Episode #18: Wisdom, Self-Discovery, and Adventure for High-Sensation Seeking HSPs

Exploring what it means to live as a “wild sensitive,” balancing sensitivity, curiosity, and courage on the journey toward freedom and growth.

Welcome back to The Happy HSP Podcast. I’m your host, Kimberly Marshall, and today we’re diving into the world of the “wild sensitive.” These are HSPs who are both highly sensitive and high-sensation seeking. I’m joined by Annet van Duinen and Randy Grasser, and together we explore how embracing both depth and adventure can lead to a great sense of freedom and authenticity.

We talk about the challenges of suppressing who we are, and what it means to live in that “goldilocks zone” between feeling completely safe and taking risks for the sake of growth, and how to gain lots of wisdom along the way. So, if you’ve ever felt that friction between living as a highly sensitive person and embarking on a more adventurous lifestyle, then this conversation is for you.

I hope you enjoy it!

Kim: All right, Randy and Annet, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to The Happy HSP Podcast.

Randy: Thank you very much, Kimberly. It’s great to be here.

Annet: It’s great to be here. Thank you, Kimberly.

Kim: So, first thing, first, I’d love to dive into your personal journeys as highly sensitive people and learn more about how you found out and what that journey looked like for you.

Annet: Shall I start?

Randy: Go ahead, dear.

Annet: Well, I think like most HSPs, I’ve always known that I was highly sensitive and always felt there was something different about me. When I was 20, I found out about the book. I found a book from Elaine Aron, and it was like, wow, this is me, right? And there was still always a part of me that was still not explained by the highly sensitive book by Elaine. And it was only later until I found out about high sensation seeking trait, which then made everything fall into place. Like, yes, this is a big, big part of me, which was unexplained by the original HSP, like the DOES trait.

And so that for me was a big part of recognizing who I am and how I am everything about me. And so that made a big difference. And then I found out about it when I was 20, more or less. So, I really was early with it, and from that moment started to dive in, learn more and more and more about the trait and just expand my knowledge about it. And so that’s how I got into the being familiar with the trait.

Randy: I think for myself, Kimberly, it’s quite a different story and I’ve had the opportunity to interview a lot of men and listen to a lot of women in their journey. And I think for us men specifically, for me, it was about avoidance. And so, we hear the story that we always knew. We were highly sensitive. I think for us, again, for me it was about thinking that there was something wrong.

I was always up against other men who were downplaying or criticizing or judging, rejecting who I was as an individual. And so, trying to conform to society’s expectations was quite difficult growing up, even into my early adulthood, you’re just never really figuring out who you were. But the high sensation seeking side of me was predominant. People grasp that actually it attracted people to me. And so, I magnified that while downplaying the sensitivity part.

But every once in a while, that sensitivity part would sneak out and cause me a lot of harm, cause me a lot of grief. So, I would suppress it even more. And it wasn’t until five years ago I was, what, 56 when I was listening to a podcast very similar to this one. And I heard William Allen, who I know you’ve interviewed, and he introduced this concept of highly sensitive person. And the more I listened to that, the more I attached to it, and I just went head over heels. I literally quit my job and dedicated my entire life from that point on forward to understanding the trade, understanding who I am and why I am. And that led me to meeting Annet. And here we are on this incredible journey, discovering more about the trait and its intricacies in combination with the high sensation seeking.

Kim: Wow, I had no idea that you, so you learned that about yourself through William Allen and that led you to this personal journey in discovery and also to Annet. Can you share more about that?

Annet: Of course, you go ahead.

Randy: I think I can speak for a lot of men where our sensitivity kind of puts us in a ballpark of the friend zone with a lot of women. The concept of high sensation seeking, because I did leave a very adventurous lifestyle and that’s what attracted people to me was that adventurous lifestyle. But it was pretentious. It wasn’t me that they were attracted to. It was the lifestyle I was leading.

And it caused me a lot of heartache and it caused me a lot of pain. And when I finally gave up, I said, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not having a relationship. No one understands, no one can appreciate who I am. I didn’t even know who I was. That’s when I said, I’m going to quit my job. I’m going to jump on my motorbike and I’m going to ride to South America and think about this.

So, a 25,000-mile journey, you should give me enough time to process all this while I read and explore. I got down to Southern Mexico and a little complication happened and all of a sudden, I was here and I got an email from Annet saying, “Hey, I’d love to interview you on my podcast.” And I was like, no, no, no, no, this is not going to happen. I am off of that stuff. And we started to talk and the more she talked to me, the more she helped me understand that she knew me, she understood me, she related to me, and it just captured my heart. And it’s been an absolutely beautiful journey ever since.

