Greta wrote:Walker wrote:duszek wrote:If a hypersensitive person lived centuries ago he or she would die an early age for sure.
In certain countries nowadays (Europe mainly but also US perhaps) hypersensitive people can survive due to social security and human rights.
They are less interested in risky activities and travelling, both being too much stress for them.
What would a course in self-care be about ?
This is a good place to offer some ideas for experimentation.
It would be about understanding the nature of hypersensitivity and directing the mind toward peace of mind.
Why is hypersensitivity over-thinking, you may wonder?
When not managed properly, the mind wanders into over-thinking, and hypersensitivity.
What if "hypersensitivity" is just "more sensitivity than usual"? What if the distribution of sensitivity in human populations plots to a Bell Curve like most other attributes? Logically, being exceptionally sensitive or insensitive and living in an unsuitable environment could make such people vulnerable to mental problems.
Each society will necessarily produce a variety of people who differ in all sorts of ways and many will gravitate to a place that roughly accommodates their strengths and weaknesses. Some people "miss their calling" in life, are never able to gainfully utilise their individual characteristics. Maybe there was no local demand. Maybe no one needed that mix of characteristics at the time?
Stuff happens, eh?
I understand your point, however yellow flags of mindfulness surround the use of words and their arbitrary, designated opposites, suffixes and prefixes, in order to dictate the meaning of reality.
Thus, the attempt to corral this thread into some semblance of pragmatic meaning as requested, with an initial, stated definition of intelligence and hypersensitivity that withstands comparison to reality.
To be too intelligent is not possible. Because sensitivity is intelligence, to be too sensitive is not possible. Thus, hypersensitivity as a problem is not an aspect of intelligence.
Considering hypersensitivity in context of it existing as a problem:
Self-cherishing is the cause of all problems, and that’s a fact, for self-cherishing is what designates a situation as being a problem. The conceptual content that fills the over-thinking, that is the crux of hypersensitivity, is self-cherishing.
In order to change the over-thinking effects of self-cherishing, you can’t simple say to someone, don’t cherish yourself. The attachment of self-cherishing, as with all attachments, is a consequence of confusing the object of cherishing with permanence.
To cherish oneself is natural because knowing ourselves, we assume a permanence to identity. Permanence in a perpetually-changing world is a comfort, thus the need for attachment. Memories of childhood comforts often seek replication.
And if one has any sense about oneself, one protects what is cherished. That is the proven principle and it extends to all things cherished, including self. This has biological causes intertwined with nurturing at an early age, cherishing that which fulfills needs, that which later gets transferred to self-consciousness and psychological autonomy.
All of this is predicated on the permanence of self.
For those familiar with Zen and other forms of Buddhism, there is a well-known contemplation that logically seeks to find specific evidence of self located in time and space, but to no avail. For those who feel the natural inclination to cherish the self which senses the world, even now, this can be a conundrum. Somehow, this results in Zen teachers hitting students with sticks, at the appropriate time and place.
However, undigressing back to hypersensitivity: When someone is following the natural inclination to self-cherish, then if the someone has any sense, there appears a naturally arising need to protect what is cherished, including the self. Thus the need for compassion in one who has nothing to lose. An old horse will run until it falls over and can run no more, thus the need for the appearance of a Yoda within a culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-t2n_jk1QM