Standing at a supermarket checkout, Juliet Owen-Nuttall felt a rising panic. Her heart was racing; she felt nauseous and weak to the point of needing to lean against the conveyor belt.

But none of these symptoms occurred as a result of something that was happening to her. Instead, she found herself on the verge of a full-blown panic attack because the payment card belonging to the woman at the till, a stranger, had been declined.

Others in front of Juliet in the queue seemed oblivious to the scene unfolding as the woman, embarrassed, searched her purse for another card.

Meanwhile Juliet’s mind, already overwhelmed by the hordes of shoppers and bright overhead lights, was scanning for possible scenarios – job loss, a controlling husband, thieves – which might have led to this ‘poor woman’ being out of funds.

Eventually, Juliet had to walk away, leaving her husband with the loaded trolley while she focused on her breathing and tried to avoid breaking down altogether.

This apparent over-reaction is far from an isolated incident, but rather an everyday occurrence for Juliet, 50.

Since childhood she has frequently been called a ‘drama queen’ – but the reality is more unexpected.

A psychologist has officially diagnosed her as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), clinically defined as someone with ‘increased central nervous system sensitivity to physical, emotional or social stimuli’.

What that means for Juliet is a distracting – even disabling – capacity to feel other people’s emotions as if they were hers. It’s like being the world’s most empathetic person – with no ability to switch it off.

‘Life as a Highly Sensitive Person is very hard,’ says Juliet, a married mum of one from Shaftesbury, Dorset. ‘I am hyper-aware of everything that’s going on around me and have always had this innate ability to read other people’s energy – to sense from the subtlest facial expression or shift in body language when they are worried, scared, angry, whatever.’

But being an HSP isn’t just tuning into people’s outward emotions with pinpoint accuracy – it’s experiencing their inner life too.

‘My biggest struggles are trying to work out who is feeling those underlying emotions,’ she says. ‘Are they mine or someone else’s? It’s often very hard for me to tell.

‘If I overhear a couple arguing, for instance, I experience all the emotions, as well as sensations in my body, of the person on the receiving end of the anger.

‘If I’m around someone who’s stressed about work or because they’re running late, it might as well be happening to me given the tension I feel all over my body.

‘People find it challenging enough getting through the day navigating their own experiences and feelings, but it’s utterly exhausting for HSPs who take on everyone else’s too.’

A century ago her hyper-sensitivity would have been dismissed as ‘hysteria’ and, in more recent times, some may have called it the behaviour of a snowflake.

It is, she says, a blessing that her husband Daniel shares her sensitivities to noise and crowds, so is ‘very understanding’.

The term HSP was coined in the mid-1990s when psychologist Elaine Aron published her book The Highly Sensitive Person.

Aron theorises that HSPs suffer from a hyper-evolved sense of danger, probably a result of inherited genes, which means they’re able to ‘read’ other human emotions to an extraordinary degree.

Later research suggests that HSPs may have higher levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which can contribute to their heightened responsiveness to stimuli, while others have even cited childhood trauma and a lack of parental warmth as potential causes.

Remarkably, 20 per cent of people are believed to fit the criteria for HSPs, according to a 2018 study of scans measuring sensory processing sensitivity in the brain.

Actors Nicole Kidman and Miranda Hart, and most recently David Bowie’s artist daughter Lexi Jones, all identify as HSPs.

After learning of the extreme empathy of the HSP, Jones, 24, said: ‘I finally found the words for what I’ve been feeling my whole life.’ She added: ‘I notice tiny details others seem to miss, get overwhelmed by sounds and textures, and either shut down or lash out when things become too much.

‘I’ve also had a history of being misread and labelled as anxious, intense, depressed or dramatic, but none of those labels ever explained the full picture.’

Juliet had also been treated for anxiety and depression before her HSP diagnosis. There is no question this extreme form of empathy has had a huge impact on her, leading her to give up her career as a firefighter after experiencing PTSD and having ‘very few’ friends because she can’t cope with the ‘responsibility’.

Being an HSP even caused Juliet to attempt to take her own life while five months pregnant with her daughter Lyra, now five.

‘After years of trying to get pregnant, once it happened, I was so overwhelmed with dread, over how I’d cope as a mum and fear of giving birth, on top of worry that my daughter would experience the world as intensely as I do, that I thought the only way out was to kill myself,’ she recalls. ‘Thankfully, my husband found me before I succeeded and got me the help I needed.’

It was this shocking turn of events, when Juliet was 45, that led to her finally getting a referral for support – initially for pre-natal anxiety – from the perinatal mental health team and an explanation for the sensitivity that had always plagued her.

‘The psychologist I was referred to said: “I actually think you’re highly sensitive and I think this is why you’ve struggled all your life”,’ says Juliet. ‘It was such a relief, hearing her say it and to finally have an explanation for why I feel the way I do. Until then, I’d always imagined I was just “weird”.’

As her experience shows, it is an oft-overlooked condition. While those who lack empathy have long been pathologised as sociopaths or psychopaths, little attention has been given to the other end of the spectrum.

But as Juliet’s suicide attempt shows, there are significant downsides to feeling too much. When Lyra was born, the condition became worse than ever.

