Feeling conflicted about getting the vaccine? Here’s how I decided.

If you are a highly sensitive person who has been feeling anxious about getting the vaccine, I want to say: I feel your pain. I know it feels overwhelming to make a decision like this.

As HSPs, we are naturally cautious, so when it comes to new situations, especially ones with so many different factors involved, it can feel like a lot!

On top of this natural caution, many of us are also pretty exhausted by this point. I have had many days recently when just the idea of making a decision, ANY decision, has made me feel like crawling back into bed. It’s as if my brain is fried, my mental circuits overloaded from making the hundreds of small decisions we’ve been making to keep ourselves safe for the past year.

So, if you’re feeling paralyzed or anxious about whether it’s even a good idea to get the vaccine, I understand. I have had many of those same questions and doubts. What if I made the wrong decision? What if the vaccine had some unintended effect?

In fact, when the vaccine first became available, I was almost happy that I wouldn’t have to decide for a while because I wasn’t eligible.

So, I had lots of doubts, and it felt almost impossible to decide. But in the end, I did decide. I got my second shot more than a week ago.

I thought I would share some things I did to get to the decision-making point. Your doubts & questions may be different, but my process of getting to the decision might be helpful to you. So, here goes:

I did a lot of Due Diligence: I am not a high-risk person. I am a deliberative, cautious person, especially when it comes to big things. So, I did a lot of due diligence. I tried to answer any questions that made me wary of taking the vaccine. For example: Like many other people, I wondered how the vaccine was developed so quickly when under normal vaccine development timelines, it can take many years. Understanding that the vaccine development did not start from scratch and built on years of prior research increased my trust in it.

Doing my research also made me aware of the bottomline: Wading through a lot of different news sources left me drowning in information. That felt overstimulating & anxiety-provoking to my highly sensitive self. So, I knew I needed to zoom out. As I took a pause, I realized that the bottomline is something that doesn’t get emphasized in news coverage/public dialogue as much as it should:

The biggest advantage of getting vaccinated is not that you will NEVER get the virus, but that EVEN IF you were to get the virus, vaccines do a wonderful job of protecting against death and serious illnesses.

I picked out a few people who I felt were trustworthy and followed them: I picked out a few people who seemed to explain both the research and their own thought process in a thoughtful, considered way. For example: I had been listening on and off to Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s Coronavirus Fact Vs. Fiction podcast over the past year. I’d, for example, listened to an episode where he talked about his logic for whether he would send kids off to school. I don’t have kids myself, but what he’d said had made a lot of sense to me.

So, I had built up a certain amount of understanding of his advice. So, when he talked about being optimistic about the vaccines, I listened. I also think it was crucial that I chose specific people. For example: I don’t always resonate with CNN’s news coverage (where I’d first seen Dr. Gupta many years ago), but I did resonate with him. I also paid special attention to how he and other people were advising their own families. Dr. Gupta, for example, talked about his parents getting the vaccine and was optimistic about it.

Since I was not in the front-of-the-line to get the vaccine, I inadvertently got a chance to see how the real numbers changed here in California: This increased my level of trust as well. Seeing the graphs trend downward and the number of Coronavirus cases fall down as more and more people got vaccinated also helped bring down some of my anxiety.

I weighed the risk of taking the vaccine against the risk of not doing anything: It has been interesting to talk to fellow sensitives during this time. A friend had travelled to a different country during the middle of the pandemic but told me she thought the vaccine was too risky. Another sensitive wondered whether I was really, ACTUALLY a low-risk person when I told them I was probably going to get the vaccine. But for me, while I felt anxious, I also, gradually, started feeling well-prepared. I had done my research & the benefits of getting vaccinated far outweighed the risks. I was also very aware that there was a big risk in not doing anything and I weighed that against the risks of any side effects.

