Why am I so sensitive?

There are lots of different “sensitivities”, and without going into each and every one while ruling out their medical reasoning, consider these two questions: 

1. How stressed are you right now? 
2. How stressed have you been in the past?

First, let’s set the stage for this conversation. Your stress response system (which is your nervous system) is designed to process information (aka stressors) from both outside and inside of you These processes are known as exteroception and interoception, respectively. In short, the stress response system wants to keep you alive, and in order to survive it needs to quickly and efficiently evaluate threats. A threat is a somewhat subjective experience: where we would collectively agree upon being physically attacked as a threat, we might differ on whether a threat could be a looming deadline at work or an embarrassing event. 

To simplify this: increased stress = increased threat.

As we become more stressed, our body increases its defense strategies. That may look like being more reactive (fight) or more sensitive (flight). 

Here is the tricky part that I struggled with and the vast majority of my clients currently struggle with: a stress response system that is “stuck on stress.” There are many paths that lead to “stuck”, but they all involve chronic activation of the stress response system, which is why knowing your stress history is important. Unresolved adversity, trauma, or chronic stress keeps the body in that defensive mode and prohibits it from returning to a calm, balanced place. You, like many, are likely used to this state of being and what you believe is “calm” is not a true calm: it's actually low to moderate stress.   

So your best bet is to: 

1. Become aware of your stress levels
2. Learn tools to help you return to calm (it’s worth mentioning that calm is not a permanent state, we move in and out of it - calm/stress/calm/stress)
3. Then, re-evaluate your sensitivities