This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Are You Really “Too Sensitive”? Rejection, Resilience & the Science of Feeling Deeply with Dr. Sasha Hamdani | 430

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Women are told to be strong, but not hard. Confident, but not intimidating. Emotional, but for the love of God, don’t be too sensitive. Apparently, there’s some magical “just right” version of womanhood—but nobody seems to have the address. In this episode of This Is Woman’s Work, Nicole Kalil talks with Dr. Sasha Hamdani, board-certified psychiatrist, mental health educator, and author of Too Sensitive about why feeling deeply isn’t a flaw to fix. They unpack rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), what happens when emotions hijack logic, how hormones impact sensitivity, and practical ways to regulate without stuffing, numbing, or apologizing for what’s being felt. In This Episode: Why sensitivity isn’t weakness—and can actually be a leadership strength What rejection sensitive dysphoria is and why rejection can hit so damn hard How to regulate emotions without suppressing them Why hormones matter more than women have been taught Why the goal isn’t thicker skin—it’s greater self-awareness and control Feeling deeply isn’t the same as being fragile. The goal isn’t to become less sensitive—it’s to understand it, work with it, and stop shrinking perfectly human parts of ourselves just because they make someone else uncomfortable. Thank you to our sponsors! Start your risk-free Greenlight trial today at Greenlight.com/TIWW. Don't wait to teach your kids real-world money skills! Connect with Sasha: Website: https://www.drhamdanimd.com/toosensitive  Book: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250423764/toosensitive/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/thepsychdoctormd/  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thepsychdoctormd Related Podcast Episodes Stop Saying “I’m Fine”: Nervous System Regulation for High-Achieving Women with Michelle Grosser | 372 ADHD in Women, Nervous System Regulation & Getting Out of Fight-or-Flight with Jenna Free | 396  How To Listen When Your Parts Speak (IFS Therapy + Ancestral Wisdom) with Tamala Floyd | 376  Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it really means to be doing women's work in the world today. And we're doing that by questioning the rules, the shoulds and the supposed to is that we've been handed, especially the ones nobody can actually explain, but we've somehow just bought into. Like the trap we often fall into that we only have two available options. We're one or the other, nothing in between. We're the virgin or the whore, the professional or the mom, or my personal favorite, and I say this as sarcastically as humanly possible, we're either too much or not enough.

We're not confident enough, not assertive enough, not resilient enough, not strong enough, or we're too ambitious, too loud, too opinioned, too emotional, too sensitive. I've spent a good portion of my adult life thinking I was too much and that I needed to tone it down. And because apparently I like to cover all our bases, I've also spent plenty of time wondering if I was good enough. The message being that somewhere in between all of that is the magical land of just right. And I'd love directions because I have yet to meet a woman who's been given the fucking address. So when did we buy into this Goldilocks version of womanhood where there is supposedly a just right way to be? And today we're going to dive right into one of the more loaded and frequently thrown in our faces versions of this Goldilocks theory.

and that's that we're too sensitive, too emotional. I mean, seriously, stop taking things so personally. You need a thicker skin. Toughen up for God's sake. Don't let it bother you. To which I respond, fuck you. Probably because I'm both too aggressive and too reactive, right? But can we just acknowledge the irony for just a second

of being stereotyped as overly emotional and overly sensitive? Because if I made a pie chart of every emotional outburst I've witnessed in a professional setting, men would own a pretty impressive piece of that pie. And there's an even bigger problem with telling women that they're too sensitive. It's that we're treating sensitivity like a character flaw. But what if the goal isn't to feel less? What if emotional strength isn't about becoming harder or tougher or less affected by the world around us?

What if sensitivity isn't something we need to overcome, but something we need to understand and can even use to our advantage. Well, that's where Dr. Sasha Hamdani comes in. Dr. Hamdani is a board-certified psychiatrist, specializing in ADHD, rejection-sensitive dysphoria, and emotional regulation, and the author of Too Sensitive, Rejection, Resilience, and the Science of Feeling Deeply.