Annet: Absolutely. I think that one of the things that makes us as a couple so awesome is that we sort of help each other process through all the parts about high sensitivity, how the combination with high sensation seeking works. And like Randy said, his life was more predominant, high sensation seeking. Mine was always more the high sensitive part.

And together we sort of educate and learn together about the combination of both traits, which we named them, e named it the wild sensitive, that’s the combination of being high sensation seeking and being a highly sensitive person. And together we’re going into depth in learning and processing and really understanding what it means to be highly sensitive and high sensation seeking. And we’re exploring and finding some great stuff, which we also wrote about in our book, The Wild Sensitive, of course. Yeah.

Kim: Wow. So, a few questions on that. So, are you saying that Randy, you’re high sensation seeking and Annet, you’re not so much, is that what I’m hearing?

Annet: No, I’m also high sensation seeking.  

Kim: You’re also, high sensation seeking, but you’re learning about the differences between the two. So how would you describe high sensation seeking? It’s come up a few times, but I don’t think we’ve really dug into that. Can you share more about what that is and what that experience is like?

Annet: Sure, of course. So, the basic description of the high sensation seeker was explored and named by Marvin Zuckerman in the end of the 60s.

And he defined, originally, he was looking more into different things of personality and then he found like, wow, there’s more to it. And so, then he found these four aspects of the high sensation seeker, which are thrill and adventure seeking, novelty seeking. So, you’re easily bored with, okay, same old. So that’s really the new things that you want to experience. Then you have boredom susceptibility. So, we’re easily bored with situations. Repeating the same thing over again is also a big part of it. And the last one is disinhibition. So, liking stuff that is a little bit out of the box. And that’s the four original traits. And Marvin Zuckerman didn’t originally look into it for highly sensitive people, so it’s like a common thing. And for highly sensitive people it looks a little bit different. As in we still use our depths of processing, the thrill and adventure part is the one thing that people recognize the most like, oh, I’m not like that. I don’t want to go bungee jumping or mountaineering or doing really adventurous stuff, although there are exceptions like Randy, but we’re processing things more, we’re looking, we still use our depths of processing to do those adventurous things and that makes it different in the highly sensitive person. So that’s the basic description of it. I don’t know if you want to add something to that.

Randy: Yeah, that’s more of a technical perspective, what high sensation seeking is. But if you translate that into basic layman terms, highly sensitive sensation seeker is an individual that is seeking wisdom through knowledge and experience, and I’m going to explain often this story that I was traveling through Southeast Asia and through the jungles via motorbike, and I came across a small village and there was a Buddhist temple there and I sat with a Buddhist monk and I asked him specifically, help me understand what wisdom is because that term is used quite flagrantly and really people don’t understand the term of it. And he put it to me in a very elegant way. He said, wisdom is when you acquire the knowledge and then you understand that knowledge and then you go out there and experience life in its entirety and you see how those two, the knowledge and the experience interconnect with one another.

That’s wisdom. So, somebody can go to school or read a book or take a course and gain knowledge, but until they actually apply that into real life and real experiences, they will never be wise. And so, what a wild sensitive does is they are on a lifelong journey to acquire knowledge through or wisdom, sorry, through knowledge and experience. But if we listen to society, speak about the highly sensitive person and how we are overstimulated and that leads to overwhelm, then we avoid the acquisition of experience.

Whereas a high sensation seeker, we crave it, we desire it, we’re not easily overstimulated, although we can be more overstimulated than the less sensitive individual. So, there’s a mix in there and so we can understand where people that are just highly sensitive, they get overstimulated very, very easily and if they don’t have the tools, if they don’t have the techniques, if they don’t have the practice in using life tools that are required. And so highly sensitive sensations or what we call the wild sensitive is somebody that is mastered or is on their way to mastering these tools and then they can acquire that experience and that knowledge through their depth of processing, through their sensitivity to subtleties, through their emotional connection without getting overstimulated.

Kim: Wow. So, what are you guys finding about this dichotomy? How would you explain this difference between the wildness and the sensitivity? You said you, you’re discovering things and uncovering them. Is there something you can share about what you’re finding?

Randy: Kimberly, It boils down to one word. It’s called freedom. I mean, we are literally free from the label. We’re free from the stigma we we’re constantly exploring. We’re constantly evolving, we’re constantly learning. It is an amazing journey to be on and it’s free. That’s the only thing I can say.

Annet: One thing that I am thinking of, it’s really what Randy said, it’s about learning and exploring and gaining more knowledge. If I can give you an example, I was just in Europe for three weeks traveling and I was visiting my daughters there and also, so we lived in Baja, California in Mexico, and I traveled on my own from here to Europe, which is not something I would’ve done that 20 years ago as well. I always liked traveling and going places and exploring, but it always brought also a certain kind of stress level, bit of anxiousness. I have to be on time, and I have to make everything work and you have to be mindful of this and that. And so that creates stress in us, which easily is the overstimulation that a lot of HSPs talk about. And so having learned a lot of skills to self-regulate, manage my emotions to deal with life basically this time when I was traveling to Europe, I mean I had to transfer planes in Mexico City, which is a crazy airport.

