Ep 17: Understanding AuDHD in the Real World - Sensory Processing and Overwhelm in ADHD, Autism & AuDHD

🎙️ Episode 17: Understanding AuDHD in the Real World - Sensory Processing and Overwhelm in ADHD, Autism & AuDHD

Episode Summary

In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, Aaron Howearth explores how sensory profiles shape daily life for autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD individuals. Why does a flickering light, a chatty colleague, or a tag in your shirt seem to "set you off" — when really, you've been quietly carrying that load all day?

Drawing from clinical psychology and lived experience, Aaron explains how neurodivergent nervous systems often process sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, balance, and body position differently from the average person. He unpacks why these differences are not defects, but a mismatch between our sensory profile and environments built for typical sensory experience.

Aaron introduces the build-up model of overwhelm — how small sensory costs accumulate across the day until what looks like an overreaction is actually a proportionate response to hours of unseen strain. He links sensory load to attention, masking, emotional regulation, and burnout, and explains how sensory gating, hidden coping, and reduced tolerance can spiral into a vicious cycle.

This episode offers validation, language, and practical strategies for identifying high-cost sensory channels, designing neuroaffirming environments, and treating sensory fit as a legitimate accessibility issue rather than special treatment.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• Sensory Profiles Explained – How autism, ADHD, and AuDHD involve over- and under-sensitivity across multiple sensory dimensions.
  
  
• The Build-Up Model of Overwhelm – Why the "last straw" reaction reflects cumulative load, not fragility.
  
  
• Sensory Gating & Attention – How difficulty filtering input amplifies inattention, frustration, and cognitive fatigue.
  
  
• Masking the Sensory Cost – How suppressing sensory reactions drains energy and feeds burnout.
  
  
• Mental Health Impact – Why visual, auditory, and tactile sensitivities strongly link to anxiety, mood, and overwhelm.
  
  
• Environmental Design – Practical adjustments: lighting, headphones, quiet zones, predictability, exits, and breaks.
  
  
• Tracking What Works – Why outcomes matter more than assumed-helpful strategies.
  
  
• Reframing Overreaction – Moving from "too sensitive" to recognising a nervous system doing extra work in a world not built for it.
  