She's the creator of FocusGenie, is an award-winning mental health educator who reaches more than 2 million people online and has been featured just about everywhere from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal and about a billion places in between. Dr. Hamdani, welcome to the show, and I'd love to start here.

What does it actually mean to be sensitive? And individually, is there such a thing as being too sensitive and collectively as women, are we too sensitive? Those three questions in one. That's a loaded question. First, I was like the best intro of all time. And I'm at the edge of my seat,

even though I'm in this episode. I feel, let's start from the basics, right? So when we talk about sensitivity, you really have to look at it on a spectrum, right? So if you're looking right in the middle as the center of that scale, as someone who, you know, when emotional things happen, they react what we would all consider appropriately. If they elevate appropriately, they depreciate appropriately, just depending on what kind of trigger is happening.

Then you look at one end of the spectrum, and that's kind of where you get into this apathy, where people feel numb, and it's really hard for them to access that emotional data. So emotional things are happening, but they don't move up or down very much based on that emotional kind of amplitude or intensity. And then on the other end of that, the polar opposite of that is that something relatively small might trigger their emotional response. but because they're wired to respond to emotions quickly and deeply, and for a long time, they take that and respond very robustly. And so everybody falls somewhere on the spectrum. Where is the normal end? I don't know.

But if you're looking at that kind of middle ground of people responding to situationally appropriate triggers with situationally appropriate emotions, I think that's where people consider. like, yes, you nailed it. You handled that correctly. Now, do women fall on one end of the spectrum versus the other? I would say no. Like, we all are people and we fall on different ends of the spectrum. However, I will tell you that women have to put up with so much more bullshit than the average man. Just because, you know, not only are we dealing with just the weight of like this invisible load at all times, But from just a neurobiological perspective, we are being smoked every month with this fluctuating hormone balance, which makes our emotional capacity a little bit less at different times in the month.

So where you are in one week might be completely different than where you are like premencerally in a different week. And so I think that when you're saying, you know, women are more emotional or women are too sensitive or things like that, okay. but like we're also dealing with huge hormonal surges where I would love to see a man tolerate that for more than one cycle. I think it's difficult to qualify and quantify, like what is too sensitive and what is that? Because I think that we need to first look at emotional sensitivity on that spectrum. We need to look at what are the underlying causes of that.

And then we need to look at how people actually handle those emotions because at the end of the day, feeling emotions, I think is actually advantageous. I think that's a wonderful thing and it has a great capacity for emotional intelligence. So if you feel things deeply, you can also transfer that and transmit that information into something very powerful. However, we just have never looked at emotions as like a neurological underpinning. And so we've never been given the tools to handle that, which is like so dumb. Teach that in schools. Yeah, no kidding, right?

Okay, so I'm literally buzzing right now. I have so many questions, but I, you know, completely buy into there is a spectrum and we all fall somewhere on the spectrum. And I don't know that any gender has anything to do with anybody just being right on a certain spot of the spectrum. But what I found really fascinating is as you put the two ends in the middle was like appropriate response, I actually caught myself thinking, and I think the world or society sort of encourages this, that the apathy side, the not showing emotion, the kind of stuffing emotions, that that, I think a lot of people see that as the center or that is the, and I'm going to put in air quotes, appropriate response where, you know, you have that out on one end.

So that triggers the question for me. I also have to point out, we as women, you said this, and I can't believe I've never even thought about this. We sort of, with our hormones, cross along that spectrum on our daily or weekly basis, and that is a whole different challenge. But my question is, do you see this that we live in a world that rewards emotional suppression? Yes. And how is this impacting our ability to find our own just right appropriate response? Okay. So yes, we are. I think that number one, the world right now is so hard and so difficult. Just like for so, I mean, I can't even get into that right now for so many different reasons. But I think the people who are celebrated as, as, you know, the most level. You handled it so well. You can take care of this stuff. Are the people who shove emotions down. Now, alternatively, and that's for like the general public. But then you also see people with exceedingly terrible behavior of emotional outbursts

that they've cleverly rebranded as like an appropriate response, even though it's anger. Yeah. And so you just get into these spots where you're like, okay, either I have to be completely blunted and neutral or I need to be completely angry and there's no space for any other emotional wavelength. And so I think that that's hugely problematic because how are you going to advance society with that kind of thing, right? Right. But I think the human experience is so rich and so beautiful.

