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Hypervigilance is a heightened awareness of your surroundings. It's a common symptom of PTSD, as well as a few other conditions.

If you experience hypervigilance, then you might feel like you're always on edge, easily startled, oversensitive to danger, or unable to relax and feel safe. You might notice that your body reaches for a fight-or-flight response much more quickly than other people or takes longer to calm down. Some people describe hypervigilance as being stuck in a fight-or-flight response even when their surroundings are safe and familiar.

Examples

One of the more commonly given examples of hypervigilance is discomfort with sitting with your back to a room, turning off the lights, or otherwise being physically vulnerable even when you rationally know that there's no danger. Hypervigilance isn't just about the physical environment, though- it can also affect your social environment and internal experiences.

You might find that you constantly monitor the thoughts and feelings of everyone around you, or that you can't emotionally tolerate conflict and disagreement. People might see you as unpredictable or sensitive because you react very strongly to small things. Criticism might feel like an attack even if you asked for the critique.

Small, passing comments might feel like they imply something that the person never actually said (E.G. someone says, "nice sweater," and you get stuck wondering if they mean that they hated the shirt you wore yesterday). You might feel that other people have to be kept happy at all times or else something terrible might happen. People pleasing, reassurance seeking, or controlling behavior might feel like your only options to stay safe socially.

On the other hand, you might feel unable to trust others, or you might push people away because the presence of someone else feels unsafe. You might constantly watch for signs that someone is going to hurt or leave you, then act on those signs even if the person hasn't actually done anything to you. It's also possible that you might decide not to care about anything or anyone so that nothing can hurt you.

Some people feel stuck constantly thinking of everything that could possibly go wrong and how they'd respond to it, and they might interpret small misfortunes as signs that everything is about to fall apart. Small body signals that most people ignore could be interpreted as signs of danger or illness. A person might try very hard to avoid all thoughts and feelings that cause discomfort even if doing so hurts them- even moreso if those things are related to a past trauma.

Hypervigilance can be exhausting. You're aware of so many things all the time, trying to juggle them all, and human bodies aren't made to do that 24/7. A lot of people wind up feeling tired, angry, depressed, or upset because they can't relax. It can make it hard to sleep or focus.

Our Experience

Personally, hypervigilance feels like ambient terror or uncomfortable physical alertness that doesn't have a clear cause or resolution. It's just there, constantly, like our brain taped down its alarm button. I usually describe it as "you know when you lean back in a chair and almost fall over, and you get that bolt of fear? That, but it doesn't stop."

It also shows up as difficulty trusting people and situations. In the past, I often got stuck in loops of trying to "fix" people because letting them be responsible for themselves felt unsafe, which did a lot of damage to everyone involved. Other people here were stuck pushing friends away, hurting themselves to try to calm down, or choosing not to have any friends in the first place. It didn't make the fear go away, but we didn't know what else we could do.

Hypervigilance doesn't have to be a permanent state of being, and it can be unlearned by learning coping skills that allow you to feel your emotions without being overwhelmed, then gently exposing yourself to discomfort or (perceived) risk and learning to tolerate it better.

Self-soothing skills have been extra-helpful for me, though it took a while to be able to do something like "take three deep breaths" without feeling worse. As kids, we were often punished for needing time to calm ourselves down, so a lot of us learned that we weren't allowed to take a moment to soothe ourselves. I had to figure out why it felt like I wasn't allowed to calm myself down before I could actually do it. Taking a deep breath has gotten easier now that I can recognize that trauma response and tell myself, "if someone gets mad at you for trying to calm down, then that's their problem, not yours".

I still have a hard time trusting people, but I've learned that they have to be responsible for themselves and their own issues. "Fixing" people doesn't help them. It takes away their chance to learn how to help themselves, hurting them in the long run.

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Don't threaten to do it, go research it, and actually give it a go!!! Most of the books for old crafts are out of copyright. Even if you don't get a job at whatever you try, or hell, even of you don't become in any way good at it, just learning and trying something new is good for you, and it gives you a greater understanding and appreciation for things.

get seduced by heavyteeth

Because they were speaking Spanish. Apparently.

He also used to be this way but about any "minority".... Up until "the incident".

My oldest sibling is my half sister from my mom's previous relationship. My mom is white and her old fiance was black, making my sister a mix race baby.

Apparently we were visiting for a family reunion with my dad's side of the family(all white) when "the incident" happened. I was like 3 at the time and have no memories of the event.

My dad said that everyone was talking in his dad's living room when my oldest sister came in and asked my mom to re-tie her hair since it came loose while playing.

Just as she finished fixing her hair, my grandpop said something along the lines of "that N***** hair" or "she's a cute kid even with that N***** hair" (the exact words have been lost to time) and you could hear a pin drop.

Thankfully, my oldest sister had not been exposed to any hate speech up until this time in her life, so she had simply thanked my mom and ran off to go play. But the way my dad tells this story...

He said he had never once been scared of my mom in his life, except in that moment. He described it in the same way one would describe seeing something otherworldly and possibly demonic crawling out of a corpse.

My mom told my grandpop he was going to come into the other room with her for a minute. They both disappeared for several minutes while everyone else kind of had awkward conversations for a while before they came out of the bedroom.

Grandpop then apologized to the room, found my oldest sister and told her he had used a bad word when talking while she was there and apologized for doing so, and then stayed relatively quiet for the rest of the trip.

He also apparently had NEVER used that kind of language again according to the rest of the family.

To this day, no one knows what she said to him! Apparently she was too angry to talk about it at the time and later had simply forgotten most everything because my mom has one of the shittiest memories of man kind!

But im not finding it easier to talk about AI with the people in my life who use it. The evils are both enormous and complex. I cannot, on the spot and in casual conversation, recite the colonial and political history that led to entire towns in Chile being devastated by AI data centers. It is unseemly to bring up how many women have had miscarriages because of lack of access to drinking water worsened by data center pollutants in places like Uruguay. How racist surveillance of the public in South Africa has been used as training data for AI companies. How AI companies would not limit their use of drinking water even during Arizona's most severe drought in history. How this whole paragraph isn't even scratching the surface of what is evil about AI companies.