This is the highly sensitive person podcast, a weekly podcast for people who experience the world

brighter, louder, and more intensely. Join me on a journey of acceptance of our highly sensitive

person traits. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 17. I'm your host, Kelly. And today's going to be kind of a ranting episode. Hooray, my favorite kind. But first, before I get into my rant about sensitivity, I want to read a really nice iTunes review from a listener called Mikey Ender. Not sure how to pronounce that.

And they said, hi, Kelly, I just listened to the episode about the importance of caring less about your job and it made me cry.

For months and honestly years, I've been struggling with taking on too much. Something about what you said just hit me, and I've decided

to take on less work starting in January so I can achieve the balance I so desperately need.

Wow, that is an amazing comment. Thank you so much for sharing, and it means so much to me to read

things like this. I just can't believe it sometimes. It makes me feel really good

that I can help spread the word about high sensitivity to people and make a difference in their lives.

So today I want to talk about the word sensitive, and I did cover this a bit in the very first

episode of this podcast, if you may recall. It's so big, I want to talk about it again.

Now, when I'm faced with having to explain to someone about highly sensitive people for the

first time, I hesitate. Depending on the person, whether or not they seem receptive to it or not,

I usually hesitate, and sometimes I won't even really tell them about it if I know that they're going to be negative.

A wonderful listener named Mike Voss brought this up to me recently, the idea that maybe it would be better to change the word sensitive within highly sensitive person to something else.

He wrote, I think one of the things that really works against HSPs is the

selection of the word sensitive in that acronym. I think we should modify it to something that

indicates awareness rather than sensitivity, maybe highly aware or highly cognizant person. I think this

would be more accurate and less stigmatizing. I so agree, Mike, thank you. He also mentioned

another phrase, highly sensory person, which is my personal favorite. I like that better because

the word sensitive has such negative connotations in our country. And actually, the scientific

term for the trait that highly sensitive people have is called,

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