And with feeling lows, you're also, you have this capacity to feel incredible highs. And so when you are experiencing that, like as a mom, I see my two kids are sensitive in slightly different ways, but my son especially is built a lot like I am. And we have worked together in terms of like when he's experiencing kind of these big feelings of emotion, just kind of recalibrating like, this is normal. Like it's normal to feel this and being able to talk about it and walk through it together so that you can handle it safely. And then what happens is that later in life you're not scared of those emotions.

When they come up, you're not having angry outburst. You're not suppressing them. You're not turning to self-medication. You're like, I know what this is. It doesn't feel great, but I'm going to move through it. And then it'll work better for me in the end because I can handle it in a more appropriate manner. Okay. It's triggering some parenting questions.

I'm not going to take us down that path just yet, though I might circle back to it. But I want to talk about the sort of like limited emotions that seem to be available to us today. And this sort of confusion that I think is happening. mislabeling. So you argue that sensitivity is often misunderstood and mistaken for things like anxiety or burnout or instability or just weakness in general. How do we distinguish between these very different things? Yeah. So it gets complicated because sometimes it's hard to tell. Like they could be happening at the same time. You could be emotionally sensitive and also burnt out. Like those things could coexist. I think you have to look at patterns, right? So,

burnout, you're assuming you're in this heavy season of work or in life or things like that, and it's directly related to that and there's a market change. If you're like, this is from Genesis, I've felt this way with certain emotions and certain triggers from the day I was born. I mean, for the most part, you're describing where you fall in that spectrum. And again, that spectrum is not static. You can kind of change and it changes from day to day. But if you're seeing this pattern of like this is what triggers me. And, you know, a lot of times in this book, we talk about rejection-sensitive dysphoria,

which is this incredibly robust response to real or perceived rejection or criticism or disappointing someone else. And that, I feel like you see a lot in higher-achieving women. They've gotten to these huge milestones in their career and in their life, and they are propelled by this fear of, I don't want to disappoint someone.

I don't want to get in trouble. And so they just keep, clicking up those ranks. I think it's an interesting phenomenon, but looking at patterns really helps you figure out where you fall. Yeah, so not so much situational or temporary, but consistent across the board. And kind of what I heard is overlapping circles. Like, I might be burnt out. That might trigger an increased sensitivity at that time, but they're not the same. And so what we're looking at is our sensitivity. So then my next question is how do we identify our own sensitivities?

And for someone like me, and I would imagine a lot of ambitious or high-achieving women who have fallen into the trap of stuffing, avoiding, suppressing, because it felt like the right thing to do, especially professionally, how might we identify our sensitivity where we've been ignoring it

or not recognizing it up to this point? I think one of the first things that we look at, and I think this was really important. So I started writing this book and actually started heavily researching this concept of emotional sensitivity as a neurological phenomenon after my dad died. So my dad died in 2024. And it was just really like messed up. Like he had random finding of stage one cancer. And then we went through the treatment and it wasn't supposed to be a big deal. And then, you know, he was like, I feel really.

bad. I took him in to get a scan. They were like, it's everywhere now. It must have seated into a lymph node and he died 13 days later. So in that, thank you, in that process, I realized for the first time in my life, and by the way, I was a fully functioning psychiatrist. So like, you'd think that I would have conceptualized this before, but it was the first time that I recognized that my emotional status directly impacts my functionality. So if I am drowning, and if this is something where there is something too big for me to process or that is taking up my emotional bandwidth, I can't do the other things I need to do. And so I was like, all right, well, let me look back kind of historically because grief and death,

that can be a completely a side thing. That can be something that rocks your world. Then I was like, no, I experienced this with just everyday triggers of emotional stuff. That's what's taking most of my brain energy. And so then that got me thinking, like, how are we wired? And, you know, when you look at that, part of the issue is that we've never understood this as like a neurological phenomenon. So we don't know how do we quantify that spectrum? How do we quantify what's the middle?

