Time to cut down on shopping in the physical world?

holidayshoppers

If you are among the twenty percent or so of us who are highly sensitive, you may find holiday shopping scenes less and less appealing, and more stressful.

Thanks to Google alerts for “highly sensitive people” I found this stimulating post on the topic, from The Highly Sensitive Christian blog. Here is an excerpt:

Six Shopping Days ‘Til Christmas for the Highly Sensitive Person, by Gail Ruth

In the U.S., the Christmas shopping season officially begins the day after Thanksgiving. But for me, that’s when my shopping season officially ends.

From Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, I avoid the stores as much as possible. And if I must go shopping, I go late at night or early in the morning. There are several reasons why, and they all have to do with the trait of high sensitivity.

First, during this season there’s a teeming mass of humanity crowded into the stores, many of whom are emoting stress.

Then there’s the sad or idealistic holiday songs playing loudly in the background. For some people, these songs stir feelings of loss or of being left out of everyone else’s holiday cheer. The result is that melancholic and desperate people throughout the stores emote feelings of loss, abandonment, and rejection.

And then there are the highly sensitive people being inflicted by these secondhand stressed, sad, and desperate feelings winging around the store, and responding with their own high-pitched stress. Then factor in the emotions of the abusive self-talk used to push themselves on. Altogether it’s a bit much.

The author also mentions the subtle – and not so subtle – coercive influences to buy stuff “they would otherwise never be interested in.”

For more on this personality trait, see the Highly Sensitive site.

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