Myths and facts about hypersensitivity

Hyper­sens­it­iv­ity is a phe­nomen­on that attracts a great deal of interest these days and is the sub­ject of many over­sim­pli­fic­a­tions and clichés. In real­ity, it is a com­plex concept and the sub­ject of numer­ous sol­id sci­entif­ic stud­ies. They are based on sev­er­al mod­els to explain hyper­sens­it­iv­ity and the defin­i­tions that fol­low from them. Among the most widely used is the ‘sens­ory pro­cessing sens­it­iv­ity’ mod­el of Aron and Aron (1997). Accord­ing to this, hyper­sens­it­ive people are char­ac­ter­ised by a tend­ency to be more sens­it­ive to intern­al and envir­on­ment­al stim­uli. They also express great­er emo­tion­al react­iv­ity, both neg­at­ive and positive.

In oth­er words, high emo­tion­al­ity is only a small part of hyper­sens­it­iv­ity. Instead, hyper­sens­it­iv­ity has three facets:

1. Ease of arous­al: a tend­ency to react intensely to intern­al and extern­al stimuli
2. A low sens­ory threshold: increased sens­it­iv­ity to subtle stim­uli (intern­al and external)
3. Aes­thet­ic sens­it­iv­ity: high receptiv­ity to aes­thet­ic mani­fest­a­tions and the reac­tions they provoke.

How­ever, our work has led us to con­sider a fourth com­pon­ent: the avoid­ance of dis­rupt­ive stim­uli, i.e. a tend­ency to try to con­trol them in order to pro­tect one­self from them.

In the media, hyper­sens­it­iv­ity is some­times por­trayed as a han­di­cap, some­times as a ‘super­power’. In real­ity, although the effects of hyper­sens­it­iv­ity most often appear to be neg­at­ive, the impact on the indi­vidu­al varies.

Aron and Aron’s mod­el pro­poses a clas­si­fic­a­tion into two cat­egor­ies. On the one hand, there are those who have had a happy child­hood, who are less intro­ver­ted, emo­tion­al and prone to depres­sion than the second cat­egory, and for whom hyper­sens­it­iv­ity appears to be less of a prob­lem. On the oth­er hand, those who had a dif­fi­cult child­hood were more likely to devel­op anxi­ety, par­tic­u­larly social anxiety.

In addi­tion, our work could lead us to pro­pose anoth­er clas­si­fic­a­tion, without con­tra­dict­ing the pre­vi­ous one, still in two pro­files. The first would be the most com­mon, the ‘vul­ner­able’ hyper­sens­it­ive, for whom hyper­sens­it­iv­ity would be a factor in emo­tion­al fra­gil­ity. On the oth­er hand, for the second pro­file, the ‘aes­thet­ic’ hyper­sens­it­ive, hyper­sens­it­iv­ity could play a pro­tect­ive role in cer­tain situ­ations, and be psy­cho­lo­gic­ally re-energising.

These clas­si­fic­a­tions do not mean that indi­vidu­als belong to fixed cat­egor­ies. In fact, hyper­sens­it­iv­ity is partly innate, with genet­ic and neuro­bi­o­lo­gic­al pre­dis­pos­i­tions, but it also requires an activ­at­ing con­text, i.e. an envir­on­ment that awakens this poten­tial. How­ever, each indi­vidu­al reacts dif­fer­ently to a giv­en situ­ation. And the same per­son can react dif­fer­ently to the same event, depend­ing on the moment and the con­text. So everyone’s rela­tion­ship to hyper­sens­it­iv­ity depends on a mul­ti­tude of factors.

What’s more, it would be prefer­able to speak of ‘high sens­it­iv­ity’, as in Eng­lish or Span­ish, rather than ‘hyper­sens­it­iv­ity’. This would bet­ter reflect where an indi­vidu­al falls on the sens­it­iv­ity continuum.

