Understanding Resilience: Tips For When You're Wondering How To Be Less Sensitive
Being a highly sensitive person comes with its unique set of challenges. Those who experience emotional sensitivity often find themselves dealing with overwhelming emotions and heightened reactions to everyday situations.
This emotional reaction tends to occur subconsciously and can make navigating everyday life difficult. However, with the right strategies and mindset, it is possible to develop emotional resilience and navigate the world with greater ease.
In this article, we will explore why some individuals feel highly sensitive and provide valuable tips on developing emotional resilience and steps to improve your overall mental health.
Why am I so sensitive?
Emotional sensitivity refers to the tendency to react strongly to external stimuli and internal experiences. People who are highly sensitive may frequently feel overwhelmed by their emotions, leading to emotional distress.
Understanding resilience: Causes of heightened emotional sensitivity
This heightened sensitivity can be attributed to various factors, including genetics, upbringing, and life experiences. Certain mental health conditions and personality disorders may contribute to heightened emotional sensitivity including:
- Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),
- Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
- Bipolar Disorder
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD)
Additionally, individuals with high sensitivity may possess a more finely tuned nervous system, making them more prone to perceiving and processing stimuli deeply.
While emotional sensitivity is not an inherently negative trait, it may lead to challenges in a number of aspects of life. If heightened emotional sensitivity is causing disruptions in your everyday life, therapy may serve as a valuable resource.
Seeking mental health support to build psychological resilience
For those looking to get to the bottom of their emotional sensitivity, online therapy often offers flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, research has demonstrated that online therapy delivers a quality of care equal to that of in-person therapy.
While embracing your sensitivity is possible, learning to manage it in healthy ways can lead to personal growth and a deeper understanding of yourself and others.
Developing Emotional Resilience
Learning how to be less sensitive tends to require a certain level of cognizance and self-compassion. While the process takes time and requires patience, there are a number of steps one can take to develop more emotional resilience.
Some of these steps include:
Self-awareness
The first step towards developing emotional resilience is cultivating self-awareness. Take the time to understand your emotional triggers, patterns of reaction, and the underlying reasons behind your heightened sensitivity. By gaining insight into your emotional experiences, you can better manage and navigate them.
Positive self-talk
Negative thoughts can intensify emotional sensitivity. Practice positive self-talk by challenging and reframing negative beliefs. Replace self-critical statements with compassionate and supportive affirmations. By fostering a more positive internal dialogue, you can reduce the impact of negative thoughts on your emotional well-being.
Gaining an understanding of emotion regulation techniques
Learn and practice effective strategies for managing overwhelming emotions. Deep breathing exercises, meditation, and mindfulness can help you stay present and grounded during emotionally charged situations. Engaging in activities like journaling, painting, or listening to calming music can also serve as healthy outlets for emotional expression.
Building emotional intelligence to become more resilient
Emotional intelligence involves understanding and managing your emotions effectively. Enhancing your emotional intelligence can help you navigate social interactions and relationships more smoothly. Seek to identify and label your emotions, and work on expressing them assertively and empathetically.
Distress tolerance
Building distress tolerance skills is crucial for individuals who are highly sensitive. Develop a toolbox of coping mechanisms to rely on during challenging times. Engage in activities that provide comfort and relaxation, such as going for walks in nature, practicing yoga, or engaging in hobbies that bring you joy.
Surrounding yourself with support
Cultivate a strong support network of understanding and empathetic individuals who validate your experiences. Connect with like-minded people, join support groups, or seek therapy to gain additional guidance and support in managing your emotional sensitivity.
Takeaway
Frequently asked questions
What is the first step in building and understanding resilience?
The foundation of building resilience is defining it, creating therefore a greater understanding of what to pursue. Resilience is a person’s ability to react and adapt to stress in a healthy way. Genetic and environmental factors can either increase or decrease a person’s resilience.
What is psychological resilience?