It’s like totally busy. They were remodeling, so there was drilling and everything going on. I had to find because we’re temporary residents in Mexico, I had to get a stamp into my passport to exit the country and able to be able to come back in. And so that in itself could have been a very stressful situation because of the remodeling. It wasn’t in a logical place. And so, I was walking in circles, which would’ve caused me a lot of anxiety in the past because, well, there’s just a lot going on, but this time it was more like I am in control of the situation.

I can manage my thoughts on this. I mean, normally we can make ourselves crazy with thinking about what’s going on. Like, oh, maybe this will happen or maybe that will happen. And so, this time I was able to relax and travel in a very comfortable way and also just see what’s going on around me and be totally okay with that. And so that’s the skills that we’re talking about and what we’re learning is that you’re managing yourself, you’re managing your limiting beliefs, how you see everything, what’s going on around you, and that’s what it’s all about to explore and to grow and to feel more at ease with yourself. Like what Randy said, you have freedom if you learn that you can take on the world basically.

Kim: Gosh, that’s such a great point and I’d love your insight on this because it actually came up on a recent social post. Someone mentioned the label of high sensitivity and how things needed to change, and I really didn’t know how to answer that and what you mentioned just now, it kind of reminded me this concept that these labels don’t have to, I guess I could use your insight on this because on the one hand, we’re sent highly sensitive people and we want to learn about the trait and learn about and reflect on how it affects our lives, but on the other hand, we don’t want it to limit us or put us in a box.

So, what’s your thought on that? I just find it an interesting push and pull here because on the one hand we’re highly sensitive and we’re educating people on that, but on the other you don’t want it to limit you. What’s your sense around that?

Annet: Well, it reminds me of the tool that we and the model that we developed in our book, the Six Zones of Life, which if you, Randy is better at it in explaining in the details more than I am. But what it basically comes down to for me is that once you understand where you’re at in life and what lack of skills you have, then you can overcome and learn those things. And that’s basically the starting point. I let you explain it.

Randy: So, I had the opportunity over the last 15 years, Kimberly, to travel adventurously through 56 different countries. Not as a tourist but as a searcher for knowledge, a searcher for experiences like I mentioned before. And the one thing that I saw, I mean I saw many in people, the behavior of people is society as a whole has condensed us into living into two zones of life. That is the safe zone, often confused with the comfort zone, and the risk zone. So, you’re either safe or you’re at risk, but that’s not life. That’s not how life is.

There’s actually six zones that we need to learn to live in, and when we look at the safe zone as an example, we hear the concept of people saying, oh, this is a safe place, especially in group gatherings. We’re going to create a safe place here. The reality of that is that there’s only one true safe place and that is with yourself isolated away from anybody and everybody in a place to which you feel safe. It might be your house, it might be your bedroom, it might be sitting on a park bench, but that’s even a little bit risky because you can have the experience of having somebody come sit beside you, which then removes you from all they have to do is say one word which would trigger you, and that takes you immediately out of that safe place into a risk place.

So true safety is only by yourself and you create that. You need to create that. Then from there we go into our comfort zone. Our comfort zone is a place that we share with other people that we trust, we care about, we love, we feel comfortable being around them. We can be ourselves, our true, true selves. Then we have the third zone, and the third zone is my favorite zone. I love this zone. This is where we should all exist most of the time, and we call it the Goldilocks zone, and it follows the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, right? It’s just right. And that’s unique for each individual. What’s just right for you? The Goldilocks zone is a place that we’re challenged a little bit, but well within our skill capability we feel we can handle this. No problem. I’ve got this.

That’s where we should be living all the time, not in our safe zone. We’re not hiding away in a back room somewhere or pretending we don’t even exist. The fourth zone is what we call the secure zone. This is our challenging zone. This is the zone where you’re going to push your limits, you’re going to push your boundaries, but not to the point of overstimulation. You’re going to grow there, you’re going to expand there. You’re going to try new things, new experiences, and you’re really going to feel it out to make sure that it is something that I can do this.

Then of course we have the fifth zone, which is the risk zone and the risk zone we want to try to stay out of. We don’t want to go to the risk that’s in over our head. That’s overstimulation and it’s just not a great place to be.

