How Sensitive Are You?
Three different things that all get called being too sensitive
Being told you are too sensitive is one of the more useless pieces of feedback a person can receive, partly because it covers three separate things. Noticing detail other people miss, being knocked about by loud and busy environments, and being moved by music or a landscape are different traits that happen to travel together often enough to have been given one name. This test scores them apart.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you generally are, in ordinary weeks rather than difficult ones.
What it measures
Three components. Ease of excitation is how quickly you become overwhelmed by demands and stimulation. Low sensory threshold is how much ordinary noise, light and texture register physically. Aesthetic sensitivity is how deeply art, music and beauty reach you. The first is the one that costs; the third is the one that pays.
Based on: Sensory processing sensitivity (Aron & Aron, 1997), scored on the three factors found by Smolewska & Woody (2006)
Possible results
Ease of overwhelm
How quickly a busy day uses you up.
Sensory threshold
How much ordinary noise, light and texture reach you.
Aesthetic sensitivity
How deeply beauty and art reach you.
Common questions
Is being highly sensitive a disorder?
No, and it is not a diagnosis of any kind. It is a temperament trait, distributed continuously in the population like height - roughly a fifth to a third of people score in the higher range depending on where the line is drawn, which is far too many for it to be a condition. The research on it is mostly about environments, not about people being broken: the same sensitivity that makes a bad environment worse also makes a good one work better, which is the finding the popular version usually leaves out.
Is it the same as being an introvert?
No, though they often travel together. Roughly a third of people who score high on sensitivity are extraverts, and that combination is a difficult one to live with: wanting company and being flattened by the noise of it at the same time. The confusion happens because both traits produce the same behaviour - leaving the party early - for entirely different reasons.
Can I become less sensitive?
Not much, and aiming at that is usually the wrong target. What moves is the load, not the trait. People high on the overwhelm component do noticeably better with a small number of unglamorous arrangements: a recovery hour after demanding days rather than after they have already gone wrong, fewer simultaneous commitments rather than better coping with many, and control over their own environment where it is available. None of that is self-improvement. It is closer to accepting a specification.
Sources
- Aron, E. N., & Aron, A. (1997). Sensory-processing sensitivity and its relation to introversion and emotionality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Smolewska, K. A., McCabe, S. B., & Woody, E. Z. (2006). A psychometric evaluation of the Highly Sensitive Person Scale: The components of sensory-processing sensitivity and their relation to the BIS/BAS and Big Five. Personality and Individual Differences.
- Pluess, M., Assary, E., Lionetti, F., Lester, K. J., Krapohl, E., Aron, E. N., & Aron, A. (2018). Environmental sensitivity in children: Development of the Highly Sensitive Child Scale and identification of sensitivity groups. Developmental Psychology.
An honest note Two honest points. First, the original authors proposed sensitivity as one trait; later psychometric work found the questionnaire is better described by the three components used here, and scoring them together hides the most useful distinction in the whole idea - that the overwhelm part and the aesthetic part come apart. Second, whether sensitivity is genuinely separate from neuroticism and introversion is still argued about. It is partly independent of both, and the overwhelm component in particular overlaps enough with neuroticism that a high score there should not be read as a special category of person. The term highly sensitive person has also travelled a long way from the research and is now sold as an identity, complete with courses. The trait is real and measurable; the identity is a marketing decision.