Theme
11:12pm August 15, 2014
Anonymous asked: Hi, sorry for bothering you with this, I don't know who else to ask. How can you tell if you are experiencing sensory overload? I think I am right now but I really don't think I'm autistic so I'm not sure if it is that or something else but I really just want to be somewhere dark and quiet which is not a thing I can do because I have flatmates etc. I'm not sure what to do or where to look for advice but I feel like I might be doing something stupid if this continues.

If you go someplace dark and quiet and it gets better, it’s probably sensory overload.  If you have an aversion to light or motion or other specific things in any of your senses, it’s probably sensory overload or some component of sensory overload.  Getting away from the stimulus helps.  Sometimes immediately, sometimes over time.  Sometimes when I’m really overloaded, I lie down, and my brain just runs in circles for ages before it finally calms down, and it’s a really struggle to stay lying there until it’s ready to shut down.  But if I get up and do things, it only makes it worse.

I used to think that sensory overload always involved pain, then my pain got under better control and I realized that it didn’t.  I had to relearn my entire way of looking at overload.  I found that if I was around a lot of stimulus, I became able to understand fewer things, and do fewer things, and in general became slower, more sluggish, both physically and mentally.  And these were all things I hadn’t noticed individually before because the overriding feeling before had been searing nerve pain all over my body.  Neurontin made me have to reevaluate everything in the light of having less pain.

Anyone else with any advice for a possibly-not-autistic (but possibly-cousin for all we know) person wondering how to spot (and handle) sensory overload?

Notes:
  1. caesuria said: I found this to be a useful guide: chavisory.tumblr.com/po…
  2. withasmoothroundstone posted this