Lesson 1 The Science of Your Senstive System
00:00:00 Jess: Lesson one the science of your sensitive system. Why high sensitivity is real. How your nervous system may experience life differently, and why your sensitivity may not be the burden you feel it is. Hello and welcome to this opening lesson. This audio is a foundation for the work we are going into more deeply inside, beyond the story and stabilizing with Somatics inside, beyond the story, we begin to explore the inner narratives, emotional patterns, and survival archetypes that many highly sensitive people develop as a way to stay safe, loved, accepted, or in control and inside Stabilising With Somatics, we begin to support the body and nervous system directly. So your sensitivity is not only understood in the mind, but held more safely in the body. But before we go into any of that deeper work. We need to begin here with your sensitive system, because if you are highly sensitive or suspect, you might be. It can be very easy to make your sensitivity mean something negative about you. You may have been told that you're too emotional, too intense to reactive, too easily affected, too much. Or maybe no one said those words directly, but you've always felt them. You felt that other people seemed to move through life more easily. They could brush things off more quickly. They could stay in busy environments for longer. They could handle conflict, pressure, noise change, or social situations without seeming to be affected. And somewhere along the way, you may have started to wonder what is wrong with me? Why do I feel everything so deeply? Why can't I just get over things? Why do I need so much time to recover? Why does my body react so strongly when other people seem fine? So before we do anything else, I want to offer you a different starting point. There may not be something wrong with you. In fact, I know there's nothing wrong with you. Your system is simply processing life differently, and your sensitivity may not be the burden you feel it is. It may feel like a burden because it's been misunderstood, unsupported, overstimulated, or forced to live in ways that do not honor how your system actually works. But the sensitivity itself is not the enemy. The deeper question is what happens when a sensitive nervous system is finally understood, supported, stabilised, and allowed to live in conditions that help it to function well. So take a slow breath here. And just notice how it feels to even consider the possibility that your sensitivity may not be a weakness. There may be a reason that your body may have been responding to life in ways that actually make sense. So what does high sensitivity actually mean when we talk about high sensitivity? We are not talking about being fragile, being dramatic, or being difficult. We are definitely not talking about a person who simply needs to toughen up. High sensitivity is generally understood as a temperament trait. A temperament trait means it's part of the way a person is naturally wired to respond to the world. Some people are naturally more novelty seeking or sensation seeking. Some are more socially driven and some are more naturally cautious. And some people are naturally more sensitive to internal and external inflammation. The research term, often used to describe this trait of being highly sensitive is Sensory Processing Sensitivity. This really matters because it helps us move sensitivity out of shame and into understanding. This is something real. We're not just being dramatic, which you may have felt for a long time. So it gives us a way of saying my sensitivity isn't an issue in my personality. It is a real way my nervous system processes the world. A highly sensitive system tends to take in more, notice more, processes more deeply, responds more strongly to what is happening inside and around them. This can include sensory information. So things like noise, light, smell, texture, temperature screens, clutter, busy spaces, are too much happening all at once. It can include emotional information. So the mood in a room, the feeling behind someone's words, the intensity of conflict, the emotional weight of another person's pain. It can include relational information. So a shift in tone, a facial expression, a pause in a message, a feeling that something between you and another person has changed. It can also include internal information. So body sensations, emotional shifts, intuitive signals, subtle changes in energy, tension, breath digestion, pain or fatigue. So when we say someone is highly sensitive, we are not just saying they feel more, we are saying their whole system may be receiving and processing more information. And when a system receives and processes more information, it makes sense that it may also become overwhelmed more easily. This is why high sensitivity can be both deeply enriching and genuinely challenging, because the same system that may be moved by music, nature, meaning, intimacy, kindness, creativity and subtle connection may also be very overwhelmed by noise, pressure, conflict, emotional intensity, social demand, harshness, or environments that are too much for the body to metabolise. So we are not here to romanticise sensitivity, but we're not also going to pathologise it. We are here to understand it because sensitivity can become painful when it's an unsupported and when it's understood, respected and worked with skillfully, it can become a source of discernment, depth, creativity, connection, and a deep self-trust. So sensitivity is not as rare as you may think, and it's not as rare as you imagine. High sensitivity is often estimated to exist in roughly twenty to thirty percent of people. So you could think of it as around one in four people. This is really important to know, because it means that sensitivity is not something strange or unusual. It is a meaningful minority pattern within the human nervous system. You are not the only one experiencing life this way, and you are not imagining that your system responds in this different, more reactive, responsive way. One of the most interesting parts of the research is that this kind of sensitivity does not only appear in humans. Similar sensitivity patterns have been observed across more than one hundred different species. So in evolutionary terms, this makes so much sense. In any group, it can be useful for some members to pause, observe carefully, notice subtle changes, detect risk, sense shifts in the environment and process before acting. So sensitivity is not modern weakness, which a lot of people think it is. It actually is an ancient survival strategy. It may be one way a nervous system is designed to keep itself in the wider group, aware, responsive and connected to what is happening in the environment. Again, this does not mean sensitivity is always easy. It does not mean it's always beautiful and it does not mean sensitive people are better than anyone else. It simply means sensitivity has a place. It has a function. It has intelligence within it. And when we understand that, we can stop treating sensitivity as something to shame, suppress, or heal away. There is some really fascinating brain research around high sensitivity. Some brain imaging research suggests that high sensitive people may show greater activation in areas linked with awareness, attention, empathy, sensory integration, and emotional responsiveness. One area that is especially interesting is an area of the brain called the insula. The insula is involved in interoception, which is your awareness of what is happening inside your own body. This may help explain why many sensitive people feel things in the body before they can explain them in words. They may sense a tightening in the chest, a shift in your stomach, changes in breath. I've had clients literally say they can feel the blood pumping and moving around in their body, or certain bodily processes taking place. The body may register this experience before the mind can organise it into language, which can be quite overwhelming. Research also points towards greater engagement of systems involved in empathy, emotional responsiveness and mirroring. So you may have heard people talk about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are often discussed in relation to our ability to resonate with, understand, or internally mirror the actions and emotional states of others. We do not need to overstate this or turn it into a simplistic explanation for everything, but it does help us understand why highly sensitive people can feel so affected by another person's mood, facial expressions, pain, joy, distress, or just their emotional state in general. For some sensitive people, another person's nervous system does not feel distant. It feels close. It feels like something the body is also responding to. This is why you may walk into a room and feel the atmosphere before anyone has spoken. It is why someone's tone can stay with you. It's why conflict can feel physical, and it's why kindness can soften your whole body. Why music, beauty, nature, and meaning can move you so deeply. Again, this is not just being emotional. It appears to involve measurable differences in how the brain and the nervous system responds to information. And if you have spent your life being told you're too sensitive, this kind of understand can be deeply validating.
