Been Told You’re ‘Too Sensitive’? The Real Reason You Feel So Much—and What To Do About It

Do you react too emotionally, or hear that you’re “too sensitive” more than you’d like? You’re not alone—and it can get more intense in your 50s. Board-certified psychiatrist and ADHD expert Sasha Hamdani, MD, shares simple ways to understand what’s really happening, calm overwhelming emotions and turn sensitivity into a strength.

Have you ever been called ‘too sensitive’?

Your friend sends a one-word text back. Your boss’s email just says, “Let’s talk tomorrow.” Instantly, your stomach drops and your mind races through every worst-case scenario—even though nothing has actually gone wrong yet. That jolt of dread, the fear that someone’s upset with you or about to reject or criticize you, is real, and it has a name. Dr. Hamdani has built her career studying this exact reaction, and in her new book, Too Sensitive: Rejection, Resilience, and the Science of Feeling Deeply, she lays out the science behind it: a pattern called rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), in which the brain treats even a small, ambiguous moment like a real threat.

“The goal is not to be less sensitive,” Dr. Hamdani tells Woman’s World. “It’s about being more in control.” That’s especially true for women over 50, whose hormonal shifts can heighten that same sensitivity—leaving many only now connecting the dots on reactions that never made sense at the time. Here, she shares real tools for handling that emotional overwhelm.

WW: What are the signs a woman might be dealing with this kind of heightened sensitivity?

Dr. Hamdani: “It’s going over and over a conversation in your head, wondering if you came across wrong. It’s being the one in the friend group who gets told she can’t take a joke, or that she’s overreacting to something that genuinely stung. It’s a passing comment that ends up eating at you for days, while the people around you seem to shrug the exact same thing off. Sometimes it’s physical—a racing heart, a tight chest, feeling like you can’t catch your breath over something that, looking back, had nothing to do with you at all. Underneath all of it is the same thing: bracing for rejection before it’s even happened. If that sounds like you, you’re not imagining it, and it’s not a personality flaw. It’s your nervous system treating something that feels dangerous the same way it would treat something that actually is.”

WW: What does that actually mean for a woman day to day?

Dr. Hamdani: “It means you’re often bracing for disapproval before there’s any real sign of it. That constant bracing takes a toll—it wears down your confidence and, over time, can leave you exhausted and doubting your own worth. You might find yourself overextending for people, terrified that one misstep will make them pull away. In adults, this rarely looks dramatic from the outside. It tends to show up as quiet perfectionism, a nagging sense that you don’t belong despite everything you’ve accomplished, or working yourself into the ground trying to outrun the fear. It’s not just an occasional overreaction—it’s a pattern that shapes how you show up in your relationships, at work and even with yourself.”

WW: You talk about over-apologizing as a way of trying to head off someone’s disapproval before it can occur. What’s a way to correct that habit?

Dr. Hamdani: “When you have heightened emotional sensitivity, your brain can treat even the possibility of someone being upset with you as a real threat, so ‘sorry’ turns into a reflex—something you say to smooth things over before there’s even a problem. Before it comes out, stop for a second and ask yourself: What am I actually apologizing for? Did I do something wrong, or am I just uncomfortable not knowing how the other person feels? If it’s the latter, try replacing the apology with something that’s actually true. If you’re worried you talked too much, say ‘thanks for listening’ instead of ‘sorry.’ If you’re worried you seem anxious, just name it—’I’m feeling a little on edge right now’—instead of apologizing for it. You’re not trying to stop caring what people think. You’re trying to stop abandoning yourself every time you’re afraid they might.”

WW: You talk about setting boundaries, since when you don’t have them, your nervous system stays braced. What’s one way to set a boundary with loved ones?

Dr. Hamdani: “As women, we’re never really taught this skill—we’re expected to be people pleasers, to fill everyone else’s cup before our own. So if you notice you’re falling into a pattern, getting resentful because you’ve done so much and it feels one-sided, start finding small ways to say no. It doesn’t have to be, ‘No, I’m never coming to help you again.’ It can be something as small as: someone asks, ‘Do you have time after work to help me move?’ You don’t have to say no, but you can say, ‘You know what? I can’t help you today. I’m busy tonight, but I could probably help you on Saturday.’ You’re still saying, I want to help you, but I can’t do everything on your timeline. By vocalizing your needs, you get more and more comfortable doing it. It’s a skill you have to learn and really immerse yourself in—you start small, and you keep pushing a little further each time.”

WW: A vague email from a boss can send someone with RSD spiraling. What’s a concrete way to temper that reaction?

Dr. Hamdani: “Start by not reacting right away. Give yourself a beat—breathe, step back—before you respond to anything. Then challenge the story you’re automatically telling yourself. If your gut jumps straight to ‘I’ve disappointed them,’ force yourself to come up with two other explanations that are just as plausible: They were busy, they’re planning to circle back later or the message genuinely wasn’t loaded with any meaning at all. That’s not about talking yourself into feeling fine—it’s about not treating silence as automatic proof you failed. Over time, pay attention to when those emotional spikes hit, because it helps you separate what’s actually happening right now from an old wound about never feeling good enough. And build a personal go-to sequence for these moments: Remove yourself from the situation, calm your body down, write out how you’re interpreting it and hold off on doing anything until you’ve actually calmed down. You’ll still get ambiguous feedback—everyone does. This just keeps it from wrecking you every time.”

