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.
Back to Blogging…Transformed & With a Twist
March 1, 2026 | Posted in Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
It’s been a hot minute since we last came together and I’m a little embarrassed and, a lot grateful to the Universe for the interesting twist that came to be that I’m able to connect with you once again in this space.
About a decade ago I had the tech upgraded on this blog and since then, I was unable to get back in to make edits. It just wasn’t happening after I tried every which way including sideways, then I just let it go and focused on my speaking and training career. As it turns out, I was feeling more and more of an obligation to come up with content, and I was getting burnt out juggling so many things that this one just had to drop. I felt it was Divine intervention telling me to put down blogging for a while and concentrate on other things – it was not the time. I let it go and understood that when the time presented itself once again, that it would be unlocked for me to once again share my resources, my lessons, and help others connect to their capacity through blogging.
Enter the Universe and its infinite wisdom. Having retired from full-time corporate work teaching and training international clientele several years ago and transforming my life and lifestyle after learning I was an Empath and an Extroverted, High-Sensation-Seeking, Highly-Sensitive Person in 2020, the doors opened and the code was cracked to once again allow me entry past the firewall and into the blog. Thanks to a dear friend who had a friend who had a husband who was willing to crack the case wide open. It was once again time to start sharing content after all I had learned that had profoundly changed my life in every way and every day, and what has made clear all that was happening to me/for me in my life up to that point.
I’m now intent on sharing the work and words of wisdom of the many from whom I’ve studied. I’m thrilled to share their brain/mind/body/health/environmental/strategic planning work that was instrumental in reframing past life events, managing time/space/self in present day events, and how to strategically plan for future events/space/ways of being and moving through the world that is more in alignment with my natural brain and body connection.
I’m putting a twist on how I work and who I work with – moving away from corporations and organizations to individuals and one-on-one coaching and advising versus keynotes and corporate training and teambuilding events. I’m intent on helping women in particular who are Highly Sensitive and/or High Sensation Seeking Sensitives because it’s such a complex connection, a guide is most helpful to figure out how to move through the world in the best possible way while honoring your very specific set of traits. Much more on this later, but just knowing these traits exist is the first step in how to get the most out of your life and create a lifestyle by design and not default to be your best self.