How do we quantify what's apathy? How do we quantify what's emotional intensity? Like, where do you fall? So in that, I was working on trying to create, like pulling from psychology, pulling from neuroscience, pulling from psychiatry. How do you kind of get the most grounded questions to ask you that will, for the most part, negate the gender component, negate the cultural component, negate the age component. What are questions that are actually going to help you assess your patterns? And then in that, there's a self-assessment in the book where it actually tells you and you can answer those questions. And it goes based on intensity and it goes based on frequency.

And those are two things. When you're assessing your own patterns, look at those two. and the book is helpful for that, but even if you were not going to get the book, not looking at that, just looking at your own patterns, what I tell my patients is those are the two things that indicate, is this pattern problematic to you? So if you are like, when I deal with emotional triggers, I feel like they're happening all the time. They take up all of my brain capacity and it's an intensity that is difficult to work around. And that's truly where I am. That's, that's, that's where I feel like I live. At that point, to me, without having adequate tools and control of that,

I feel like I have very little agency over how my day goes. So that's what really got me thinking about, like, okay, this is how you figure out where you are on the spectrum. If you fall a certain area of the spectrum and to you, that is very limiting and it's taking up so much time. If that's the case, we got to find skills and tools that you can, that help you work through those moments and get through them because in that, that's how you take that emotional sensitivity and turn it into emotional resilience. And I think that's the piece that is like very much a work in progress. But that's what I think in my eventual goal is. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess

Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself. friends and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest.

Conditions apply. CoshaBank.com slash H-I-S-A to learn more. Scotia Bank, you're richer than you think. Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free

for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st. Visit ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. And I want to talk about some of these tools and skills. But before we go down that road, I said it in my introduction. I know you believe it from the book,

but how is sensitivity a strength, a superpower? I think we have the tendency to look at it as a problem to be solved. And you position it as something very different. to talk to us about how sensitivity works for us, benefits the world, all those things. There have been times in my life where I'm like, this sucks. Like I should, like my emotions, I wish I could handle this a little bit better. Or why am I the only one in my peer group that is feeling this devastated by this? Or, you know, anything like that, you look and you compare and contrast with people around you.

And if you are on that emotionally sensitive side, you're acutely aware, even from a young age, that this is different than how other people occupy space. So I think that there has been many times in my life where I felt like this was a huge problem for me. But I'll tell you, as I've grown older, especially in conceptualizing, you know, my dad was very emotionally sensitive. And I think we shared a lot of that.

And the way that he was able, looking at the legacy of his life and things like that, the way that he was able to take that emotional sensitivity and really use it. He was a CEO of his own company. But the thing that was so, like, people loved, like universally loved him for was that he was so empathetic as a boss. And he would use everything to kind of like problem solved to lift up everyone.

And even when it came time to selling his company, he pulled away from numerous offers because he's like, I want to make sure that the whole team is safe and not just pick and choose. And so I think with emotional sensitive, you have this incredible capacity for empathy. You have this incredible capacity to quite literally pick up on cues that other people are completely oblivious of. So I can walk into a room and I can tell you something's weird.

This is off. I can walk into a situation where I'm seeing my kid. I haven't said a word to them. I can see on their face. I can see in their body. I'm like, there's something. Something happens. Something is weird.

