I can relate. I do call it hypervigilance and it seems to me that it's really about learning so early to scan the environmnet - and to scan so thoroughly as a way to survive, or at least to try to prepare yourself for what was coming next, that we hold onto it as a way of maintaining our precious self-preservation skills.

Sometimes I find that it gets in the way. I'm generally pretty accurate in my take on things (that sounds so conceited -that's not the way I mean it - just that I do pretty well in reading people) but sometimes my hypervigilance stops me from trusting someone who actually might be trustworthy.

That gets in the way of relationships. I don't really know how to tone it down. Any thoughts?