Some emotionally sensitive people are worriers. Not just your everyday worriers, but world-class worriers. They worry when they wake up about what the day will bring. They worry about their appearance, they worry if they’ve done the right thing, and they worry about what might happen in the future. They worry about their family; they worry about their friends. They worry about people they love. They worry because they love. Some see worry as being part of  love and caring. They may not realize that their worrying can interfere with their sense of belonging and the closeness of their relationships.

Worrying Can Drain Happiness

Your daughter comes in to tell you that she’s been accepted to the college of her dreams. You had secretly hoped she wouldn’t get in because the college is so far away. You bite your lip and say in what you hope is an excited voice, “That’s great. Congratulations.”  It’s not long though before your brow furrows and you are asking questions like, “If you go there you won’t be able to come home as often, you know.”

Of course you don’t mean to dampen her excitement. You just want to be sure she is thinking of all the problems with being so far away. Truth be told (come on, now, admit it), you are thinking of the problems that you see happening and that bother you, not your daughter. She may respond with, “Mom, can’t you just be happy for me?  Just this once?”

Thinking of the pros and cons of a situation is a helpful way to evaluate choices that you have. Pros and cons are presented in a logical way though and worrying is filled with emotion, usually sadness and anxiety.

Worrying Communicates Lack of Confidence

Though you may not mean to do so, worrying about others communicates a lack of confidence. If they are uncertain about their decision or situation, your expressing worry can lead to their being more upset and uncomfortable. It can increase the tension that they already feel. If they are confident in their decision or situation, expressing worry will be seen as saying you don’t believe in them. Neither outcome is helpful and you may find they talk with you less and less about what is most important to them.

Worrying Can Be a Way of Avoiding Happiness

Sometimes people who worry are afraid of being happy. Most suffer greatly with their own worry and when they have let themselves be happy, losing that feeling hurt more than not feeling it at all. So when an event occurs that seems to bring happiness, they may automatically look for ways it could not be a pleasant experience. Sometimes they do this for other people too, perhaps not even aware of hat they are doing.

Most events in life are a mixture of both desired and less desired emotions. Graduating from high school can be a happy event with sadness about leaving friends. It’s usually pretty easy to find a reason to be doubtful about happiness. Winning the lottery could bring fears of tax problems and conflicts with relatives. Getting married can bring fears about losing independence.

While a realistic view considers both the advantages and challenges of events and decisions, not allowing celebration and not enjoying the positives limits your overall joy. Joining with others to celebrate joyful events is part of having a sense of belonging and strengthens relationships.

Worrying Affects the Way Others Treat You 

When you express worry about the decisions of others, they may see you as someone who can’t handle life. “Don’t tell her, she’ll just worry about it,” may be the mantra of your friends and family. They may discount what you say because they see you as worrying about everything. If others don’t listen to you, that can lead you to feel left out, which weakens the relationships.

You may be confused about how others react to your worrying about them.  You care so much and they don’t seem to understand that. If you’ve noticed that your worry is pushing people away, then you may want to try some ways to decrease your worry.

Ideas for Change

Find ways to be more aware of worry statements you make. Sometimes worrying is such a habit that you don’t notice when you are communicating worry. For example, ask others to point out your worry behavior to you. Statements of uncertainty can communicate worry. Asking others if they are sure about their decision, with a stressed tone and/or look, is an example. The television character Edith Bunker is an exaggerated example of communicating tension and anxiety to others through body language and tension level in addition to her tone of voice and the words she uses.

Once aware of your worry statements and body language, practice omitting those statements from your conversations. Practice having a more relaxed body.

Replace worry statements with supportive and congratulatory ones. “I’m so happy for you,” is an example.  You probably still have worries, but you don’t always need to express them.  If you do need to voice a concern, timing is important. Wait for some time to pass.

When you notice yourself being obsessed with worry, find an activity that gives you pleasure. Throw yourself into the activity.

Remember that productive worry is when worry gets you to take effective action, such as preparing for a test. Unproductive worry is worry over events that you have no control over and cannot change. Notice when your worry is not helpful and practice distracting yourself.

These are just a few ideas. Changing worry behaviors will not be easy and won’t happen quickly.

Research Study

I am starting a research study soon and I’d like to interview a few people about what emotional sensitivity means to you. If you are interested in being interviewed please email me your contact information. My email address is karynhallphd@gmail.com. This project has been reviewed by the University of Houston Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects (713) 743-9204.

