What does a sensory overload feel like for you?

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for me, its on a range from Mild to severe sensory overload. i have sensitivities to some taste, hearing, vision and texures.

hearing, a mild sensitivities, my ears will go numb and i will twitch. a moderate one will make me frusturated and ill plug my ears. a severe one i will actually loose vision temporarily, loose balance, and feel sick, ill become extremely angry and have a meltdown.

Vision, a mild sensitivity will loose 50% of my vision and i cannot read, a moderate sensitivity i will become irritable and ill start to cry. i never experienced a severe overload.

A taste is very mild sensitivity, i will just spit out the food and gag,

and textures, a mild sensitivity will make me irritable, a moderate sensitivity will make me take off whatever is bothering me, never experienced a severe sensitivity

An auditory overload feels like my brain is short circuiting, like someone hot wired a sore nerve in my brain. It makes me feel dizzy and confused. And enraged.

Tactile overload gives me more of a panicky, claustrophobic feeling. I feel like things are closing in on me. The worst is if I have something uncomfortable on my feet, it actually makes me feel scared, like I might die if I can't bare my feet.

A strong smell can make me feel nauseated and a bit angry.

Bright sunlight or glare can make me feel angry too, and give me a headache.

I don't experience overload with taste because my sense of smell will usually stop me before I eat something bad. And if I try to taste it anyway, I'll probably just spit it back out.

You lose half of your vision? That's pretty scary..

When I have sensory overloads such as being in a crowd I get all fidgety and feel claustraphobic. I remember whenever in school, when the teacher said we are having a fire alarm drill today, the whole day I was nervous and anxious, and I kind of leaned forward with my arm over my ears in case it goes off. I also get quite irritable depending on the situation. Other sound sensitivites such as toilets, hand dryers, the THX thing at movie theatres, vacuum, etc.

I'm sensitive to light, which sucks because I have Seasonal Affective Disorder, and dark, low, lights get me depressed. But the thing is, I hate being in a room with lights on. Whenever i'm in my room typing on my computer, I have to have the lights off. Whenever I'm at the dinner table, I have to have the lamp above me off.

The worst sensitivity experience was going to the dentist. The light killed my eyes, even sunglasses wouldn't help. Nowadays i'm fine with it, but that's the main reason I didn't like going to the dentist.

When in bed, I like to have a cotton blanket under me, because it feels itchy, cold, and uncomfortable without it.

Not many texture sensitivities, but I do hate being wet, and I hate the feeling of being wet and cold in a shower without warm water, and when your feet touch the surface of the bathtub. Also, maybe things such as oatmeal, or any other squishy food, but other than that not many texture wise. I also hate eating snacks and other various foods out of the closet.

I do have smell sensitivity.. I hate the smell of tuna, cigarette smoke, older food.

I have very little touch sensitivity, i'm actually hypo-sensitive to pain.

^ Pretty much all that.
Usually when I experience too much overload I will either have a meltdown
Or I will curl up in a ball and basically go catatonic.

I remember being a child and experiencing one of the worst cases of sensory overload; in response to a misophonia trigger. I was at my grandmother's and the sound of sniffing was enough to have me curled up in a ball weeping. Its like hot needlesgathering in intensity. Basically thefight or flight. Since my ASD is overall on the mild side of moderate my sensory overload is simialarly mild. In a club for instance (on the few ocassions ive gone) I tend to space out. The first time I went to a club I basically flailed like a deranged windmill - it was my way of blocking out all the sensory input. The next time I just stood rooted to the spot and was virtually catatonic. It wasnt exactly unpleasant either time since I guess my defence mechanisms kicked in

I can relate to your anxiety over fire drills. I don't know what was worse, being on edge knowing it was coming, or having it happen suddenly.


I experience this sort of thing as well. All the noise and activity tends to leave me feeling dazed and out of sorts.

Auditory overload makes me anxious and I can't think. Sunlight is blinding. Tactile sensitivity is the worst because I can't get away from it. the feel of my clothes on my skin is extremely uncomfortable and frustrating.
Repetitive motor movements and pressure help take the focus off of the discomfort. Stimming really does help integrate the senses.

Auditory overload is my biggest sensory issue. My head hurts and I can barely think. It kinda feels like the world is caving in on me. Stimming--lots of it--usually calms me down.