Psychological resilience is both the process and outcome of successfully adapting oneself to overcome challenges or stressful life events using mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility to adjust to internal and external demands. In other words, it’s a person’s capability to adapt to minor or major adverse life events.
Can a mental health professional help you become more resilient?
A mental health professional often works with their client on building resilience as a tool to manage both acute and chronic stress. Those who experienced severe early life stress, have post-traumatic stress disorder, or mood or anxiety disorders often have decreased stress management skills.
Behavioral or psychological techniques can help a client increase their resilience and employ active coping strategies to more effectively manage symptoms when experiencing stressful life events.
What are the seven Cs of resilience?
The 7 Cs of resilience include the following:
Competence
Confidence
Connection
Character
Contribution
Coping
Control
These resilience factors can be bolstered through building stress management skills, such as creating strong social connections, practicing self-care, finding a life purpose, and cultivating healthy thoughts and perspectives. Successful adaptation relies on building these emotional and cognitive protective factors.
How do I know if I’m a resilient person?
Resilient people are typically self-aware, self-confident, maintain strong boundaries, are socially connected, and can find humor in difficult situations. Uncontrollable stress induced pathways are activated in hard times, but the effects are short-lived compared to others. You may have a good deal of optimism. Positive affects the stress response in positive ways, whether it is through optimism, gratitude practice, or strong friendships.
What is the understanding of resilience?
For many years, scientists have been studying the effects of resilience. Significant research has included preclinical and clinical studies of gene and drug therapies, as well as stress inoculation training. The stress inoculation hypothesis posits that creating a resilience developmental environment through offering exposure to mild stressors enhances the stress response. Animal stress models have shown some positive results, using mice and squirrel monkeys. In the latter study, monkeys experienced acute stress when separated from their mothers, yet at nine months of age, they experienced both less anxiety and lower basal stress hormones than the group that did not experience these separations. Researchers hypothesized that controlled acute stress leads to an inoculation effect.
What causes lack of resilience?
A number of factors can influence stress response in human beings. An impaired stress response can be caused by early life stress, adverse or traumatic events, chronic social defeat, stress around socio-economic factors, as well as biological and genetic factors. PTSD studies found that ongoing war stress can lead individuals to develop heightened anxiety states that damaged stress response systems.
A few imaging studies have shown decreased functioning in the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex in individuals with anxiety disorders compared to those without.
How to be a resilient person?
Individuals with stress related psychiatric disorders can be best served by enhancing resilience through maintaining normal psychological appointments for treatment. Psychological techniques utilized by professionals can be useful in managing anxiety, depressive, and PTSD symptoms by addressing environmental factors such as childhood trauma, as well as educating the individual on how to modulate stress responses.
If you are not experiencing anxiety, depression, or other psychiatric disorders, promoting resilience against mild and moderate stressors and psychological distress in your own life can do so through boosting protective factors. This can include promoting coping self-efficacy through mindfulness training, getting frequent physical exercise, focusing on positive emotions and maintaining your social relationships.
What is the difference between coping and resilience?
Coping can be one of the key factors in resilience against critical life stressors, but it is not resilience itself. In fact, maladaptive stress responses can lead to developing maladaptive coping mechanisms. For example, developing adult depression symptoms, the individual will primarily exercise avoidant coping such as emotional or behavioral withdrawal. Positive coping mechanisms can contribute to greater resilience, while maladaptive ones can have a negative impact.
Can resilience be taught?
Yes, and in fact therapists can use both pharmacological and psychological interventions to help a person build resilience to stressful events. Resilience or lack of resilience is not simply a personality trait, it is developed through identified mechanisms encompassing genetic, biological, and environmental factors. Environmental factors react with stress response systems, which affect neurobiological factors, impacting the adaptive stress response. Animal and human studies have found that differential stress vulnerability is associated with chronic pain patients, and others with chronic illness. In specific studies, cancer patients with depression found that symptoms improved with resilience training.
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