And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this episode is all about highly sensitive people.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hey, hey, it's officially spring.

Where, here in the UK, you don't know whether to put your shorts on or fetch an umbrella.

Especially this week, we've got drizzle all weekend, and then next week it's going to be so bright

and sunny that you can't see without sunglasses even in the shade. It's weird around here.

I do wonder how we coped thousands of years ago, before we had sunglasses.

Back in very ancient times, did we all just sit in the shade-eating ants, waiting for it to get dusk?

Maybe our eyes weren't quite as a sensitive delight in those days. We'd have to ask a primate anatomist, I guess.

But maybe we're more sensitive nowadays to stimulation than those days. We'd have to ask a primate anatomist, I guess. But maybe we're more sensitive nowadays to stimulation than we used to be. It's possible. Some of us do have a genetic

difference that means our brain processes stimulation, ever so slightly differently to most people.

But it's always going to be in the minority.

Because when it comes to sensitivity, it's only an advantage in natural selection when it's rare.

If everyone was sensitive, then it would probably be a disadvantage.

We call it sensory processing sensitivity. And maybe that difference wouldn't have been that good

for natural selection 100,000 years ago, and it didn't become more common. It's just an assumption,

but I'd have thought that those highly sensitive people would have taken fewer risks.

And risks are needed if we're going to travel across unknown lands or try out different types of fruit to see if they're poisonous or not.

And the safety that comes from being more sensitive to your environment and more aware of risks, just wasn't quite enough

to become dominant. Either way, the highly sensitive gene isn't that common even now, but still,

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