The HSP World Podcast Ep. 36: What Highly Sensitives Love About Their Trait

This podcast is brought to you by the HSP World Mastery Program dedicated to inspiring and empowering HSPs. 

Thomas: Hi, HSP World listeners, it’s Thomas. In light of the ongoing Spotify controversy, we just want to say that you have a lot of listening choices. Our podcast is available on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the Podbean app, Amazon music and Audible, iHeartRadio, PlayerFM, Tune-in + Alexa, and Listen Notes, and it’ll soon be available on Pandora. 

Hi, and welcome to the HSP World podcast. With each episode we have a conversation about an interesting HSP- related topic. We’re not coaches or therapists. We’re HSPs holding space with you.

Every Saturday we ask a question on our social media channels and we get the best answers. We want to shout you out and chat about your answers and what our answers are. 

I’m one of your hosts, Thomas and your other hosts are: 

Robyn: Robyn.

Rayne: and Rayne.

Robyn: Welcome back everybody to another episode of our podcast. And as you may have noticed by now, we’ve got some changes for you today. We like to keep it fresh here at the podcast and we thought of a new way to connect with you. So, as Thomas mentioned, we do ask these questions every Saturday on our social media channels.

We’re going to tackle one today. We’re going to pick it up and go over some of your answers and add our own thoughts as well. Today’s question is, ‘What do you love about your HSP Trait?’ 

Thomas: That’s a great question. I think.

Rayne: Yeah. I love this question.

Thomas: Because we don’t ask it over ourselves enough. Like, what do we really love about it? 

Robyn: Hmm, that’s a good one to, uh, I know Elaine Aron always says that we we need a stream of positive information about HSP-ness to counteract all the negative stuff that we hear all the time. 

Thomas: Right. Exactly. 

Robyn: It’s good to get a question that puts us in that mindset. So let’s look at what some of our followers put… 

Thomas: Well I’ll start. a follower named notbinham said, feeling music deeply. And I can definitely relate to that. When I put my headphones on it takes me into another world and interestingly for me, I’m connecting with the music, the, the melody and the rhythm even more so than the words. For me, it’s all about the sensory-ness of, of the music itself. Not so much the words, the lyrics. How about you?

Rayne: Yeah, I would totally, I would have to say music. It can, it can. And, and it depends on what type of mood I’m in too. You know, sometimes music can pull me out of, you know, it can, it can bring me up, you know, and lift me up. And other times it can, I can find music that matches my mood. So I can feel more into my mood more so, I love that about it. Sometimes the words matter for me, Thomas, and sometimes they don’t, you know? Yeah. Yeah. 

Thomas: Well, Robyn, pick another one.

Robyn: I mean there’s a lot of people talking about intuition. In the words of Sashology spidey senses… 

Thomas: I like that one.

Robyn: That’s another way way to put it. Um, a lot of people saying, you know, I just get these strong intuitions about people. I’m able to read what’s going on in the room, or I can just know when something is right or something is wrong. Quite, quite a few people adding that one in there. 

Thomas: What do you think about that?

Robyn: It’s interesting. I am currently, anyway, not really leading from my intuition these days, I think because things are I’m in a mode where things are pretty routined. So, um, I mean, that will change. Of course there’s lots of surprises coming up. But, yeah, I don’t know. It’s not, I think it’s not my first go-to so I can forget that it’s there. 

Thomas: I think that my intuition has evolved as I’ve grown. When I was younger, I took people at face value and I had to learn not to do that. I had to, I had to learn to, to lean on my intuition a little bit more. And, and it took me a while to develop.

Robyn: Yeah and you know… I’m wondering if I have just developed it in certain areas and that I don’t think of it as intuition anymore. I just, because now I have words for it. Often people will say, oh, the intuition is, I just, I can’t explain why, but, this is how I feel.

And, and now I don’t know. I think there’s like, yeah, getting impressions of people or getting a sense of like, how secure is this person feeling? How easy is it for them to be around other people or around me, you know? It’s a lot easier for me to observe that, but I think because I can name it I don’t consider it an intuition anymore, but, um, but I guess it is, I don’t know, maybe when you become very developed with it… I’d love to be able to do that in all spheres.

But, uh, maybe if you develop it, you can just, know. 

