Despite generally feeling young, occasional sleep-deprived days or minor injuries quickly remind me of my midlife status, reminding me I’m no longer in my twenties. While I don’t love aging, the research backs up the notion that we continue to change and grow across our adult lifespans. Some aspects of growing older are indeed less appealing, but there are some HSP aging benefits to consider. As a fellow highly sensitive people (HSP), I aim to share four HSP aging benefits so that you can be on the lookout for them in your own life and take steps to consciously cultivate them.
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HSP Aging Benefit #1 – Sensitive People Tend to Build Vibrant Relationships and Communities
Part of being highly sensitive is our deep attunement to what people around us are experiencing. This incredible empathy helps us to be more responsive to others, and as we age, our increasing exposure to others helps us to identify more accurately what we are picking up on empathically. We get better at sorting out what are our emotions and what belongs to someone else, which helps us to relate to people more effectively.
HSPs don’t necessarily choose to have huge social circles, and as we age, we often embrace having fewer but deeper relationships. We let go of expectations to be social butterflies. We become more comfortable and confident in building relationships that are healthy, have good boundaries, and deeply cherish and support others. I think of these kinds of relationships as having a sparkle to them, being full of life, and inspiring others to want the same kinds of connections.
Our ability to build these vibrant one-on-one relationships helps us to build networks that are similarly imbued with deep, healthy connections. Our networks might include circles of friends and family, membership in social groups, and connections to spiritual and religious communities. By being our true HSP selves, we model healthy interpersonal relationships and help the groups around us be healthier and have a greater impact on the world around them.
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HSP Aging Benefit #2 – Sensitive People Make Great Parents and Better Grandparents
A particularly important offshoot of how we relate to others is the way that HSPs make great parents and even better grandparents. HSPs are beautifully attuned to what their children are experiencing.
As our children get older, we may find it easier to bypass the overwhelm that comes with the early years of parenting, feel more confident in our ability to fill the role of parent and grow more adept at getting our own needs met while focusing so much of ourselves on our children.
That’s part of why I think HSPs make phenomenal grandparents: the daily pressures of childrearing and, in some cases, working outside the home, are gone, so grandparents can attune and give their all to their grandkids for a short time. The breaks in contact can help set the boundaries that allow grandparents to recharge and be ready for the next interaction.
As we age, we also benefit from the expanding body of research and lived experience of what it means to be highly sensitive. Let’s face it: many adults were not celebrated for being highly sensitive.
As we age, we get to continually revamp our understanding of sensitivity and how it influences our experiences. While we may need to grieve the ways that our parents or grandparents might not have understood us, HSPs get to care for the children in their lives with a deep appreciation for how sensory processing sensitivity influences people. I believe this is part of why I see so many HSPs advocating for children with various marginalized identities: we know firsthand how important it is to be seen for our unique selves.
HSP Aging Benefit #3 – Sensitive People Know How to Lean Into Creativity
One of the ways that research shows that HSPs change with age is through a growing aesthetic sensitivity. This deepening appreciation for creativity and beauty can take many forms. I notice it starting in how HSPs frequently realize in early or middle adulthood that they are not cut out for the ambitious, non-stop lifestyle that culture, especially in the United States says people should pursue. Many HSPs are making choices to craft lives that are slower, more intentional, and deliberately removed from the rat race.
I also see many HSPs increasing their engagement in creative pursuits as they age. For some HSPs, this means a return to the arts, writing, or performing that they did as children but may have stopped because of messages that such things are impractical or would not be a way to make a good living.
Other HSPs are exploring for the first time what it means to allow activities like cooking, gardening, home decorating, and community building to be outlets for their creative energy.
HSP aging benefits include using the self-regulation skills that come with adulthood to overcome the performance anxiety and imposter syndrome that can get in the way of committing to creative pursuits. Regardless of the specific outlet, living creatively helps HSPs find the meaning and purpose in life that becomes increasingly central to our desires as we age.
Looking for HSP Tools to Thrive in a Chaotic World?
The modern world is often overwhelming and stressful for those of us with sensitive nervous systems. Many of us have suffered from the challenges of high stress, anxiety, sensory overload, and mental health and physical health issues. Fortunately, after years of working with and researching Highly Sensitive People (HSPs), Julie Bjelland has developed many tools that have not only helped her but thousands of HSPs all over the world move out of survival mode living and into thriving. In this free webinar, she’ll share the tools that HSPs have found the most life-changing. Her goal is to help you live to your fullest potential because the world needs you.
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HSP Aging Benefit #4 – Highly Sensitive People Tend to Embrace Their Identity
To me, the most exciting thing I see in my HSP friends, clients, and within myself is the way that aging allows people to embrace who they authentically are, including their identity as a highly sensitive person. There is such lived evidence that we care less about what other people think of us and are more willing to live in ways that work for us as we age.
If you think about human development, this is a natural part of the aging process. Children have a deep dependency on the adults in their lives and thus must be profoundly aware of what adults expect of them. That dependency begins to be challenged in adolescence, where we naturally begin to experiment with our own sense of who we are and how we want to live.
But adolescence also brings a knee-jerk energy, a tendency to react against the expectations put on us. It is only as we move into adulthood that we begin to constructively and proactively build a lifestyle based on integrating whatever we wish to take from childhood expectations with our chosen adult values and behaviors.
For many of us, it can take until well into our 30s, 40s, or 50s to begin that full integration process, including our HSP selves as part of those calculations. And for some people, that process starts even later (for the record, I believe it is never too late). But when we decide at 30 that we’re done going to parties that start at 10 PM even if it upsets our friends, or we choose at 40 to use earplugs in public that we wouldn’t have braved wearing a decade ago, we are learning to say that our needs and desires matter as highly sensitive beings. These are the true HSP aging benefits: knowing yourself better and conducting your life accordingly.
Aging can also help us soften to parts of ourselves that we have resisted, including our sensitivity. If we have spent years hoping that we could be less sensitive, trying to change ourselves, and wishing we were different, we may begin to see over time that we cannot be anyone else but who we are.
We are born highly sensitive; it is an enduring temperamental trait. Our experiences of trying to change ourselves convince us that being an HSP is fundamental to our identities. This certainty can help us focus on accepting our authentic selves and fostering self-compassion for and building skills to cope with how it is nonetheless challenging to be highly sensitive.
Choose Your Perspective, Shape Your Experience
One of the delightful qualities that HSPs possess is our ability to come up with sophisticated ways of looking at things, based on our heightened awareness of what is happening around us and our tendency to reflect deeply on our experiences. We can use this to work with our perspective on aging:
- Challenge the subtle ways that ageism creeps into your mindset.
- Notice the small and simple benefits of aging.
- Discover new parts of your life to nurture and allow yourself to outgrow aspects of yourself that no longer serve you.
- Direct your attention to the ways that being highly sensitive makes for a richer experience of aging.
Choose your perspective, and you’ll shape your experience of HSP aging benefits and find where your sensitivity is a guide and a support to building a meaningful, rewarding lifestyle.
Be sensitive, be free
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