Mood swings aren’t mandatory, and being sensitive doesn’t mean that you should accept unpredictable oscillations between high-highs and low-lows. Your life doesn’t need to feel like a never ending battle of emotional ping-pong.

Highly sensitive individuals often tell me that they feel like their emotions are simultaneously a great gift and a great burden: they feel blessed to be able to feel deeply, but they likewise find themselves in situations where even the smallest of triggers can change the course of an entire day, or even throw them off balance for an entire week.

You can probably remember a time where an offhand remark hurt you deeper than expected… or when an excited afternoon leads to a sudden crash of emotional fallout in the evening. What’s happening here?

It doesn’t have to be like this.

You can be both sensitive and stoic. You can feel deep emotions and likewise experience safety and predictability with your feelings. You can stay sensitive, while likewise setting reasonable limitations on your moods and creating dependable systems for rest and recovery.

Here’s the issue: your moods cannot be regulated by your ego consciousness if you bypass responsibility and cling to the story of ‘being sensitive’ as a central identity marker.

I know that sounds harsh, but I’m likewise a spiritual and empathic person who feels things deeply, and I likewise agree that our feelings can be teachers, but I avoid labelling myself an ‘empath’ or ‘highly sensitive person’ even if I recognise that I have some of those capacities.

What does it mean to be highly sensitive?

It means many things, but I’ve unfortunately seen an increasing number of people using the sensitivity label as a get-out-jail-free-card for times when they’ve stepped out of integrity with their words or actions because they were swept up in ‘an authentic feeling’ and consequently harmed themselves or another person because they were over-identified with their emotions rather than taking a moment to pause and practice rational-minded detachment.

If you’re a sensitive person, I want you to limit the harm you could cause yourself or others due to the trigger-finger actions you might take based on sudden feelings at either end of the high-high or low-low spectrum.

This isn’t just outer conflict, weak emotional boundaries have major implications on common mental health challenges such as self-criticism or negative self-talk: setting healthy limitations on emotion-based decision making protects us against things like shame spirals and low-integrity actions which can harm our reputation with ourselves.

You deserve to feel, but your feelings should be measured.

Jordan

P. S. It really is a shame that I’ll share a post like this and some people will misconstrue my words to suggest I hate highly sensitive people or that I’m an advocate for numbing out your feelings or never listening to your emotions - that’s not at all what I’m saying.

I believe in the intelligence of the heart, but not all feelings are equal, and not all feelings are to be honoured as the equivalent of high-grade, empathic consciousness.

I wrote this post because I want to encourage people to take the time to establish emotional boundaries which allow them to experience, but not be controlled by, either aggressively elated or deflated moods and sensations - both are overcharged positions, and both are harmful when followed without due caution.

You can be both sensitive and stoic.