When life forever chafes

A short intro to life (and church) as an HSP

A lot of these sensitivities make for funny stories.

Not so funny when lived through, of course. But something in your mind shifts when you frame them all as a peculiarity of your species and chuck the outside imperatives of what “proportionate” reactions to stimuli “should” look like.

Who knows, I wonder in the mornings when I sip my coffee and stare at the trains passing each other in the torrent of bright yellows and oranges of the fall. Who knows which wiring would fare better in an apocalypse situation or a jungle? The hypersensitive might have the advantage there.

Winters are tricky. When the temperature drops below freezing, it’s a struggle to figure out what I can wear to stay warm that wouldn’t involve wearing tights under my pants. I hate that feeling of being padded. My skin begins to crawl sooner or later. Who cares if I’m warm if at first sight of a public restroom I know I’ll make a dash for it and undress in the cubicle with a sigh of relief.

In general, dressing appropriately for the temperature is a daunting task. I get headaches in closed spaces where the dry air is trapped in endless circulation: cars, planes, auditoriums, movie theater halls. I’d rather be cold than overheat. But there’s a fine line. When I get too cold, I can get the uncontrollable shivers, and that’s pretty much a system failure—I know it’s a sign I should go home, eat something hearty, and reboot with a hot shower, a warm blanket, and a hot water bottle.

Layers seem an obvious choice, but more clothing also means more micromanaging. What is the fabric? How is the fit? Is the wool itchy? Are the seams not too prominent? How will they feel against the skin?

A recent example: a beautiful woolen jacket with a viscose lining that feels plasticky and smothering against my skin even though theoretically it shouldn’t—I’ve worn viscose before with no issues. But there are different types of this fiber, and this one seems to be the one my system rejects. I’m seriously thinking of having the jacket relined—but with what? The seamstress says all she has is polyester based. Now I need to track down some fine cotton that’s acceptable for the job. I also might fix another jacket while I’m at it. In this one, only the arms are lined with polyester. Yes, I could tell the moment I put it on.

All this time, we haven’t even reached the aesthetics of layering. Stylists are unanimous: in the art of dressing well, layering is for the advanced. We know women are judged more severely for what they choose to wear. Even if I don’t focus on that context, I know it’s there—opinionated footnotes of content. It’s been five years—and counting—that I’ve been building a wardrobe that’s comfortable, functional, and—maybe, just maybe—goes well with what I want to tell the world.

But fabric sensitivity is just a tiny facet of the HSP experience. There is more.

There’s regularly telling my friends, “I can’t meet this week—I’m feeling a bit overstimulated.”

There’s sitting in a café thinking how I just want to come up to the loud talker from across the room and tell them, “OK, but now SHUSH!”

There’s reading the room without really trying, to the point of being pained. It’s a bit like being an acoustic box, reverberating with the mood shifts of everyone around you.

There’s feeling cornered, almost claustrophobic, in closed crowded spaces, especially when intense energies are involved.

There’s coming home after successful, positive events feeling drained instead of pumped.

If I were to describe what it’s like to live as an HSP—a highly sensitive person—I’d say imagine getting dressed in the morning and leaving for work, just like every other day. So far so good—you don’t notice anything unusual. Then maybe a few hours into your day, something starts bugging you, and you discover your T-shirt has an annoying little tag that keeps chafing against your skin.

No big deal—it’s probably happened to all of us. Depending on your sensitivity spectrum, you might make a mental note to get rid of the tag when you get home. Or you might take care of it right then and there if possible. You might cut off the tag or change the shirt.

Well, living life as an HSP is a bit like that, only instead of one annoying tag, it’s a couple of dozen at any given moment, all chafing and rubbing and grating and drowning out everything else until you feel you’re getting smothered, your system’s going into overdrive, error messages are popping up, lights are blinking, you’re getting something like a hot flash and then you get frantically cold to the point of shivering uncontrollably, and suddenly it dawns on you that you really need to figure out what to do before you nosedive, and FAST.

I’m describing a full-blown crisis situation here. Such a nosedive rarely happens to me now. Ideally, I catch this process before it spirals out of control. I say, “No, I can’t do this,” “No, I can’t come,” “No, I don’t have anything planned, I just need a quiet day that’s all to myself,” “Let me just close that window,” “There is no need to talk so loud—I can hear you just fine.” I stay home, I sleep in, I walk out of the party, I think, “Screw the schedule, I’ll be late. I need to get something to eat.”