The sixth zone is what we call the floating zone, and that’s a really important one, and that’s the one most people don’t even listen to, but they hear it all the time, and that is the zone of uncomfortableness. So, when you feel uncomfortable, it’s telling you you’re in the wrong zone, move into a different zone. But if you listen really, really carefully to that uncomfortableness, it’s going to tell you one of two things. It’s either going to tell you to retreat, you’re in over your head, it’s uncomfortable here, let’s pull back, or this is not good. We need to expand, we need to grow. I am bored. I need to change spaces here. Relationships can be like that. This relationship is stagnant. I need to move out of this relationship into a better relationship.

And that relationship can be with yourself. And so, if we become stagnant, we become just keep listening to that uncomfortableness and interpret it as I need to recede. You’re going to keep receding until you’re all the way back into your safe zone and you’re never going to grow. And so, we need to expand our understanding of the zones to which we’re living in and start to regrow these center zones instead of just having the two with a little sliver in between them that contains all the other three, we need to start expanding those other three and then shrinking the risk zone and the safe zone. There’s time and a place for each one of those.

Kim: That makes sense. It sounds like you can keep yourself safe in a bubble and not have any experiences, but then you’re not really growing, or you can keep yourself in this place where you’re constantly in the wrong place and fear anxiety. There’s those two extremes, but what you’re saying is finding that sweet spot where you’re just challenged enough, you can grow, but you’re also, it sounds like we probably float in between all of them at some point.

Randy: And that’s why we call it the floating zone because you should never just stay in one zone. You should float at times. We want to just chill. We want to just be with friends. We want to develop those relationships where we can just be ourselves and hang out. Sometimes we need that solitude. Sometimes we just need to go, you know what? I need time to myself, and I’m just going to go and park myself and reflect and absorb what I’ve learned. Other times, we’re going to push ourselves. We’re going to take a new course, we’re going to read a new book, we’re going to meet somebody new and test out some of the skills that we’re learning in our Goldilocks zone.

Annet: And one of the things that I would like to add to that is indeed for, to connect it back to being a highly sensitive person. We experience from the overstimulation, we go into overwhelm, but basically overwhelm is when you’re starting to go into your risk zone in between from the secure and the risk zone. It’s basically the moment you do not have enough skills or tools to deal with that situation, which makes you go into like, oh my God, I can’t deal with this. This is too much.

And so, the overwhelm in that way comes from not having enough skills to deal with the situation. And of course, we get tired, and we need the basic self-care, which is really important, but most of the time when we go into overstimulation, when there’s too much going on, we do not have the skills and the tools to deal with that in the moment. It’s like the example I gave from the being in Mexico City at the airport, if you have the skills to manage yourself, and that’s a lot of the skills that we’re talking about. It’s about self-regulation, self-management, managing your beliefs, how you think about something. If you learn how to deal with that and to manage them better in a better way, then you won’t go into that overstimulation overwhelm so quickly.

Kim: And this sounds like it ties back into the wisdom piece because you’re learning, you’re growing, you’re gaining knowledge, something’s uncomfortable. Then I feel like with HSPs, we would typically, if something’s uncomfortable, search out why and then applying it, it kind of feels like that comes full circle.

Annet: True, true. Exactly. And unfortunately, in a lot of, in the HSP world, there’s a lot of talk about you are overwhelmed, you need to retreat and without any exploration of what’s going on, maybe learning new skills. But no, it’s mostly based on I need to calm myself, I need to relax, I need to sleep and everything. And yes, we do need that self-care and maintenance of course, but it’s also about the skill development. That skill development. That’s such an important part of it.

Kim: Absolutely. How do you use this knowledge in your work? I know you mentioned you wrote your book, you also have a coaching practice, is that right?

Annet: Yes, yes. We are developing programs as well from our book. We’re in the middle of creating the program that goes with that, because in the book, there’s a lot of tools and to be able to learn and put that into practice, you need to experience with it. And so that’s what we’re building. But I’ve been a coach for over 10 years coaching highly sensitive people also to learn those skills and the management, and now together we are perfecting it even more and building it more.

Randy: I ran a youth corrections program for a number of years where I worked with the government to take court-appointed young offenders, teenagers into the bush, into the wild for 26 days for behavioral modification. And so, the goal was to get them to see themselves and see the impact they were having on themselves and on society as a whole. And so we’re applying those two principles, Annet’s high sensitive training as she was trained by Elaine Aron, and the education that I received from working with the young offenders and combining that into a very effective system that helps people understand how to use the knowledge that we’re offering, the tools that we’re offering, put it into practice, which is technique, developing technique. And the only way you can develop technique is by practicing. A lot of people just say, well, we’ll read the book, and they’ll read the tool that we have in there.