  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty pod podcast, potty potty, potty potty potty potty, potty potty potty potty potty potty pod podcast. We love an audio stim and self-acceptance. It's the Audi HD Psych Podcast. What if you're not oversensitive and overreacting? What if you're reacting to the slow accumulation of stress through a different sensory profile that nobody else can see? Hi friends, welcome back to the Audi HD Psych Podcast. I'm Aaron Howarth, clinical psychologist, and we are different, not defective. Today we're going to have a talk about sensory profiles, sensory sensitivity, and how they can impact us in day-to-day life. So ADHD and autism, and therefore AudieHD, are associated with meaningful differences in our sensory profile compared to the average person. What that means is that we tend to be over or under sensitive compared to the average person to our various senses: sight, smell, sound, touch, taste, our sense of balance and our sense of position and body and space. Why does that matter? Because the world that's been built around us has been built by the average person broadly, and that means it's been built for typical or average sensory experience, and we might not fit into that. Now I hasten to point out that that over or undersensitivity can be helpful or unhelpful, and that depends on the context or the environment that we're in. In hypersensitivity to particular smells, that might yield sickness and a disgust response in me in some contexts, but it also might make me a great perfumer. I might be able to smell how different things interact really well and create beautiful scents for people. Or I might be, and I'll mispronounce this word, it might yield my great skill as a simelier, those people that work with wine and pairing wines together and cheeses and things like that. So we're not inherently defective by that, but the interaction of our characteristics and the environment that can yield strengths or weaknesses. That can yield strengths or what we diagnose when we diagnose disorders. So, why some people might have been told that your sensory experiences don't count? That could be if your ADHD has been recognized first, there's a much greater research base that talks about sensory differences in autism. So perhaps when you've been diagnosed with ADHD, you have actually had some of your sensory differences picked up. But that doesn't mean that your sensory differences aren't impactful. So sensory sensory processing differences are clinically meaningful in both autism and ADHD. And they can include over or under sensitivity and reactivity to those various senses, which can result in both sensory seeking and sensory avoiding behaviors. Now, just because I'm over-reactive or oversensitive to perhaps light doesn't mean that I'm inherently over-reactive to all of the other senses. I may have high reactivity or high sensitivity to light, low sensitivity to sound, typical sensitivity to body balance. Everyone has a unique profile. We can think of them as sensory dimensions that everyone sits somewhere on that dimension. So AudieHD profiles can be very that, they can be mixed and variable, and they can be very much dependent on where I am and what's going on for me at the time. Sensory profiles are not bad personality characteristics. You're not overreactive, you're not dramatic. It's genuinely a part of how your nervous system treats and responds to the in the information that it receives, the sensory input. So when we talk about those sensory differences, if I'm overly sensitive to a particular characteristic of the environment, say sight, um, light, uh visual busyness, how does that impact me? It means that for every minute I'm overexposed to the thing that I'm sensitive to, I'm building up a little bit more stress, a little bit more of my energy and my cognitive and emotional resources are going into one, perhaps trying to filter out that thing that I'm sensitive to, in this case the light. But also, I probably have reactions to that sensitivity. Part of me, part of my cognitive and emotional energy is probably going into suppressing those reactions so that I can fit into a typical world and typical expectations. And also, I beg your pardon, the more I do that, the more energy I'm using, the more my stress builds up until at some point I'm likely to hit my capacity and reach overwhelm. Nobody sees everything leading up to that overwhelm. People don't see all of the masking work that I'm doing. What they see is they use a tone that is slightly abrasive to me, and I have a big reaction because I'm not just reacting to their tone. I'm reacting to their tone in eight hours in an office with flickering light that's too bright for me, alongside perhaps a lot of noise distraction in the workspace, perhaps with tags on my clothes that have been niggling at me all day. And individually, these things might have been something I could cope with. But cumulatively, when we add them all together across the day and my energy gets lower and lower, that final thing that's worth six points of energy, and I've only got three points left, that's the thing that I appear to be responding to. But I'm not actually being oversensitive and overreactive. I'm reacting appropriately to a significant amount of stress that I've been dealing for the whole day, sometimes the whole week, month, year. So, excuse me. So that's what we refer to as the build-up model of overwhelm. And we can see how that might work across domains of life. So let's say I work in a busy office. Um, I'm environmentally conscious, so I don't take my car, I use public transport, and that involves going into big, dense social spaces like perhaps a train station. I walk out in public, I have all the distractions and the noise and the sound there. I get to a train station, there's 10,000 people all getting ready for their morning commute. That can trigger perhaps I have social anxiety, a bit of an