He Said He Had No Energy Left — Not Even for Two Minutes of Small Talk
He asked me to buy lunch for him because he couldn't handle two minutes of small talk. I didn't understand — until I learned what high sensitivity really means, and what it costs the people who love them.
That day, he said: "I really don't have any energy left."
The lady who ran the lunch box shop near our place was friendly. Every time she saw him — this foreigner in the neighborhood — she'd chat a little. How's the weather, been busy lately? Just the kind of warmth that comes naturally to Taiwanese people. The wait was never long. Two, maybe three minutes.
He liked her too.
But he said he couldn't do it.
I didn't understand at first. Two minutes. A few pleasantries. How hard could that be? In the end, after he practically begged me, I went to pick up the food for him. I wasn't angry exactly, but I wasn't entirely without feelings about it either. Mostly, I was just baffled.
It took me a long time to understand: those two or three minutes were not just two or three minutes for him.
What most people call "highly sensitive" probably isn't what it actually means.
The term gets thrown around a lot these days. People say they're highly sensitive, meaning they feel things deeply, get hurt easily, experience emotions more intensely than others.
But that's not the clinical definition.
True high sensitivity — known in research as Sensory Processing Sensitivity, or SPS — was identified in the 1990s by American psychologist Elaine Aron. It describes a nervous system that is wired differently from birth to process external stimuli. It's not something you develop. It's not caused by childhood trauma. It's something you're born with.
About 15 to 20 percent of the global population has this trait. It's been found in over a hundred animal species. It's not a disorder. It's an evolutionary survival strategy — perceiving the environment in finer detail and observing before acting.
So what does the world feel like for someone like this?
Aron uses the acronym DOES to describe four dimensions of how highly sensitive people experience the world.
D — Depth of Processing.
They think more deeply than most people. Not "overthinking" — their brain simply processes information in more layers, from more angles. You see a small thing; they've already turned it over a dozen ways in their mind. Sometimes this gives them extraordinary insight. Sometimes it makes it very hard to switch off.
O — Overstimulation.
This is the most misunderstood part.
Because they take in more information than others, their energy drains faster. An ordinary gathering, an unfamiliar environment, even a few minutes of casual conversation — what's routine for most people is a real energy expenditure for a highly sensitive person.
My ex-boyfriend was like this. When he asked me to go buy lunch for him, it wasn't laziness. It wasn't an excuse. He had already spent everything he had that day, and he simply didn't have the reserves to handle two minutes of friendly small talk — even from someone he genuinely liked.
E — Emotional Reactivity and Empathy.
Highly sensitive people experience emotions more intensely — both positive and negative. Joy can be profoundly full. Sadness can be crushingly real. They also tend to have strong empathy — picking up on subtle shifts in other people's emotions, sometimes before the other person is even aware of them.
S — Sensitivity to Subtle Stimuli.
This is the most concrete — and the hardest to believe.
He could smell the kimchi I'd eaten the day before, hours after I'd come home. He could hear a high-frequency sound from a certain appliance after it was switched on — a sound I couldn't detect at all. When I turned it off, he said "it's gone." When I turned it back on, he said "there it is again." That sound didn't exist for me. For him, it was a real, constant disturbance.
At night, when I used my phone in the next room — with a bathroom between us — he could sense the faint glow of the screen and asked me to dim it to the lowest setting.
This isn't exaggeration. This isn't being dramatic. This is what his nervous system actually picks up.
There's a research finding that very few people know about.
Aron discovered that highly sensitive people actually fall into two distinct groups.
The first group grew up feeling accepted.
They have all the same traits — the heightened senses, the rapid energy drain, the deep processing. But because they grew up in an environment that was relatively safe and understanding, they're at peace with who they are. Life has its inconveniences, but it's not painful. They know themselves and they've learned how to take care of themselves.
The second group grew up in environments that felt unsafe.
This doesn't just mean being told "you're too sensitive" or "you think too much" — though those words do real damage.
More often, the harm comes from an environment where a child absorbs the message: "My feelings are not allowed to exist here." Maybe it was emotional neglect — parents who meant no harm but never responded to the child's emotional needs. Maybe the household itself was unpredictable — a parent with addiction issues, emotional instability, or an atmosphere that kept the child in a constant state of alert.
For any child, this is hard. For an HSP child, because the nervous system is already receiving more input, the same environment inflicts amplified damage.
The trait itself doesn't disappear. But it acquires a layer — a hard-to-name feeling that you're different from everyone else, that your feelings are too much, too heavy, not something you should burden others with. Some HSPs learn to lock their feelings away. Not because they don't feel, but because they learned very early: feelings are your own business. Don't let anyone see them.
Aron calls this "differential susceptibility" — HSPs are like amplifiers. A good environment gets amplified into something even better. A bad environment gets amplified into something much worse. Same sensitivity, different soil. The childhood determines whether this trait becomes a resource or a wound.
Almost every article about high sensitivity is written for the HSP themselves.
Telling them: your trait is a gift. Take care of yourself. You don't need to apologize for your feelings.
All of that is true. All of it matters.
But nobody talks about the person standing next to them.
I couldn't buy kimchi for the house. I couldn't eat certain foods with strong smells. I couldn't talk to him too much when his energy was running low. I couldn't use my phone with the screen on before bed. I had to remember which small things would make him uncomfortable. Sometimes I had to do the everyday tasks he simply couldn't manage that day.
This isn't a complaint. I truly loved him, and I was genuinely willing to adapt.
But being willing doesn't mean it's not exhausting.
The drain was real. The constant adjustments were real. Many times I had no idea what had happened — just that his mood had suddenly dropped. Sometimes what I thought was care turned out to be, for his nervous system, one more piece of stimulation he didn't need. I was trying to understand his world. He was trying to survive in an environment louder than his nervous system could handle.
There was no villain between us. But we were both tired.
Understanding is the starting point, but it's not the finish line.
Looking back now, I feel a lot of tenderness toward him.
He lived in a world that was permanently too loud, too bright, too much for him. Every single day, he spent several times more energy than most people just to get through things others don't even notice. That wasn't his choice. That was his nervous system.
If you have a highly sensitive person in your life —
You don't need to become their shield, blocking out every stimulus. That's not realistic and it's not fair. But one thing matters: when they say "I have no energy left today," don't interpret it as them not caring about you or making excuses. In that moment, they can barely take care of themselves. It's not that they don't love you. The tank is genuinely empty.
Understanding that is one of the most important things you can give them.
But I also want to say — understanding doesn't mean carrying everything indefinitely. Your exhaustion is real too. The constant self-adjustment isn't because you're too fragile. It's genuinely heavy. You can love someone and still be honest about what this relationship asks of you.
If you are the highly sensitive person —
Your feelings are real. You're not being difficult. You're not exaggerating. You're not too sensitive.
But let me say something that might be uncomfortable: the people who love you are real people too. Their effort is real. Your nervous system gives you strong empathy, but when your own energy hits zero, that empathy is hard to sustain.
What's needed then isn't just mutual understanding — it's practical strategies. The ability to navigate daily life together.
If you have even a little energy left — let the people around you know that you see what they do for you. You don't need to match what others can do. But let them know you care. Even one sentence. It recharges the people who love you.
If you, like me, have loved a highly sensitive person —
The drain from that relationship was real. You don't need to pretend it wasn't, and you don't need to feel guilty about your exhaustion.
Looking back, I learned one thing: some people in this world use several times more strength than the rest of us just to face the same morning.
That's not being dramatic. That's their life.
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Tingman Liu
Tingman Liu
