Am I too sensitive?
You're not too sensitive, you're accurately picking up on things other people miss or ignore, and nobody ever taught you what to do with the information once you have it. The question itself usually comes from someone else, a parent, a partner, a boss, telling you that your reaction to something real was the actual problem.
What's actually happening
Your nervous system is running a finer-grained scan than most people's. You catch the half-second delay before someone answers a question, the word they chose instead of the one they meant, the flatness in a text that reads normal to everyone else in the group chat. None of that is imagined. What happens next is the part that gets labeled a problem: you feel the hit before you can name it, and it comes out as tears, or going quiet for two days, or replaying a sentence from Tuesday on Thursday night. The detection is precise. The processing speed is what people are actually reacting to.
Why this makes sense
Somewhere back in your history, paying close attention to shifts in mood was not optional, it was how you stayed safe or stayed loved. Kids who grow up with an unpredictable parent, a house where the temperature could change without warning, or a caregiver whose attention had to be earned, develop exactly this kind of radar. It's not fragility. It's a skill you built under pressure, the same way someone who grew up near a fault line learns to notice tremors nobody else feels. The problem isn't that the radar exists. It's that it never got told the emergency is over, so it stays on in rooms that are actually safe.
What genuinely helps
Separate the noticing from the story you build on top of it within the first sixty seconds, because that's where the spiral starts. Noticing your friend seemed short with you is data. Deciding within a minute that she's pulling away, that you did something wrong, that this is how it always goes, is a narrative your radar wrote without evidence. Try writing down just the observation, no interpretation, and wait a day before acting on any conclusion. Also stop auditioning your reactions for other people's approval before you're allowed to have them. You're allowed to feel something before you've confirmed it's a reasonable amount to feel.
When this runs your life, it usually traces to one underlying pattern. For this, it is most often the Mirror rhythm, the thing under the behavior.