What Do Highly Sensitive People Struggle With? (And Why It Makes Complete Sense)
If you've ever been told you're "too sensitive," felt completely wiped out after a social event or found yourself lying in bed replaying a conversation from three days ago, this post is for you.
I remember years ago when someone told me that they saw me as a “sensitive” person, and I remember thinking it was an insult.
After sitting with the word, I realised it encapsulated and gave language to my lived experience of being someone who feels the world, life, emotions - really deeply.
Being a highly sensitive person comes with a lot of gifts. But it also comes with struggles that, for some people, can make you feel like there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
Being highly sensitive does not mean there is anything wrong with you. It’s certainly not a bad thing to be highly sensitive either.
And I want to talk about why.
First, what does it actually mean to be a highly sensitive person?
Being highly sensitive isn't a personality flaw or a diagnosis. It's actually a biological trait, one that around 15-20% of the population shares - where your nervous system processes information more deeply than most. You take in more and feel more. You notice or sense things other people miss entirely.
Which sounds like a superpower! And it is, in a lot of ways.
But in a world that moves fast, values productivity and doesn't leave a lot of room for people who need space to feel things before they can move through them… the highly sensitive person struggles in ways that we aren’t talking about enough.
The world is... a lot
One of the most common highly sensitive person struggles is overstimulation. And overstimulation don't just mean loud noises or busy spaces.
It can look like:
An open-plan office that makes it impossible to think
That feeling when that friend talks at you, and you feel exhausted after the conversation
A news article that feels heavy in your body for hours after you've put your phone down
When you're highly sensitive, your nervous system is taking in and processing everything, constantly. What is just ‘background noise’ for someone else can feel like full sensory overload for you. And by the end of a regular Tuesday, you can be completely exhausted in a way that's hard to explain to people who don't experience it themselves.
Absorbing everyone else's emotions (without meaning to)
Probably one of the most exhausting highly sensitive person struggles there is.
If there’s tension in the room, you feel it. If a friend is going through something difficult, you feel their emotions too - not just as empathy, but as a physical, felt experience. You might not even realise you've absorbed something until you're home and wondering why you feel so heavy for no obvious reason.
Over time, this can make it really hard to know the difference between what's yours and what belongs to someone else. And you may place other people's emotional states ahead of your own, or you may have lost the thread of how you actually feel underneath all of it.
Taught to suppress, not feel
A common experience among many highly sensitive people is growing up receiving some version of the message that your emotions were too much or too intense.
And so you learned, often without realising, to hold it together. To smile when you wanted to cry, push through when you needed to stop, and keep the peace when everything in you was screaming that something wasn't right.
You got really good at managing your emotions, rather than actually feeling them.
Emotions that don't get felt or expressed don't just disappear. They often linger in the body, showing up as tension, exhaustion, bracing or that low-grade anxiety that never quite goes away. It can show up as the sense that something is just slightly off beneath the surface.
And you might have experienced those moments of wondering “why didn’t I just speak up?”, “why did I just go numb?” or “why did I just isolate?” Or why your emotions, a burst of anger or wave of overwhelm, feels so disproportionate to what's happening in the moment.
It's not because you're doing it wrong.
It's because you were likely taught to suppress instead of feel, to hold your tongue or to not cry. And perhaps you now feel like you’re the one who needs to absorb and hold all the energy/emotions together for everyone else.
Feeling like you don't quite fit anywhere
Growing up highly sensitive in a world that doesn't always make space for it… usually means you learned pretty early that the way to belong was to adapt.You made friends by toning yourself down (especially the sensitive parts), and became more agreeable and less reactive.
And you got really good at it.
But that kind of constant adaptation comes at a cost. A lot of highly sensitive people reach a point where they're so used to adjusting themselves to fit the room that they don’t even know who they are anymore, even when they’re alone.
The feeling of being misperceived, people not quite ‘getting’ or understanding you, feeling like you don’t know who you are anymore - are some common experiences I hear from the people I work with.
Understanding yourself but still feeling stuck
A lot of highly sensitive people are also incredibly self-aware. They've read self-help books, love journalling, gone to therapy. They can articulate their patterns or trace a pattern back to childhood.
And they feel like they’re stuck.
Not because they haven’t tried hard enough, or reframed their situation from a new perspective.
But often it’s because they can understand and have empathy for a situation or person, and yet what’s lingering under the surface is the heavy, unprocessed emotions from previous life experiences that may have been noticed but were not able to complete their cycle. This is the somatic residue that can get stuck within the body as tension, heaviness, stiffness.
Understanding something lives in the mind. But so much of what sensitive people are carrying lives in the body and the nervous system. These are the places that ‘I understand myself’ insight alone can't reach.
This is where somatic work comes in. It’s not another thing you have to do to heal. But it actually offers the conditions for what's been feeling stuck, heavy, held back or incomplete in the body to finally have somewhere to go.
You're not too much. You just haven't had the right conditions or spaces to be you.
If any of this is landing for you… you’re not alone - welcome!
I work with women who feel everything deeply and are done pretending they don't. Through somatic coaching and nervous system support, we work gently with what's actually happening in the body - not just the story about it you may have learnt in therapy - so that things can start to shift in a way that feels more embodied and congruent.
If you're curious about what that could feel like for you, I offer a free Connection Call - no pressure or obligation. Just a gentle conversation to see if it might be a good fit.