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Validation is like relationship glue. Validating someone brings you closer. Validating yourself is like glue for fragmented parts of your identity. Validating yourself will help you accept and better understand yourself, which leads to a stronger identity and better skills at managing intense emotions.

Being out of control of your emotions is a painful experience and damaging to relationships. Knowing how to self-validate is important to learning to manage your emotions effectively. Self-validation means you can accept your internal experience as understandable and acceptable. But learning to self-validate is not so easy. How do you apply the six levels of validation to self-validation?  Notice that mindfulness and self-validation go hand in hand.

Level 1  Be Present

To be mindful of your emotions without pushing them away is consistent with Linehan’s  first level of validation, to be present. To be present also means to ground yourself and not dissociate, daydream, suppress or numb your emotions. Being present means listening to yourself. Feeling the pain of  sadness, hurt, and fear is most challenging and difficult. At the same time avoiding emotions results in quite negative consequences, while accepting allows emotions to pass and helps build resiliency. Being present for yourself validates that you matter and that you have the strength to feel.

Level 2  Accurate Reflection

Reflect means to make manifest or apparent. For self-validation, accurate reflection is acknowledging your internal state to yourself. Perhaps you reflect on what triggered the emotion and when. Maybe you reflect on the ways you feel the emotion in your body and consider the actions that go with the emotion. Reflecting means observing and describing, components of mindfulness. When you observe and describe your internal experience, you do not interpret or guess or make assumptions. You would say, “I feel angry and it started yesterday after my friend cancelled lunch. I sense tightness in my stomach, so maybe there is fear as well.”

Saying, “I am a total loser and no one wants to spend any time with me,” would not be stating the facts of your experience.  Stating the facts of your experience is validating and helps build trust in your internal experience.  Interpreting your experience in ways that you cannot observe to be true invalidates and leads to distrust in your internal experience and more

Level 3:  Guessing

Sometimes you won’t be sure what you are feeling or thinking. In these situations you may want to say something like, “If someone else were in this situation they would probably feel sad. Am I sad?”  You might also guess by looking at the actions you want to do.  If you want to hide, maybe you are feeling shame. Maybe you are thinking shame thoughts. You can notice where you feel body sensations, such as fear is often felt in the throat. If you are feeling fear, maybe you are thinking scary thoughts. Guessing your emotions and thoughts based on the information you have will help you learn more about yourself.

Level 4:  Validating by History

Sometimes you will have thoughts and feelings that are based on events that have happened in your past. Maybe you are afraid when people argue because in the past arguments led to your being hurt. Validating yourself by saying, “It’s acceptable and understandable that you are afraid of

Level 5:  Normalizing

Sometimes people who have intense emotions don’t see any of their emotional reactions as being normal. Everyone has emotions. It’s normal to feel sad, angry, hurt, ashamed, or any other emotion. The issue sometimes is that most people would not feel this emotion in this situation. That is important to realize. At the same time, it’s just as important to validate when others would feel the same way and accept that as well.  If you are sad because you didn’t get a job you wanted, remember that others would be sad if that happened to them. Check out whether what you are feeling is what most other people would experience and validate those feelings as such.

Level 6:  Radical Genuineness

In terms of self-validation, this means being your real self and not lying to yourself. It means that you don’t pretend to be someone you aren’t. Rejecting who you are is one of the highest levels of invalidation. An important distinction is that who you are is different from what you do. You are not your behavior, yet changing some of your behaviors may alleviate some of your suffering.

Self-validation is one of the critical steps for living with intense emotions. It is part of forming relationships and thriving. Practice and more practice will help you self-validate automatically.

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Belonging means acceptance as a member or part. Such a simple word for huge concept. A sense of belonging is a human need, just like the need for food and shelter. Feeling that you belong  is most important in seeing value in life and in coping with intensely painful emotions. Some find belonging in a church, some with friends, some with family, some on Twitter or other social media. Some see themselves as connected only to one or two people. Others believe and feel a connection to all people the world over, to humanity. Some struggle to find a sense of belonging.

Some seek belonging through excluding others. Yet a single instance of being excluded can undermine self-control and well being. A sense of belonging to a greater community improves your motivation, health, and happiness.  When you see your connection to others, you know that all people struggle and have difficult times. You are not alone.

