Highly Sensitive Brains Pay a Price: How Workplace Setbacks Fuel Daily Fatigue

Some people seem to absorb the emotional weather of a workplace more intensely than others. A curt email from a supervisor, a colleague taking credit for shared work, or a meeting that goes badly wrong can linger in the mind for hours, keeping the nervous system on high alert long after the moment has passed. New research published in Discover Psychology by Antje Schmitt of the University of Groningen suggests that this heightened reactivity is not merely a personality quirk but a measurable pathway linking everyday negative work events to exhaustion. The study, conducted as a ten-day diary investigation with 183 employees producing 1,158 daily observations, reveals that people high in a trait called sensory processing sensitivity respond to impactful negative events at work with increased hypervigilance, and that this cognitive state in turn drives daily fatigue.

The theoretical backbone of the study is the Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress, or CATS, a framework that describes how stressful situations trigger sustained cognitive activation. According to this theory, when an event is perceived as threatening or consequential, the brain mobilizes attentional resources toward monitoring the environment for further danger. This state of hypervigilance, a persistent scanning of surroundings and situations for potential threats, is adaptive in short bursts but metabolically and cognitively expensive when maintained throughout a working day. Schmitt proposed that the perceived impact of a negative work event, rather than the event itself, is what sets this activation in motion. A minor inconvenience that barely registers will not sustain vigilance, but an event that feels consequential, such as a public reprimand or a failed presentation with career implications, can keep the stress system engaged for hours.

The second pillar of the study is a vulnerability-based perspective on sensory processing sensitivity, a trait describing individual differences in how deeply people process sensory and emotional information. Sensory processing sensitivity is commonly assessed through several facets, and this research focused specifically on ease of excitation, abbreviated as EOE. Individuals high in ease of excitation tend to be quickly and strongly aroused by external stimulation, including negative social experiences. From the vulnerability perspective, this facet represents a heightened susceptibility to overstimulation rather than a general advantage. The prediction was straightforward: employees high in EOE would react to impactful negative work events with stronger hypervigilance than their less sensitive colleagues, and this amplified cognitive activation would translate into greater fatigue by the end of the day.

To test these ideas, Schmitt employed an intensive longitudinal design in which participants reported on their daily experiences across ten consecutive working days. Each day, employees rated the perceived impact of any negative work events they had encountered, their level of hypervigilance, and their fatigue. This diary approach is methodologically powerful because it separates within-person processes from between-person differences. Instead of asking whether sensitive people are generally more tired, the design asks whether, on a specific day when a negative event occurs, the same person shows more hypervigilance and fatigue than on days without such events. This within-person focus substantially reduces the confounding introduced by stable traits, chronic workload, or baseline health differences.

The statistical analysis used multilevel path analysis, a technique suited to nested data in which daily observations are clustered within individuals. The results supported the hypothesized moderated process. On days when employees perceived negative work events as highly impactful, they reported heightened hypervigilance, and this hypervigilance was in turn associated with higher daily fatigue. Crucially, the strength of this chain depended on ease of excitation. For employees high in EOE, the pathway from event impact through hypervigilance to fatigue was markedly stronger, indicating that the same objectively comparable setback produces a deeper and more exhausting cognitive response in sensitive individuals. The findings were largely robust when the author included various covariates in additional analyses, strengthening confidence that the pattern was not an artifact of confounding variables.

An important nuance emerges in the study of related traits. Schmitt also tested whether low sensory threshold, another facet of sensory processing sensitivity, and neuroticism, the broad personality dimension associated with negative emotionality, moderated the process in the same way. Neither moderation effect reached statistical significance, although the estimated effects were similar in magnitude to those for ease of excitation. The author explicitly cautions that the apparent specificity of ease of excitation should be interpreted carefully. It remains possible that with larger samples these related traits would also show significant moderation, or that ease of excitation simply captures the most relevant variance within a broader family of sensitivity constructs. This honesty about statistical boundaries is a reminder that trait research often involves constructs that overlap substantially, and single studies rarely settle questions of which facet matters most.

The study makes two notable contributions to the occupational health psychology literature. First, it addresses the limited research on hypervigilance as a daily attentional state in workplace settings. Hypervigilance has been studied extensively in clinical contexts, particularly in post-traumatic stress, but its role as a transient, day-level cognitive response to ordinary work stressors has received far less attention. By measuring hypervigilance daily and positioning it as the mediating mechanism between event impact and fatigue, the study offers a concrete cognitive pathway that could be targeted in future interventions. Second, the work highlights ease of excitation as a trait that predicts how employees respond to impactful negative events, moving beyond the common practice of treating sensory processing sensitivity as a single undifferentiated score.

The practical implications extend to both employees and organizations. For highly sensitive workers, the findings suggest that the aftermath of a negative event is not a matter of willpower or resilience in the colloquial sense; their nervous systems are genuinely more activated, and that activation consumes resources that would otherwise sustain energy and focus. Organizations might therefore consider how the impact of negative events can be softened through timely communication, fair procedures, and manager training, since it is the perceived impact rather than the event count that drives the fatigue process. For individuals, awareness that a day following a consequential setback may demand more recovery could inform decisions about scheduling demanding tasks, taking breaks, or engaging in recovery activities after work. Interventions aimed at reducing sustained vigilance, such as mindfulness practices or structured worry periods, might also be particularly valuable for this group, although the study itself did not test such interventions.

Several limitations frame the interpretation of the results. The data were collected in 2023 as part of a larger data collection effort, and the study relied on self-reported daily measures, which are vulnerable to common-method variance even when collected repeatedly over time. The sample of 183 employees and 1,158 daily observations is respectable for a diary design, but detecting moderation effects, which are notoriously small in multilevel models, requires caution, as the non-significant results for low sensory threshold and neuroticism illustrate. The study also examined a single day-level pathway; it does not establish whether repeated cycles of hypervigilance and fatigue accumulate into chronic exhaustion or burnout over longer periods, a question that would require longer time horizons. Finally, the research was conducted in a Dutch organizational context, and cross-cultural differences in how negative events are perceived and processed remain to be explored.

Nevertheless, the study offers a compelling and technically grounded account of why the same bad day at work can leave one person mildly annoyed and another completely drained. By connecting the Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress to the daily dynamics of work events and identifying ease of excitation as a vulnerability factor, the research transforms a familiar intuition, that sensitive people feel setbacks more deeply, into a testable and supported process model. The chain from event impact to hypervigilance to fatigue provides researchers with a template for studying other cognitive mechanisms, such as rumination or threat appraisal, that may similarly mediate the effects of daily stressors. For the growing community of researchers and practitioners interested in sensory processing sensitivity, the message is clear: understanding who is most affected by workplace adversity requires looking not just at what happens during the day, but at how deeply the mind keeps working after the event is over.

Subject of Research: The role of sensory processing sensitivity in daily hypervigilance and fatigue following negative work events

Article Title: Sensory processing sensitivity strengthens the relationship between impactful negative work events, hypervigilance, and daily fatigue

Article References: Schmitt, A. (2026). Sensory processing sensitivity strengthens the relationship between impactful negative work events, hypervigilance, and daily fatigue. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00897-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00897-z

Keywords: sensory processing sensitivity, ease of excitation, hypervigilance, daily fatigue, negative work events, Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress, occupational health psychology, diary study, multilevel path analysis, neuroticism, low sensory threshold, workplace stress