What is a sensory overload for an autistic person? How does it affect them and their ability to function?

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I understand that they get them but what happens exactly to them?

In: Biology

29 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m on the spectrum but never had one, My hearing isn’t great though so perhaps that’s “helped”

Anonymous 0 Comments

In very basic and over simplified terms, an autistic individual lacks the unconscious ability to filter irrelevant information from the environment, leading to information overload accompanied by the inability to process it effectively.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Go try to read a book while being tickled, music blaring, and strobe lights going off. It is pretty much intolerable. Some people have a lower thresh hold. It’s just to much for your brain to process.

Anonymous 0 Comments

For me the overwhelming feeling erase everything. Its like eternal kind of pain in hell. The only thing i want to do is run away.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m on the spectrum. “Sensory overload” covers a whole bunch of stuff. Mostly, for me, it makes it very difficult to perceive things. Loud noise makes it hard to see. Bad acoustics make it worse. Waiting rooms with high ceilings make me agitated and nauseous. Clothing stores (or anywhere with too many soft surfaces) make it difficult to track where people are, what’s going on.

When I was a kid, the color red used to set me off. Put me in a red room, I would become increasingly agitated until I left.

Certain sounds trigger it hard. Country music has always been a trigger. Anything with too much twang or treble.

Don’t know if it’s related, but listening to idiots make small talk is the only other thing that can produce the same escalating anger and anxiety. Feels like I’m being attacked, kicks in my adrenaline hard. Like, chest pounds and I want nothing in the world more than to just start throwing punches. I don’t, but fuck. People need to pay attention to the folks around them. If you aren’t being concise, why are you talking? If someone asks you a question and you respond with a story, I hate you.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Too much input from outside sources. In my personal experience, I have a difficult time talking to people while looking at them and listening to what they say, and either I’d miss something they said, or I clam up and have a hard time talking.

In times like those, I look at something else that is bland to reduce the input, and prevent myself from socially shutting down. Of course, this has its own problems, where people think I’m not listening to them and not giving them the time of day – up until I repeat everything they said to me, with about 90-95% accuracy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Oh, also, you asked about how it affects our ability to function.

For me, and many others on the spectrum, it takes _a lot_ of brainpower to process social things. The nuances in a facial expression, the emotions implied by a choice of words, etc. Not just the inputs, but also the outputs: what’s the right word choice to express sympathy versus indifference (even if I don’t care about the topic, because I do care about the person). Even just remembering to show my emotions to the outside world by smiling, etc, that takes brainpower that it doesn’t for neurotypicals.

When I’m having a sensory episode, that brainpower gets chewed up trying to process the senses, so all of the social stuff drops. My wife refers to it as “the human simulation goes offline”. I can’t read faces, linguistic nuance is completely lost, my affect goes flat, I say things that sound completely inappropriate (but are really just what we’re all thinking) because that filter drops, etc.

My wife has actually figured out how to use this reduced social cognition to recognize an oncoming sensory episode. She’ll flat out ask if I’m having one, which is great because it makes me stop and do some self assessment. Not all episodes are sudden and noticeable – sometimes they creep up like background noise. So she’s able to see them before I do, in some cases.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What it feels like for me:

Have you ever thought about how listening works? Like, some sound hits your ear, and there’s some kind of background context and some expectation, etc. The combination of those gets interpreted by your brain to tell you not just what the sound was but how it fits into your expectations, how it adjusts the context, etc. Is that car engine you’re hearing a outside the building, or is it revving and heading right for you?

My sensory overloads feel like I lose my ability to connect the input with the context and expectations. So all the inputs become disconnected. Maybe I recognize that it’s a car engine, but suddenly I can’t figure out whether I expected to hear one right now. Or maybe it comes through as a sound I think I expected, but I lose track of what the sound actually is, or what produced it. For visual overload, I lose the ability to keep the narrative – it’s like watching TV where someone else is switching the channel several times each second, but all the channels are showing episodes of Friends so your brain tries to make sense out of it.

My brain gets stuck on that gap – trying to figure out what the missing information is, or how to contextualize, etc. For hearing, it turns up the volume on everything in the hopes that it will help. For visuals, colors stop making sense, it takes several seconds to recognize objects, etc. For touch, my skin loses its ability to discern, so everything feels itchy at once, and my brain gets stuck trying to manually separate the feeling of my clothes on me from the shape of the thing I’m holding, etc.

For me, when it happens to one sense it generally happens to others at the same time. Sometimes it’s sight and sound, sometimes it’s sound and touch, etc. It’s pretty rare for me to get smell or taste episodes.

Actually, I have a great example. It’s NSFW, though. Go to YouTube and find [Eminem’s new song, Godzilla](https://youtu.be/pWdI4pHbiU0), one where you can follow the lyrics onscreen. Put in on 2x and play it. Now, while listening and trying to read the lyrics, have someone else in the room start talking to you about the most boring subject in the world. Then have a third person pick up random objects in the room and start rubbing them against random parts of your exposed skin – the back of your neck, hands, etc. In front of you there’s a plate of unrelated foods that you can’t look at, you just have to eat them – carrots, jelly beans, sushi rolls, potato chips, mushrooms, licorice. There’s a lot of sensory information coming at you at once, none of it seems connected, but it doesn’t stop.

That’s what it feels like for me. Generally, it only lasts a few minutes, especially if I notice it happening and can pull myself away to a quiet room for a few minutes. On bad days it will happen at work and I’ll just have to either excuse myself or intentionally tune out of everything that’s happening. On really bad days it might last hours, and the best I can do is try to take a nap, which is almost impossible given the lightning storm in my brain.

Also, these are some great explanations. Thanks to everyone for writing down what it feels like for you.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine you’re in a room and lights are being flashed and 10 different yoko ono tracks are being played at the same time on repeat at volume well beyond safe levels. Well not really that. Imagine you’re working at an office and all through the day there is the sun blaring against the blind and a little slit in the blind lets a laser beam of light shine in your eyes, and the blinds are moving a bit so the beam kind of follows you around and keeps shining in your eyes, distracting you from your work. It’s reasonable to be totally distracted by that to the point where you couldn’t work. But an autistic person might complain that a broken fluorescent lightbulb above them buzzing and trying to power up all day and blinking would distract them just as much, even though no one else in the office even noticed the bulb was broken. People here talk about sensory overload like it’s something normal people can’t understand, but it happens all the time, if I ran a jackhammer next to your desk all day then you’d be bouncing off the walls if you spent the day trying to do some work. CIA routinely use sensory overload when torturing people. Your alarm clock is sensory overload to kick your ass out of sleep in the morning.