Thomas: I think that having the HSP Trait of course gives us a little bit of a leg up on, on developing our intuition. I don’t know that we’re born with that intuition, but I, I definitely have noticed for myself that, that it is something that allowed me to, like, like I’ve said, lean into it and, and rely on it a little bit more. Rayne, you were about to say…

Rayne: Well, I was just gonna say it feels to me like, it depends what your definition of intuition is, you know, and, and I mean, we could dive deep into this one, really, you know. So, you know, cause it, intuition is a pretty broad word to cover quite a few things, but it feels like most people, when you say ‘intuition’, it’s, it’s sort of their immediate gut feeling, you know. But I could be wrong, but that’s what it feels like to me is, what most people mean when they say intuition, when they, when they talk about the word intuition.

Thomas: A lot of people talk about it in terms of energy or just that energetic, you know, thing that they get from other people. A lot of, a lot of people will say, oh, you know, I can, I’m getting a certain amount of a certain type of energy from that person. And that’s informing what I’m feeling.

Rayne: Right.

Thomas: So sometimes it’s just a different way of understanding what this is about is that energy? Am I picking up on a, on a particular type of energy from a person. That’s what I’ve observed. That’s what I’ve heard from other people that have talked to.

Rayne: Yeah. 

Robyn: Yeah, and I mean a couple of the comments resonate with that. So lucythescalpel saying, I can tell if someone is a narcissistic or manipulative person just by looking at them. Uh we don’t, we don’t have the data on that, but, oh, here’s, here’s someone who put a statistic. We got a statistic from dmcf97. 99% of the time I get very accurate impressions of people upon meeting them. I have only been really wrong about someone once. 

Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. There’s definitely something to it.

Rayne: Yeah. Maybe that’ll be interesting to see how they’re going to come at that one scientifically.

Robyn: Yeah.

Rayne: Do a study on that.

Robyn: Kind of validate those numbers. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, we’ve also got, abbycreateshere, the ability to read energy. Definitely. 

Thomas: Yeah. 

Robyn: Cool. 

Thomas: Rayne was there an answer that stood out for you?

Rayne: Yeah, I like this one, gringirls77 says I feel that my HSP-ness adds a lyrical quality to my writing. I’m already, and then she says I’m already funny. It enables me to reach inside my characters and make them sing. I’m Robbie K Brown on Amazon. Ms. Darling is my quirky rom-com paranormal.

Thomas: I loved that answer when I read it, I, I just thought, wow, what a beautiful thing to connect the HSP Trait to that lyricism, or that, that ability to write depth into characters. What a wonderful thing to have.

Robyn: Yeah, and I mean there were a few, there are a few comments about, well, like art, like appreciating art and also more generally beauty. So, we’ve got ofsageandstars who says that I witness beauty everywhere. Which is really interesting if you, if you think about that one, cause it goes even beyond what we traditionally think of as, as beautiful. Right?

And I can see how, you know, if you really take that to an extreme, and if someone is able to see what can be beautiful or, valuable, about something that’s, that seems difficult or, or, I don’t know, just harsh or horrible. If you can find a kind of beauty in it, that’s, there’s almost a protective quality in that, right? It can help guide you through some, some terrible stuff. 

Rayne: Well, and, and to me it feels like it could even be something really simple, you know, like you go outside and say you’re surrounded by concrete, but you see, you know, a dandelion growing up from a crack in the concrete and just the tenacity that dandelion had to do that is pretty beautiful. You know? I guess it’s a matter of, what do you consider beautiful? Which of course that would have something to do with your values and, and stuff like that.

Robyn: Yeah. 

Thomas: Tinaraehspcoach says the same thing. She says, I see beauty in the smallest things and that, that resonated with me. And actually this resonates with me in a, in a different way as well. You know, that I also identify as, as a, multipotentialite interested in many different things. And so this is sort of a, to me also speaks to the multipotentialite in me. Seeing beauty in many, many things, even the smallest things.

Rayne: Yeah.

Thomas: Doneandgone says, I see magic. I like that one.

Rayne: That’s pretty cool.

Robyn: That is. Yeah, that’s great. But you know, this one’s interesting. Cause we’ve I’ve I know I’ve had conversations with other HSPs wondering like, okay, you know, I think this is a skill that we can appreciate, but people who don’t engage with that very often might have a hard time understanding why it would be valuable.

