Emotional Health

Emotional health can be challenging for highly sensitive people. HSPs have such sensitive nervous systems and are so empathetic that they have trouble processing their feelings about many life events. They respond more than non-sensitive people to positive and negative emotions and images and process information so deeply that they often have difficulty relating to people who do not. Sensitive people are on a different wavelength.

HSPs do not respond well to an aggressive, competitive culture and the injustices it creates. Sensitive people are the healers, the artists, and the social workers.

What Are Emotions And What Is Emotional Health?

The easiest way to think of emotions is to think of them as responses to external stimuli. They are expressions or results of our relating to the people and conditions of our environment. Some emotions come from our experience of pleasure or displeasure.

Other emotions come from a deeper place. In the case of highly sensitive people, emotions often come from the experience of their empathetic natures. Although HSPs can experience disappointment of their desires just like anyone else, it is the disappointment to our basic nature that is often the hardest to resolve and heal from.

Another way to think of emotions is to think of them simply as information: information about what is working and what is not working in our lives.

Emotional health exists when we are comfortable with our emotions, accept them and are able to process them which means acknowledge them and release them. Emotional health also occurs when we are able not only to accept our emotions but also to trust them.

The Difference Between Mental And Emotional Health

Since we live in a mind-centered culture many people assume that mental health and emotional health are different. For all intents and purposes they are really the same thing and interrelated, since there is a relationship between our thoughts about a situation and the feelings we have as a result.

The Path To Emotional Health For HSPs

Highly sensitive people can achieve emotional health but it does take some effort. By combining perspective, knowledge and good self-care, HSPs can create emotional stability for themselves while retaining the benefits of what makes them special.