Latest Research & Something More Personal and “Spiritual”

PART I: THE LATEST RESEARCH

These are the studies that have appeared since my last blog and that I wanted to share. Each has a heading, the reference in the journal where it appeared, my short description, and a “Bottom Line” to skip to if you wish!  These will also be added to the big list under the research tab.

HSPS STUDY ALL THE CLUES BEFORE CHOOSING THE RIGHT ANSWER

Xiao, L., Baetens, K., & Deroost, N. (2025). Adaptation in attentional cautiousness among highly sensitive persons: Evidence from spatial cueing paradigm. Personality and Individual Differences, 237, 113042.

In this study, HSPs and others were given tasks in which they had to choose the right answer, and first were given a cue that might or might not provide the correct answer.  The likelihood of it being a correct cue was varied from 50% to 100%.  HSPs were slower than others on all of these tasks, as if wanting to carefully study every cue before deciding—which describes well our trait and various findings about our brains: We like to observe more than others do before acting.  However, when the correctness of the cues was increased to 100%, we adapted and speeded up our making use of the cues and answering.

Bottom Line: One more study confirms that our basic trait is to “pause to check” before acting.

Akawu, M., Oladesu, O. R., Itse, Y. I., Yahaya, I., & Uzoigwe, T. L. (2024). Hypersensitive Personality and Empathy as Predictors of Hell Anxiety among Undergraduate Students: The Need for Psycho-Spiritual Therapy. International Journal For Psychotherapy In Africa, 9(3).

This might seem like an odd study, but it is one of the few or only studies of HSPs and spirituality or religion.  It focuses on the fear of Hell or the problem of Hell anxiety.  The participants were 354 college students in Nigeria (about two thirds Christian, one third Muslim), but according to the authors, the issue is described all over the world. Some people become extremely obsessed with images of hell and the sins that cause someone to be left in Hell forever if they do not behave perfectly.   They may engage in behaviors to avoid the fear, but mostly they focus their life on avoiding hell.  

No one has studied why some people in particular develop hell anxiety, but the authors wondered if “hypersensitivity,” as measured by the HSP Scale, might be associated with this fear, due to vivid imaginings of descriptions of Hell that HSPs have heard.  The authors also measured  empathy, since that might cause one to imagine more vividly the suffering of those forever in Hell.  About 9% of their sample reported hell anxiety, and not surprisingly, both SPS and empathy were associated with having more of this fear. Having dogmatic or fundamentalist-religion views were not especially associated with this fear.

Bottom Line: Not surprisingly, HSPs more than others, or at least HS university students in Nigeria, take their beliefs very seriously.

HSPS MORE OFTEN DEAL WITH “EMOTIONAL” BUT NOT “SOCIAL” LONELINESS

Meckovsky, F., Novak, L., Meier, Z., Tavel, P., & Malinakova, K. (2025). Highly sensitive persons feel more emotionally lonely than the general population. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 2707.

This study included 3247 Czech participants, aged 18 to 80. The authors used a measure of loneliness that included overall loneliness, social isolation, social loneliness (e.g. not having many friends) and emotional loneliness (not being as close to others as you would like).  HSPs were not any more socially lonely or isolated than others, but they did feel more emotionally lonely.  It is nice that the study made this distinction, as I think many HSPs have felt this way—that you can talk to people, but those you talk to have no sense of the depth of your inner life, and it may feel futile to try to explain yourself. Or as the authors put it, “Thus, HSPs appear to have a higher need for intimacy in close relationships, which they lack. In terms of ordinary social relationships, they interact like the general population.”

The authors did not look at how one’s childhood might affect these results—for example, having an insecure attachment style–but thought this would be important to look at in the future.

Bottom Line:  This study is very helpful in the way that it reaffirms the experience of many HSPs, that one can feel lonely when spending time with those who do not think as deeply as we do, no matter how kind they may be.

HSPS EXERCISE AS MUCH AS OTHERS, BUT DO NOT CHOOSE INTENSE ACTIVITIES FOR THEIR EXERCISE

Webb, B. L. (2025). Sensory Processing Sensitivity and Its Relation to Exercise Behavior and Preferred Exercise Intensity. Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 10(1), 18.

 Participants in this study were 320 college students and employees, age 18 to 70, mostly female, who completed the 12-Item Highly Sensitive Person Scale, the Godin Leisure-Time Exercise Questionnaire, and a question related to preferred exercise intensity. HSPs were as likely as others to engage in exercise, but they exercised less intensely than others.  Intense exercise meant those activities during which the heart beats rapidly, such as running, jogging, hockey, football, soccer, squash, basketball, cross-country skiing, judo, roller skating, vigorous swimming, and vigorous long- distance bicycling.  (You can imagine various reasons why HSPs might not engage in some of these.)

Bottom Line:  The good news, since exercise is healthy, is that we exercise as much as others do. Also good news, and maybe why we exercise, is that we choose what we like!

