You Were Never “Too Sensitive” (A Psychiatrist Explains Why)

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]He's probably been told you're too sensitive. Maybe it was a parent or a partner. Maybe it was just a voice in your own head that got so good at repeating it, you forgot it wasn't yours. I'm Dr. Zasha Nani. I'm a psychiatrist who specializes in ADHD and I have it [music] myself. And I spent years believing the same thing that you have been told. But today, I want to tell you something that I wish someone had told me years ago. Your sensitivity was never the problem. Let's get into neurobiology. It won't be boring. I promise it. And it's going to be short.

[00:00:30]This is what's actually happening in the brain. Every brain has two systems that are working at the same time. Something that fires the emotional response and something that regulates it. In the ADHD brain, the thing [music] that fires that emotional response is fast. It works really well. But the part that regulates it is behind. It's slow. And you feel that, right? You feel emotions quickly and deeply and intensely. [music] And it takes a while for you to process and resolve those. That gap isn't a character flaw. That's just how your brain is wired. That [music] timing difference is quite literally neurological. So, I want to tell you all those times you thought you were overreacting or you were told that you were overreacting. You were underregulated. Those are two completely different things. So, I'll tell you what I've heard as a solution to this problem, I have been told. It's not that big of a deal. Just ignore it. Toughen up. Toughen up is what I have been told.

[00:01:22]Like mid sobbing because like that's exactly what people want to hear while they're crying. My biggest beef with that is that tough enough. Actually, all of that assumes that the problem is your attitude towards something. Do you think that I'm unaware of this behavior? Do you think that it's a personal choice that if I could just think about maybe I should feel less, I would be able to?

[00:01:43]You can't really willpower your way around a neurological timing issue.

[00:01:48]Prescribing an attitude change for a regulatory difference is like prescribing confidence for a broken leg.

[00:01:54]Be real. that doesn't work. And every time it didn't, every time you were told to toughen up and you couldn't in that moment, that's more proof that there's something wrong with you. That advice was never for you. Let me tell you what that advice did. That original feeling that you were exposed to was painful and hard enough, but what made it consuming was the layer that got piled on top of it, the shame about the feeling itself.

[00:02:19]So then you're told, "Just suppress it.

[00:02:22]Quiet down. It's not that big of a deal.

[00:02:25]Suppressing doesn't solve the emotion.

[00:02:27]It doesn't help you process it. It relocates it. It's going to come up at a different time and it's going to be even weirder. You hold it down long enough, it's going to come out bigger and more unexpected than you previously felt. And then what does it do? That's your evidence. That's you telling yourself, I am too much. I am too sensitive. Why is this happening to me? There's something wrong with me. I'll give you a really brief example. I was already emotionally fried when my dad was really sick and I was starting to realize that my emotional threshold was much lower than what it was normally. But during that time, I had a silly interaction where I felt like a peer group that I had for years and years were leaving me out of things because of my grief. Like I knew that I was unable to talk about things outside of my dad's health and I knew that it was buming other people out. So I was withdrawing to some degree. But then when I would see things about all of them hanging out without me without an invitation or something. And I recognize that as I'm saying this, I'm like my temperature is going up because I feel like that's such a juvenile thing to talk about. But I can't help that. I felt so left out. I felt so ignored. So during that, I was given the advice, don't worry about it. This isn't a big deal. Just ignore it. Press your erase button. And so I [music] tried. I suppressed it. I tried to ignore it. Do you know what happened after that? I am like purposefully every time I thought about it, I'm like, just ignore it. Just ignore it. Trying to move on. Trying to distract myself. 3 days later when I probably could have processed and gotten through that moment or had conversations, but 3 days of ignoring later, I was in a Pilates class, minded my own business, thinking I was doing fine, I did some weird little stretch.

[00:04:14]Truly, I erupted in crying in the middle of CL and not like like a delicate little tear like you know when you're like surprised by the sound you make.

[00:04:26]That's what happened. And I was like [music] start scream crying. It was scary for me because I was like where is this coming from? Nothing is triggering this. I get up. I like hurriedly leave the class and proceed to ball in the car. I couldn't even put two and two together. I didn't know what this was coming from and I certainly didn't trace it back to that thing that I was ignoring. But now in retrospect, had I processed that, it wouldn't have felt so overwhelming on top of everything else.

[00:04:55]That was an overshare, but that's the example I have for you. And I think I gave you that example because this is something that people don't talk about.

[00:05:02]They don't talk about how those experience make you erode your own self-rust. Like being told that your reactions are wrong enough times doesn't just make you doubt the reactions. It makes you gaslight yourself. There's something wrong with me. I shouldn't be feeling this. Clearly, they aren't doing anything wrong. The question stopped being, "Was that reaction too much a [music] long time ago?" Right? cuz now you're thinking to yourself, I don't know if I can trust what's going on inside me at all. And that's unsettling.

[00:05:31]And that's probably really familiar for a lot of people listening, [music] or maybe just me. In case you're listening and you need this today, the sensitivity was real. The intensity was real. You were never wrong about what you felt.

[00:05:43]You were just given the wrong explanation for it. So, let's talk about what actually does help. And I know that I talk about this a lot, but this is because three years of research has gone into this and we don't talk about this enough. We don't talk about people who are highly emotionally sensitive, especially within that neurodeivergent community. [music] The goal isn't to feel less. The goal is to navigate what you're feeling more effectively. Those aren't the same thing. Suppression and regulation go in two completely different directions. And the feelings that you're experiencing are neurological that your brain is literally firing in response to things that are happening. You don't get to vote on whether or not it arrives, but it's what you do once that feeling starts to come about that can be trained. And that was a huge revelation for me because for so much of my life, I have felt completely victim to my emotions. If I feel something, I just need to strap in and feel it at in the full scope of what I'm feeling until that passes. And my problem is that I'm really good at exploring my feelings in my own brain. I obsess over them. I ruminate. I spin. I make my own brain a full-on hellscape for these things because I'm emotionally sensitive.

[00:06:57]Because my brain is wired differently.

[00:06:59]Because I am neurologically feeling things faster, deeper, and for longer.

[00:07:05]This is part of the reason why I [music] wrote too sensitive. This is actually the first time I'm showing people this because it just came in. Look at how shiny the cover is. Um, this is this is too sensitive. This is the guide I wrote for heightened emotional sensitivity, especially within the neurodeivergent population. But as a phenomenon across the board, for people that feel like their emotions are too difficult to manage and it's starting to impact everything, which honestly so many of us do. I want to provide that safe place that is backed in re do you know how hard it was to find research on all this? People don't study this. It was so difficult not only to find those good reputable studies but then to have to go back and do that work and look at brains and figure out where that problem is and then be able to find a way to measure it. That's something that it has taken us so long because that's a lot of our holdup. How do we measure what's too sensitive? How do we measure when you have heightened emotional sensitivity?

[00:08:07]So, it took a second to get that [music] metric, but there is a quiz in there that helps you establish that. There is a list of 12 principles where I have pulled it from every area of psychiatry and psychology trying to figure out what works in that moment and for long-term to help with this emotional sensitivity.

[00:08:26]And then real world examples so you can apply it. I mean, and literally all of them are things that I have felt before.

[00:08:32]every single one. I'll put a link if you're interested. Knowing your sensitivity was never the problem.

[00:08:37]That's the reframe. Your brain still has to learn how to work with itself. And there's one thing that makes that almost impossible. And it has nothing to do with focus, nothing to do with strategy, and most people never connect this to their ADHD at all. In the next video, I get into what it looks like to build systems that actually work for your brain and why shame is quietly destroying your ability to use