WW: People with RSD often rely on outside signals—being needed, being praised—to feel okay. What happens to your sense of worth when that role disappears?

Dr. Hamdani: “This is one of the hardest things for me, personally—I built my identity on external validation, which is very tricky to unwind. My dad got sick, and I stepped away from a huge, flourishing career to become his caretaker. In the moment, it was the most depressing, thankless role; I was mourning that pause in my career. But looking back, I feel so thankful I had that time with him. You might not be able to see the impact yet, but if you can reframe it as ‘what is most needed from me right now,’ I think you’ll get there.”

WW: How does being in perimenopause and menopause make sensitivity even more intense?

Dr. Hamdani: “These are women who’ve gotten used to holding everything together. You’re at the peak of your career, you’ve raised your kids, you’re caring for your parents—you’re doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing. Then, all of a sudden, a drop in estrogen leads to a drop in dopamine, and it dysregulates your entire system. All that scaffolding changes, and everything gets harder. The first thing I hear from women in my office is that it feels like things are out of control. You might also notice much bigger emotional swings than usual—rage over something that shouldn’t have upset you that much, or crying over something that never used to affect you. And there’s often a persistent brain fog: executing tasks, prioritizing, communicating—it all takes far more effort than it used to.”

WW: What can we actually do about it?

Dr. Hamdani: “Number one: recognize that it’s happening. So many of us are ready to blame it on everything else—burnout, getting sick, ‘things will get better once this deadline is over.’ You could do that for the rest of your life. Take a step back and ask, has my baseline functioning changed? Is it fluctuating? Could this be hormones, or this transitional shift? Just recognizing it takes away a lot of guilt and shame. From there, there are really two paths. One is to see if you need a hormonal solution—talk to your primary care doctor or ob-gyn, someone who understands this transition, and figure out whether hormone support could help. The other is to work with it from the other side: if hormones aren’t the right route for you, look at what’s actually changing—your mood, your focus, your workload—and address each piece. Sometimes that means treating the mood swings directly, sometimes it’s delegating what you can so the load itself becomes more manageable.”

WW: After menopause, does that hormone-driven sensitivity fade?

Dr. Hamdani: “Hormonal emotional sensitivity feels most dramatic in contrast to your baseline. Once your baseline has shifted and settled, the swings don’t feel as huge, so a lot of women do say it fades. It’s not necessarily fading—you’ve just adjusted to the new normal. I think about emotional sensitivity on a spectrum: in the middle is a situationally appropriate response, on one end is emotional blunting, and on the other is a much bigger emotional swing for the same trigger. Where you sit on that spectrum at baseline matters. Some people process emotions in a very intense way no matter what—they’re probably still going to experience that sensitivity well into later life. Others sit closer to the middle, and once the hormonal turbulence settles, they may go back down.”

WW: Many women recognize, in hindsight, what was happening to them in their 40s. What can they do now?

Dr. Hamdani: “Every time you understand your brain a little better, it gives you a different lens to look at your past behavior through. Even if you weren’t your best self during that hormonal transition, understanding that this was happening, that it was dysregulating you, that it was out of your control—you didn’t have the capacity, you didn’t know it was happening—gives you a lot of grace. And if you’re a parent, this is something you can pass on to your kids. My mom’s generation didn’t talk about this at all; she’d barely say the words ‘the big M.’ Now we can talk about it openly, and it turns out—of course—she went through the exact same thing. One of the best things you can do is just talk about it. Sharing that lived experience with other people reduces so much of the stigma and shame.”

WW: How do you turn sensitivity into a strength instead of a liability?

Dr. Hamdani: “Sensitivity by itself isn’t a strength or a weakness—it’s just intensity. What turns it into a strength is pairing it with a skill. My book lays out 12 tools for this, and a few of the easiest to start with are: move your body when a big emotion hits—even a five-minute walk, a stretch or dancing around your kitchen can calm your nervous system down; catch and challenge the negative thought instead of believing it automatically by writing down one or two other explanations for what happened before you assume the worst; and set small boundaries out loud instead of silently absorbing everything. Once you have tools like that, the same sensitivity that used to spiral you starts working for you—it keeps you empathetic, makes you a sharper problem-solver and helps you say hard things kindly instead of either exploding or staying silent.”

WW: If a woman recognizes herself in these patterns, what’s the very first thing from your book you’d point her to?

Dr. Hamdani: “The sensitivity spectrum quiz. When I started this whole journey, I didn’t even know what ‘too sensitive’ really meant, or who gets to decide that. Once you see it as a spectrum, it starts to make a lot more sense—your baseline can shift with hormones, with life changes, with all of it. Finding out where you sit on that spectrum gives you a new lens, and from there, the rest of the book is real-world examples of how to apply it.”

A version of this story appears in the October 26, 2026, issue of Woman’s World.