Heightened sensitivity makes me feel like I don’t fit in
Strictly champion tells AMY PACKER why she walked away from the show at the height of her dancing success
RETURNING to “normal” life after lockdown has been taxing for many. Learning to push aside anxiety when stepping into a busy bar or restaurant takes time, as does dealing with longer days now commuting and socialising are back on the agenda.
But former Strictly Come Dancing champion Camilla Sacre-Dallerup is feeling it all particularly intensely.
The 46-year-old describes herself as a highly sensitive person (HSP) – someone who has heightened sensitivity to sights, sounds, emotional cues and other stimuli.
While most of us are unlikely to have heard this term before, it’s estimated as many as one in five of us fall into this category.
It was coined a decade ago by psychologist Elaine Aron, who found the part of the brain which controls empathy and sensory information is different in people who score highly on a scale of sensitivity, causing them to become overstimulated more quickly.
Camilla, who has hung up her dancing shoes and now lives in LA working as a life coach and author, had no idea this was why she always felt so wiped out after performing, while her co-stars were ready to hit the town. “I never realised why I was so exhausted,” she says. “When the show was over on a Saturday night, I wouldn’t go out and party with the others. I had to go home and get my sleep.”
It was as if the people, lights and music had stolen her energy and left her extremely stressed.
“You go into fight and flight,” she says. “I can only explain it as a kind of anxious feeling in the body where you think, ‘I’m not OK here. I’ve got to take myself away from this, this doesn’t feel good’.
“You want to run away from that feeling – and it’s not just noises and crowds but smell as well.”
SLEEP has always been Camilla’s way of coping with the problem. “I always knew that sleep was important but I never knew it was important because I was an HSP.
“My eight hours each night are absolutely non-negotiable for me and have been for many, many years. If I don’t get my eight hours, I don’t feel good mentally or physically.
“So back when I was doing Strictly, Sundays used to be my self-care day where I knew I could recover. Even now, as a judge on New Zealand’s Dancing With The Stars, I always schedule in rest time after a couple of shows.”
Being an HSP has impacted Camilla’s confidence as well as her social and working life. “I always felt like I was that boring friend a little bit. I know that if I go to a big party or festival – or even just an office with a lot of people – I can feel so over-stimulated that I have to rest.
“When people start drinking and things start to become loud I begin to feel uncomfortable, so now I let my friends know in advance that I’ll be leaving early. I wouldn’t have done that 20 years ago.
“I would have just sat there and felt uncomfortable and then paid for it the next day.
“You find yourself wanting so much to join in the fun and not have to feel like you have to get home.The feeling of not fitting in is something I deal with every day.
“I’m going to sound like an old lady, but it is what it is. It’s taken me a long time to accept others may find me boring and that’s ok,” she adds.
“Now I pick nature settings for hanging out with friends. Instead of going to a noisy restaurant, where I know as an HSP that’s not very comfortable, I’ll suggest going for a walk, having a picnic or taking the dogs to the park. Anything with a more earthy, grounding setting.”
In the past, there were times when Camilla wouldn’t rest enough.
“I would just push through and that’s when I burnt myself out completely,” she says.
“It feels like an emotional and physical kind of hangover in the body from stimulation.”
That was one of the reasons she walked away from Strictly at the height of her success. “I needed to find a life for myself where I could be comfortable,” she explains. “Now I’m self-employed and that works because I can put in boundaries and schedule in some meditation, a hike or go to the ocean if that’s what I need to be OK.”
The slower pace of life forced on us all by the coronavirus pandemic is something Camilla and fellow sufferers have appreciated.
“For HSPs, lockdown has been brilliant,” she admits. “There are so many things we haven’t missed. That’s a wake-up call in itself – lockdown has made me question how we are going to live when we go back to normal.
“Having had more time at home, I’ve been easing myself into bedtime every evening with meditation. Then in the morning, I will repeat affirmations about how I want to feel and what I want to achieve that day.”
Camilla, who has been married to former Hollyoaks star Kevin Sacre since 2010, remembers starting to experience these feelings of overload when she was young.
“I felt things so deeply my entire childhood and people used to say, ‘Oh, you’re so sensitive, don’t worry about it’. I used to wish I could make the feeling go away. It was overwhelming and obviously I didn’t know how to fix it.
“I’ve talked to Kevin about it and how I feel and I know we are very different. Sometimes, however, I choose to do something he really enjoys, like go to a big sports game with him, even though I know it’ll make me feel uncomfortable.
“Then we might go away for a weekend or on holiday somewhere and immerse ourselves in nature, which I obviously love and we can very much enjoy together.
“So we’ve found a way where there is a little bit of both in our lives.We compromise.”
● It’s Not You, It’s Me by Camilla Sacre-Dallerup (£9.99; Watkins Publishing) is available from Amazon. For more information about Camilla, visit zenme.tv