Sensory sensitivity and sensory overload
It is not uncommon for people with ASD to have a totally different experience of the sensory world. Until someone actually points this out to us, how would we know that the way we experience the world isn’t the same?
🦻 Hyper sensitivity towards intense light, sounds, images, sensations, movements, colors and people, the variances are vast. For me it’s sound and vision. My hearing is hyper sensitive. I can hear everything all at once, I’m unable to filter out background noises, conversations and so on. Everything becomes equally loud, all at the same time. So as you can imagine crowded places are a really big challenge indeed.
👀 I see the world in vibrant technicolour – like someone turned up the brightness and vibrancy of everything. Yep, I often feel like I need supersonic sunglasses. It also means I see all sorts of crazy detail. All at once. If I’m trying to concentrate and there’s tons of other stuff happening in my vision field too.. it’s impossible.
Intense environmental and social factors can become too impossible for me to handle – too much of anything then all becomes too much and can cause breakdowns or meltdowns.
This is not a wee hissy fit. It is something that stops us in our tracks and disables all our normal functioning until we have our sensory systems back under control.
For me that’s no people, no sound, nothing. Sometimes it’s like u go into a trance, other times I might sit at the sea, or in the park. Time seems to stop, nothing else in my life can continue until I get past this: yes. It’s that serious.
Melanie Magowan 