The Hidden Psychology Of Highly Sensitive People - Dr Sasha Hamdani - #1147

Chris Williamson (0:00)

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Why did you get interested in researching emotionally sensitive people?

Sasha Hamdani (0:30)

Because I am an emotionally sensitive person. And I think also just from my body of work, seeing patients, you just start to see patterns of people becoming more or falling into the pattern of being emotionally sensitive.

Chris Williamson (0:47)

What does that look like? What's the experience of life like for someone who's an emotionally sensitive person?

Sasha Hamdani (0:52)

I think it's different for each person, but I think one of the bigger overarching things is that these are the people who feel things quickly, deeply, and for a long time.

Chris Williamson (1:03)

Okay. What would be the sort of way that they spend their days? Like they're going about their day, what will be some of the habits, some of the mental experiences that they go through?

Sasha Hamdani (1:13)

Yeah. So I think a lot of times people with emotional sensitivity, because they're taking in so much emotional data, they are overanalyzing every interaction and reading it for, am I doing something weird? Is this other person doing something weird? Are you mad at me? They're just interpreting and re-evaluating every single interaction, which takes up a lot of brain power throughout the day.

The other thing that they do is you see a tremendous amount of time spent where you're already predicting that that could be an issue. So they are changing their behavior, they're masking behavior, they're overcompensating for certain things. So there is work that's being done within interactions on a day-to-day basis, and there's stuff that they're also anticipating these possible interactions.

Chris Williamson (1:59)

Oh, that's interesting. So even silence and in preparation, people are interpreting that with a particular lens as well.

Right? That's interesting. What about criticism? What's the relationship like with criticism?

Sasha Hamdani (2:13)

I don't think anybody in the universe likes criticism, but I think when you look at rejection-sensitive dysphoria, which is a neurological phenomenon we're talking about, it is this robust, emotional, sometimes physical response to rejection or criticism. So it's not just like, okay, that happened and that really hurt my feelings and that sucks.

It's, I feel like the air has been pushed out of my lungs. I don't know if I can recover from this. And it becomes this thing that instead of being like, okay, well, I'm chewing on this and it's annoying, it becomes this thing that consumes them.

And can it be as significant as to look like a major depressive episode?

Chris Williamson (2:55)

It feels like a fear of disappointing other people is quite central to this.

Sasha Hamdani (3:01)

Yeah, it can be.

Chris Williamson (3:02)

Right. Why?

Sasha Hamdani (3:03)

I think it stems from this fear of rejection or criticism. So if you're going to disappoint someone, you don't want the other person to be upset with you, you don't want them to reject you, you don't want them to think badly of you, you don't want them to criticize you. And so you're dealing with this very complicated phenomenon that's coming at you, all of these emotions happening at once and you're trying to process them in real time.

Chris Williamson (3:27)

Is rejection-sensitive dysphoria the same thing as being a highly sensitive person? Is there something like sufficient, necessary but not sufficient in here?

Sasha Hamdani (3:35)

Well, okay, so here's my deal. So highly sensitive person, I mean, I think that was a, it's not a clinical term, but that came about years and years ago.

And it's talking about highly sensitive to everything. So not just emotions, but sounds, lights, everything you're sensitive to. Okay. When I talk about rejection-sensitive dysphoria, I'm putting that on a spectrum of emotional sensitivity. So in terms of, there are some people that, you know, emotions and emotional data doesn't impact them that tremendously on a day-to-day basis, and they kind of roll along their day. And maybe it could be a little bit off-median, where they're like, hmm, you probably could afford being a little bit more emotional.

There's people who, you know, they have healthy ups and downs, and then there are other people who emotional data can just sync them with things, which might be completely out of proportion to what the stimulus is happening.