They have something they need to talk about or something is going. on, I can go into situations in like higher roles. And because I'm able to kind of talk to many different people and get many different outcomes and like not placate, but, but understand their emotional criteria. I'm able to get to a solution than maybe other people weren't thinking about because it's a little bit more outside of the box, but it's, you know, beneficial for everyone. So there's so many different things that I will tell you at this point in time where I'm sitting in my seat, I would never trade that emotional sensitivity because I don't think the goal is to become less sensitive. I think the goal is to become more in control. Yes. And I would argue that the world

is craving this right now. I mean, when I talk to people about what's missing in their work environments or their relationships or things like that, empathy, as you mentioned, connection, curiosity, vulnerability, transparency. These are the things that people say they want and want to experience. And yet if you're on the apathy side of the spectrum, you're unlikely to give that. You're unlikely to provide that. So the example of your father, I think looking at these sensitivities as not just valuable, not just strengths, but leadership qualities and things that really support people. I mean, there's so much there. Okay. A coach of mine, many years back gave me the phrase, it's okay to have your feelings, but your feelings shouldn't

have you. And that really stuck with me. And I think you talked about control. So that's where I want to go next. How do we have our feelings, acknowledge our feelings, value our feelings, but not let them rule us and not throw reason out the door, regulate control, tool skills. How do we do that? So that was my biggest problem, right? I'm perfectly capable of feeling my feelings. That I can do fine, but I would drown in them, right? They would get too big for me very quickly, and then that would be, and then a day would go by. Like, I would lose time because of it. I think when you're looking at this, one of the way that I was trained in residency for psychiatry, because psychiatry is just kind of like, it's an interesting field of medicine. For a long time,

a lot of those concepts and things like that, you're just, no, there's no blood test you can do. There's no, like, you're really basing it on understanding of the brain. And that's how you start a lot of your concepts with psychiatry. You understand what's happening in the brain and then you can extrapolate information. So if you look at what's happening in the brain for an emotionally sensitive person, you look at two big areas of the brain.

The first of that emotional threat detector in the brain, which is your amygdala. For highly emotionally sensitive people, this amygdala is a little bit more hyper-responsive. On the flip side, the second area of the brain is your prefrontal cortex directly under your forehead. That is the smartest part of your brain, judgment, decision-making, processing,

And that is slightly under-responsive. And to make things worse, the connection between those two areas is weak. So now you're dealing with this very activated emotional center and this under-activated center, which should be telling you like, easy. It's not that big of a deal. Move on. So now emotions are going to trump this kind of logical center every single time. Once you kind of understand that that's what's happening,

then you start to figure out, okay, what tool can I use? in the moment to either slow down this amygdala from spinning and dumping out alarm chemicals telling me this is a huge deal or what skill can I use to get my frontal lobe online so I can think through this. And so it really depends on what you're experiencing in the moment. Like for example, I will say when I have those kind of emotional things, there are times where I am so restless and so, and I'll give you an example that happened like a week ago on this press tour. I've been negligent. in terms of like truly committing to like knowing every single second of my schedule. But I, but there's like two or three podcasts where I was like, okay, this is great.

And then I'll play and stuff around it. So I'll travel there, play and stuff around it. Great. It's like my big thing. A couple of days before one of the podcasts, they canceled. I had my flights. I had moved patients around. And I got that notification.

It was like a day and a half. It was such short notice. I got that notification. I immediately get up from where I was sitting on the couch with my husband. I start pacing. It was like my body was vibrating. In that moment, my brain was just on overdrive. Like, they didn't think I was a big enough deal.

They don't like the book. They don't like this idea. Within seconds, I'd gone from like, I'm watching reruns of Breaking Bad to now like I've gone off the deep end. And so my husband is just like silently watching all this happening. I can tell. I can't even think right now about. anything other than what my brain is populating in terms of this negative kind of stuff.

My muscles, like, I know that alarm chemicals are dumping through me because my muscles are tense. I'm pacing because I literally can't stay still. And so I was like, okay, what are one of the techniques that I could use to calm this, to replace some of this nervous energy? And I was like, okay, one of the things that we talk about in my book, which, by the way, in two sensitive, literally every single skill in this book you have heard, someone has told you, they've told you to move your body, they told you to challenge negative thoughts, They've told you to accept them.