‘I couldn’t stop worrying that something terrible might happen to her and hearing her cry was unbearable for me,’ she says. ‘Babies cry a lot – when they’re hungry, tired, need a nappy change – and every discomfort she experienced felt like a knife going through me. I was haunted by destructive thoughts. I’d wanted a baby for so long I felt horrendous guilt about the fear and dread I had now that it had happened.’

As well as seeing a psychologist, Juliet was supported by the local health authority perinatal team during her pregnancy and throughout the first year of her daughter’s life.

She also had Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), a talking therapy based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which incorporates mindfulness and distress tolerance, and is designed for people who feel emotions intensely.

While she embraced the treatment, it could have come far sooner. As far back as she can remember, Juliet had a sense that she experienced the world differently from others. As a little girl, she even thought she might be able to see, or feel, ghosts.

One vivid memory comes from a trip to a Roman burial site near Chichester, aged five. Sobbing, she refused to join her family on the visit. ‘I remember sitting on the ground and refusing to get any closer to the site while my parents insisted: “You’re coming because we’re going”,’ recalls Juliet. ‘Although I couldn’t put it into words, I had this strong sense of there being something sinister, frightening, there. Although I’ve never seen one, I’ve sensed the presence of ghosts many times since and I really don’t like it.’

Juliet and Daniel, 43, run an 18th-century pub and she refuses to be alone in the bar after hours, having ‘sensed’ ghosts there too.

And that’s not the only thing she avoids. Her sensitivities mean that working behind the bar, with all the noise and customer interaction that entails, would be far too draining, so she sticks to managing the books and dealing with the admin. In fact a pub, with its cacophony of clinking glasses and multiple conversations happening at once, is quite a trial for her.

‘My senses will start doing the whole Superman thing of hearing every conversation, including all the struggles – at work, with health, in relationships – that people are having and then I’ll feel completely overloaded.

‘I get a pulsing sensation around my solar plexus, my belly button area, and feel panic, a high level of anxiety, which makes me just want to run.

‘Since starting DBT I’ve learnt, instead of panicking, to try to calm myself by asking questions such as: What emotions are you feeling right now? Is this yours? Is this someone else’s? And to reassure myself that, up until that point, I was feeling OK and nothing has changed in my life, so it’s OK to calm down.’

This approach also helps Juliet manage her anxieties around causing upset to others. For another part of being an HSP is the crushing fear of causing hurt or dislike.

Since Juliet is able to interpret the most fleeting facial expression, she can instantly see if she has caused offence, for example, and can feel guilty for days as a result. Managing staff at the pub can be a minefield.

Using DBT, she will ask herself: ‘Have I done anything wrong?’ and ‘Did I intend to upset this person?’ and it helps her see reason.

While it’s not a ‘cure’, and she will always be a HSP, Juliet’s life would, she says, have been much easier if she had been in possession of these tools many years ago. They may, for example, have enabled her to carry on working as a firefighter, a job she loved but had to quit in 2010 because of the ‘crippling emotions’ it brought with it.

As the only female in her crew, Juliet would usually be assigned the job of supporting and calming victims of road traffic accidents while colleagues cut them out of their vehicle.

‘I’d often discover later that the victim had died in hospital and endlessly torment myself with thoughts that I could have done more to save them,’ she says. ‘These thoughts would go round and round in my head and I’d blame myself.

‘When I talked to colleagues about it, their response was much more rational – that we’d done all we could and the injuries were too severe – but there was no logic in my reactions, which were entirely emotional.’

Juliet lasted two years in the job before her GP signed her off sick.

She also trained as a shiatsu massage practitioner, believing she could draw on her natural intuition and channel some of her emotional responses into healing energy. However, that proved too much as well.

The practice involves using finger pressure and stretching to balance energy flow in the body and Juliet found herself getting mental images of her clients’ traumatic pasts.

‘If, for example, they were there because of back pain, once I got to that area I’d see a sort of screenshot of a memory, like it was something lodged in their body,’ recalls Juliet. ‘I’d say, “So I’ve got a sense of this scene (it could be an abusive ex, an aggressive teacher or parent or even a sexual assault), is this something that happened to you?”

‘The answer was always “Yes”, so I’d work on releasing that area.

‘I was very good at it and got a lot of clients over the nine years I worked as a practitioner, however I couldn’t carry on. The impact on me was far too great.

‘I would absorb all of their sadness, fear, anger and carry it around in my body instead.’

Since having her daughter, Juliet has worked as a ‘fertility wellbeing practitioner’, supporting mostly older women trying to conceive.

She says: ‘I can only work with women who take responsibility for their own health and mindset. Otherwise, as a HSP, I end up taking it on and getting overwhelmed, as I did in my previous careers.’

Since turning 50, her thoughts have also turned to supporting daughter Lyra, who she believes may be an HSP too.

‘She’s finding school really challenging,’ says Juliet. ‘I was chatting with her teacher the other day, when one of the kids said something and got told off. My daughter looked over and I could see her physically recoil.

‘The teacher noticed and said: “Lyra sees, hears and is aware of absolutely everything”. I told her: “I have always been the same”.’

Knowing the impact it has had on her own life, Juliet understandably worries about her sensitive child. But at least she now has strategies to cope.

‘I’m really pleased that highly sensitive people are finally being recognised – and not just dismissed as dramatic or hysterical,’ says Juliet.

‘My support should mean my daughter’s life will be way less challenging than mine has been.’