There’s a very, a very concrete example from, that Elaine Aron has in one of her books where she’s talking about Victor Frankel, who was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust. He was actually in a concentration camp and she believes based on some of his readings, that he was very likely a highly sensitive individual.

And, you know, he talks about all the inner resources that he was using, like his imagination and his humor. And he would coach other people to do that too. Like you have to find something funny today. Go find anything that’s funny today, you know, or imagine, imagine different. Like he would escape into his imagination often a lot.

And, I mean, and he survived, you know, not to, not to suggest that that was the only thing but it definitely, based on some of his writing, it definitely gave him a kind of strength and inner resources. So, you know, it can have practical applications, even if it sounds like something, ah, yeah, it’s not just something for art, you know.

Rayne: Yeah.

Robyn: But that’s important too. Of course. 

Rayne: Absolutely.

Thomas: It reminds me a little bit of a book that I just picked up by Andrea Scher called, Seeking Wonder. (Editor’s note: The book is Wonder Seeker) And it’s, and it’s, a book of prompts. It’s a book of exercises just to, to go out and do to connect with awe and wonder. And, um, and one of the exercises is to, to go out and see how many, heart shapes you can find on your walk, like heart heart shapes in, in leaves or in flowers or in cracks in the sidewalk, whatever.

Robyn: I like that.

Rayne: It kind of reminds me of that’s a game I play sometimes is, when I’m, when I go outside, I’ll find somewhere and I’ll just look at the clouds. And what I do is I look for what the shapes are in the clouds. So it, it could be like an elephant head on a, on a bunny rabbit, but then it morphs into I don’t know, you know, it morphs into a gopher, or something, you know, and, and then it’ll of course, and then it’ll morph into something else. And then I’ll just sort of, I’ll make a story up to go with what’s going on with the clouds. And it’s just like a fun little exercise I use to, just to, to sort of, exercise my creativity muscle sort of, I guess.

 And it’s, I don’t know. I just, I just find it fun. I find it really fun.

Thomas: Yeah, I, and I need to correct myself. The name of the book is Wonder Seeker, 52 Ways To Wake Up Your Creativity and Find Your Joy.

Rayne: Oh, cool Thomas.

Thomas: And I can, I can, recommend the book.

Rayne: Excellent. Awesome.

Thomas: Let’s take a quick break to hear about our sponsor. We’ll be right back after this.

Our podcast is brought to you by the HSP World Mastery Program with a mission of inspiring and empowering Highly Sensitives, so you can use your natural creative abilities to co-create an amazing and hope filled future.

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Thomas: Here’s another answer to our question that I thought was interesting. It’s tusatfor, and they say getting ahead of other people’s emotions often before they realize they’re having them. Getting ahead, getting ahead of their emotions. That’s interesting because we were speaking about intuition before, and that’s a definitely sort of an intuition.

Rayne: Yeah.

Thomas: And for me, I’ve noticed that that’s something that I’ve developed with my life partner. I don’t know that I have that necessarily with a lot of other people, but I can definitely sort of sense things are gonna happen before they happen with my partner. I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve experienced that?

Rayne: Well, for me I’ve been single for quite a while so I can’t really say that, but with close relationships, yeah. Where I care about how they’re feeling and stuff like that. Yeah, I can, yeah, I can tell, I can tell kind of where they’re heading, you know, emotionally, what, what kind of road they’re going down, starting to go to. Yeah. 

Robyn: Actually my, what my, my partner tells me that I pick up on his, his cues, more easily than other people do. And I’m surprised because I don’t, I don’t feel that I do. I just, I don’t know. Or I, or he’ll just, I’ll just tell from one or two things that he says, so maybe it’s not that I can, can see it necessarily in his face.

But I, I think it’s more that I can kind of understand his temperament a little bit, because it… we’re both Highly Sensitive. So it overlaps. And I think I can kind of just imagine when he says certain things or expresses certain feelings, I’m like, okay, not that I know exactly what he’s going through, but I get it quickly. 

You know, I’m like, oh, well, if he says, okay, he’s feeling overwhelmed or he’s feeling, you know, he’s feeling in a bad mood because, because he’s overwhelmed. I’m like, okay, I know what that is. I know what that kind of bad mood is like.