I reframed my thinking about what risk IS: Even through all this, I had lots of days when I felt really anxious. One part of me really wanted a 100% risk guarantee. I’ve always thought of myself as a “low-risk person.” And this felt like a BIG risk. So, I felt like a deer in the headlights for a while. I even bought a book called You are What You Risk to figure this out. That helped.

Something right in the beginning caught my eye. It talked about how, in human languages, there was a time when there was no word for risk because risk was the equivalent of LIFE. Living is inherently risky. Somehow, this fact really helped me. It made me stop labeling myself a low-risk person. I thought not only of ways in which I am cautious, but also the times that I have taken positive risks, such as when I relocated from India to the States. You have to take some risk, and life does not come with guarantees, even though my anxious self really wanted them.

I tried to soothe and bring awareness to my history of trauma: If you are someone who has a history of trauma, you know why making a decision can feel so paralyzing. It can feel as if something terrible can happen again just because something really painful DID happen once upon a time. That can make us want to do NOTHING because we don’t want to take any risk, whatsoever. I really tried to go back and forth with this part of me, the frightened bit that irrationally thought that if I did nothing, I would also risk nothing. This was a little part frozen in time. Just being aware of this helped a lot.

I realized that as a highly sensitive person who pays attention to subtleties, my 70% certainty was good enough.

With all my research and discussions, I became around 70% certain that I wanted to get the vaccine. I realized I was never going to feel hundred percent surety (and of course, in this case, it was not even possible). I also realized that in the past, for all big decisions, I have always made a decision when I was at seventy percent, that my 70% is the same as other people’s 90%. I am hyper-aware of all the things that can go wrong.

So, this process of deciding was really interesting, for lack of a better word. It was almost as if for months, I was very undecided. I felt frozen. But at some point, the balance tipped. The more context I built for myself, the more I understood what I wanted to do.

I wanted to get the vaccine.

Some other things that helped me decide were thinking about how historically, wide-spread diseases have ended. It’s with advances in medicine. I also thought about how many people around the world don’t even have access to vaccines. I didn’t take the vaccine only for that reason, of course, but I definitely took my opportunity to get the vaccine a little more seriously because of that. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a place where vaccines are freely available.

In the end, even my small, niggling fears of the second dose didn’t come to pass.

So, in the end, I got the (Pfizer) vaccine. I’d also been scared about the effects of the second dose. But all I got was a sore, heavy arm and a very tiny amount of chills. So, that part of it worked out well. Every person has a different reaction, of course, but in my case, my fear did not materialize.

I would say I am cautiously optimistic about the vaccine. I know we might need a booster shot. I know there’s no 100% guarantee. But I know that I made the best decision I could with all the information that was available to me.

I shook myself out of my fear and I decided.

I know that even this decision is not available to everyone. If your employer wants you to get a vaccine, for example, you might have to get it to keep your job. That doesn’t feel quite right to an individualist like me. I think everyone should be able to make decisions about their own body themselves. But of course, I do see the other side too, that this is a public health crisis, and we’ll only resolve it through coming together.

If you’re feeling paralyzed, I would say: As a thoughtful person, you don’t have to just go and put your trust in someone else’s judgment. But you CAN trust yourself. Do your own research. Look at multiple news sources. Write down your list of questions. Do things like getting a news subscription that simplifies the research, if you need that. If you want to look at the practical rollout, look at how vaccine rollouts are going around the world in different countries and how the graphs are trending.

And then, decide for yourself. As a highly sensitive person, your deliberative, cautious style can be a real asset here. The trick is for us not to get stuck in the loop of worrying OR to get overwhelmed because of the information overload and not decide.

Ritu Kaushal is the author of The Empath’s Journey, a book with tools for highly sensitive people, and a Silver Medal awardee at the Rex Karamveer Chakra awards, co-presented by the United Nations in India & given to people creating social impact through their work.

P.S. In the past few months since I got the shot, things have developed. Now, it’s EVEN MORE important to get the vaccine because of the more contagious Delta variant. Here, in the U.S, states with low vaccination rates are now at an even higher risk.