The tricky part is, a lot of these stimuli are what you call “small things.” Your textbook definition of “not a big deal.” A fabric that sits uncomfortably against your skin, a skipped meal, a rushed morning, a noisy street, an irritated tone from a colleague—we all know these. This familiarity makes the HSP experience both relatable and hermetic—we react to stimuli that are familiar to all people, but we react to them in a much more intense way.

(When I skip breakfast, my world literally collapses in a matter of hours—I get the shivers, I get depressed, I get nauseous, I get a headache.)

We also detect many more stimuli at any given moment than a person of regular sensitivity. So there is a twofold difference – one in the kind of reaction, the other in the sheer number of triggers.

This un/familiarity is also why we get stuck on routine questions we get about our well-being: “What’s wrong? Why didn’t you say something before?”

These two questions still leave me speechless, even after all these years.

It’s not only that some of these reasons sound silly and high-maintenance. “What’s wrong? This jacket’s arms are lined with polyester, and you’re asking me what’s wrong?”

It’s also that there’s many reasons for our discomfort that are very real to us but ephemeral and imaginary to the rest of the world. “The air in this room is vibrating with despair, the boundaries are being wiped out, the energies are leaking all over the place, and you’re telling me you can’t feel it?”

“Why didn’t you say something before?” This one still gets me, too. I should have known better. After all, it’s not like my sensitivity is news to me.

But in my defense, when you grab that shirt in the morning, you don’t think about the tag. You’re thinking about your day. You’re excited. You’re full of plans. You forget. Or it’s there at the back of your mind, but you’re feeling strong, and you decide to wing it. Or you take the precautions, and life still throws you a curve ball.

For example, I keep a rigorous meal schedule now and travel with my own food just in case so I don’t get hungry and shut down. It definitely helps. But every now and then, it just doesn’t work: There’s a schedule I need to keep, there’s a deadline I have to meet, there’s an assignment I can’t back out of.

In fact, I know full well that many of the safeguards I have put in place for myself are a byproduct of my privilege. I had the tools to figure it out. That’s easily 80% of the work. Maybe more.

But if it sounds like living life as an HSP is a sorry and daunting affair, it doesn’t have to be, really. I almost don’t notice it now. Once you have your boundaries in place, you navigate the capricious currents on autopilot, of sorts. There is an element of a flywheel to it—the more boundaries you set, the lower the risk of overstimulation, and soon, you’re less likely to react intensely to the triggers you’re sensitive to.

This process of taking care of yourself takes time, though. Saying “No” is hard for everyone, and it’s even harder for HSPs because we can pick up on the expectations others have for us simply by being around them. So we don’t have the benefit of not knowing what is wanted from us. We know—and we have to ignore it. That’s what makes us so strong once we figure this out.

That takes care of another myth I’ve heard so often growing up—that my higher sensitivity somehow makes me “fragile.” I vividly remember being given a book entitled “Porcelain people” that was supposedly about us, about me.

With hindsight, I guess I should have been happy any resource on the topic existed. Nowadays, it’s easy to get resources on the internet but those were the early days, information was scarce, and the label “oversensitive” was always implied to be negative. This was the troublesome lot. The ones who were “making things complicated” for themselves and for those poor people around them.

And so for a long time, I bought into that “fragile,” “complicated” narrative. And I lived with the self-consciousness and the guilt.

Nowadays, I think “fragile” could not be further from the truth. It’s actually very hard for an HSP who’s owning their sensitivity to have a serious nervous breakdown. We’re so attuned to our bodies we have to resolve issues in real time, we can’t be waiting for them to accumulate. Our occasional meltdowns are like safety valves, and we know what to do—we’ve done it hundreds of times. We likely have a customized first aid kit. I know I do.

Neither are we “complicated,” at least not any more than people on the lower end of the sensitivity spectrum. To the contrary, how we work is very simple: we’re only as good as our body is. That’s it. That’s really the direct opposite of complicated. It’s regular. It’s normal. I might even go out on a limb and say it’s the way it should be for everyone.

I think it’s worse when you’re growing up as an HSP because you don’t understand what is happening, your points of reference are usually average sensitivity, and you feel like such a freak for “making a big deal out of nothing.”