So there’s a lot less for me to imagine. So there’s a lot less for me to say and I just kinda adapt to it. And I think maybe that’s where, whereas when people are… ‘Cause I, I, I don’t know that I don’t, I certainly don’t consider myself a mindreader by any stretch of the imagination. 

And I think it’s that, you know, when I see people who are really not high on the sensitivity scale. I actually, I have a hard time reading them, or I have a hard time understanding them because I’m like, oh, I don’t know. I don’t know it would be to act like that. I think it’s a bit, I think it’s, it’s easier as I get older and I, I don’t, um, and I can kind of look past people’s words and, and posturing.

I think there is a lot of posturing. I think a lot of times people will say, oh, I’m fine. Or, yeah, I don’t think is wrong or no, I don’t want to talk about this. And I used to, I used to think, okay, well, if they’re fine, they’re fine. I guess there’s nothing to see there, but now I’ve, I’ve come to learn that people censor themselves quite a bit.

So again, I still really don’t consider myself somebody who can intuit what’s going on with another person, but I can, I can notice patterns. And if it’s a pattern that I’m familiar with, then it’s like, okay, I understand quite quickly.

Rayne: I totally get that. I totally get that Robyn. I have to say too, though, that I find that I’m able to, to pick up a lot more from people that are somewhere on the neuro-diverse spectrum, so to speak, you know, like there, there was an incident that occurred, I don’t know, like a month, month and a half ago, and I’m pretty sure the younger guy was, I don’t know, he was high functioning. Uh, I’m not sure, I think maybe autistic, but he was high functioning. And normally he was very calm. I would see him like kinda maybe every three or four days or every other day or something at the time.

And then something happened. And there was just a lot of activity and a lot of people and a lot going on. And I could tell this was overwhelming him. Like his senses were just, you know, and, so it, it came in really handy is I was able to kind of pop in and understand right away what was going on with him, why he was, why this, why he was getting overwhelmed so, so quickly, so much, and, and kind of, you know, calm, calm him down, you know?

Like basically just breathe deeply, take deep breaths. It’s all going to be fine. You know, it’s all going to be over in a few minutes kind of thing. And, and, but I have noticed that with people that are neuro-diverse, the higher sensitivity area that, yeah, there’s, I can pick up a lot more. Whether I do something with that or not kind of depends on the situation, but yeah. I don’t know if anybody else has noticed that or it sounds weird, but that’s the way it is for me.

Thomas: Well, what I’m curious about is, is this idea of unconscious skills that we have as a part of the HSP Trait. Robyn, you, you were saying that, you know, you don’t think that you have that intuition, but, but your partner says, oh yeah, you notice things pretty quickly.

And so I wonder if that’s just an example of some of the unconscious skills that we have, but we don’t recognize that we don’t, we can’t express. 

Robyn: Maybe, I really think it’s one of those things that, yeah, you might have a baseline ability, but you have to watch how you develop it and how you use it. Right? Because sometimes our intuitions can get us into trouble. Right?

Thomas: Right.

Robyn: I have to ask myself sometimes is my intuition a bias? Is it an intuition of something that’s actually, am I picking or is it an intuition of something that’s, that’s accurate that I’m picking up on? Well, I mean, even if it’s a bias, right, it might be rooted in an accurate perception of something, but that I am then interpreting in a way that skews the results.

So I think, I know I had to learn to be really careful with the interpretive part of it. I had to really learn to watch out because you can pick up on things and you can spin a story that actually is not accurate or, or is, has a reliable kind of bias that has then has other consequences. So, Yeah.

I think, I think that that’s it. I think that’s why I just like to remind myself frequently. You know? Yeah. I’m picking up on something, but I don’t always, I don’t always know what it is. I guess in contrast to what I said earlier. 

Thomas: I think it’s really true for the HSP trait is that we feel something, but what is it and, and how do we go from, what’s the term? Unconscious competence, or I forget what the terms were.

Robyn: Implicit?

Thomas: Yeah. Like an implicit competence to conscious competence, you know, in other words where you, where you are doing exactly what you’re suggesting, taking into account, your biases and, and what you know, and, and all that.

Because I think with the HSP Trait is very easy to pick up on energies and on stimuli that are coming our way, but we don’t necessarily know what to do with it yet. I was like, I feel something and something strange about this, but I don’t know what to do. You know, that’s that’s I guess, where I was trying to go with the unconscious skill. Anyway, that was an interesting diversion. Thank you for that.