Building a Sense of Belonging

To build a sense of belonging requires active effort and practice. Look for ways you are similar instead of focusing on ways you are different. Someone is much older than you? Maybe they have wonderful stories to tell. Maybe you can contribute to their lives with your youthful strength. Someone has a different believe system that you? Sharing your differences and still accepting the person creates peace. Acceptance does not mean agreement.

Communicate acceptance through validation. Validation builds a sense of belonging and strengthens relationships.

Say yes to opportunities to be with others and then throw yourself in to whatever the activity is. Let go of your judgments. Judgments build walls. Focus on people.  At a dinner and nnoyed because you don’t like the food? The food is not the goal. Connecting with others is far more important than the food or the noise in the restaurant. Gained weight and don’t want others to see? Stop isolating until you believe you are worthy. No one is perfect. Others have their struggles with their health too.

If you are emotionally sensitive, remember that in general people suffer the same emotional pain you suffer just not as intensely most of the time or as quickly.  Also, there are many other emotionally sensitive people who struggle as you do. You are not alone.

How do you give a sense of belonging?  Watch your words and your way of thinking. Some words create separateness and others promote togetherness. Other people don’t need “fixing.” They have strengths and offer their own unique contributions. Think community and acceptance. Validate yourself. Validate others.

Attributional Retrainng

Dr. Gregory Walton developed a belonging intervention he called Attributional Retraining. Through this intervention, people shift from blaming themselves for painful experiences, such as “I’m flawed,” or “It’s just me,” to seeing that they weren’t alone and that other people had experienced the same situations.

The technique is brief. It involves you seeing yourself as an expert on what you have experienced and writing about that experience to help someone else. Here is a video on how the techniques works for college students. The key is to write suggestions for other people on how to cope with something you have experienced.

If you are not a college student, the issues in the video may not seem relevant. But consider how you would use the technique. For example, what two points would you offer to others about coping with intense emotions or rejection sensitivity?  Your experiences can make a difference for others who also have intense emotions. Write your ideas down. I’d love to see them.

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Successful people are typically viewed as possessing certain characteristics: high motivation, strong skills/abilities, and opportunity. In his book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, Adam Grant says there is another component to success and that’s how you approach relationships.

In interactions with others, are you likely to give more than you get? Or do you believe that you have to look out for yourself first  so you make sure you get more than you give?

Outside the workplace, in personal relationships, most people behave like givers. With family and friends they don’t keep track of who gives what. But in the workplace, givers are rare. Givers are generous with their time, knowledge, and connections. They don’t think about the personal costs and help without expecting anything in return. Takers help others strategically, when the benefits to them outweigh the personal costs. There’s also a group of people called matchers. They attempt to keep an equal balance of giving and getting. They want fairness. They help others but expect reciprocity.

The lines between giving, taking and matching aren’t hard and fast. You may find yourself acting like a giver when mentoring an intern, a taker when bidding for a project and a matcher when exchanging ideas with a colleague.  But overall, the vast majority of people adopt a primary style of interacting most of the time.

The Style Most Likely to Be at the Bottom of the Success Ladder

Which style is most likely to result in success at work? You might guess that givers would be at the bottom of the success measures. You would be right. Across occupations, givers are just too caring and too trusting and too willing to sacrifice their own interests.  There’s evidence that compared with takers, givers earn 14 percent less money, have twice the risk of becoming a victim of a crime and are judged as 22 percent less powerful and dominant.

The Style Most Likely To Reach the Top

So what style do the people at the top of the success ladder have? They are  also givers. The best performers and the worst performers are givers; takers and matchers are  more likely to land in the middle.  The givers at the top of the ladder have strong interests in helping others and get satisfication from making an impact in that way.  They score high on measures of  caring about others.The difference between the givers who were top performers and the givers who are the lowest performers is that the givers at the top also had strong self-interests. They were ambitious as well as giving.  Self-interest and other interest are not mutually exclusive but two different characteristics.

The emotionally sensitive often have difficulty with balance and tend to  extremes. This can translate into being extreme givers, takers, and matchers. Extremes usually lead to misery.  Having both self-interests and other-interests would seem to create a balance that would lessen suffering as well as lead to more success in career goals.

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Emotionally sensitive people are known as compassionate and caring about other people. Their emotionally sensitivity means they are usually particularly aware of the emotions of others. However, sometimes being emotionally sensitive means you are completely off base and sometimes invalidating of others’ feelings.

