The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron

"In short, you do not have to take the job that will create excessive stress and over-arousal. Someone else will take it, and flourish in it. You do not have to work long hours. Indeed, it may be your duty to work shorter ones. It may be best not to advertise it, but keeping yourself healthy and in your right range of arousal is the first condition for helping others."

"Stay in good contact with many kinds of other people, at work and elsewhere, accepting that no one person can  relate to all of you. Indeed, accepting the loneliness that goes with giftedness may be the most freeing, empowering step of all. But also accept its opposite, that there's no need to feel isolated, for everyone is gifted in some way. And then there's the opposite truth. Non one, including yourself is special in the sense of being exempted from the universals of ageing and death."

"No matter how introverted, you are a social being. You cannot escape your need and spontaneous desire to connect with others, even if your conflicting urge to protect yourself is very strong."

"Over-arousal is easily displaced onto worries, regrets, anything that is handy."

"Overall, sensitivity can greatly enhance intimate communication. You pick on so much more of the subtle cues, the nuances, the paradoxes and ambivalences, the unconscious processes. You understand that this sort of communication requires patience, you are loyal, conscientious, and appreciative enough of the value of the relationship to be willing to give it the time. The main problem is, as always, over-arousal. In that state we can be extremely insensitive to everything around us, including those we love. We can blame our trait. 'I was just too tired, too overwhelmed.' But it still our duty to do whatever we can to communicate in a helpful way, or let the other know ahead of time, if possible, when we are unable to hold up our end."

"In several studies of married and dating couples, we found that the pairs felt more satisfied with their relationships if they did things together that they defined as exciting, not just pleasant. This seems logical. If you cannot expand any more by incorporating new things about the other into yourself, you can still create an association between the relationship and self-expansion by doing new things together. To an HSP especially, it may seem that life is to stimulating especially, and when you come home you want quiet. But be careful not to make your relationship so soothing that you do not do anything new together. Perhaps to do that, your hours apart have to be less stressful. Or you have to search for what expands you without over-arousing you."

"The doctor shares the culture's bias in mistaking your trait for shyness and introversion, and in viewing these, in turn, as less mentally healthy. Furthermore, for some doctors especially, sensitivity is a dreaded weakness they had to repress in order to survive medical school. So they project that part of themselves, and the weakness they associate with it, onto patients with any sign of it at all" (Chapter 15).