Special Edition: The Truth About Highly Sensitive People

**Megghan Thompson** (0:00)
We want a sensitive boss who notices when we're frustrated by the workload. We want a sensitive lover. We want a sensitive teacher for our children who manages and notices when our children are overloaded. So first and foremost, sensitive is not a bad word.

**Erica Mandy** (0:15)
Today is Saturday, June 27th. Maybe you've heard it or you've said it before that you're too sensitive. Or maybe you're a parent trying to understand why your child seems to notice everything and sometimes gets overwhelmed by things that don't seem to bother other kids. Today, we're talking about what it really means to be a highly sensitive person and why it isn't a weakness. It's also not a diagnosis. It's a temperament trait that impacts one in five people. Our guest is Megghan Thompson. She's a licensed clinical professional counselor, registered play therapist supervisor, parent coach and mental health consultant, as well as a TEDx speaker, bestselling author and a mom. She's worked with highly sensitive children, teens and families for more than 15 years. Today, you'll hear about the gifts and challenges of sensitivity for both adults and kids, why it can get confused with other labels, and ultimately how better understanding it can change the way we see ourselves and each other.
Welcome to The News Worthy special edition Saturday, when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes where we provide all the day's news in less than 15 minutes. I'm Erica Mandy. It's now time for today's special edition Saturday.
Megan Thompson, thank you so much for joining us here on The News Worthy.

**Megghan Thompson** (1:32)
Hi. Thank you for having me.

**Erica Mandy** (1:34)
So let's start with the basics for people who don't know much about this. What does it actually mean to be a highly sensitive person, and how many people likely fit this temperament?

**Megghan Thompson** (1:42)
About one out of every five people, so 20 percent of the population experiences the world differently, and this is not a deficit. So I want to explain this in the four components. First and foremost is that this is a depth of processing life experience. Your brain is taking in more information than the average person, and so that means that your thoughts are more deep, you have an interesting inner world that can lead you down a very vast imagination. You can also take in more information sensory wise from the environment, and so that might mean that you could be easily overstimulated if you don't have emotion regulation skills. Next is that you're highly emotionally responsive, so this might lead to emotional reactivity. Again, if you don't have emotion regulation skills, and then lastly is that you're sensitive to subtleties. So these are people who notice more details in life, you're more susceptible to those small details and changes in those small details, and then you are also overstimulated by the environment itself. This can lead to a personal experience where you feel like there's something wrong or broken.
If you have not heard of this temperament trait before, but great news is that this is a designed temperament. We need this temperament in our human experience to notice the big picture and the small picture at the same time. So it is not a diagnosis, but rather an observation that has been noticed for over 100 years.

**Erica Mandy** (3:10)
You've said that there are even brain scans that show the difference. Can you explain that a little bit?

**Megghan Thompson** (3:17)
So when they've done brain scans on highly sensitive people, compared to non-highly sensitive people, what we've noticed is that they are using more brain power, if you will. They're using more of their surface area of their brain. They're likely going to be more overloaded because of that, and we can see that in neuroscience studies.

**Erica Mandy** (3:37)
Just for practical purposes, if a highly sensitive person walks into a room, they might notice different smells and different things that other people might not notice. Can you give us that real-world example?

**Megghan Thompson** (3:50)
Sure.
I'm doing an interview. If I were a highly sensitive person, I would probably be more overstimulated by the very bright light that I have shining up here to make my face look normal, and in the room that I'm set up, I might be distracted more if there were construction going on right outside where I live. I might also be noticing your facial expressions and have a hard time interpreting them if I'm noticing that you're raising your eyebrow when something I said didn't seem very clever. So you might be having a thought around, crap, I forgot to order groceries and your eyebrow raised. But I might interpret that as I said something that I need to pay attention to because I'm paying attention to more things in my environment than the average person.