Strategies for dealing with sensory overload

Happy New Year to all.

I have decided to write about strategies that I use – strategies that I have found effective in dealing with some of the challenges of Asperger Syndrome. Everyone has strategies for dealing with life and its challenges, because everyone has their own difficulties, but the challenges for people with Asperger Syndrome can be different from those of people who are not on the autistic spectrum. Also, because our minds work differently in some ways, the strategies that work for us might be different from the strategies that work for most people.

In the past I spent a lot of time reading self-help books for dealing with certain difficulties, and would get quite frustrated that the methods they suggested weren’t helpful for me, or that their explanations for the cause of certain difficulties simply didn’t apply to me. So, since I started reading about Aspergers, I started trying to work out strategies that would specifically suit the way that the autistic brain works, and I have experimented with all kinds of strategies for myself.

I must point out that what works for me will not work for everyone on the autistic spectrum. We are all different. But maybe some of the strategies will work for some people, or will give people ideas for finding their own strategies.

At first I was thinking of doing a big list of all the strategies I use, but then I decided it would be more organised to divide Aspergers up into the different sorts of challenges it presents, and the strategies I have for each of them. Recently I did a talk on what it’s like to live with Asperger Syndrome, and I found it useful to divide it up into three categories as follows:

1. Sensory integration difficulties
2. Difficulties with multi-tasking
3. Difficulties with organisation

I will write a separate entry for all three. This entry shall be about the first challenge. For me one of the biggest challenges of Asperger Syndrome is difficulties with sensory integration, which can result in sensory overload. Some examples of this are:

• I am hypersensitive to noise, so that too much loud noise can actually feel painful, and feel like it is intruding into me.
• When lots of people are talking around me, at the same time, such as in a pub, I get overwhelmed and start to zone out, and can’t make sense of any of it.
• Fluorescent lighting makes me feel dizzy and unwell, and I can start to shake and sweat. When the lights are turned off, I can feel a tangible difference – my whole body relaxes, and I feel a huge sense of relief, even if I hadn’t been consciously aware of the fluorescent lighting.
• I have a hypersensitive vestibular system – I could never go on merry-go-rounds as a kid without feeling very unwell. I would fall on the ground after getting off the merry-go-round and be unable to stand up for a while. As an adult, I get this feeling to a lesser extent in buses and sometimes in cars, from the motion, particularly in areas with winding roads.

Here are the strategies I use to help with sensory overload:

• Plenty of rest – making sure I get enough sleep each night, and taking a whole day to rest (in quiet and darkness) when I’ve had a day which involved a lot of sensory input. I find being tired increases my sensory hypersensitivity, and makes me a lot less able to tolerate it.

• Baths and swimming – the sensation of water is very helpful to me. I have at least two baths a day, which people tell me is very extravagant and a waste of water, but for me it’s a very helpful strategy so I don’t see it as wasteful. I think it is partly the light pressure of the water on my body and the sensory feeling of the wetness which helps me. Also with swimming there is the positive feeling of doing physical exercise. I like to go in the steam room too, which I find a bit uncomfortable when I’m in there, but it makes me feel very refreshed afterwards.

• Light pressure – when I realised that light pressure helps, then I found all kinds of other ways to do it. I wear clothes that provide a light even pressure over my body, like leggings, tights, tight-fitting polo-neck tops. I find the pressure that is right for me, and I find it has to be even – if an item of clothing is tighter in one area, then that is uncomfortable. I also tuck my duvet tightly into my mattress, so that it creates a light pressure over my body, and this helps me sleep better. I got this idea from reading about weighted blankets – weighted blankets are expensive, but tucking your duvet into your bed is free. But it’s important to get a duvet that is a size bigger than your mattress for this to work effectively – I have a double size mattress and a king size duvet.

• Massage – this is another form of pressure. I occasionally go for massage therapy, but this is quite expensive, so more often I will massage myself, as this doesn’t cost any money. I mix aromatherapy oil with olive oil and I massage myself all over when I get out of the bath. I sit on a towel on the bathroom floor and massage myself, starting with my feet and going all the way up to my face and head.

• Scented candles/oils – I am hypersensitive to smell, which can be a good thing if it’s a smell I like. For instance, I really like the smell of lavender, and find it very soothing, so I like to pour a few drops of lavender oil into my oil burner. I like to get scented candles and incense sticks too, but I always make sure to get a smell I like.

• Irlen lenses – my glasses have Irlen tints. These are quite expensive, and I was lucky that my disabled student allowance paid for them. However, just ordinary tints on your glasses can be helpful – they are obviously not as specifically tailored to your needs as Irlen lenses are, but before I had my Irlen lenses, I got glasses with ordinary tints on from the optician – the tint cost £10 – and this made a huge difference from having no tint.

• Cranial osteopathy – this is quite expensive, so I don’t have it very often, but when I do have it, it is really helpful for me, and particularly helps with dizziness.

• Theta waves and alpha waves – this is something I have recently discovered and which makes a huge positive difference. The brain has different waves:

beta waves – your brain wave frequency when you are alert
alpha waves – your brain wave frequency when you are relaxed
theta waves – your brain wave frequency when you are drowsy/falling asleep
delta waves – your brain wave frequency when you are sleeping deeply

It turns out that there is a theory the autistic brain gets stuck on high beta and is in a state of constant hyper-alertness. Being constantly in high beta can lead to anxiety. Listening to alpha waves or theta waves gets the brain to align to these waves, and can be relaxing and soothing. I discovered this quite by chance, before I’d even heard of all the different waves. I was trying out listening to various hypnotism albums, to see if they could help me become organised. There was one that I liked to listen to every day, even though I thought what the guy was saying was a bit daft – I found it very relaxing because of the pulsing noise in the background, which he said was theta waves. So I listened to this every day for a couple of weeks and found myself feeling a lot more balanced and I noticed I wasn’t getting the acute abdominal pains that I normally get. So then I googled theta waves and found the information about the different types of brain waves. I also discovered that SMR waves (which are low beta) are recommended for people on the autistic spectrum, so I started listening to those too, and I find they help a lot with sensory overload. I found MP3 tracks on Amazon, which turned out to be very good value for money – for 79p you can often get a track that lasts for an hour or longer.

So these are my strategies for sensory overload. I do not understand the science behind them, and can’t say that they will work for all autistic people, and they may indeed cause more overload for some people, but they are what I’ve found to be helpful for myself, through trial and error. If anyone else has other strategies they use, please do share them in comments.

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