Are you perceptive?
Many people call themselves hypersensitive. This test separates two things that word confuses: what you perceive, and what it costs you. Five dimensions, placed at a given moment, from your answers alone.
30 questions and 4 context questions · one at a time · about 8 minutes · immediate result
What this test says about itself
This test has no diagnostic value and replaces no medical or psychological advice. It does not measure an aptitude and delivers no clinical result.
It places five dimensions at a given moment, from your answers alone. Thirty questions, then five context questions, about eight minutes. Your address is recorded only if you ask to receive your result. Your answers are kept anonymously, without your address or any identifier, for research on perceptibility. Nothing makes it possible to trace them back to you.
Answer according to what is generally true for you, not according to what you would wish.
The principle, explained before you begin
Many people call themselves hypersensitive. The word has become an explanation for everything, although it names no recognised disorder and says nothing about what is really at play.
What is called by that name covers two very different things, which must be separated.
A broad perception: you pick up more than average. That is neither a quality nor a flaw. It is a fact.
A cost: what you pick up passes through you, exhausts you, scatters you, or complicates your relationships. It is this cost that causes suffering, not the perception itself.
One person can perceive a great deal without it costing them anything. Another can perceive moderately and pay a high price. These are two opposite situations, and they do not call for the same thing.
Perceiving more is therefore not progress in itself. Balance is not found at the maximum. A broad, unstructured perception costs more than it serves — which is precisely what many discover too late.
This test separates those two things: what you perceive on one side, what it costs you on the other.
A research position
This test and its reading grid come from the research work that M. Mischa Harmeijer has devoted to heightened perception for years. He observes and analyses this phenomenon in his practice, and has documented it in writing since 2013 — texts, personal observations, and several hundred documented accompaniments whose systematic analysis made it possible to distinguish what the common term “hypersensitivity” confuses. These observations and conclusions have been taken up in several books and publications devoted to the subject.
To this practice is added the field: at the public meetings he holds each year, in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, M. Mischa Harmeijer talks with thousands of people. Many arrive with the same label — hypersensitive — and the same finding: the label describes what they endure, never what produces it. No one has asked them the question of the cause.
This research leads to a precise position: hypersensitivity is not a nature, it is a state. The emotional state of submersion produced by an unmastered flow of information. Hypersensitivity names a consequence, without shedding light on the mechanism that produces it — to stop there is to settle into managing the effect, without ever asking the question of the cause.
The Centre makes the opposite hypothesis: this state has an identifiable cause — the overflow of an unmastered heightened perception — and this cause can be worked on. That is what the term PPA, Person with Heightened Perception, designates: the notion of perceptibility, introduced and developed by M. Mischa Harmeijer in his writings, brought back to what a test can situate — a flow that exceeds the ordinary rate, whether that perception is still endured or already mastered.
Five last questions
They do not count in your scores. They serve only to read you correctly: what you have described does not mean the same thing depending on your age and on how long you have lived with it.
Like the rest of this test, your answers are not recorded.
A testimony
“I did not know it was a faculty”
A former subject recounts the passage from perception endured to perception understood. An extract from the film Words from former subjects, shot at the Centre. The film is in French.
This test is an orientation tool, without diagnostic value. The approaches of Centre EPÉU belong to a complementary field of observation and perceptive structuring, outside any care in the regulatory sense. They are in no case a substitute for a diagnosis or for medical, psychological or psychiatric treatment. In case of significant suffering, consult a health professional. Read the full note
In case of dark thoughts or distress in France, the 3114 (suicide prevention line) answers at any hour, free of charge.