You Respond Based on Your Own Emotional Intensity

You see, one of the ways people are empathic is by imagining how they might feel in the same situation. Imagine a friend  describes an argument with a boyfriend who broke up with her. You would feel incredibly sad if that happened to you. You  respond with deep concern and say something like “Oh no. How awful. Are you okay?” Your friend responds in an off hand manner saying, “Of course I’m okay.  It’s not that big a deal.”

Her response confuses you and now you are cocerned that she is upset with you when you are only concerned about her. You respond that you guess the relationship wasn’t that important to her. She frowns in an irritated way and replies that  it just wasn’t working. The interaction now seems awkward. You try again and say you admire how well she is coping and that you couldn’t handle it as well if you were in her situation. Obviously annoyed now, she informs you that break ups are just a part of life and everyone goes through them. She changes the subject.

The interaction starts to feel tense. You were trying to be compassionate and validating and you know it isn’t working. You might think judgmental thoughts such as how cold your friend is. At the same time the situation seems like you’ve stepped in quick sand and whatever you try only makes the situation worse. You worry about losing your firiend. Your perspective is that she must be hurting and devastated and that is a horrible situation. You want to be kind to her. Her view is that the situation is painful but normal and she knows she’ll get through it. Your efforts to acknowledge her pain are seen as invalidating by her. The intensity of your caring did not match what she was feeling.  She says you must think she is completely helpless, which offends her.

How You Imagine You Would Feel is Sometimes Not What the Person Feels

Your daughter, just home from work, calls you to announce she didn’t get a promotion.  You are sure her tone of voice is sad. You feel so badly for her. She must be so disappointed. You think about her at night and can’t sleep. You feel so badly and can’t get the incident off your mind. In fact, you quite sad because of how you know she must feel.  Later in the week you say something to her. She isn’t clear what you are talking about but when she realizes you are referring to her not getting the promotion, she laughs. She tells you that if you really understood her you’d know she didn’t care about that promotion. With the best of intentions, you’ve invalidated her.

Taking the perspective of the other person can be difficult.  Usually the emotionally sensitive are upset by others not understanding their sensitivity. But the emotionally sensitive can misunderstand and invalidate the emotions of those who are not emotionally sensitive as well. Though you can use your internal experiences to know basically how someone might feel in a situation, you also need more information to  truly validate and/or  be effectively compassionate. To be validating, understanding the perspective of the other person is key.

Survey:  I am very grateful for all your help in better understanding emotionally sensitive people. I am currently writing a new book and would like to learn more. If you are emotionally sensitive, please consider taking this survey about decision making.  Thank you! If you gave your contact information to be interviewed about being emotionally sensitive, thank you more than I can say. It may be a few weeks but I will be in contact.

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The emotionally sensitive usually have a particularly strong reaction to painful emotions. When you struggle with intense sadness or anger for long periods of time, have difficulty controlling your words and action, and these emotions are easily triggered, that is not a walk in the park. On top of the pain involved in having such intense emotions, there is also self-consciousness or perhaps shame about being so reactive. Sometimes you become afraid of your emotions. You also may be on guard or watching for whatever might upset you. You might learn to pay a lot of attention to what upsets you.

Sometimes you may be so alert to upsetting events and annoyances that you completely disregard the pleasant experiences you have. Gratitudes are easy to overlook when you are stressed or busy, yet paying attention to them helps increase our happiness. So what can you pay attention to today? Maybe some of the suggestions below will help.

Beauty.  Maybe there are lovely flowers planted in someone’s yard. Or perhaps there is a large tree with branches that drape out giving shade to the street. Maybe you see beauty in fruit or stones or in the way you have decorated your home. Notice that beauty and take it in. Let yourself appreciate it.

The Basics of Life. Did you sleep well last night?  Life is much easier when you are rested so sleeping soundly is a positive. Having enough to eat and cool water to drink are positives we often take for granted.  If you drink and eat mindfully you will notice the complex flavors of even simple foods and how much pleasure can come from taste without overdoing the amount you eat.

Treasures. Most people have special possessions that are dear to them for emotional reasons. Perhaps you have a shawl that belonged to your grandmother or a trophy from when you won a sports event. Maybe you have a t-shirt from your favorite concert. If your treasured items are hidden consider putting them where you can enjoy them each day.

