One of the reasons that emotionally sensitive people use food as comfort is likely due to cortisol. Cortisol’s job is to get you all prepared to fight that tiger lurking outside your cave. It gets your energy up by increasing your heart rate and the blood pumping to your muscles. Cortisol tells the body to release sugar to bloodstream, which is why when you’re upset about your boss criticizing you at work, your body is all on alert to fight, as if there were a tiger about to attack.

You just want to calm down and get rid of this tension and agitation, so you stop at the grocery for cookies, potato chips and dark chocolate ice cream. One of the reasons for this is that high levels of cortisol can create cravings for high fat and sweet foods. High cortisol reactors have been shown to eat more food.

Recently the leader of a girls’ school in England planned a “failure week.” The idea was to  teach students to be willing to take risks and build their resilience, their ability to bounce back when they didn’t succeed or do well at something they tried. What a great idea.

How many of us know how to fail? Failure is a part of succeeding, especially when your goal is a difficult one to achieve. Persistence is said to be the key to success. Persistence means to keep going even when a door closes.

So what’s the difference between people who keep going and crave a challenge and those who give up?

In conversation with new friends, at some point a version of “What’s your story?” will be asked. That question has a deeper meaning than the one given in casual encounters at parties. The deeper meaning of “your story” affects how you interact with the world and with other people.

Everyone has basic core beliefs about themselves, a “story” that reflects their how they see themselves. That story may be the way you or your family interpreted events as a child and may have little basis in reality, but you make decisions and live your life as if it were true.

Most people don’t even think to question whether the way they see themselves is accurate.

One of the most important levels of validation in Dialectical Behavior Therapy is cheerleading. Cheerleading involves holding and encouraging hope.

Hope is what keeps people going forward when difficult emotions and harsh experiences slam them against the ground–hope for a better life, for a life with less suffering, for the skills to manage challenging emotions in healthy ways.

For the emotionally sensitive, less desired emotions like irritation, hurt, sadness and shame can take over their thinking and behavior and become their whole world. When others might be angry or frustrated, the emotionally sensitive may feel rage or fury.

What might feel hurtful to others may be crushing and what would be sad to others may be depressing. It’s difficult to go to work, clean house, keep appointments, talk with friends, or otherwise function when experiencing such intense feelings.

In his book Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, Timothy Wilson described the “broken windows” theory of James Wilson and George Kelling.

This theory is about neighborhoods and safety. Wilson and Kelling believed that the appearance of  neighborhoods made a difference in preventing criminal activity. They proposed that the environment communicated to people information on what behavior was appropriate.

Broken windows and graffiti were signals to people that a neighborhood was deteriorating and breaking the law was acceptable.

Have you ever seen someone walk into a room, maybe at a conference, bump into one of those metal chairs, and say “Oh, excuse me?” Or heard someone apologize because it’s raining? Or because someone else is sick? Maybe you’ve done it yourself.

The emotionally sensitive are often champion apologizers. They do not want to upset anyone, so they are hyper-alert to any insult that they might unintentionally cause.

They do not want conflict or upset and hope to keep relationships calm. Sometimes the emotionally sensitive will apologize in order to hold onto relationships whether or not they believe they owe an amends to the other person.

A research study completed years ago has always fascinated me. In the 1960′s Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson administered a test to all students in an elementary school and gave the results to the teachers. They told the teachers that based on the test results some students were particularly likely to excel academically in the upcoming year whereas others were not.

The “gifted” students were actually chosen by drawing names out of a hat, not by their performance on the test. In fact, the test was bogus and didn’t really measure anything. At the end of the year the students identified as gifted scored significantly higher on an actual IQ test than students who weren’t labeled as gifted, though in truth there was no difference in the groups at the beginning of the year.

That is an amazing result. The authors believed that the only way  this could have happened is through a self-fulfilling prophecy in the minds of the teachers. The students themselves did not know they had been designated as high-achievers (or not) and neither did their parents. Only the teachers knew. The researchers believed that the teachers’ expectations caused them to act in ways that improved the performance of the students who were labeled as being intellectually brighter.

Emotional validation means acknowledging and expressing acceptance of someone’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors as understandable. Sometimes understanding someone else’s thoughts and feelings requires a lot of work because the way they think makes no sense to you.

Emotional validation is different from emotional invalidation which means someone’s feelings, thoughts and behaviors are judged, rejected, or ignored.

Validation is particularly important for emotionally sensitive people. So if you love or care about or interact with someone who is emotionally sensitive, using validation can help build your relationship or help communication go more smoothly.

Emotional invalidation is when a person’s thoughts and feelings are rejected, ignored, or judged. Invalidation is emotionally upsetting for anyone, but particularly hurtful for someone who is emotionally sensitive.

Invalidation disrupts relationships and creates emotional distance. When people invalidate themselves, they create alienation from the self and make building their identity very challenging.

Self-invalidation and invalidation by others make recovery from depression and anxiety particularly difficult. Some believe that invalidation is a major contributor to emotional disorders.

Have you ever wished you could take back an email that you sent when you were emotionally upset?  Or maybe you made some statements when you were sad that  you didn’t really mean or agreed to something when you were thinking with your heart that you later regretted ? Or maybe you wanted to be supportive and helpful to someone you love but couldn’t because your own emotions made it difficult?

Communicating when overwhelmed with emotion does not usually work well. Being overwhelmed with emotion is not a pleasant experience. For emotionally sensitive people, managing their emotions so they can communicate most effectively and with the best results means learning to manage the intense emotions they experience on a regular basis.