Overview
In this video, you will learn more about what it means to be a highly sensitive person who is also a high sensation seeker. You could say that these traits have pretty opposite characteristics, so it makes sense that it can be challenging to be HSS HSP, especially if you are unaware of it.
If you can relate to many of the traits of a highly sensitive person, but you find yourself craving new experiences and you get bored with routine, you could be a high sensation seeker too.
You will learn about the 4 characteristics of high sensation seeking, how that translates for highly sensitive people and then I also share 3 helpful tips that can help you as a high sensation seeker, highly sensitive person.
Transcript
(Tertia) 00:00 Hey everyone! In today’s video, I’m going to be talking about the high sensation seeking, highly sensitive person or HSS, HSP for short. High sensitivity and high sensation seeking sounds like two completely opposite traits and actually it is. That’s why if you are a high sensation seeker and a highly sensitive person, it can be very confusing. So, that’s why I want to make this video to help you understand a little bit more about these two conflicting aspects that you have so that you can know yourself better and therefore create your life better. If you are new to my channel, hi! My name is Tertia. I am an EFT practitioner and a coach and I help highly sensitive people get unstuck and break through the things that hold them back so that they can live better and feel better. Say hi to us in the comments, introduce yourself and please subscribe to my channel to get updated on my new weekly videos. So, high sensation seeking is something that is present across all boards and all people. So, it is not specific to a certain group of people but when it comes to high sensation seeking and highly sensitive people, there’s not a lot of information out there and the most definitive work is by Dr. Tracy Cooper. So, most of what I’m going to be talking about comes from the information that he has shared with us. So, let’s quickly look at what is high sensation seeking. What does that mean? I’m going to then share with you how it shows up for us as highly sensitive people and then most importantly, I’m going to tell you what you can do to incorporate and balance these two sides of yourself. So, let’s start then with what is high sensation seeking and really this can be categorized by four specific items. The first thing is that high sensation seekers are always looking for new experiences. So, that means they enjoy going to new places, different places, different restaurants trying out different kinds of food. They’re not really so fond of routine. The second thing that is particular to high sensation seekers is that they are thrill seekers. It means that they are at the extreme adventure junkies. They’re looking for things that can give them adrenaline rushes and they are also bored easily. So, they need to be stimulated. They get under stimulated quite easily and then the fourth specific to high sensation seekers is a sense of disinhibition. So, that means a disregard sometimes for societal norms, societal rules and really going a little bit wild and taking things to the extreme. So, that is what high sensation seeking is putting that onto highly sensitive people. All of these specifics are present for highly sensitive people where the difference is that our risk taking is not so intense. So, we will participate in things that has a very low risk factor. So, we don’t really risk ourselves but we want that adrenaline stimulation or that, that adrenaline rush. We want stimulation. We do disregard societal norms as long as it is going to be safe and then finally we enjoy experiencing new things. Now, I have five signs that I want to tell you about. Obviously, there are many more. These are the top five that I want to share with you of how you can tell that you are an HSP HSS. The first is that you will rather be active than lying on the couch. You might feel the need to just vegetate on the couch or just vegetate because you are feeling exhausted but you can only do this for a little while and then you have this yearning and this need to be active and to do something and to, to, go out or to create and just to move. So, that can be one of the first signs. The second sign is that you value freedom above everything else. Freedom is a core value for you. You don’t like being told what to do. You don’t like being told how to think. And you like to make your own rules and again this is where some of that disinhibition comes in. The third sign is that you enjoy experiencing new things. So, while on a lot of the HSP blogs, they’ll talk about have this set routine. Make sure that you always know what is going to come next. If you are a high sensation seeker, the idea of always knowing what is coming next is terribly boring. You want to experience different things. You want to try out new things and you actually feel kind of depressed and sluggish if you have the same repeating routine every day but having said that, it is important for our brains not to get over stimulated by not having too many different new experiences all the time. So, again we need to find that balance. Now, the third or the fourth sign rather of what it is like to be a high sensation seeker and a highly sensitive person is that your moods can be quite extreme. There’s no middle ground. So, you can be very euphoric and then you could be very down. Down in the dumps and very low and there’s no golden middle ground. It’s either way up there or way down here and that can also be confusing because when you don’t know about yourself that this is possibly because you’re a high sensation seeker and a highly sensitive person. You could think that there’s really something wrong with you because you don’t have a measured emotional response. You get excitable very quickly and then you can also feel sad and affected by the world around you very quickly and that is actually then the fifth sign is that you get excitable very quickly and you are very keen to start things. You don’t need to wait too long to decide and to make a decision sometimes or most of the times. It’s very easy for you to first take action and then you might break and reflect whereas typically for highly sensitive people, a lot of times it’s explained that they are very, we are very deliberate and yes we can be very, very, deliberate but when you have that high sensation seeking part to you as well, then you will find that you might be quite impulsive at the same time to go and experience those new things. So, the biggest challenge of course is that we need to find a way to balance these two extreme sides. The most important thing is to accept both parts of yourself. When you accept that you have these two parts to you and that they both need to be honored, then you can start making choices. That’s going to support that if you don’t know that you have both this yearning to take time to process information and to be alone and at the same time you have this yearning for stimulation and adventure and new experiences. When you don’t know this about yourself, it is very confusing to try and deal with all of the emotions and the discomfort that come up as a result of you, not honoring your true nature because you’re trying to be something that you are. So, I’m hoping that by the information that I’m sharing with you in this video, it’s going to help you get a new insight into yourself and a new insight in how you can as I said earlier marry these two parts of yourself saying no to yourself and having boundaries is the second tip that I want to share with you. There’s a lot of talk about saying no to people in your life and having boundaries out there but I think as highly sensitive people with high sensation seeking the high sensation seeking trait, it’s important that we learn how to say no to ourselves. You need to learn how to say no, so that you can balance your two extremes. You need to learn how to say no for yourself so that you don’t go for the rush. If it is time for you to take a step back and just recharge a lot of times when we are and this is especially when we extrovert it because you can be a high sensation seeker and introverted. So, it doesn’t mean that you must be extroverted. If you are a highly sensitive person and a high sensation seeker, it’s both introverts and extroverts. But as an extrovert, you run the risk of never stopping, never slowing down always surrounding yourself with people and action and activity and you need that time to process. You need that downtime otherwise you’re going to crash and burn. So, learn how to say no for yourself and you can only do that when you know what your triggers are and then the last tip that I can give to you is to stop hiding your sensitive nature and again this is something that I think comes easier for extroverted HSPs. It’s very easy for us to divert or to revert rather to our extroverted nature, it’s very easy to put our extroverted side forward and present that to the world but whenever you are suppressing a part of who you are, that takes a lot of energy and that takes a lot of effort and often we feel exhausted and we feel drained and we feel like we cannot function properly in the world because we are suppressing so much of our true nature because we are hiding and denying so much of who we really are. And once we begin to discover who we are, once we begin to discover what makes us tick and what our triggers are and how we can, can, show up in the world. We begin to release that energy so that we can start using it for creating instead of suppressing. If you enjoyed this video, then please give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven’t yet done so, I’d love to have you as part of our community. Thanks very much for being here and I’ll see you in the next one, bye!