For example, the three R rule that we have, which is recognize, regulate, reclaim. That’s a tool. Okay, now what do I do with that? Recognize in situations of overstimulation that you’re in overstimulation, regulate your emotional wellbeing, understand what your nervous system is doing, how do you manage that? Don’t focus on the overstimulation. Focus on yourself and how you can regulate your own nervous system and bring it back into a process to which you can think clearly and make proper decisions, and then reclaim that ability by acting forward. So just by sitting on a couch and practicing those three words, recognize, regulate, reclaim over and over and over and over and over again.

The next time you find yourself in an overstimulating situation, those three words will pop into your head because they are now a pattern, and you can work with it. And now you start to practice that exercise. I recognize that this is overstimulating for me. I need to take some deep breaths. So, we have the grounding breath, we have different techniques of how you can regulate your nervous system, and then how do I make decisions? How do I make proper decisions without overstimulation being involved?

That all takes practice. We can put it in the book. That’s the knowledge. You got to have the experience behind it.

Kim: So, it’s almost like you can keep your nervous system safe by not exposing it to anything, or you can be more mindful of what’s going on around you and learning how to manage it as you go.

Randy: Yes, avoidance is not the secret. Avoidance only exasperates the situation. The more we avoid, the more we are susceptible to overstimulation, but at the same time, don’t jump into the deep end of the pool. Wade in that test the water gently and incrementally build those skills with trusted people that can help you and guide you along the way. Someone you can talk to about how is this, this is how I’m feeling right now. How do I manage this? And that’s the right way to do it. That’s how you practice these tools and get better. But if you just simply avoid, I can’t do that, you say you can’t. You can’t. And so, it’s not about throwing people. If they read the book and they say, oh, I can do all this, and then they go and try it, they say, well, it doesn’t work for me. That’s because you jumped into the deep end of the pool.

Kim: It’s almost like you’re giving me the idea of your nervous system being something that’s more pliable and you can nudge it so it can handle more than you think you can without pushing yourself to the extremes. It’s like a process, it sounds.

Annet: But true. Very true. And it’s also about the mental part about it, because a lot of what we can do and what we can do, Randy already mentioned it is what we believe we can do. And so that is all based on thoughts. If I think I can, I have a much better chance of being successful than if I believe, no, I can’t do that. That’s not something I can, then you can’t.

And so, the beautiful thing about the mind is that we have neuroplasticity, which means that we can change the patterns of our thinking, which you could. I always translate that to my clients in a way of you’re walking through a forest and you have this wide trail through the forest, it’s easygoing, and it’s like where everyone walks, and this is the easiest path to take. But if you create a new path, you have to chop out the branches, you have to duck maybe some trees or branches even.

And so, you have to create that path. And that’s the same with our thinking. If you want to create a new habit, you want to create a new thought, that’s how you do it. You have to create that new path in your mind, and the more you take it, the easier that path becomes. And so, practice makes perfect and you need to practice it before you are getting better at it. And the biggest example of that, I mean Randy learned this when he was 16, 17 in your diving training, and he hardly ever gets overwhelmed or overstimulated.

It’s like when I met him, I was like, really? Because some people they question and are you truly an HSP? Because you don’t get overwhelmed, right? Well, trust me, he is definitely a very highly sensitive man, but he does not get overstimulated that easily because he had the three R rule from very early on, what’s happening? What do I do with this? How do I process? What do I need to do to make things better? And so, I’ve learned it myself, and I’ve tried to do that 10 years ago already, but now for the last two years, using it more, applying it even more, it works like a charm because it really makes such a huge difference in how you feel in the world. Do you feel calm or do you feel like, oh my gosh, this is too much?

And so, it really makes a huge difference in daily experience.

Randy: That three R rule, Kimberly, was taught to me by a gentleman by the name of Tony Zemos, who’s long since passed. And Tony was a US Navy Seal served two terms in Vietnam, and he was my commercial diver trainer. So, in my early years, my early career, I was a commercial diver. And that was the golden rule that he taught me was if you do not recognize, regulate and reclaim, you’re going to die. And the underwater world is not a pleasant environment, it it’s not a friendly environment. Sport diving, that’s a different story. Commercial diving, whole different ballgame. And so it was about learning that tool, and then he made us practice it by putting us through all these challenging situations that we had to apply that rule. And if we didn’t, it was not fun, it wasn’t good, it wasn’t life threatening. He made sure we were somewhat in control, but that was a good training center to embed that into me. And ever since then, it just stuck with me. I mean, it works.

Kim: Right? And you saw how you could also apply that to different areas of life and even on the high sensitivity journey. That’s pretty awesome.

Randy: The one thing about high sensitivity that I’ve understood over the last five years is how we can magnify everything. So, we can magnify overstimulation if we choose to do that, but we can also magnify solutions. We can also magnify love. We can magnify joy if you choose to do that. And so, it’s a matter of choice. What do you choose to do? Do you want to sit in a bathtub of overwhelm or do you want to actually get out in life and embrace its incredible nature and beauty and love, and that’s the path I prefer to choose is that one.

