I was recently struck by a sub-heading in Holly Klassen’s Huffington Post blog piece on parenting as an introvert: “They are with you ALL THE TIME.”

I don’t know whether it’s an introvert thing or an HSP thing, or both, but that sentence neatly encapsulates my experience of other human presences. They don’t have to be doing anything, or saying anything. They don’t even have to be awake. Just the awareness of their presence in some way engages a portion of my energy, rendering it unavailable for other purposes. It’s like a computer process that runs in the background and eats up all your RAM, slowing down normal tasks, and making high-resource tasks impossible.

This doesn’t happen with animal companions, however. I have often contemplated why I prefer to live with animals, but was never able to pinpoint it – until I read that sentence. The cats I share a home with are also with me, literally, all the time, not just somewhere in the house, but often in the same room I am in.  Yet somehow, my attention is not engaged in the same energy-consumptive way. If this is true for other HSPs, it may explain why HSPs are more likely than average to have a strong affinity with animals. Continue reading →