Are you easily hurt by negative comments, criticism and small insults? Do you find it unbearable when someone shouts at you or talks to you in a rough way? Do you have too much empathy?
If your answer to the previous questions was yes, then you might be an emotionally sensitive person. A highly sensitive person experiences all emotions more intensely than other people. This means that, if he went through a painful life experience, he would experience emotional pain more intensely than other people.
In this article, I’m going to tell you how to stop being so sensitive to negativity but before that, you should also know the benefits of being a highly sensitive person.
Advantages of being a highly sensitive person
- High empty: a highly sensitive person usually has higher empathy than normal people. High empathy does not only make you feel what others are feeling but you also read other people’s emotions easily. A sensitive person can get sad because he is talking to his sad friend.
- Niceness and kindness: because of their increased empathy, sensitive people are usually nice and tend to avoid hurting others or offend them. Since, they also have low tolerance of harsh people and insults, they become nice to avoid provoking people.
- Increased happiness: overly sensitive people experience all emotions more intensely, therefore they also experience happiness and excitement more intensely than other people.
From the previous points you can see that highly sensitive people have some advantages over other people. Unfortunately over sensitivity can affect you negatively as well if you didn’t learn how to handle it properly. See: why do we obsess over people who don’t want us.
How to stop being highly sensitive
The following are some of the important steps you need to take in order to make sure that your over sensitivity does not affect you badly.
- Correct your perception: how would you feel if somebody told you that you are worthless? You would probably feel bad if you thought that he really sees you as a worthless person. On the other hand, if you realised later that he was just having a bad day and cursing everybody he encountered, you wouldn’t feel that bad especially if you understood that has low emotional intelligence and can’t control his emotions when he is frustrated. This brings us to an important point. Words hurt you only when you interpret them in a certain way and especially when you give them a wrong meaning.
- Heal your emotional wounds: for example if you were emotionally hurt in the past as a result of being rejected by significant others, then you will not only feel bad whenever someone rejects you but you may also become defensive whenever you think that someone is going to reject you. In my article about traumatic bonding, I explained how fear of rejection can get you emotionally attached to a person you don’t love just to avoid being rejected.
- Build your self-esteem: a person who has low self esteem usually thinks that he is less worthy than other people. Now when you have low self-esteem you become very sensitive to criticism and negative remarks because they remind you of your inner self-worth that you haven’t strengthened yet. Changing your mind-set alone is not enough to build a solid self confidence. You need to take real life actions in order to prove to your unconscious mind that you are worthy. In my books I said that unless your unconscious mind believes that you are worthy, you can’t build self-esteem and feel good about yourself. See: why you should not suppress your emotions.