Like you've heard them all. I think the difference in this book is knowing when to apply it and knowing how to apply it. So the latter part of the book is literally real-world examples. And it tells you, this is the tool you use. Let's practice together. Because I think if you can practice it when you're not in a dysregulated state, you're able to use it better when you need it. I think in just writing the book, I had all that information kind of floating around in my

head and I'd work through it enough. I was like, okay, I'm restless. I'm going to move my body. And I had been scrolling on Instagram. Came across something and they're like, do squats. And that's better for like, it's good for brain health, good for, you know, longevity, all of that stuff. So I was like, all right, cool. So I'm like, still, haven't said a word to my husband, break down, start doing these like squats in very bad form. He's just like looking at me watching what I'm doing. But you know what? Within like a minute of doing that, it was like something caught up in my brain and and maybe it was like it just slowed down enough and I I truly don't think it was the distraction of it. I think that I'm pumping you know because I'm getting down

I'm squatting. I'm pumping oxygenated glucose up into my brain where my frontal load can be like all right cool. So what's happening now is that I've slowed down this process. I go back. I read the email. The email what I forgot. I did not see them. first time is we need to move this podcast due to a family emergency and then two things later, which I also did not scroll down, my team was like, they offered another date on this. Didn't see any of that because I was already like, I suck. That's where my brain wants to go. This is such a perfect story, not perfect that it happened to you.

I'm sorry, but perfect in that I think every one of us can relate. We all have an example of where something triggered a fear or a belief or a doubt or whatever, and we missed all the information other than what supported that initial fear or doubt. I know I do this in my life. I've seen it in coaching. So the what to do and how to do it, I think, is incredibly helpful. But you'd said earlier specifically about rejection sensitivity that we as women might be, a little more prone to that. Any tips or thoughts or anything for us as women, if we know that

that might be heightened? And there's also potentially a feeling that there is some truth to the nuances. Like occasionally, I'll feel like I got rejected for something because I'm a woman. And occasionally, that's probably true. Maybe not every time I think it, but sometimes it is. So I guess my question is specifically with rejection, any thoughts, tools, are tips. Well, so with rejection-sensitive dysphoria, I think a really important thing of that understanding of that concept is that it's real or perceived rejection. This could be actual rejection that is happening to you in real time, or it could be something that you are, like, putting out into reality because this is so real in your brain, but it's not actually happening.

So when you deal with rejection-sensitive dysphoria, and especially since, you know, now I've dealt with thousands of patients that I've seen and that we've talked about this and we've talked about this, whether it's in regards to ADHD, we've talked about this, whether it's in regards of just like general emotional sensitivity. But you talk to enough people and you get to a spot where truly just understanding that this is a concept, that this is something that isn't just you making a big deal out of stuff, knowing that it has a name and then knowing that there are times where that neurological phenomenon can be triggered, I think is incredibly vital. Because without that knowledge and without that understanding, you're just kind of going through

life thinking like, I'm too sensitive, this is just me. This is like, this is something that's immutable that I can't fix or change. But the brain is so incredibly neuroplastic. You can change your wiring, which is the coolest part of psychiatry ever. Like I feel like it's such an overwhelmingly hopeful message, but people have to know that it exists because then they know how to work on it and kind of like, you know, actually take control of that moment. And it's just something that I wish, like in my teen years I knew. Like I wish that was something that like when I saw my friends hanging out without me or doing something or like, you know, all of this other stuff that you go through in your early teen years,

which like teenage years are misery anyway, but then you add this extra. layer of emotional sensitivity, I wish I had known. I wish I'd known that neurologically, I'm just wired to handle emotions differently. I would have found safer people. I wouldn't have chased around people that, like, made me feel terrible for no other reason than the frontal lobe wasn't developed. I would have explained it to myself better when I'm in these deep moments. I would be like, okay, yes, I feel bad. I'd feel like this was triggered because I am emotionally sensitive, but I can work myself through it instead of just feeling so hopelessly stuck because that's where it was. And I have been at numerous points in my life because I'm like,

it can't, it can't possibly, I can't imagine a future where this would get better. It's interesting. My daughter turns 13 next week. And as you're talking about this, and this is a skill that I wish they taught in schools. And I have a lot of reasons why I want to dive into your book for myself. But if for no other reasons, you know, and then help my daughter with this at a younger age. Talk about life-changing, right? Yeah. Okay, I cannot let you go without diving into a little bit around the hormones piece of this,

specifically for women. I know you explore the relationship between hormones and emotional regulation. Why are hormones so overlooked? Why do we fail to account for hormonal shifts? When we think about mood and memory and even resilience and sensitivity and, and all the things. What do we need to know? That's the biggest question ever, right?