Annet: It’s a difference between looking at what’s wrong or what’s right. And most people it’s like, oh, this is wrong. This is bad. Oh, really bad. And then they stuck with, they stay with that. Or you look at like, okay, this is what it, it’s not about denying reality because you still look at what’s there, what’s in front of you, but you look at how can I change this? How can I make this better? What can I do in myself and also possibly in my environment to make it into a more positive situation that I can thrive in better?

Kim: I love that. It’s like, here’s a lesson. What am I taking from it? What am I going to focus on?

Randy: Exactly. And that’s when you pull back to either your comfort zone or even your safe zone if you don’t have that good connection with other people and process deeply process, what did I learn from that secure zone experience? And a lot of times we don’t do that. We allow it to overwhelm us. Were avoid it at all costs, when really, we should process what was the lesson that I learned and how can I overcome that?

And we talk about, you mentioned earlier about being in that safe zone and you don’t grow there. If you stay too long in your safe zone, you actually erode. It’s not you stay stagnant because nothing in the world. I’ve asked this question to many people, name one thing that stays the same. In our known universe, nothing. Everything either grows or erodes.

It’s just a matter of time. Even a diamond will erode over time. And so, we as people, we have to understand, if you are not growing, then what are you doing? You’re eroding. And so, I prefer to grow. We have endless opportunity to grow. Why not seize the moment?

Kim: Gosh, it’s such a beautiful thought. Thank you for sharing that. We’re never stagnant. We’re either losing steam or gaining steam. And that’s really up to us to figure that out. How would you guys describe things that you struggle with, your high sensitivity? What would you share?

Randy: I think the one thing Annet mentioned that I don’t get over overstimulated, which isn’t entirely true.

Kim: He just doesn’t show it!

Randy: But I do at times. And when I walked into, for example, not too long ago, I walked into a store by myself. And don’t get me wrong, I do that all the time, but Annet wasn’t with me.

And I walked in just to grab something quickly and it was just crowded with people. And I could feel that emotional energy coming from all those people. And it wasn’t good. It wasn’t pleasant, and it just took me by storm. We know as HSPs, we feel, we feel deeply, we feel the emotional energy of other people. We can’t separate whether it’s ours or theirs or it’s just there. And that can be overstimulating at times.

And so, once I started to feel that, I knew I had to recognize this is what was happening, regulated my system, okay, I’m going to buy what I need and get out of here as quickly as I can. And so, when I go into that same store regardless of, and Annet is beside me, it’s like there’s a counterbalance there. I’ve got this anchor that helps me stabilize my emotional intake. So having somebody around you that gets you understands you is really the key to helping you manage some of those difficult situations where overstimulation is potential.

Annet: I think that makes a lot of sense because most HSPs experience from the other 80% like, nah, you’re not feeling this. It’s not correct, or you’re being denied your feelings. And so that’s why the gathering with other HSPs and learning more about the trait and recognizing what’s going on. Because if you wouldn’t have known that you were highly sensitive and you experienced something like that, you are thinking like, oh, what’s wrong with me? Other people don’t have this, right? And so being around other HSPs and learning, yeah, I experienced that too. How do you deal with that? And just talking about things that’s so important for us to gather and be together and understand our tribe, basically because we do function differently than the other 80% out in the world. And so being together is really important.

Kim: What do you celebrate about the trait? What would you say you love?

Randy: The list is endless. I mean, for me, the amazing depth of processing, and a lot of people understand that as overthinking, and it’s not, I mean, that’s a stigma that we got to really make sure that we’re offering accurate information about what we’re, so the depth of processing, being able to really quickly define the truth of the world. And what I mean by that is recognize really quickly if you’re into what I call the “what if” syndrome, and because the What if syndrome can really, really destroy you.

And I will tell you a short story how I spent a year, I think it was in my 30s, captured in that what if syndrome, and it was a result of a very traumatic situation. I was buried in an avalanche on the side of a mountain in a tent long story, but I spent a year captured in the, well, what if the tent was six inches deeper in the snow? What if this happened? What if none of that happened? And so, I realized through that depth of processing, I escaped out of that PTSD through my depth of processing. So, I celebrate that if you use your depth of processing as it is intended, then miracles can happen. Absolutely. Amazing things can happen. Focus on your emotional connection. I mean, here we’re in a society that’s afraid of AI. And to be honest with you, I find AI more friendly than most people.

And so, we need to realize that we are emotional beings and we need to celebrate that fact that we have emotions. Just manage them properly. Just learn to manage them, right? Know, when to express joy, know, when to express love. Know, when to cry, and don’t condemn other people for doing that. They’re just, especially men, men have never been taught how to express emotion.