Photos.  Photos of trips you took or events you shared with friends can bring back fun memories. Savor those times by taking time to look at the photos and maybe share them with someone else.

Kindnesses: Go through your day in your head and think about any kindnesses that might have been offered to you or that you offered to others. Let yourself take in the warmth that was included in each kindness.

Values and Meaning: Notice if you acted in accordance with your values and/or engaged in activities that have meaning for you.

Friends and Family:  Maybe you enjoyed talking with a friend or a family member today. Knowing they care about you is a positive, particularly if you have friends and family who you can count on when you need them.

Laughter:  Laughing is good for you in so many ways. Be appreciative of anyone who made you laugh today.  The day is not over yet–find reasons to laugh, big all-out full force laughs.

Pets:  Play fetch with your dog, scratch your cat behind his ear or find other ways to interact with your pet. Pets can be funny and adorable and loving. Count your pet as one of your gratitudes and pleasant experiences of the day.

Small Gifts: Getting to work on time, chewing your favorite gum, stars in the sky, a good book, music, finishing a project, wearing your most comfortable jeans, watching a television show, dessert and playing an interesting game are just a few of the small gifts you may have enjoyed today.

This list may not fit you at all. Make your own list. If you aren’t sure what makes you happy or what you consider pleasant in your day, pay attention each day to what makes you smile and what you appreciate. Make notes. You may be surprised.  Sometimes what we think makes us happy may not be the most joyful part of our days.

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Making decisions can be difficult.  Heath and Heath (2013)  propose a system to help called WRAP. WRAP stands for Widen Your Options, Reality-Test Your Assumptions, Attain Distance Before Deciding, and Prepare to Be Wrong.

Widen Your Frame

One of the main pitfalls in decision making is having a narrow frame. That means you don’t consider possible alternatives that might be better options.

Consider Opportunity Costs. Imagine that you are considering buying a new phone you want. If you just consider buying the phone or not buying the phone, you are more likely to buy the phone, regardless of whether it is the best decision. If you consider whether to buy the phone or keep the money for something else, you are more likely to keep your money. Just thinking about what else you could do with the money makes a significant difference in your choice.

Use Vanishing Options. Another way to widen your frame is to tell yourself that you cannot choose any of the options you are considering. You have to think of other alternatives.  When you imagine that you cannot have an option, you free your mind to shift your focus to new ideas and strategies.

Multitrack. Multitracking means approaching or working on a problem in different ways, thinking “AND not OR.”  If you consider different options at the same time you are less likely to become personally invested in a particular choice. Listening to feedback on multiple options is easier than for a single option, probably because you are less likely to see the feedback as personal. So if you are considering artwork for your home, bring home three or four paintings or other types of art that you really like. Consider how each looks in the room and get feedback from more than one person.

Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem. One way to generate new options is to find someone who has already solved your problem. For example, how have other people over 40 successfully changed careers?

Reality Test Your Assumptions

We tend to give more weight to information that is consistent with our beliefs about what is the right decision and discount information that contradicts the choice we favor. Because of this bias, we may misjudge the data even when we think we are being objective. The following ideas can help overcome that cognitive prejudice.

Consider the Opposite. Pay special attention to people who don’t agree with the option you are considering. Listen carefully to their logic. If you are only listening to people who agree, you may be missing important information.

Consider what would have to be true for each of your options to be the best choice.  This challenges you to imagine conditions in which you would choose a different option than you are considering.

Ask for specific information. For example, if you are interviewing for a job and value time with your family, don’t ask if the firm values work-life balance. Ask for more specific information such as how many times last week the interviewer had dinner with his family  before 8:00 pm.

Assume positive intent. Instead of thinking that others are disrespectful of your time or don’t care about your friendship, assume that they do. Then consider what their behavior might mean instead of what you assumed it meant.

Consider the “outside” view in addition to the “inside” view.  The inside view draws from your own impressions and assessments of the situation you are in. The outside view ignores the specific details of the situation and instead considers the bigger picture such as how other people have experienced a certain solution to that situation. For example you might be sold on a certain weight loss program.  That would be the inside view. The outside view would be the opinion of other people who have tried that plan.

Ooch. Predicting the future is impossible. When you make a decision, you may want to take small steps whenever possible and assess the results of each step. You might also run small experiements to test your ideas. For example, before launching a website to sell cars, try selling one or two cars on the internet to see the results.

