been helpful to you?

In hindsight, I would’ve liked it if someone had explained to me why I was “different” and how I could deal with that. I would’ve found a role model really helpful, especially when I was going through puberty. Someone who got my sensitive disposition and could’ve helped me find my place in the world. Maybe it would’ve also been good if someone had more clearly communicated to me that it was “okay” to be how I am and that I don’t need to achieve things to be recognized or loved even. On the other hand, the term highly sensitive wasn’t around back then. And my father, who knew about my sensitive nerves, gave me some little practical tips that I still remember to this day. For instance, before my driving test, he instilled in me that I should take it all really slowly.

What are the particular challenges that highly sensitive men face in our society?

I feel like society sees sexually successful men as being promiscuous and also expects that men want to be promiscuous. Because of my high sensitivity, I don’t find it easy to instigate cursory sexual contact. Not wanting to do it isn’t an argument, though: a “real man” should want it. In this regard, I don’t think that men have been successful at emancipating themselves completely from society’s expectations.

How does your high sensitivity affect your relationships with other men?

This observation may be something that’s just a coincidence, but I feel that I get along really well with gay men. Two of my good friends came out after I’d known them for a while. Other than that, I tend to be friends with women. I don’t do very well with activities that are “typical for men.” I have a particular problem with competitive sports, perhaps because I know that I don’t have much of a chance in those sort of games. I am just better friends with women. My sense is that they are more communicative. I probably assume that men are going to be more shallow.

How does your high sensitivity affect your relationships with women?

I think that high sensitivity makes friendships with women easier. Depth of processing at an emotional level means that you can have deeper conversations. In relation to sexuality, I think I’m a bit insecure when it comes to recognizing sexual interest, eliciting it, and to attracting women. I think you need to exude a really robust self-confidence for that, which doubt-ridden highly sensitive men often don’t have. In terms of romantic relationships, I lack a certain playfulness with women. But if I’m emotionally involved, it feels like the stakes are very high, because the threat of being deeply hurt is so high.

What are the advantages and the disadvantages of being highly sensitive at work?

I never felt like being highly sensitive played any kind of role in my professional life. Sometimes I’ll be asked how a highly sensitive person deals with the sort of antagonistic situations thrown up by legal fights, which you experience a lot working as an attorney. But this is only an issue if you believe that the aggression in those situations is real and not just part of the game.

My advice for other highly sensitive men … ?

Free yourself from society’s expectations about how you should behave, what your preferences should be, or how you define success or happiness. Accept that you’re going to be following a different set of rules.

CHAPTER 2

Understanding High Sensitivity: The Scientific Background and Why People Differ in Their Innate Sensitivity

YOU MAY WELL HAVE READ a lot about high sensitivity in other books or online, thought long and hard about the term high sensitivity, and already decided that you’re highly sensitive. Or perhaps you’ve read a couple of articles about high sensitivity, heard about it here and there, and wondered whether you, too, might be highly sensitive. Or perhaps you’re not highly sensitive at all, but you have an inkling that your spouse, your partner, your son, your son-in-law, your brother, your father, or one of your friends might be highly sensitive and you want to better understand what it means. Maybe someone gave you this book as a present or lent it to you because that person thinks that you could be highly sensitive. Whatever the reason is that you’re reading these pages, I’m really happy that you’re here. Because the more people who know about high sensitivity and really understand what it is, the better.

In this chapter, so that you get a really clear idea of exactly what high sensitivity is, I want to give you a compact but detailed overview of the academic research on the subject. This will increase your knowledge about high sensitivity and give you a firm grounding in the theoretical background. I will also explain the scientific context, showing how high sensitivity complements the better-known term introversion. At the same time, it’s important to me that you understand that the concept of high sensitivity is based on the results of numerous robust scientific studies from around the world and represents a serious field of scientific research. It is in no way some sort of “new age” phenomenon. One can get this impression when one sees the myriad ways in which people try to sell the term high sensitivity and the way it is sometimes presented in online forums. High sensitivity is neither a silver bullet nor some sort of sixth sense. Highly sensitive people haven’t traveled from another galaxy, nor are they necessarily gifted. It is not a psychological disorder, but a neutral temperamental trait that can help to explain many things, but not all things. It is also very important to differentiate high sensitivity from a temporary psychological sensitivity during stressful life events or a short-term period of feeling thin-skinned after, for instance, suffering trauma or during a period of depression or anxiety. High sensitivity is not a temporary state, but a constant trait that you are born with and will carry with you for the whole of your life.

