High sensitivity · Zen Books
Feeling a lot isn’t a manufacturing defect
A trait shared by roughly one person in five, studied for thirty years and still poorly explained. Here are the books I wrote to explain it with rigour and without overpromising.
Christian Duarte · Molecular biologist and science writer
What high sensitivity is
And what it isn’t
It isn’t a diagnosis, it isn’t an illness and it isn’t shyness. It is a temperament trait that the psychologist Elaine Aron described in the nineties and that has since been studied with instruments of its own. People with this trait process the information that reaches them more deeply, and that brings a cost and an advantage at the same time.
Research sums it up in four markers. They are easier to recognise together than apart: whoever has the trait has all four.
None of my books promises that sensitivity will turn into a superpower. What they offer is an understanding of the trait and concrete tools for the days when it weighs heavy. If you were looking for therapy, this isn’t it, and it is worth knowing that before you buy.
Personas Altamente Sensibles
The main book · 30 days · Spanish edition
Thirty days, one per chapter, each with a short reading, an exercise and a question to write about. It starts with understanding the trait, moves on to what wears you down most -overstimulation, boundaries, work, relationships- and ends with what can be sustained once the month is over.
It is also written for the people alongside: partners, mothers and fathers, teachers and therapists who want to understand someone close to them.
The collection
Four ways in · all in Spanish for now
Niños Altamente Sensibles
Corazones Valientes
Diario para PASFree download
Forty colouring sheets
Plants and animals in line drawings, as a print-ready PDF. Colouring keeps the hands busy and turns down the noise inside, which is exactly what is needed at the end of a heavy day. I’ll send it to your inbox and let you know when I publish something new.
Christian Duarte
Molecular biologist · Writer and science communicator
I am a molecular biologist, with postgraduate training in biomedicine and neuroscience, a master’s degree in Advanced Therapies and Biotechnological Innovation and a doctorate in social sciences. It is an unusual mix, and it explains quite well how I write.
Until 2023 I was a university lecturer and researcher. Since then I have been writing and communicating science independently, under the Zen Books imprint. What I try to do in every book is easy to say and hard to do: tell what the evidence supports, point out where it ends and not fill the gap with promises.
My author website brings together the rest of my books.