Yeah, that;s a good description. I also get head aches and can't think properly. Then sometimes I panic and get anxiety attacks or physical symptoms of anxiety. That;s when it feels like the world is caving in and my heart races, I have trouble breathing and sometimes feel dizzy and nauseous. For me it's a combination of too many sounds and too many smells. The smells all mix together and are overwhelming and make me nauseous. The sounds bombard me. When I feel trapped in a situation where there's sensory overload or it goes on for too long I either have a panic attack or I get agitated and have a kind of outburst yelling and scratching at myself and doing odd, out of control things ( a meltdown). I had more of the latter as a child. My sensory issues are more severe than my other symptoms of ASD, I think.

To calm down I just need to go somewhere quiet and be alone for a long time and stimming does help. Unfortunately I pick and scratch at my skin too, which I'm trying to stop. I do that when I'm anxious in general.

Last edited by daydreamer84 on 07 Jan 2014, 8:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

Losing environmental awareness. Delayed processing of sensory information.

Sight is changed the most: the background alternates between too bright and certain details pop out while the rest dulls.

Sensory overload for me causes balance problems. I will feel dizzy, wobbly, and eventually fall. It will also cause me to loose my ability to concentrate, which in turn makes me anxious because I can't figure out what is going on around me. If it continues to long, I go into shutdown mode and just curl up into a ball.

Feeling trapped, physically/mentally/emotionally exhausted, and angry.

If in overload, things go pale and wavery. It feels like I'm moving very fast or very slow--things smear around the edges or seem to jump from one position to the next. My heart starts hammering, and the ambient sounds blur together to make a wave of sound that crashes over my head. I can't pick voices out without extreme effort. I start to get dizzy and feel like I'm about to pass out (little specs of not quite a color start to dance in front of my vision.) Things feel like they're tilting up toward me even though they aren't. I get nauseous, my hands start tingling and I move jerkily. My speech slurs and stutters. I try not to say anything, because I tend to be super irritable if pushed (because it takes everything I can do remove myself from the area before something really awful happens.) And because I'm usually feeling humiliated that I'm having such an extreme reaction to such a commonplace circumstance.

If I don't get to a quiet place, I start to hyperventilate. It feels like my brain is full of bees or sparks, crawling inside my skull. I've almost never pushed it much further than that, because at that point it's all I can do not to pass out or lash out and run in panic. The times I've had to stay in a place, I've shut down.

It's described by others as me going very pale and rigid, moving like a robot and mumbling or yelling. I have actually blacked out if under a great deal of stress and in meltdown, but that's only happened twice (and I'm very careful to avoid those circumstances.)

Any excessive decibel level tends to trigger my "fight-or-flight" reaction if it's sudden. Even if I knew it was coming, it still becomes VERY difficult for me to think about anything other than the sound until a few seconds after it stops (assuming I can be assured it won't come again.) If it's really, REALLY loud, my ears physically hurt.

With people talking when I'm trying to sleep at night, unfortunately, this sensitivity tends to feed on itself as I become obsessed with either stopping or blocking out the sound. This makes me even MORE sensitive to it, and the cycle continues as long as I can hear it AT ALL with earplugs. Much of it, though, is that I'm simply not sleepy when I "should" be sleeping! If my body needs sleep badly enough, it will take it DESPITE such talking or other distractions. I just don't want to to be while I'm at work or something...

With foods I don't like (which is a lot of them), I'll get a severe gag reflex, like I'm trying to eat human feces or something else nasty/lethal. Which renders me pretty much incapable of pretending to like food that I dislike more than very mildly. Nor do I even think people should be doing that anyway...

I don't really have any tactile "anomalies" right now, but in childhood I was sensitive to the tightness of my shoes being ever so slightly different. Ironically, being "close" actually AGGRAVATED what difference there was! Nowadays, thankfully an EXTREME, rather than a slight, difference would bother me, as I suspect to be the case with most people.

It's hard to describe in words, but imagine thousands of YouTube clips being played around you at once, and you're forced to watch and listen to them.

Is anyone repulsed by dry textures on dry hands. Just takng a towel out the dryer os torture. It feels somehow unnatural