PART II:  SOMETHING MORE PERSONAL AND “SPIRITUAL”:  The Delicate Subject of God-No-God, and How the Expansion and Contraction of Consciousness Helps with Pain                                                                                                                   

Some of you may not have read my last blog, as it came just before the holidays and was not very clear about the subject—“Two Gifts.”  The two were that the new HSP measure, HSP-R, is now ready. You can now download it on the website under tests [say if it is on the screen].  The self-scoring version will be available soon [or say it is now]

The other “gift” was that while the first half of each blog post would continue to cover the latest interesting research, the second half would be on subjects more “spiritual.” I admitted then and do again that that is a difficult term to swallow, but I hoped you would understand that I would remain factual and practical.  The comments on that first attempt were almost entirely positive, so I guess it was okay for at least some of you. I do think that HSPs tend to be spiritually inclined, but not all, of course.

Spirituality–A Delicate Subject

I think spirituality is a very delicate subject for most of us.  It’s very personal, private.  I have joked that in the West’s diverse and mostly secular/scientific culture, talking about one’s sexual life might be easier than talking about one’s spiritual life.  Perhaps that fits with the study I reported above, that HSPs can be surrounded by people and yet emotionally lonely, maybe partly because they do not feel they will be understood or accepted it they talk about their “deep” or even “spiritual” views.  I am hoping this blog will help with that feeling, being here in a community of other HSPs who are at the minimum interested in deeper subjects, open to each other’s views, and kind, even if, as normal humans, we do not all agree with each other.

The subject of this blog was going to be “contraction and expansion,” and it is, below.  But first I feel that I need to share something more personal (yet factual, in that it happened), to bring us a bit closer. I feel a bit nervous about doing this. But it seems important.  My experience is taken from an account in a book I have spent five years writing and that comes out next year.  (There, another personal revelation.) The book aims to be objective, but of course an author’s subjective experience is always there too, even if between the lines, so I brought the personal out from between the lines by putting accounts of my personal experience in italics. Hence the italics in the paragraph below, from the book.

Another night when I was lying in bed feeling very depressed [this was about thirty-five years ago, when I was dealing with clinical depression, which I am not now]… I thought how much I wished that I had concrete evidence of God that I could trust for the rest of my life. By God I meant at that time someone or something that cared about me and guided my life…. Immediately after having this wish for a sign, I saw in my mind a small automobile accident, a “fender bender,” with me standing at the back of my car beside the driver of the car that had hit me, looking at the damage. 

That bit of imagery seemed like a “dumb” random thought that I certainly hoped would not manifest. But the next day, you guessed it, I’m on an on ramp into a congested freeway and the car in front of me stops suddenly. The driver of the car behind me did not see me stop and hit me. We pull over and get out to exchange info, but I am smiling, almost laughing. This was my sign, my peculiar sign.

I did not immediately convert to anything!  Even though I had already been meditating for almost 20 years when this happened, seeing the spirituality all around me in my life required considerable time. But I could not honestly call this experience a coincidence either (especially as there was another similar experience at about this time, via a dream). But at that point in my life I had no place to put it cognitively. Having such a place would have required a deep confidence that someone or something cared, and given my difficult childhood, I was not there yet. But whatever was doing “this” has done something like it several more times.  It’s not like I now feel deep faith, but rather a weird absolute certainty, given the fact of those events (although I can frequently forget that certainty!).

Okay, What About God?

I know I have now brought up the very complicated subject of God.  It’s difficult to avoid when talking about spirituality.  I know that for some of you God is central to your life, and for some anathema. Or you may be among those who are call yourself “spiritual but not religious,” leaving the idea of God to be explored.  Or “spiritual but atheist.”  Yes, there are some.

But maybe here we can all give it a rest.  To write this blog for the many, not just a few, I need to find a way to keep the peace among us, for us to accept each other.  Maybe to do that we could think of perspectives on God as lying on a dimension that most of us slide along, from days or years at the No-God-for-Me end (along with most Buddhists) to the other end, where faith in God is beyond doubt. A certainty. Where someone else is on this continuum about God may be interesting, and may well change, but is not a cause for debate.

What we mean by God can also change. I am asking you to be inclusive about that, too. At times you or anyone might have in mind a personal God, at other times something completely abstract, without attributes, akin to or the same as Brahman, the ground of Being, or pure consciousness in Vedanta.  Or, consider the Christian mystic Meister Eckart, who saw creation as constantly bubbling out of the Godhead.  Maybe you or some of you see God much like that, the source of all creation, similar to today’s concept of the quantum field. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a quantum field (such fields lie “beneath” everything) cannot sit still. Instead, it froths and boils, a bubbling soup of particles and anti-particles, constantly created and destroyed. It is the basis of everything, with virtual particles constantly manifesting according to the field’s energy state. If one calls this God or the Godhead, one has a purely scientific view of the Great Whatever.

Instead of Relative and Absolute, But How About Contraction and Expansion?

In my December blog, the first on something “spiritual,” I talked about the oldest solution to stress, loss, anxiety, and pain of all sorts, as given by all spiritual traditions—access to the two fields of life.  The alleviation of suffering through access to these two fields is, in a way, the basis of all spirituality. Buddha spoke of nirvana as the way out of all of our suffering.   Krisha in the Bhagavad Gita said, “Established in Being perform action.”  Jesus said the Kingdom of God (a kingdom totally unaffected by Roman domination) was within.  Muhammad said handle difficulties by staying close to Allah, what we might call the field of God, through prayer and supplication.  The two fields?  One is the “relative world,” which we all live in, but there is also the transcendent, which we can experience—some easily, some with practice. 