In Aron and Aron’s mod­el, hyper­sens­it­iv­ity is a char­ac­ter trait, i.e. a con­sist­ent indi­vidu­al dif­fer­ence that appears from birth, based on genet­ic and neuro­bi­o­lo­gic­al con­sid­er­a­tions. It’s not a dis­ad­vant­age, just a par­tic­u­lar way of func­tion­ing that one must learn to cope with. Accord­ing to stud­ies, it affects 15- 30% of the population.

In fact, it’s not even neces­sary to detect hyper­sens­it­iv­ity, as long as it doesn’t cause dis­com­fort. If it does, then there are sci­en­tific­ally val­id­ated tools, such as the Aron and Aron scale, in the form of a ques­tion­naire avail­able in sev­er­al languages.

How­ever, the ques­tion should nev­er be reduced to “Am I hyper­sens­it­ive?” Instead, the aim should be to take a glob­al approach, to identi­fy the psy­cho­lo­gic­al and rela­tion­al dif­fi­culties that people encounter in their lives, and to see how hyper­sens­it­iv­ity may or may not play a role.

There is no sci­entif­ic evid­ence to sug­gest that women are more hyper­sens­it­ive than men. The pro­por­tions are gen­er­ally sim­il­ar between the two genders. On the oth­er hand, there are more intro­verts among hyper­sens­it­ive people. But this is not a spe­cificity either since it con­cerns around 30% of extroverts.

It is impossible to com­pare the num­ber of hyper­sens­it­ive people over time, simply because the concept is still fairly recent. So how can we estim­ate the pro­por­tion of people affected at a time when hyper­sens­it­iv­ity had not yet been defined? That’s not to say that there wer­en’t hyper­sens­it­ive people in the past, but they wer­en’t recog­nised as such.

How­ever, this sup­posed increase can be explained by the recent media cov­er­age of the term. Many people can recog­nise them­selves in approx­im­ate descrip­tions and describe them­selves as hyper­sens­it­ive. But how many of them con­firm this intu­ition with a val­id test? It’s hard to know.

But per­haps we are also wit­ness­ing a gen­er­a­tion­al trend. As edu­ca­tion­al prin­ciples have changed, con­sid­er­a­tion and man­age­ment of emo­tions may have evolved, thereby favour­ing hyper­sens­it­iv­ity. But as far as we know, this has not been con­firmed by any studies.

The brain of a hyper­sens­it­ive per­son is the same as that of any oth­er indi­vidu­al. Its struc­ture, in par­tic­u­lar its cent­ral nervous sys­tem, shows no not­able dif­fer­ence. How­ever, it func­tions dif­fer­ently: it does not react in the same way to dif­fer­ent situ­ations, cer­tain areas of the brain are more activ­ated than oth­ers… To draw a par­al­lel, most people have two arms. Although they are struc­tur­ally identic­al, each indi­vidu­al does not use them in the same way, wheth­er vol­un­tar­ily or not.

Hyper­sens­it­iv­ity is neither an ill­ness nor a dis­order. Con­sequently, it can­not be ‘dia­gnosed’, let alone ‘treated’ or ‘cured’. Moreover, it is not included in the DSM (Dia­gnost­ic and Stat­ist­ic­al Manu­al of Men­tal Dis­orders), which lists men­tal and psy­chi­at­ric disorders.

How­ever, in some cases it can lead to emo­tion­al dis­orders. Ini­tially, the idea is to become aware of this spe­cificity and gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of our own func­tion­ing. The next step is to find the tools to man­age it more effect­ively, for example through psy­cho­ther­apy. The aim is to turn hyper­sens­it­iv­ity into a resource rather than a constraint.

How­ever, it is import­ant to bear in mind that there is cur­rently no uni­ver­sal, sci­en­tific­ally proven meth­od for trans­form­ing hyper­sens­it­iv­ity into a strength. But this is one of the areas in which we are look­ing to apply our research.

Bastien Contreras