Attain distance Before Deciding

Attaining distance means that you don’t make decisions based on short-term emotion. One way to do this is to consider the 10/10/10 rule. Ask yourself how you think you will feel about this decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. You can also ask yourself what you would tell your best friend to do in this situation.

Honor your core priorities by paying attention to long-term emotional values, goals and aspirations. By identifying your core priorities you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas.

Prepare to Be Wrong

When you’ve made a decision, anticipate and prepare for both adversity and success. Add in extra time for unforeseen difficulties. Anticipate problems and identify ways of coping. Set a tripwire. A famous rock band once put a clause in their contract asking for M & Ms in their dressing room, but with all the brown ones removed.  If they found brown M & Ms, they knew their contract hadn’t been read and they needed to triple check the complex set up they needed for their performance. Their tripwire was brown M & Ms.

Survey:  I am very grateful for all your help in better understanding emotionally sensitive people. I am currently writing a new book and would like to learn more. If you are emotionally sensitive, please consider taking this survey about decision making.  Thank you! If you gave your contact information to be interviewed about being emotionally sensitive, thank you more than I can say. It may be a few weeks but I will be in contact.

References 

Heath, C. and Heath, D. Decisive:  How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.  New York: Crown Business, 2013.

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For many emotionally sensitive people, decision making can be agonizing. Deciding what to wear to an important wedding, where to go on vacation, whether to break up with a boyfriend and sometimes even which restaurant to choose for dinner with friends can take painful hours. Worry about making choices can mean constant self-doubt. Which decision is the right one?  What could go wrong?  What if it’s the wrong choice?  The process can be so exhausting you wish you could just flip a coin and be done with it or avoid the process altogether.

Given that decision making can be unpleasant, we may avoid thinking through the consequences of decisions or adding any additional information to the mix. Sometimes we want one option so badly that we don’t want to hear any negatives about that option. There are many ways that decision-making can get derailed.

The Four Villains

In their book Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath suggest that to make the most effective choices we need to go beyond a pros and cons list. Just looking at pros and cons will not address all the problems people face in making decisions. They identified four “villains” of decision making that interfere with making good choices: narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, and overconfidence.

Narrow Framing. Narrow framing means that you are not considering all the alternatives available to you–you are defining your choices too narrowly. Narrow frame thinking would be when you are asking yourself if you should take a certain action or not, or which of two actions would be better. For example, should you move to a new city or not? Should you go for a walk or read a book? Restricting yourself to two choices limits your alternatives. You may not even consider options that would be better.

When you are emotional, your thinking narrows. If you are deciding how to save yourself from an approaching tiger, this narrowed thinking can be helpful because it promotes quicker action. In other situations, narrow frame thinking is too restrictive. If you are deciding whether to buy a new car, choosing between buying or not buying would be a narrow frame. Considering other options for the money, such as booking a trip to Europe or putting the money into savings, may give you a better picture of  the worth of the car to you.

Being aware of narrow frame thinking is particularly important to emotionally sensitive people. When emotionally sensitive people face a decision, they tend to become more emotional than others and their thinking tends to narrow more than the person who is not emotionally sensitive. With awareness, the emotionally sensitive can take steps to widen their view.

Confirmation Bias. Confirmation bias means that when you want or believe an idea to be true, you pay more attention to the information that supports that belief. People naturally tend to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs and actions. For example, if you believe that people with red hair are more likely to have a temper problem, you will notice and spotlight whenever you see a redhead angry. You may not even notice when someone with redhair doesn’t react or see it as a rare exception. An executive may believe his gut decisions are the right ones and give greater weight to the times this is true and negate information to the contrary.

Emotionally sensitive people sometimes fear the worst may happen if they don’t make the right choices or they may have other beliefs that are not supported by current facts. Having these beliefs means you are likely to see and interpret information to support your fears when that is not the case.

Short-term Emotion. Short-term emotion will pass and is not useful in making a long-term decision. Short-term emotion clouds thinking. When you are emotional about a decision, you might replay arguments over and over until you can’t think straight, even though the facts have not changed. You may also only be thinking emotionally, such as wanting a red sports car that is impractical for you in the long run. If you are emotionally sensitive, having to make a decision about something may trigger fear and worry that will interfere with your logic in addition to narrowing your focus.