Sensitivity, Introversion, and Extroversion

We are all different, and we arrive in the world with some of these differences. Anyone who has kids or who has friends and family with kids knows that newborn babies already differ from each other, even in their very first few weeks of life. Before we have been influenced by experiences, other people, our education, or any number of other factors that help form our personalities, we are already reacting differently to stimuli and consequently display different behavioral tendencies. “She’s a much worse sleeper than her sister,” “She cries much more than her brothers and sisters,” or “He feeds really slowly because he’s always distracted by things he sees” are just a few of the kinds of comments I’ve heard from parents describing and comparing their children. So children’s innate temperaments have a substantial influence on them and are observable from Day 1. And a child’s temperament also has an influence on its parents’ behavior, which, in turn, influences how secure the parent–child bond is. This means that differences in temperaments between parents and children can sometimes lead to problems in this relationship and that parents can sometimes become frustrated if they feel that their child has a “difficult” temperament. I can recall a highly sensitive client who was often yelled at and even punished by her stressed and overworked mother because, as a child, she cried far more often that her elder sister and her mother couldn’t bear it.

If we are going to talk about temperament, this, of course, raises the question of what the term temperament actually means. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460–375 BC) was one of the first Western thinkers to tackle the question of temperament, developing his own temperamental theory. Since then, countless writers, philosophers, doctors, psychologists, and academics have explored the idea of temperaments and defined a range of different temperamental traits. To this day, research into human temperaments remains an important area of developmental psychology.

Professor Silvia Schneider of Ruhr University, Bochum, offers a clear and easily comprehensible definition of what temperament actually is: “The word temperament describes a constitutional factor that is inherited and which predisposes someone to react to situations and people in specific ways. Temperamental traits can be understood as those that form the basis for the development of the personality, appear early in life, are stable over time, and which are influenced by biological factors.”1

Simply put, our temperament is the basis of our personalities and the complex interaction between our temperament and our environment forms our personality.2 Researchers disagree on exactly how stable temperamental traits are. There is, nevertheless, broad agreement on the fact that our temperament represents a relatively permanent tendency that affects how we react and interact with the world from early childhood onward.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was the first person to talk about “innate sensitivity.” Jung believed that around 25 percent of all people are born with a particularly sensitive disposition and that this sensitivity has a decisive influence on people’s worldview. Jung introduced the terms introversion and extroversion into personality psychology to describe two different natures that influence people’s perception, intuition, thinking, feelings, and behavior. According to Jung, introverted people are more inclined to direct their energy and their attention inward and toward their inner processes (feeling and thinking, for instance), whereas extroverted people are more strongly inclined to direct their physical energy outward.3 Since then, numerous researchers into personality traits, including Jung himself, have continued to develop the concept of introversion and extroversion.

One of these researchers was the German-born British psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck, who related Jung’s concept to Hippocrates’s temperamental theory and believed that there is a neurological basis for the differences between introverted and extroverted people. In 1968, he described the typical introvert as someone who is quiet, introspective, rather reserved (except with very close friends), and loves books more than people. Introverts tend to make plans in advance, be cautious, and not like impulsive actions. They don’t like arousal, approach daily life with a certain seriousness, and value a well-ordered life. Eysenck describes the typical extrovert as sociable, as someone who likes events, has many friends, needs people to talk to, and doesn’t like being alone. Extroverts crave excitement, are constantly making the most of opportunities, react spontaneously, take risks, and are generally more impulsive.4

As such, Jung’s concept of innate sensitivity began to shift to a difference between observable extroverted and introverted behaviors in people. Jung’s theory of extroversion and introversion continues to be hugely important, and it has had a decisive influence on research into both temperament and personality. In the most commonly used model of personality psychology, the Big Five, extroversion is included alongside openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And there continues to be widespread interest in the concept of extroversion and introversion outside of academic research, as evidenced by the success of books like Susan Cain’s brilliant bestseller, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

