How Hypervigilance Shows up for LGBTQ+ Highly Sensitive People

Guest Blog by Aimee Tasker

Queer highly sensitive people often live on high alert, constantly reading the room and monitoring for safety. This story explores how that hypervigilance might develop and what it looks like to stop scanning and start feeling safer.

I'm sitting in a new coffee shop with noise-cancelling headphones on, supposedly reading, but I've noticed everyone who's walked in for the past twenty minutes. I realise I'm tracking body language, tone of voice, and who's sitting where. I notice my shoulders are tense, again.

For years, this was just how I operated. Hypervigilance, the constant scanning for potential problems, was my default setting. As a queer highly sensitive person (HSP), I'd gotten used to monitoring everything: people's reactions, room vibes and space dynamics, and whether I thought it felt safe enough to actually relax.

These days, I’m grateful I don't live like that as much anymore. I notice when that thinking happens now.

What Hypervigilance feels like for Queer HSPs

Hypervigilance is when your nervous system stays on high alert, endlessly scanning for threats. For LGBTQ+ people, this usually starts early. Growing up closeted meant monitoring everything. How I walked. How I held my hands. Whether I laughed too loudly or stood too close to certain friends. I learned to watch myself from the outside, constantly adjusting to this outside-in way of being.

Even after coming out, the scanning continued. Now I had to figure out: Will this person ask invasive questions? Will they say something casually homophobic? Will I need to come out again?

My research into this shows that this is common. Minority stress, the ongoing pressure of navigating a heteronormative world not necessarily built for you, can really affect LGBTQ+ folks' mental health. That unease then gets lodged in your nervous system.

When you're also a highly sensitive person, your body amplifies these threats. Dr. Elaine Aron's research on HSPs shows we process information more deeply and get overstimulated more easily. Combine queer minority stress with an already sensitive nervous system, and you end up running on high alert most of the time.

How Hypervigilance shows up in daily life

Here's what living with hypervigilance as a queer HSP actually looked like:

• Constant self-monitoring. Walking into any space meant calculating: Is it safe to be myself here? I might think about adjusting my voice, my mannerisms depending on who was around.

• Overthinking every interaction. I'd spend way too long on simple texts, making sure my tone was right. After conversations, I'd replay them: Did I say something weird? Did they seem annoyed?

• Tension even in safer spaces. Even at queer events, my body stayed tense. Shoulders tight and jaw clenched. I was still tracking reactions and monitoring how much space I was taking up.

• Reading every room. Before walking into anywhere, I'd scan: Who's here? What's the vibe? Will someone say something problematic? Is this going to be draining?

• Taking on everyone's emotions. I'd absorb other people's mood, society’s, the news - a lot of anger and shame in the air.

• Holding back with everyone. I'd keep parts of myself hidden, worried that if people saw all of me, there might be confrontation to deal with on top of everything else.

• Living in hypothetical problems. My brain constantly ran scenarios. What if they ask about my personal life? What if they find out? I was reacting to imagined things that hadn't happened.

• Exhaustion from doing nothing. I wasn't actually doing anything taxing, but I'd be wiped out. The constant mental scanning and emotional monitoring drained all of my energy, and I couldn’t understand why I was tired all the time.

For highly sensitive people who are also queer, this isn't just anxiety. It's your nervous system doing what it learned to do: stay alert in environments where being yourself didn’t feel safe.

Recognising it's a pattern

Things shifted when I understood that much of this anxiety and stress was about patterns of thinking and learned behaviour. My body had got really good at staying alert because it needed to. The hypervigilance had helped me navigate spaces that weren't always safe for queer people like me. But I was now mostly in different spaces, and I was more comfortable in my own skin. My nervous system just hadn't caught up yet.

So I started noticing the patterns:

• Feeling anxious before events, even ones I wanted to go to

• Absorbing others' emotions and energy

• Mental chatter stuck in problem mode

• Struggling to rest without feeling guilty or unproductive

These were habits I had learned over time.

How things changed

Change didn’t happen in one big breakthrough. It was a combination of practical steps and a fundamental shift in how I understood what was happening.

I found the right people. Not just queer people, but queer people who got my sensitivity. People who didn't expect me always to be resilient or have it together. A therapist and a Coach who understood.

I learned some helpful tools. Grounding techniques gave me something to do when tension built; slow breathing and relaxing my body helped, especially at first.

I set boundaries. Leaving conversations when they got uncomfortable and spending less, or no, time with people who I didn't trust.

But the biggest shift? I started seeing my hypervigilance differently.

I realised I wasn't actually responding to the world around me; I was responding to my thoughts about the world. The constant scanning wasn't keeping me safer. It was just my mind running old patterns, creating feelings of threat even when I wasn't in danger.

This really changed everything. I stopped treating my hypervigilance like an enemy I had to defeat. I started recognising it as temporary mental activity, some thinking that it would shift on its own, especially when my body felt calm.

Sometimes I'd notice fearful thoughts, and they'd pass quickly. Sometimes they'd stick around. But I wasn't taking them as seriously anymore. I wasn't building my whole day around managing and navigating them or getting stuck in believing them. I connected back to a quieter place inside myself, beneath all the noise. From there, different choices became obvious.

The hypervigilance didn't disappear overnight. But it faded as I stopped feeding it so much serious attention.

A less stressful life

I'm not scanning all the time anymore. Not because I found the perfect technique, but because I stopped believing my feeling of security came from monitoring everything.

These days, I can be in spaces without running threat assessments. My body's different, more relaxed. That came from understanding where my experience was really coming from, and working with my body.

I still have moments where old thinking patterns show up. Certain situations trigger familiar fears. But now I recognise them as thoughts, not facts. They pass. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. But they always pass.

The difference: hypervigilance used to feel like truth. Now it just feels like thinking.

For Queer HSPs still stuck

If you're still constantly scanning, here's what helped me most:

Start with practical support. Find people who get it. Try grounding techniques when you're overwhelmed to get you into your body and out of your head. Set boundaries where you need to. These things can help create some space.

But also look at what's creating the feeling. Your hypervigilance isn't just about the world being unsafe. It's also about the thoughts you're having about the world, moment to moment.

This doesn't mean discrimination isn't real or that caution is wrong. Fear looks different to danger, and there are real dangers in the world for a lot of queer people. Finding the spaces where you can feel safer is vital. But running a constant internal alarm system isn't protecting you as much as it feels like it is. Mostly, it's exhausting you.

The good news is you don't need years of healing before you can relax. And you don't need to fix every single trauma or perfect your nervous system regulation. You really can start with one breath and one new thought.

And by seeing that you're sometimes living in thought-created feelings, and thought changes naturally. When you see this, even a little bit, your system starts settling on its own. Not because you made it happen, but because you're no longer adding fuel to the fire, which has felt very helpful for me as a queer highly sensitive person needing to turn down the flames.

Notice when you're caught in hypervigilant thinking. Not to stop it or fix it, but just to see it for what it is: temporary thinking, not reality. Your inner wisdom is already there underneath all that overstimulated internal noise.

Use the tools that help. Set the boundaries that make sense. But don't get so caught up in managing your hypervigilance. The goal isn't to never feel vigilant again; it’s to make it the exception instead of your default setting.

Choose calm.

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Aimee Tasker is a coach for highly sensitive LGBTQ+ people who want to create heart-led, nervous system-friendly lives and businesses. Aimee brings grounded, compassionate support to those navigating change, self-discovery, or entrepreneurship. She founded Sensitive and Queer to support LGBTQ+ HSPs to understand their sensitivity as a strength, build confidence and clarity, and take aligned action without burning out.

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