What is a Highly Sensitive Person? Resources for You to Find Out.
March 14, 2026 | Posted in Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
After watching the Prime Video Documentary Sensitive: The Untold Story, intuitively I knew I had to learn more about this thing called a Highly Sensitive Person and I dove in headfirst into everything I could find on the topic. How could it be that I’d been in the self-help, professional development, personal enrichment, coaching field for decades as a certified facilitator of several personality trait instruments, and I’d never heard of such a thing.
It was Dr. Elaine Aron who started researching the topic of High Sensitivity, officially known as Sensory Processing Sensitivity as a trait in 1991 and it further rolled out in the later 1990s and has been growing in understanding ever since. HSP is not a disorder nor a disability. It is a trait that some would call a superpower that 20-30% of the population exhibits with further breakdowns in percentages as you combine High Sensation Seeking and a lower percentage of Extroverts vs. Introverts with this trait. It can be explained using the acronym DOES. Here is a brief example representing each of the letters with an expanded explanation on Dr. Aron’s site HSPerson. Be sure and read her books and workbooks as well to give you a jump-start into your journey – found on her site.
- Depth of Processing: Do you reflect more than others about the way the world is going or any other topic, need a little more time to make decisions, known for good ideas and thoughtful internal dialog?
- Over Stimulation: Do you experience overstimulation and burn out due to sheer amount of incoming information, need a quieter/calmer environment to think and process, need more sleep or downtime to recoup?
- Empathy & Emotional Responsiveness: Are you more easily moved to tears of joy, gratitude, relief or equally moved to laughter, do you tend to react with emotions similar to others – you catch their emotions and feel similarly, are more distressed by violence, horror, bullying in TV shows/movies, or are disturbed more than others by social injustice, unfairness, arguing?
- Sensitive to Subtleties: Do you notice details other normally miss, or sense how somebody may feel, if things are out of sorts or if décor is moved around, more aware of small environmental or house noises and temperatures, susceptible to humidity and temperature changes, textures, tastes, light and sounds?
You can read more about her research, find resources, take the self-tests to see if you are a Highly Sensitive Person or a High Sensation Seeker on her website HSPerson.com. She also has a link to the first-ever documentary film series covering the topic of Highly Sensitive Men called Sensitive Men Rising that was just released in the past couple years – so this is a new and burgeoning area of study. The resource page on HSPerson has many other books and articles: HSPerson. Here’s a link to the Sensitive Men Rising site.
I found a guide who was also a High Sensation Seeking, Highly Sensitive Person who could customize my learning curve specifically tailored to my life. Having her was an invaluable resource in shortening the time it took me to get up to speed and understand how knowing of these traits and how they fit together and fit into every single area of my life was essential to moving forward making the right decisions for me to live more attuned, content, and awakened to what I need in my life to fully support who I am and who I am becoming. It was also an amazing experience to reframe so many experiences in my former years, why they affected me in such a manner, and how not to become dysregulated and burned out in the future.
Another favorite resource I read regularly is the Highly Sensitive Refuge blog. They offer oodles of articles on all topics concerning Highly Sensitive People and I find it extremely helpful. I always have it pulled up on my phone to read while in waiting rooms for one thing or another. It’s positive and has impactful tips that you can implement immediately.
Exercise Your Empathy and Compassion as Leaders
December 19, 2015 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Research from the neuroscience field has demonstrated that we’re actually hard-wired to empathize with those around us, thanks to a neural network called mirror neurons. We see it when we hear of natural disasters, which causes a deep emotional response. Our empathy makes it so that we can’t help but feel concern and care for those we don’t even know. Not to be confused with sympathy. I watched a stirring, animated short video on Youtube regarding empathy with a little fox. Check it out. One of the points to the video was that when you make an empathetic statement, it should not start with “At least….). Oh how that resonated with me. How often do we mention something to a colleague that did not go well and they being their response with “At least it didn’t….” Responses like this don’t help and don’t solve the issue, they just annoy you.
Though we are hardwired for empathy, we don’t see evidence of this behavior in the workplace. It seems too mushy. Why are so many workplaces suffering from a lack of human compassion, connection, and shared belonging? We care about the realities our colleagues face in our organization – of the challenges and opportunities they see going unaddressed and thus, our compassion arises from our curiosity to listen and learn, paired with our innate drive to relate to the realities of those around us.
This type of compassion is vital in today’s leadership because it’s the key to the internal driving force found within each us to understand what motivates our employees, what matters to them, and how we can connect the work they do to the shared purpose that defines why we do what we do. Many studies have shown that compassion in the workplace leads to higher levels of employee engagement and job satisfaction and reduces employee absenteeism and burnout. The Gallup organization’s major study asks employees if they have somebody they can call a best friend at work and if they have been asked about how they contribute to the organization and shown by their leadership that what they do matters. If they don’t feel they matter, they walk.
Here are some steps to help you to reconnect with your sense of curiosity and empathy to bring more compassion into the workplace:
- See your team mates beyond the roles they play in your organization and remain curious about what challenges them along with the willingness to listen to what opportunities they see for our organization to succeed.
- Make efforts to discover their true strengths by seeking to better understand and know those we lead – of what serves as the fuel for their internal motivation.
- Be open about not having all the answers because it’s impossible for anyone to truly know or understand the complexities of the work we do today and its impact.
Most of the daily decisions we make are not driven from a rational mindset, but from a response to our emotionally-driven, network of mirror neurons where we seek commonality and connection both to the work we do and to those around us. And that means that compassion in leadership involves an honest and more outward-focused approach to leadership that allows us to tap into the native talents, creativity, and insights of those we lead. Leaders must show their team members that they are present to hear, understand, and provide them with what they require to succeed and thrive. How will you show compassion and empathy to your colleagues, clients or customer today?