Another researcher influenced by Jung’s theory of extroversion and introversion is Jerome Kagan, professor of developmental psychology at Harvard University. Based on the results of his longitudinal studies, begun in the 1970s, Kagan differentiates between two groups of children: inhibited children and uninhibited children. According to Kagan, these two types represent relatively stable temperamental traits that follow us throughout our lives and that can only be influenced by environmental factors to a limited extent. Schneider summarizes Kagan’s results as follows:

Behavioral inhibition can be defined as a withdrawn, cautious, avoidant, and shy behavior in new and unfamiliar situations, such as meeting new people or dealing with unfamiliar objects and environments. This behavior can already be evident at the age of eight months. In babies, behavioral inhibition manifests itself as an easily triggered irritability (for instance, crying or screaming), in infants as shy and anxious behavior, and in school children as socially withdrawn behavior. The stability of this temperamental trait into adolescence has been demonstrated in a number of studies.5

According to Kagan, around 20 percent of all children exhibit inhibited behavior. These children have a lower arousal threshold than other children, particularly in unfamiliar situations. This means that their sympathetic nervous systems respond in a more reactive way to these stimuli. The sympathetic nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system, alongside the parasympathetic nervous system, which is involved in activities such as digestion when we are at rest. The sympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is involved in stimulating activities that affect our heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tone, and metabolism. When confronted with an unfamiliar situation or a new stimulus, inhibited children—in contrast to uninhibited children—will exhibit shy, cautious, and withdrawn behavior, while simultaneously exhibiting increased stress symptoms in their sympathetic nervous system, such as muscle tension and a heightened heart rate.

Numerous other researchers on temperament, including the psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, have developed a range of different categories and models to differentiate between various temperamental traits. In their longitudinal study on temperamental development, which ran from 1956 to the 1990s in New York, Thomas and Chess observed the behavioral characteristics of babies and defined nine new temperamental dimensions.6 They were able to assign a clear temperamental type to 65 percent of the babies: 40 percent were categorized as “easy” babies, 10 percent were “difficult” babies, and around 15 percent were categorized as “slow to warm up.” In a book on high sensitivity, you can probably guess that it is the babies who were “slow to warm up” that we are interested in. The babies in this group were withdrawn when they had to deal with new people or situations and needed more time to get used to them. This means that they were initially behaviorally inhibited, but they then particularly benefitted from repeated contact and increased familiarity with new situations, people, or objects.7, 8 Their activity levels were lower and their sensitivity to subtle stimuli greater, and they reacted less emotionally than babies with “difficult” temperaments.

What these scientific findings suggest is that Jung was probably right when he posited that “many people are more sensitive than others from birth onwards.” And it also seems to be the case that children described as “inhibited” have similar characteristics to those described in other studies as “slow to warm up”: a stronger physical and emotional reaction to new and unfamiliar situations and stimuli and withdrawn behavior. What research has also been able to show is that alongside visible differences in behavior, there are also underlying physical and biochemical differences between inhibited and uninhibited children, as well as between extroverted and introverted adults. Introverted people, for instance, display a lower pain threshold and generally react more sensitively to external stimulation, such as visual and aural stimuli.9 Both the British psychologist Jeffrey Alan Gray and the American psychiatrist C. Robert Cloninger have created influential models that suggest that personality differences between people can be explained by biological causes.10

For a long time, though, inhibited behavior among children had been judged negatively because it was connected with the development of anxiety disorders in adulthood. A sensitivity to new environmental stimuli was seen as representing a higher level of vulnerability or susceptibility and was thus judged to be a risk factor in the development of psychological problems, as well as being connected with shyness in both children and adults.

But could being more sensitive to external stimuli actually be advantageous? And could the same fundamental higher sensitivity be the underlying cause of all of these different behavioral characteristics, be they “slow to warm up,” “behaviorally inhibited,” “withdrawn,” or “introverted”? It was these questions that a series of researchers began to ask in the 1990s, with fascinating results.