You know, this is something that emotional sensitivity hasn't found a home anywhere. Like people have thought, like, maybe it's psychiatric, but maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's depression. Maybe it's not actually something that carries a diagnostic label, in which case you're just bitchy or like you're just kind of a weenie. Or you go kind of that opposite. realm of things and you're just like, okay, well, I mean, first of all, neurologically,

no one is looking at this as a neurological thing. Physically, when your body gets like broken down from carrying this emotional weight, then you start to look at autoimmune things. You start to look at is there like, are you physically ill? So I think there's, we're missing a lot of different points that we should be grabbing onto. And hormones are just such a huge part of the puzzle because that fluctuating baseline also makes it tricky for us to land on diagnostic terms because you, especially women, we feel bad. Like, let's say the week before I period. I feel bad.

I feel dumber. I feel fatter. I feel like my emotions are out of control. So, like, I'm not feeling great for numerous different reasons. Then fast forward a week and a half. and I all of a sudden feel the best I have in a month. And I'm like, I don't know what that was. That was a fluke.

And then I continue to perpetuate that pattern for the rest of my life. Like, I just ignore things because they got better. And so I think that if women themselves are also kind of looking at this, like, I kind of forgot about how bad I felt because I popped out of it. We just don't get that appropriate help. But once you understand that like hormones impact this fluctuating relationship with emotional sensitivity, you can, number one, understand your cycle and to couch what you're feeling through that.

Like, oh, okay, this is a time I might be more emotionally sensitive. Is there something that I can do to work through it? Or if it's a time where you should be feeling great and you really are smoked by something, you could be like, okay, this is something that it's not just a hormonal thing that's making it worse. I think this actually is something that I'm struggling with. I think it's good for reality testing. I think it's good in terms of us understanding our own bodies better. I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to recognize, like, oh, I'm a week before my period.

This actually makes sense, right? Yeah. Let me look at the calendar and see if this might be a contributing factor. It was like my mid-30s where I kind of made that connection. Same. And I'm a psychiatrist. Well, even just having that piece of information that gives some sort of explanation, that doesn't mean that your feelings aren't valid. it just might mean that I might not act so quickly on that feeling or I might understand that feeling a little bit better.

Dr. Hamdani, I could literally ask you one million more questions and talk to you all day long. But what I want to make sure that our listener does is hit pause, go to Amazon or whatever, wherever it is that you buy books. And either that or walk or run or however you get there to your local bookstore, let's keep them in business and get the book too sensitive. You can also find and follow Dr. Hamdani on all of the social medias at the psych doctor MD. We'll put the links to all of those and her website and the book and everything in show notes. Thank you for being our guest for doing this work and for writing the book. Man, this is such an important big topic that I can't wait to continue to dive into. So thank you.

Yeah, thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. All right, friend, here's the thing. Feeling deeply isn't the same as being fragile. Caring isn't weakness. Noticing what other people miss isn't a flaw and having an emotional response doesn't mean we've lost control,

lost perspective, or lost our minds. I'd argue that resilience should never be about becoming harder or thicker skinned. It's about knowing ourselves well enough to feel what we feel without being ruled by it, to understand our sensitivity instead of apologizing for it, to regulate without having to numb and to stop shrinking perfectly human parts of ourselves

just because they make someone else uncomfortable. There will always be somebody ready to tell us that we're too much of something or not enough of something else. Our job isn't to find that mythical Goldilocks version of ourselves that everyone else finds just right. It's to know and trust ourselves well enough to decide what's just right for us and then do that, because that is woman's work.

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