I remember going to summer camps and not being able to fall asleep because of mosquitoes buzzing in my ear. All the rest of my group slept in a log cabin, and I ended up sleeping in the supervisors’ brick house. It didn’t help my social status, as you can imagine. I was a lonely child.

My teenage years were no better. I remember being invited to a friend’s house, and I got so excited that day that by the time I made it to her home, I developed a debilitating stomachache. I couldn’t even hide it, I was bent double with pain. I spent the afternoon lying in her bedroom while everybody had a great time downstairs. When I’m thinking back to it now, I so badly want to reach out and give my former self a big hug. What a terrible situation! You’re confused and clumsy, with all these extra limbs growing out of your body and the excess height that took you by surprise, and now this. Your body is betraying you, again.

Of course, now I see how backwards this conclusion really is. My body wasn’t betraying me. It was just saying, “Hey, if you want us to stay together for a long time, you should do more of this and less of that!”

We buy a washing machine, a laptop, a vacuum cleaner, a stupid box of Ibuprofen, and there is a booklet attached telling you how you should proceed. You don’t get it with humans. Scientists are still figuring out how this engine works. There’s the social and cultural norms, but these are mostly one size fits all rubbish. Our body is the only reliable instruction manual we own. Yet in the West especially, it’s like we have this ethos of shrugging it off. Mind over matter. Ah, how far we’ve come, with our 16-hour work days and Prozac and success-over-everything mindset.

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How does belief, how does church fit into all that?

I’ve already written at length here how the church conspires to break the bond we have with our bodies. This rhetoric is harmful to everyone but it’s downright catastrophic for HSPs, who should really stay attuned to their body’s signaling if they want to stay well and thrive. That’s one thing.

There’s another one, though: it’s very nearly impossible to “do church” the traditional way if you’re higher on the sensitivity spectrum. Going to church for us is like going to a club, only way worse.

It’s not only about the music, although personally, I’m not a big fan of the loud modern worship aesthetics. It’s more about the energy.

People coming to church have the same hungry, hopeful, desperate energy that people coming to the clubs.

The only thing is, people in clubs usually want to forget their problems and have a good time.

And church is for the people to bring their pain and bring their questions and bring their troubles.

It’s for people to cut themselves open.

Everything in church is designed to move you into a cathartic moment, a breakthrough, a revelation. Preachers know it, too, and they lean into this vulnerability.

This is a place where you’re asked to relax your boundaries: to share your “testimony,” to exert yourself in ministry, to take off your mask.

There are no trigger warnings—you’re more likely to get one when you’re scrolling through Instagram than in church.

It’s all beautiful, in a way. Also, dangerous. But we’ll get to that later.

As an HSP, I find the whole church experience draining.

Surviving the service is one thing.

But it’s also troubling for me to see individuals who I know have little strength left to spare basically bleeding energy all over the place in a way that is completely unsustainable and cannot but end in a crash.

Then, it’s exhausting to try to cut myself off from it all. At the end of the day, these people are not my responsibility, and I am not their shrink. In another life, I could be a medicine woman. But times have changed, and I cannot come up to them and say, “Listen, you may want to take care of it in therapy, not in church.” Or, “How about sleeping in instead of coming here? You might benefit from that more.”

This kind of thing rarely works. And as an HSP, I already empathize with too many people. I’ve had to learn to put a cap on that, too.

My last stab at going to church regularly, I would come home from the service and basically pass out on the couch for two hours of dreamless rock-hard sleep.

The experience wasn’t all that bad, and getting some sleep didn’t hurt anyone, of course.

At one point I had to ask, though: Does it really make sense? This is not only my day off, this is (allegedly) the Lord’s day. A day of rest. A day dedicated to look up, calibrate, have your heart swell with gratitude. Do I really want to spend this day like this, flatlining emotionally?

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This is a short introduction to church for HSPs. I’m curious to know your thoughts here.

If you’re higher on the sensitivity spectrum, what’s life been like for you? What’s church been like for you?

If you consider yourself regular sensitivity, what do you think about your HSP friends? (You’re likely to have some—there’s more of us than you might think.) Do you have any questions? Ever wondered why some people just disappear from church or seem to struggle with the whole experience? (This is actually what I wrote in the introduction).

I know even people who are closer to me are still a bit stumped by some of my behaviors. And of course, those of my friends who are churchgoers—even those who know about higher sensitivity!—still cannot understand why on earth I choose not to go. “But you’re involved in ministry? But we never see you in church? So what church do you go to?”