The Advantages of Being More Sensitive to Your Environment

So we have now learned that research into temperament suggests that, pretty much from birth onward, people register information from their environment differently from each other and also that they differ in their observable reactions and behaviors. These differences in sensitivity are not only seen among people, but have also been observed to date in over one hundred different animals, including rhesus monkeys, mice, dogs, zebra finches, fruit flies, and fish.11

Be it in a human being or a zebra finch, we can observe two distinct strategies when animals or people are faced with new or what initially appear to be threatening situations. One group behaves reactively, that is to say, they wait and become observant and cautious before they act. The other group, however, when faced with the same situation, reacts proactively, displaying daring and aggressive behavior and actively exploring the situation. Neither of these strategies is better than the other, both have advantages and disadvantages depending on the situation, so it seems that, for many species, it has paid off to retain both types.

Since the 1990s, a number of different models and hypotheses have been created to explain the individual differences in human sensitivity, including Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess’s differential susceptibility theory, W. Thomas Boyce and Bruce J. Ellis’s biological sensitivity to context, and Elaine Aron’s sensory processing sensitivity. Although these theories all have their differences, the Swiss psychologist and researcher Pluess uses the umbrella term environmental sensitivity to broadly describe all of them.12 What all of these theories have in common, in comparison to the earlier temperamental theories outlined above, is that they foreground the term sensitivity, which they judge neutrally, sometimes even identifying advantages associated with this higher sensitivity. Numerous studies over the past few years have clearly shown that those people who react more sensitively to their environment, react more strongly not only to negative events but also to positive events.

This means that being highly sensitive does not, as had previously been thought, necessarily lead to an increase in psychological vulnerabilities or disadvantages, but that, on the contrary, in the right surroundings, it can actually be an advantage. Both Belsky and Pluess have been able to show that it is precisely those particularly sensitive children, whom we once called “slow to warm up,” “difficult,” or “behaviorally inhibited,” who most profit from a caring and loving relationship with their parents and consequently receive better grades and display higher social competencies than those children with “easy” temperaments.13 As Pluess said during a conversation with me, “We were able to show that children with ‘difficult’ temperaments developed better in positive, supportive surroundings than other children, precisely because their higher sensitivity meant that they reacted more strongly to positive influences.” This is what Pluess calls “differential susceptibility”—that being sensitive means you suffer more from being in a negative environment, but also that you thrive more in a positive environment.

Belsky and Pluess believe that there are biological and evolutionary reasons why differences in individuals’ sensitivities could be advantageous for a whole species when faced with uncertain conditions. If one strategy does not pay off, then the existence of the species could be assured by the alternative strategy. According to Belsky and Pluess, these differences manifest themselves in a more sensitive central nervous system and are influenced by genetics and prenatal and early postnatal factors. These individuals then react more sensitively to their environment and are thus more formed by it, a process that they can profit from.14 It could thus be the case that differences in the sensitivity of people’s nervous systems is a natural phenomenon.

Boyce and Ellis’s theory of biological sensitivity to context is also based on the idea that being more sensitive is not necessarily a disadvantage for those affected, and can indeed be an advantage. But this is only the case when these particularly sensitive children grow up in a caring, loving, and supportive environment. Then the advantages of their sensitive nature becomes clear because they profit more strongly from these positive experiences and relationships than those who are less sensitive, precisely because they are so open to and affected by external influences and thus are more influenced by them than less sensitive children.

Boyce, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, has been able to observe that around 15 to 20 percent of all children react particularly sensitively to their environment. He refers to these children as “orchid children” and calls all other children “dandelion children,” because, like robust dandelions, they can “grow anywhere” and have less “complicated care needs.” The orchid children, on the other hand, are more pliable and react more sensitively to their environment. Boyce discovered that orchid children react particularly strongly to negative factors in their surroundings, which he measured based on their heart rates and their levels of cortisol (which is sometimes called the stress hormone because it is released at increasingly high levels when people are stressed). These children tended to react more often with behavioral problems when faced with negative situations in the family, such as money worries, illness, or parental conflict, in comparison with the dandelion children. In later life, these orchid children were more susceptible to developing problematic behaviors and psychological problems, including drug abuse and depression. But if those same particularly sensitive and malleable children grew up in low-stress, loving, and supportive surroundings, then they were happier, more productive, and healthier than the dandelion children.15, 16