There is a profound difference in the ability to discern what is a mountain and what is a molehill when you train yourself to form the constructive mindset. It is true that some potatoes are mountains, but others are molehills. In order to have the skill to triage and prioritize the potatoes in your life, you require constructive mindset training.
When you are living your life within the destructive mindset, your emotions tend to have the control in the decisions you make and hence your actions. Our emotions are like sensory organs that detect potatoes (e.g. injustice). Since our negative emotions are not necessarily pleasant to experience, and since there is a risk of understanding our or others’ emotions destructively, we can very easily consider our emotions to be the potatoes and manage our emotions so as to calm or soothe them. Emotions in this way have the control over your life. You make your life be about emotions.
Whenever an emotion detects something wrong (a potato), you may experience stress, tension, anxiety, etc. Since you live as if your emotions are the potatoes, rather than using your emotions to alert you to the potatoes you encounter, you develop high sensitivity to the potatoes in your life, and lose the discernment of specificity. Emotions are already sensitive, so I think most people have high sensitivity as it is, unless you have trained yourself to turn off your emotions, which is what the “repress” chapter in the potato book addresses.
But if you are aware of your sensitive emotions and live as though your emotions are the potato, then your only specificity is linked to your emotions. You manage your emotions, and come up with plans to lessen the impact of what you feel. You seek to decrease your anxiety. You have no specificity, as you live only to relieve your emotions. Your actions may look very caring and loving, or you may become addicted to a substance that you find calms you down. You have lost the ability to discern the difference between a mountain and a molehill, and there is a good chance that everything you encounter is a mountain, especially if what you are feeling is intense. You become a slave to your emotions, which is a very difficult way to live.
In order to get the most out of your life, learn to accept your emotions as a sensory organ. In the same way that you accept your eyes detect light and your ears detect sound, your emotions detect potatoes. But you do not see those potatoes with your eyes; you “see” them with your emotions. Learn the constructive mindset and train yourself to use your emotions to see the potatoes and address them. You become able to enhance the sensitivity of your emotions by balancing them with the specific potato they are alerting you to. You become able to tell the difference between a mountain and a molehill. You learn to prioritize, understand boundaries, and delegate as necessary. In this way you can relate with yourself and others in the context of what happens rather than making your life be about the emotions you feel. As our eyes help us to appreciate the various colours in our world, you will also experience the emotional texture that accompanies the ups and downs in the adventure that is your life story.