emotional overwhelm there, or certainly an emotional tax I'm paying, reduces my cognitive energy and resources. Then there's all the people around me doing all the things, bit of light sensitivity coming in, I can hear lots of sound, more of my capacity to cope is being taken up. Then I go into the workplace where I have to pay attention for eight hours. And then I might have two colleagues chatting away beside me. Uh, that was me, I was the chatter. So my apologies to all my former colleagues. But I've already got stressed from getting to work. I'm now stressed because I'm in an environment where I'm trying to filter out what the people beside me are saying so I can pay attention to my work. But those sensory differences are maybe impacted by sensory gating, that is, that cognitive ability to filter out things that aren't important to me right now. Probably see how that would impact on what I can pay attention to. So if I'm naturally inattentive, that may or may not be the result of my sensory sensitivities and my difficulty filtering out sensory information, amplifying my difficulty paying attention to the task at hand, the job that I'm trying to do, the report that I'm trying to write. As I can't filter out those people chatting beside me, I'm probably getting more and more frustrated with them. So I'm building up an emotional load as well. I already have my energy, my cognitive load drained or reaching capacity because of all of the sensory stimulation I've received and not been able to filter out. That's impacted on my attentional capacity, which is then impacting on my emotional experience. And then suddenly it's three in the afternoon. I've been putting up with those flickering fluorescent lights all day and people chattering beside me. All I want to do is go home and not be in that environment, shut the door, pull the blinds, turn the lights off and recover. So those different sensory things, um, and of course, if I have sensitivity to seams in my socks or clothes or tags, that's going to add to it. If I uh, as in often in autism, I like things to be predictable and that's safe for me, there's some unpredictability thrown in there, that can increase the cost that I'm paying just to be in the workplace in a typical world on a given day. Pardon me. Each of those things individually might be just a small cost that I pay, a$2 fee for getting through the day. But when I have 50, 100, 150 of those little things throughout the day, all of a sudden I have a$300 bill and I've only got a$200 bank balance in terms of my energy. When I reach that critical point, then I become dysregulated. I become overwhelmed. I might have particularly reactive emotional responses. And again, other people haven't seen my build-up. They're just seeing my response to the last thing, which might be the door slamming behind me or the tone you used when you asked me to hurry along. But it's not just that, it's so much more. The more sensory processing differences I have, um they're likely associated with greater difficulties with either internalizing or externalizing difficulties in autistic people. Visual, auditory, and tactile sensitivities have a particularly strong association with mental health strain, probably by mechanisms like the example I gave a moment ago. An overwhelm often reflects the cumulative buildup, the cumulative load, rather than one big reaction to a small thing. So, you know, we we've all heard that adage. Well, maybe we have, maybe we haven't. There's an old adage, and it's uh that was the straw that broke the camel's back. That's usually what people see us reacting to. One little stressor that we experience, they don't see the rest of the weight that that camel is carrying. They don't see all the other stresses that we've picked up during the day and are carrying with us. So I talked about sensory gating, that's sort of filtering out sensory input. If I'm oversensitive to light and I have difficulty then filtering it out, I'm more likely to be more reactive to it. That's probably going to contribute to my attentional differences, like I said before. But then I'm going to be putting more effort into trying to filter out, trying to suppress my experience of, let's say, the flickering light. That's masking, that's a part of the experience of masking. It's me putting cognitive energy into some difference that's related to my neurodivergence. Uh there's hidden coping, but sorry, that hidden coping, that masking, um, it has an energy cost, and that leads to exhaustion, which last week I tapped into exhaustion, masking, and burnout. So it can lead towards burnout. Burnout can then reduce my tolerance for sensory input. So it can become a vicious cycle. I'm sensitive to light that impacts on my cognitive function more broadly, reduces my energy, contributes to burnout, and in burnout I have a lower tolerance or increased sensitivity to that sensory input. Once it might have been managed or manageable, but now when I'm in overwhelm, it's completely unmanageable for me. So masking, looking okay, and being okay are not the same thing. And our efforts to meet the expectations of okayness are part of our mask, and they're often contributed to by our sensory differences and not wanting to be seen as overreacting or overly sensitive. So I guess now I'll have a little bit of a chat about sensory adaptations and environmental design. So if we if we want to support ourselves, if we want to create workplaces or environments that support people with sensory differences, we can. And that can reduce that extra load that people with a different sensory profile can carry, that we can carry. Pardon me, and that can increase our ability to manage our sensory differences, our attentional differences that may be influenced by that, our mood, our anxiety, our stress, our overwhelm, our exhaustion, our burnout, and our overall well-being. So how would we manage that? Well, first of all, we need to have a think about