Overconfidence. Overconfidence is believing that you know what the future holds. Some years ago people generally believed the Internet would never catch on and no one would pay for television programs. Many years ago people were confident the earth was flat. In everyday life it might be that you are absolutely positive that a certain job is the right one for you (even though you have never worked in that field before) or that getting into a certain school is the only way to achieve your goals. Being overconfident leads to not considering alternatives or what might happen if your choice doesn’t work out well. Being overconfident about the future can lead to unfortunate outcomes.

Heath and Heath propose the WRAP model for effective decision making.  I’ll discuss that model in the next post.

Survey:  I am very grateful for all your help in better understanding emotionally sensitive people. I am currently writing a new book and would like to learn more. If you are emotionally sensitive, please consider taking this survey about decision making.  Thank you!

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Mindfulness has been shown to improve our mood, reduce stress, improve our performance and reduce pain. Part of mindfulness is to accept the present moment as it is, to be fully present. Practicing mindfulness as we go about our daily routine can be a challenge.  One of those challenges is in accepting reality as it is. This is often particularly difficult for emotionally sensitive people who experience the emotions of life so intensely.

Wishing

More than one fairy tale is about having wishes that come true. We’ve all made wishes, some more important than others. Sometimes though wishing can become a daily routine. You wake up , turn over, and say, “I wish I didn’t have to go to work today.”  You stay in bed longer than planned and then wish you didn’t have to rush to get to work on time.  You walk into your closet and wish you had an outfit that fit and then wish you could lose ten pounds. On the way to work you wish the traffic would clear. You get to work and wish you had time to stop for coffee before you have to start your day. At your desk you wish you didn’t have to write that report and that you had a different boss. Your significant other calls and you wish he or she would be more serious about marriage or career. Maybe you wish you could take a vacation or that you could afford to pay someone to clean your house.

Many people wish at times that their life situations were different. There’s probably no harm in wishing unless you find yourself constantly wishing life were different and experiencing a chronic discontent.  Consistently wishing things were different is non-acceptance of what is. When you are wishing for life to be different you may be missing out on the life you have. In addition, for some people, wishing builds dissatisfaction and suffering.

Complaining

Chronic complaining  is also a way of not accepting reality as it is. You might complain because it is raining, too cold, or too hot. You might complain about your boss being too demanding or your spouse gaining weight. Complaining is about being dissatisfied with what is and that is not acceptance.

When you complain repeatedly, you are focused on what you don’t like about your world. Soemtimes that builds discontent and leads to more complaining. Over time you may find that you are focused more on what is wrong than what is right about your day. You may even ignore the positives and only focus on what didn’t go well. In that way your reality can become distorted and your suffering increases.

Shoulding

Another way of not accepting reality is to say that events or people should not be the way they are.  You might believe that your daughter shouldn’t quit her job to tour with a band or that you shouldn’t have to work so hard or that doctors shouldn’t make mistakes. The word “should”  implies that there is a set way lives should be lived and  the universe should operate and the situation you are talking about deviates from those rules..

Maybe what you truly  mean by saying your daughter shouldn’t quit her job to join a band is that she is taking a high risk that is unlikely to pay off and is likely to have negative consequences. She is more likely to have difficulty paying her bills if she quits her job, for example.  In that case perhaps you are using “should” to mean a better or safer choice.  You might use “should” to indicate that something does not fit our sense of fairness. For example, children “shouldn’t” get cancer or you shouldn’t lose valuable, irreplaceable photographs of your family.

Avoiding 

A woman once told me she did not go to the doctor for several years because she was afraid of what he would say. She believed she had a serious illness and did not want to know for sure. A gentleman shared that for several weeks he avoided being alone with his wife for fear she would ask for a divorce. There are many ways of avoiding and most if not all are ways of not accepting reality as it is.  When you are mindful, you notice your fear and do not let it control you in ways that are not consistent with reality.

Being aware of problems is different from shoulding, complaining, wishing or avoiding. If you notice a harmful situation and work to change it, that is problem solving.

Try going for an hour or a day noticing when you are  complaining, shoulding, or wishing things were different.  Notice  and bring yourself back to the presnt moment and reality. Acceptance is not about agreeing with the way things are, it is simply an acknowledgement that reality is what it is. You can accept what is and still work to change it.

 JD Hancock via Compfight