However, I realize that the transcendent–Pure Being, God-as-the-Absolute–may actually seem a bit inaccessible.  So in the rest of this blog I am going to look at these two fields in another, more practical way, as something we can always access.  Let’s start by seeing all of the relative world in terms of contraction. Please think about this a minute. Matter is in a sense a contraction or concentration or condensation of stuff—atoms, etc. Air is not as contracted as water, water less contracted than hard stuff like stone.  We see relative degrees of contraction or denseness all around us.

Inside we also can feel degrees of contraction.  We can be highly focused (thinking hard, or emotionally focused, as when we feel fear or anger); we can be alert but not especially focused; or very relaxed, open, and uncontracted. As an analogy, our thoughts are like a stream, flowing along freely, but sometimes there is something like a pile of rocks that causes rapids, and on the other side of the rapid the water forms eddies.  That is, we start thinking about something and we HSPs especially may process it deeply.  Our thoughts churn around this rock pile like the water in rapids, stopping to eddy in circles before moving on.  At other times we can just “float along.”  

I like the eddy analogy because when we went down the Colorado River for 15 days (!), after going through a rapid, a place requiring intense concentration for boat travelers because of the big rocks in the water, our oar person would “eddy out”—allow the boat to be caught in an eddy–in order to stop and see that those coming through after us were alright.  An eddy was a safe place in a sense.  The rushing river did not control you, carrying you down to the next rapid. You just floated in circles.  But you had to row pretty hard to get out of an eddy and continue to flow down the river.  

Of course contracted states, whether diamonds in the material world or intense thoughts in the subjective world, can be very nice.  When we are experiencing some great pleasure, we are fully contracted, “really into it.” We can truly enjoy being completely focused while engaged in a concert performance, learning something fascinating, or working to express ourselves creatively. There is nothing wrong with contraction. Our very self or ego is a contraction, or an eddy we swirl around in, separate in a sense from the big river of life.  The universe is thought to have been contracted to the tiniest, infinitely dense point, a “singularity,” before the Big Bang expansion.

Some Contracted States are Fun—But Some Are Not

Most people on that Grand Canyon trip lived for the white-water rapids.  They loved them.  Not me.  I went in spite of my fear of the rapids.  My point is, contracted states can also be painful.  Pain itself can reduce us to nothing put PAIN.  Emotional states can do that too.  Think of terror.  Or sinking deep into feelings of Loss, suffering, worry, grief.  They all cause us to contract, to focus down, until we are that one huge thing, that huge eddy in the rapids that has us cut off from the flow.

I have said that as HSPs we focus especially well due to our extra observing and processing of our surroundings.  We also feel physical and emotional pain more than others.  So we contract very easily.  And, again, contracting is normal, even good. But as HSPs we need to be as skilled at expanding as contracting, for those times when we want to escape a painfully contracted state.

Using Expansion Skillfully

Finally, something practical!  Think about all the ways you naturally expand out of a contracted state.  Sometimes we use distraction to deal with the contraction that comes with pain—physical pain, or maybe grief, or maybe waiting for a test result to tell us if we are seriously sick.  What kind of distraction?  Maybe plunging into some work, or watching an absorbing movie. Here, true, we are exchanging one eddy, a painful one, for another. But in a sense when we use a distraction our world has expanded beyond the pain.

  But there are other natural ways to expand.  Suppose you have been concentrating very hard.  Then you “take a break.”  As you know, a great way to do this is to step outside. Getting out into nature is a brilliant way to expand.  Just going outside for a walk.  Looking at trees.  Going down to the shore and staring across the ocean, a lake, or up and down the length of a river.  Looking up at the stars.  

People can expand us, too–talking to a friend can give us a new perspective; realizing others have gone through the same thing or worse; and more expanded yet, seeing our situation in the light of human history.  

We can expand out of a contracted state by doing something that is easy for us and that we love–dancing, singing, running, petting our dog or cat.  And of course there is the ultimate expansion, doing something “spiritual”–meditating or praying or performing meaningful rituals.  These can expand us right out to the edges of pure Being.  Think about the many ways you expand when you need or want to.  Perhaps, thinking about the need to expand sometimes, you can think of more ways you can do this.  Again, it is an important skill for HSPs.

May you focus on the rapids, then eddy out to regroup, and then when ready rejoin the flow, as you wish, expanding and contracting as smoothly and skillfully as a jellyfish–or your own heart.

Elaine

P.S. I want to give credit to Andrew Holechek for introducing me to this contraction/expansion perspective. In the last blog I mentioned one of his books, Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom. The reason for the title is that Holechek begins his book by arguing that meditation is sold as a way to feel better, but what happens when we feel bad? If equanimity is the ultimate sign of enlightenment, why not tackle it at the start by facing the hard stuff first? Reverse the goal, by learning to fully, fully expand at the moment of intense contraction. But that is a topic for another time.