where am I most impacted? What are the places where I spend most of my energy trying to manage my over or under sensitivity when it's being unhelpful? We want to identify the high-cost sensory channels and recurring contexts. Is it at work where I work in a big shared office space and there's lots of people talking and distracting and tapping away on their keyboards? Maybe I misophonic and somebody eats their lunch chewing loudly or chewing gum beside me. In such a case, then I want to reduce the amount of demand on me through those sensory differences. Uh if it's lots of bright fluorescent lights, perhaps I can have LED lights installed. Uh perhaps I can work in a darker space. If it's noise, perhaps I can work with my earphones on. Um if it's textures, perhaps I can work, or perhaps I can buy clothes that are the right texture for me that don't have seams, that don't have tags or have easily removable tags. Perhaps I can take an unpredictable environment and make it more predictable or move to a more predictable environment where I'm not going to be interrupted and derailed. Perhaps I can work in a less crowded space, which again contributes to less interruptions, less sensory exposure. And perhaps I can increase my sense of control over those things because my sense of control interacts with my confident environments, my stress, anxiety, depression. That interacts with my sensory gatekeeping and my sensitivities. So perhaps I can have more exits, more ways to get out of environments that can be overwhelming for me. Perhaps I can have more breaks to rest my cognitive abilities, to rest my emotional overwhelm. Perhaps I can have plans that are written out, headphones, remote work options, um, movement breaks if I'm somebody who's sensory seeking and wants to externalize some of that energy, some of that uh difference, or other environmental adjustments, like having quiet zones, having sensory zones, as uh as the wonderful neurodiversing affirming therapist conference here in Melbourne did last year. Uh it was an excellent space. But we also want to track outcomes rather than assuming a strategy helps just because it seems appropriate for somebody's sensory differences. Um maybe if I perhaps I get migraines from uh fluorescent lights, just changing out and putting LED lights might not be the only part of the strategy for me. I might actually need to dim the lights a lot more. Or perhaps the reverse, uh, I as a human actually am really attracted to light. I like all the lights to be on. I like all the natural light to be coming in, and that helps me function and keeps me alert and alive and interacting with the world and doing what I'm doing. So we want to have a look at what are the outcomes? What are the difficulties that I have? What are the interventions or the strategies that I'm applying to trying to manage my sensory differences? And are they actually being effective? If they are, wonderful. If they're not, we may need to add to them or maybe try something different. Things that we can consider, questions that we can ask ourselves, or scripts and prompts are what part of an environment is the most expensive for me? Is causing the most difficulty for me? Is it the distraction from all of the sounds and all of the noise that I'm quite sensitive to? Is it my clothes? Is it the temperature of the environment that I'm in? What would reduce that cost or those difficulties by 10%? How, if I've got a workplace that it's difficult for me to be in because of my sensory profile, how can I reduce some of those difficulties? Can I have a quiet space? Can I have a different uniform? Can I work with my headphones on? That's such a simple accommodation that employers and managers can make in appropriate and safe environments that can make a huge difference to people's comfort. Not only can it manage sensory input through sound that may be overstimulating or that I may react to, it can also act as a psychological barrier to some of our social anxiety, which can reduce the impact of those sensory differences. And another question number three: what do I need to stay regulated enough to participate, not just endure? I don't want to act and perform okayness and mask the difficulties I have. I want to actually be able to reduce those difficulties and engage in the point of me being in that place. What do I need to do that? And finally, we can have a little bit of a think about designing sensory safe environments. We as employers, as managers, as parents, uh, we can think to ourselves, if I have a human that comes into my environment that's under my care or my management, how can I create a space that's safe for their particular sensory profile? Um, you know, in my little clinic here in Melbourne, I have some busted old uh those uh globe chairs, there are ball chairs. Um, so that if somebody comes in really overwhelmed and overstimulated and really reactive to sight and sound, they can feel cocooned in there, feel safe. There's only a little bit of light and sound can come in. And that creates a space where hopefully some of the people that we chat to can find a little bit of reprieve and sense of safety. I might have dimmable lights. I might have enforced silent periods in between break times. What can I do to create an environment that's safe for people with sensory andor cognitive differences? What can I do to create a neuroaffirming space? The research evidence supports treating sensory fit as a legitimate accessibility issue. If I don't have environments that cater to my sensory needs, I'm less likely to engage in them. And if those environments are my workplaces, that's contributing to the underemployment of neurodivergent people, financial difficulties, potentially housing and education difficulties and disparities in many, many neurodivergent people. But also, we want to better understand uh, sorry, have those sensory safe environments, that good sensory fit between myself and the environment. