Hello and every week I'll help you meet life's challenges with evidence-based

I'm Dr Ellen Hendrickson and every week I'll help you meet life's challenges

with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

Google Intraversion, and you'll come up with an alphabet soup of acronyms,

I NTJ, INms, I N. T. J. I. S. T. J. and many more.

But another acronym went mainstream way before the interweb was littered with 16 personality type quizzes.

HSP. 15 to 20 percent of people identify as a highly sensitive person.

So this week for everyone who is an HSP or loves an HSP, we'll talk about six ways to

thrive.

So let's start with some backstory.

Imagine it's 1996. You hum along to the Spice Girls

Wannabe on your disc man as you shop for platform chunky loafers in a store not

online because in 1996 Amazon had just started selling books out of Jeff Bizos's

Seattle garage. Email was barely a thing, and social media wasn't even on the horizon. But then Dr. Elaine Aaron, a then unknown

psychologist and HSP herself, published a book titled The Highly Sensitive

Person, How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.

Through good old word of mouth, the book climbed the bestseller charts and went through over 35 printings.

The world over, HSPs instantly recognized themselves in the pages.

And they wrote to Dr. Aaron, saying they read the entire book while standing in the bookstore

and thanked her for nothing less than a chance at a new life.

Now some 20 years later, listener Chowle wrote in and asked if being a highly sensitive person

has been accepted by the psychological community?

...