When you develop over-sensitivity, it is the people around you who suffer the consequences the most. You may think you handle things well, and if they don’t love you enough, they won’t tell you how much your reactions to things are usually over the top.
If you’ve ever noticed you take things people say too seriously, you overanalyze people’s behaviour, you like to be right, jokes can rub off on you in a certain way (negatively, I might add). You get upset at feedback, you take criticism so harshly, and you sometimes don’t like being around people who could potentially reprimand your bad behaviour? You are too sensitive.
Over-sensitivity may have more negative sides, but, sometimes it has a flip side. Overly sensitive people can also be very caring, feel things deeply, including loving deeply in places the oceans couldn’t touch. Still, the negative sides mostly overwhelm the positives because sometimes, you just can’t find the right balance.
Think of sensitivity as a bottle of fanta that’s been shaken without you even realizing it. You carry it around all day, looking calm on the outside, no sign anything is wrong. Then someone barely touches the cap; a joke, an offhand comment, a piece of feedback, and it doesn’t just fizz, it explodes, and everyone standing close to you gets soaked. The explosion of your reactions to things could hit anyone at that point.
Simply put, overly sensitive people are either too confrontational or too withdrawn. Either you hurt the people around you or hurt yourself. There really is no upside is there?
I was fortunate enough to have people tell me that I can be very sensitive to things that don’t require that much energy from me and I didn’t take alot of jokes well. Joke is on them now oh! The have to beg me to be less playful. the only good thing about my reaction to this is I can take feedback, even if I was unhappy in the moment when I received it, I usually care about the content of what is being said.
Now, I care way less about how a thing is delivered and more about that context of what is said. I started asking the question ‘what is this person trying to tell me? insetad of how did they just talk to me?
Less ego, more curiousity to what is being said.
All that reacting isn’t feeling, it’s flinching.
The less sensitive I became the freer and more comfortable people were with me. I make less assumption, so much so that people compliment how I like to get clarity, give clarity and help break complex things into simpler, easier to understand ways. I also got into the clarity business. Helping people to not over analyze, to be less reactive because you are prepared for the context and not how it is deleivered whether in your personal business, career, work, and different facets of life.
Being less sensitive will give you the freedom to discover your best self, because the flip side to that keeps you stuck at over ruminating every little action, every word, every reaction of people that you have no control over.
Oversensitivity is really just your realization of your lack of control. And, the more you accept you cannot control the outer, the less reactive you are in your core.
No need to give your energy away like that. Reserve it for the little things that make life whole. So the next time someone says something to you – a feedback, a joke that makes you want to act in a way you will feel guilty about, remember it is just them. Them, not you. Them you have no control over, but you? You can and should control your actions.
A whole new world opens up to a person who is less sensitive to what people say and do. You just kind of feel the warmth of the sun a little more and have fun even better.
What has been overly sensitive done for you? If nothing positive, then why are you still at it?
#viekieo
