My Heart Hurts Emotionally: How To Grow From The Pain

We All Experience Life in Different Colors

For most of us, there are adjustments that can be made to be better in sync with your mode of sensory processing. Learning how you best take in, processing information from your environment and shaping it to best suit your well being are skills that many people lack or could stand to sharpen.

Being introspective enough to recognize when my heart hurts emotionally can ultimately enable me to identify what factors in my environment led me to feel this way, and what I can do to improve my situation. We all gain energy and have that energy depleted by different things. Recognizing what these factors are is an important step towards mindfulness.

Understanding Sensitivity

Too often, sensitivity is associated with pathology as something meant to be changed or bolstered. However, in reality it is just another quality on which we all vary, defined by our internal experience and how it manifests itself in a varied concept of the world one exists in. Each person's life is made up of boundaries, both those that we create and those inflicted upon us.

Those between yourself and others, between the past and the present, and between the varying degrees of object and subject. We all vary in the ways and degrees in which we perceive and embody these boundaries in our lives. How do we differentiate ourselves from our environment? What makes up who we are? These are the questions that may arise when beginning to evaluate the different frontiers in your life.

When My Heart Hurts Emotionally:

Those with more sensitive reaction to the environment are often found to be susceptible to ailments such as irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, migraines, chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia. We are yet to know the full implications of this general variation, but what we do know for certain is that there are neural markers for sensitivity or lack thereof.

Western culture has in many ways fostered contempt for sensitivity, especially in males. We have these misconceptions that hold us to maladaptive standards of gender roles, specifically certain tenets of masculinity, which seemingly deem that sensitivity in men is a sign of weakness.

How Does This Manifest?

If sensitivity is a value on which we all vary, then it stands to reason that there are those who fall toward the thin-boundary end of the spectrum. Being familiar with the hallmarks of sensitivity may ring a bell of recognition of your own experience, or of someone in your life that you could interact with more efficiently. Some people have a more extreme responsiveness to sensory stimuli, making them more sensitive to the inputs that they encounter.

Much of this sensory processing is experienced as a psychosomatic component, such that physical symptoms arise and may feel as if they came from an actual ailment. This leads those with this propensity for sensitivity to have higher than normal rates of health anxiety, formerly labeled as hypochondria. BetterHelp is an online resource developed with the aim of connecting qualified professionals with those in need of idiosyncratic mental health care.