Robyn: At any rate a lot of the followers here do mention empathy, being able to meet people where they’re at and understand other people’s emotions. So that seems to be a pretty strong theme. 

Rayne: Um, yeah, I liked that one republicaddtochile, imparting the deepest truths by staying in silence and presence. Seeing the here now from our higher perspective.

Thomas: Mm. Yeah. Rhyma77 says something a little bit similar. It says having a rich internal world and enjoying alone time.

Rayne: Yeah, I gotta 100% agree with that one.

Thomas: Well, as far as the HSP Trait goes, we are aware of overwhelm and, how important it is to have that alone time. And especially if we don’t get it, you know? 

Rayne: Or we don’t, or, or we’re not creating that, I suppose. Right? Because that’s something that we, to some extent we can control that quite a bit, and work towards creating more of it in our own lives. Right?

Thomas: Yeah.

Rayne: I like this one. Cause of course it speaks to my, HSS, the high sensation seeking. Lifebythedrop2022, love my solo travel reboots. 

Robyn: Yeah. Yeah. I know a few people who who’ve done that. I know a few people who had done that as a way to like reset was to do a solo travel. 

Rayne: Yeah, I, I absolutely love doing it. It’s, it’s sounds so, you know, it sounds odd to some people, because some people wouldn’t not go traveling by themselves, you know, they just would not do it. But I find it so much easier. I can decide what I want to do, when I want to go, you know how long I want to stay. I don’t have to negotiate or talk about it with anybody.

I feel like leaving, I leave or, you know, some of the things that I’ve done or I’m not sure who would do them. Like I’ll go stay in a jungle in Nicaragua or doing things like that. And I don’t know how many people would be interested in doing that, you know?

Thomas: You know, we just have a few more minutes here. And I, I thought we could close out by saying, what would we each love about our own HSP Trait.

So I’ll start and what, what I love about it is the appreciation of colors, like just the whole spectrum of colors and, and, I can’t have enough color in my life. Of the whole spectrum of greens and blues and reds and yellows and oranges and you name it. I just love color.

Rayne: Cool for me, it has to be, smell my sense of smell. That’s a big one. I love smelling fresh air or the smell of forest. You know, the smell of, I’ve got some carnations, the ones that smell and every morning I take, you know, at least five or six big deep whiffs and throughout the day, and it just, I just love the smell. And smelling, you know, like, oh, good food cooking, stuff like that. Yeah. That’s one that, that comes to mind first for me. How about you Robyn? 

Robyn: For me, it’s not the sensory stuff per se, it’s I think it’s the deep feeling and the deep thinking,

Which honestly, I don’t know if that’s unique to HSPs, but a lot of HSPs say that they have that. So there’s that feeling of, of depth. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. Sometimes other people don’t understand it and I don’t, but it’s very, it’s very rich.

I would say it’s really, that adds a lot of color to my life. Is just when I go through things, I, I just take in a lot and I, I, yeah, there’s a lot to reflect on too. So it’s, I don’t know. It makes it makes life interesting. Definitely I think so.

Just one final thought here. I’m going to give a shout out to, leanna3birds meditative, who said her favorite thing about her HSP trait is having other HSP friends. I do think, you know, it’s kind of what we’re doing here. We’re trying to be HSPs seeing other HSPs and there is something really nice when we find each other and, you know, you can say, Hey, I see you. I get what you’re about. You know, at least with respect to this and, uh, yeah.

Thomas: That’s so true.

Robyn: Hopefully for those of you who are listening, we can be your HSP friends. And, but hopefully you have other ones as well. If not, we’re here. 

Rayne: That’s awesome.

Robyn: Well, thank you, Thomas and Rayne for today’s episode. And thank you of course, to everyone who contributed answers to our weekly question.

So please join us for our next episode where we’ll be chatting about another question from our social media channels.

You can join the conversation yourself on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. And a friendly reminder to visit our website at hsp.world. 

Our thanks to the HSP World Mastery Program and to all of you who support our show by subscribing and listening to our podcast, reading the blog posts on our website at hsp.world and chatting with us on our social media channels.

Your support is contributing to the upliftment of HSPs around the world. We’re very grateful.