Understanding Hypervigilance: What It Is and How to Heal

A Comprehensive Guide to the Signs, Causes, and Effects of Hypervigilance and How to Overcome It.

Are you constantly preoccupied with how others perceive you, replay conversations repeatedly in your mind, and pay close attention to shifts in others' emotions?

That's hypervigilance, and in this article, you will find everything you need to know about it, where it comes from, how it presents itself, and how to heal from it.

What is hypervigilance?

Hypervigilance is a state of increased alertness and sensitivity to potential threats in your environment. It often manifests as excessively scanning your environment while also being easily startled.

When we are hypervigilant, we need to be constantly alert. We often feel a sense of unease and stress, driving us to repetitively scan our surroundings for potential dangers, causing us to feel drained, anxious, and easily irritable. In our bodies, hypervigilance often presents itself as increased heart rate, muscle tension, and being easily startled by touch or loud noises.

Hypervigilance involves more than just scanning the environment for physical threats. It also includes being overly sensitive to social and emotional cues and constantly monitoring your thoughts and feelings. Explaining why it is incredibly draining.

Being hypervigilant means that our nervous system is chronically on high alert, and that can have significant negative effects on our well-being. Hypervigilance becomes especially problematic when we start to sense threads in our environment that aren't actually there but that we interpret as being there or that we fear could be there.

What are signs you are hypervigilant?