So, if they’re trying to express emotions, they’re going to do it in an awkward fumbling way. And if you have somebody there that says, yes, it’s okay, practice that, get good at that, then it allows you to rehearse, how do I manage these things that I’ve been told my whole life? Not to show the sensitivity to subtleties. I mean, there is a great thing to be able to notice the nuances in life and appreciate and voice them. I noticed when you were and speak up and let people know that they’ve been seen and they’ve been heard, but we don’t, most people, 80% of the population, they just close right off. We have that gift, we have that ability. We just need to express it. I have a conflict with the “O” in the DOES and sorry, Elaine…

But I don’t see it as overstimulation. I see it more as observation. And I know we’ve even talked to Elaine about it, and it’s like, but be more observant. Be more observant in the world, not focused on overstimulation, not focused on overwhelm. We ask a lot of people, where did the term overwhelm come from? And a lot of people say from Elaine Aron, no, it didn’t. She never said that. In her writings, in her research, it’s always overstimulation overwhelm is the result of overstimulation. And so, we need to take overstimulation and overwhelm out of the equation as the major component and celebrate the other three because they are so wonderful.

Annet: And I think that relates back to the O of overstimulation. Most of the time comes from our depths of processing. And when you ask that question, what is the thing that I celebrate most about the trait? It’s the depth of processing. But at the same time, that’s also the biggest challenge because if you process everything so intensely and you see all the differences and all the shades of possibilities in something, then it’s easy to let yourself be overstimulated by that. And from that, if you don’t have the tools, get into overwhelm. And so, the depths of processing to me is like what is the most beautiful trait? Because you can apply it to everything, even the sensitivity to subtleties. How do you feel? What is going on? What do you see around you if you use your depths of processing to go through that? The world is such an amazing and beautiful place, and there’s so many good things. If you apply it to emotions, that’s also something, it deepens everything. And so, it’s both the biggest challenge, but also our biggest, wonderful thing,

Randy: Kimberly, I’m going to go back to, I mentioned the avalanche. We survived myself and my two partners survived that avalanche because of my high sensitivity. And so, when you start to look at the situations to which we get involved in high sensitivity, if you refine it and you really put it to good work and do some amazing things,

Kim: Wow. And how would you say that happened? Did you sense it was coming? Did you have the…

Randy: Oh, no, no, no. So, it happened at two o’clock in the morning. We were sound asleep in a tent.

Kim: Oh my gosh.

Randy: There was no sensing of it happening. It’s the depth of processing, sensitivity to subtleties and emotional connection I had with the other two.

So that allowed me to understand the decision-making process that needed to happen because they were incapacitated. They were not capable of doing anything. And so, getting rid of that overstimulation part and focusing on the other three is what really is important. But if we focus on the overstimulation, it shuts you down. And so that’s my emphasis is we have to learn not to focus on the overstimulation, focus on the other three, improve it. Depth of processing doesn’t take time. What takes time is learning how to use it. Once you learn how to use it, it becomes lightning fast. But if you don’t learn how to use it, then you become overstimulated.

Kim: That’s such a great point. What advice would you give to highly sensitive people who may be struggling with their sensitivity and finding happiness and purpose in their lives?

Annet: Learn more about the trait, learn more about how it works, and also gain skills, gain tools to deal with all these situations like learn self-management, emotional regulation, understanding how your body works, because no HSPs is the same, right? We are all different in a specific way. We all have our own unique way of being in the world, and so we need to learn to recognize what is important to me, how do I regulate myself? And it might be different than what works for you. And so, you really need to learn to know yourself in order to deal with your life.

Randy: My advice would be Kimberly is the same advice. So many other motivational speakers will tell people, invest in yourself, right? If you don’t invest in yourself and you’re investing in a house, you’re investing in a car, you’re investing in new TVs, but you’re not investing in yourself, then you’re never going to grow. You’re always going to be trapped. You’re never going to find that freedom. We talked about earlier, the most freeing thing for me is when I decided I was hitting rock bottom five, six years ago. And it wasn’t until I heard that podcast and all of a sudden, I realized that there was something out there and I needed to invest in myself in order to discover it, because I was tired. I was so tired of it. And that was the most amazing journey that I could have ever taken. I had a really good job. I was doing really well for myself, but I was so unhappy until I started investing in myself. And then everything changed. I brought Annet into my life. I brought this amazing journey of self-discovery into my life, and then I brought the freedom into my life.

