Hypersensitive? causes, myths and remedies

18 hours ago
10 min read

Young woman standing in a crowded urban street with blurred people around her, holding her temples with closed eyes, expressing sensory overload and stress in an overstimulating environment.

The evolutionary function of the group’s sentinel animal

Inside a pack, a tribe, a small community, it wasn’t “the strongest” that survived, but the group that perceived first.

In that scenario, the hypersensitive animal had a precise role: detecting micro-signals that others missed, like a subtle shift in tone, a rustle out of rhythm, a light that felt too still, a new smell, a barely-there social tension.

If you reacted late, it could cost you; if you reacted early, you might alarm for nothing, but you stayed alive. This is one reason the human nervous system is so prone to hypervigilance: the social and physical environment has always been a matter of safety.

Even today, on a neurobiological level, relational signals like rejection, criticism, prolonged stares, or exclusion activate brain networks that partly overlap with physical pain networks, as if the brain treats social separation like a concrete risk.¹²

In Bodymind terms, this means the “animal” isn’t irrational: it’s a sophisticated radar for belonging and danger. The problem is that the modern world is a forest of continuous artificial stimuli, and the radar almost never finds a real pause. What was adaptive in a slow-rhythm village becomes costly in a city, at work, on public transport, on social media, with lights, sounds, and demands without interruption.

It’s not always pathology

Having low sensory thresholds is not automatically a disorder. It’s often a temperamental-neurobiological trait: some people are born more reactive, more “finely tuned.” It can even be a resource, because it increases aesthetic sensitivity, empathy, the ability to notice details, prudence, social intuition.

It becomes a problem when intensity exceeds recovery capacity, when exposure is prolonged, or when chronic stress and relational load are added: in that case the nervous system isn’t “sensing better,” it’s defending too often.

A practical criterion is this: if your sensitivity makes life richer and still manageable, it’s a trait. If it narrows your life (sleep, work, relationships, freedom of movement), it’s a signal worth taking seriously and understanding more deeply.

When it’s a symptom within clinical pictures

Sensory hypersensitivity often appears within certain conditions, but with different profiles. In neurodivergence it can be a stable part of functioning:

in ADHD and autism, for example, many studies describe sensory atypicalities across multiple domains (sensitivity, avoidance, but also seeking or low registration).³⁴

In stress- and trauma-related conditions it can emerge as hypervigilance and difficulty “filtering,” especially when the body stays in alert or freeze mode for a long time.

In chronic pain syndromes, particularly fibromyalgia, it’s common to find altered central processing of pain and stimuli, often described with concepts like central sensitization and nociplastic pain (pain arising from altered nociception not fully explained by tissue damage or classic neuropathy).⁵⁶

A critical note matters here: these models explain a good part of the phenomena, but they don’t close the conversation. In fibromyalgia, for instance, there are also alternative hypotheses and peripheral contributions (such as evidence of small fiber pathology in some subgroups), and the scientific community is still debating mechanisms and subtypes.⁷

This is useful to remember in a Bodymind frame: don’t reduce everything to “it’s in the brain,” but don’t reduce it to “it’s only in the muscle” either. It’s a system.

Types of hypersensitivity: it’s not all the same

Behind the word “hypersensitivity” there can be different mechanisms.

Intensity: the stimulus arrives “too strong.”
Unpredictability: tolerable if expected, intolerable if sudden.
Duration: not dramatic, but it never stops and the system tips into overload.
Integration: too many channels at once (noise plus lights plus smells plus people) overwhelm processing capacity.
Combination: often it’s a mix of several of these factors.

Which senses can be involved

It can involve one or more channels, and not necessarily all of them. Many people have an “islands” profile: hypersensitivity in some senses and, at the same time, hyposensitivity in others (for example, high sensitivity to noise and low perception of hunger or pain). This is common in neurodivergent profiles and, more broadly, in sensory processing differences described in the literature.⁴

Sense by sense: what happens and how to shield yourself

Hearing

Hypersensitive hearing suffers most with unpredictable, continuous, or layered sounds (many sources at once). The body reads sound as intrusion: muscle tone rises, irritability increases, the mind looks for exits.

The most common shielding is to physically reduce intensity using earplugs or noise-canceling headphones, and to reduce complexity by choosing “quieter” places and positions (farther from speakers, doors, kitchens, traffic). A trick that often works is replacing chaos with a stable, controllable sound (white noise, uniform sound), because it makes the system more predictable.

The Bodymind piece here is the pause: after a noisy environment, the nervous system needs decompression in silence or soft stimuli, otherwise it accumulates.