Living with anxiety; Sensory Overload
Good morning!
Today I wanna share my experience with Sensory overload, as an anxious person with you guys. Basically, it’s something shared among different disorders, and affect how your body treat the response it got from its senses.. so it can take many different forms, taking that into account.
While I don’t remember how long i’ve been living with them, iknow for a fact that I wasn’t aware of the name for what I was experiencing.. the sense that’s affected is the hearing for me.
At times, I get really overwhelmed by too many sounds at once: like my mother talking, something beeping & the radio turned on. The mix of all the noise give me a reaction of a panic attack.. the only real way for me to get it to calm down is to either remove myself or shut down whatever might be making the noise so there’s less sounds to concentrate on.
On the opposite range, Mother has undiagnosed ADHD- and in times where she’s been staying alone especially, whenever I get home, she just won’t stop talking. Not only that, but she tend to repeat the same comments over a dozen of times.. which aggravate the anxiety linked to the sensory overload and i’m even MORE panicking 😅
Despite me asking her to please be quiet and sit down for a few moments.. she doesn’t really understand my sensory overload issue. How can someone explain it? i’ve tried, but as her brain can’t go fast enough, i don’t think she grasps that while in her brain it fire powers through her, giving her energy, it takes the energy away from mine, leaving it exhausted.
One day in particular, I had to go for my car licence (going from beginner to the real one); I had been anxious because covid cases were being quite on the rise, on top of that we couldn’t find where we needed to go because they were doing renovations, everything already toying with my anxiety enough. but on top off all THAT, mother were being particularly pushy saying that no, we needed to go NOW because “why go later when we are here?” and just.. she thought she was being supportive, but that was the drop too much that I couldn’t handle. I was legit on the verge of crying- by very few I was gonna bawl out- She had finally understood, backed up and finally let me go home and let go for the day 😅 (turned out I couldn’t even get it then, I had to wait another 2months so yeah.)
As a way to kind of prevent getting too overload, and because she keep repeating the same 4-5 things, now I automatically tune out & stop listening after a while.. which ofcourse she’s not too happy about ahah- but constantly repeating the same thing over and over, aswell as saying things with no relation to each other that I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, can be draining.
Do you get sensory overload too?
Have you found anything being helpful for you?
4 thoughts on “Living with anxiety; Sensory Overload”
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That sounds like it’d be a lot to live with day in day out. It must be especially hard given how your mum can talk, and because she’s your mum, you just have to try and endure it.
I don’t think I get the sensory overload for noise like you, but sometimes I can become aware of the droning background noise in busy places and if I don’t check my thoughts, I can cause an overload to happen
Thankfully it doesn’t happen everyday! and atleast I have control over shutting some things off (TV or whatever.. even if I can’t with mother) — I do try to gently explain to her that I need her to just.. stop talking and stay quiet for a while but.. yeah she don’t quite understand..
Oof yep- one of the noise that I hate, especially as I worked in a Café, is that moment where it’s crowded and everyone’s voices just seem to rise up at the same time 🙃 so you have this loud noise of a babbling bunch of voices.. That’s also really hard as you don’t have much control of the situation.
I get sensory overload all the time and I hate it so much. I’m Autistic so the world is just a little Too Much and I just can’t be around when there’s too much noise. When I was at university there were a few times when I would leave a class and hide in the bathrooms because the sound of people having a heated debate was just too much. I think I can handle it better now but I do still have days where I need to hide somewhere quiet until I feel better.
Oh no, that’s the hardest.. I generally don’t like when people are yelling either- working at the coffee shop, when it’s crowded you get that specific moment when it’s crowded that everyone seems to raise their voice at the same time.. 😬 and it’s especially hard when you’re in public, as it’s not like you can control anything ..
I’m happy you found what works to make you feel better, and that it seems better handled ❤️