Annet: I think that’s the one thing that we’ve not always realize is that the more you start looking for your true inner self, your authentic part, the more life aligns also with you. Because like you said, you can have a really good paying job, but you’re not happy because you’re not living your true authentic life that you need to be living. And so, the more you align with your true core, what is important to you specifically, what is important that you want in your life that you want to bring out into the world, maybe also, the more life will align with you as well.

It’s like a lot of HSP sometimes say, people don’t see me, people don’t take care of me. They’re not recognizing what I need and everything. But if you do not put out into the world who you are, what you need, then people can’t take that into account. They don’t know what you need if you don’t show your honest, true selves. And so that’s all we need to learn as well, to be ourselves to put out there into the world, because we do have some very beautiful insights, and the world needs the view of HSPs as well, so we need to learn and be more ourselves in order to also get more of what we want in life and to be seen. So, it’s a two-way street.

Kim: That is such a great point. I feel like so many HSPs ask, how can other people change to see me when it’s the real work is from the inside out, it’s shining light on yourself. It’s being authentic so that you can feel comfortable being seen because there is a world out there waiting to love and honor you. It’s just you have to do that first.

Annet: Yourself. Yes, exactly. The more you start to align with yourself, the more your world starts to align with you. That’s how we met.

Randy: I think we’re so afraid of rejection because we put on these what we call costumes to try to fit in, but really what you’re doing is you’re rejecting yourself and you, most people seem to think that’s okay as long as other people accept me, but they’re not really accepting you. They’re accepting your costume. And so, once we say, you know what? I’m done with that. If you don’t like me, that’s okay, because there are going to be people out there that will like you for who you truly are. And that’s part of that freedom we talk about is that you don’t have to pretend anymore, just be you. 

Kim: Just be yourself. Wonderful. How can people follow along with your journey and what are you working on that you’d like to share?

Annet: Well, our website is called wildsensitive.com, and we’re also active on Facebook, the Living Adventurers. And like I said, we’re working on developing the program, which is coming soon. We’re also working on creating a, what we call the HSP, the Wild Sensitive Village, which is going to be an online community where we get to talk to each other and connect with other HSPs and find all sorts of, it is going to be a really big village online.

Randy: It’s quite evolved, so there’s three levels to it. The first level is absolutely free. Anybody can come join and investigate what it is to be highly sensitive or high sensation seeking highly sensitive, meet other people. The second level is more about resources, and so we’re offering a variety of resources from library, journaling, programs, not just from us, but from the community. We want people to come and share their programs and share their podcasts and share with the, because let’s face it, where a lot of us are on islands, and we want to try to build bridges between those islands to strengthen our community. The third level is more of a professional level, and it’s where a lot of the researchers are going to hang out, sharing their insights and information, professional development as highly sensitive people. How do I become a leader? How do I become more professional in my highly sensitive authenticity?

Kim: Wow, what an amazing adventure you two are on. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing, and I wish you the best. Thank you for joining me today.

Randy: Thank you so much for having us. It’s been a wonderful pleasure.

Thank you so much for listening in on my conversation with Annet and Randy. I hope it reminds you that you can always live life on your terms, and there is adventure out there waiting, even for HSPs.

If this episode resonated with you, I’d love if could write a review or share it with another HSP in your life who might need to hear these words. It’s a great way to spread the love and help other HSPs find more connection and support.

Until next time. Take care!

About Randy and Annet:

We’re Annet van Duinen and Randy Grasser, partners in life, adventure, and growth. As Highly Sensitive People who are also High Sensation Seekers, we live what many see as a paradox, deeply empathetic and reflective, yet drawn to challenge, freedom, and adventure. 

Through The Living Adventurers and our book, The Wild Sensitive, we help others like us embrace both sensitivity and boldness, where feeling deeply and dreaming wildly go hand in hand. Together, as coaches, educators, authors, and speakers, we guide Highly Sensitive Sensation Seekers to see their nervous system not as a burden, but as a finely tuned compass to a fuller, freer, and more meaningful life. 

Follow along on Annet’s and Randy’s journey:

Website: wildsensitive.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thelivingadventurers

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📩 Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out to Kimberly at: kmarshall@happyhspcoaching.com

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About Kimberly:

Kimberly Marshall is a career coach for highly sensitive people (HSPs) and host of The Happy HSP Podcast. After 20 years in the publishing industry working for companies like Time Inc., Monster.com, and W. W. Norton, she left her corporate career to pursue work that better suited her HSP needs. She now helps HSPs overcome burnout and low confidence in the workplace and create gentle and nurturing careers that bring them lots of purpose, meaning, and joy. 

Through her work and creative ventures, Kimberly hopes to shed more light on the reality of living with high sensitivity and inspire more HSPs to embrace their empathetic, loving, and gentle natures.

• Hosted/produced by Kimberly Marshall

• Edited by Fonzie Try Media

• Artwork by Tara Corola