The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You

“After thinking for so long that you might be the only one, it is nice to have company, isn’t it?”

One of Aron’s main purposes in the book is to foster solidarity among highly sensitive persons (HSPs), the book’s main audience. She establishes this purpose early on, in the Preface, using a friendly and confidential tone and first-person point of view to include herself among the group.

“But if our sensitivity saves a life even once, it is a trait that has a genetic payoff.”

Aron claims HSPs’ awareness of potential risks and dangers as a trait that has genetic benefit from an evolutionary perspective: HSPs are responsible for saving lives. This serves Aron’s larger purpose of highlighting high sensitivity’s advantages and attractive features, and it offers evidence for her claim that high sensitivity is an inherited trait.

“HSPs do more of that which makes humans different from other animals: We imagine possibilities.”

Aron spotlights one aspect of HSPs—their imagination and inventiveness—to argue that humanity benefits in a special way from the group. Aron ties HSPs’ inventiveness with their enhanced sensitivity to material conditions and problems, which leads them to seek solutions. Highlighting the social benefits of high sensitivity is one way of Challenging Societal Misconceptions About High Sensitivity.