But actually think of anything that you feel that is new information. We often think of the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell) or the seven senses (adding in vibration and proprioception). Something I want to stress on at this point is that using the word ‘sensory’ means anything that is an input to a person. Sensory Shutdown = Where the level of sensory overload reaches a high level for long enough that a person cannot tolerate it, leading to an intense physical and emotional internal reaction.Sensory Meltdown = Where the level of sensory overload reaches a high level for long enough that a person cannot tolerate it, leading to an intense physical and emotional external reaction.Sensory Overload = Where a person experiences stimuli at a higher level than they can self-regulate.
While there is an increasing amount of research evidence looking at sensory overload, we are going to focus on that at a different time and instead look at what people experience.įirstly, let’s get some definitions down:
Therefore, when this happens to me it is normally due to a perfect storm of events that all hit me at once, while having a bunch of other inputs rolling around in my head.ĭue to the relevance of the situation, I wanted to make today’s post one looking at sensory overload, meltdowns and shutdowns. However, this isn’t always effective as: a) you can’t always see it coming until afterwards (when I guess you’re seeing it going…anyway), b) you can’t always do anything about it. Over my life I’ve learnt to identify what is going to escalate and do something about it. For me, sensory meltdowns are pretty rare events, occurring a couple of times a year. I had a sensory meltdown yesterday and today I feel shattered. We will focus on providing some information on what each concept is, what they mean to an autistic person, and what you can do to help in the future.
SENSORY OVERLOAD MELTDOWN SERIES
This post is a start of my series on “Things you should know about autism” where we take concepts that you won’t find in a textbook, but are very real to autistic people and their families.
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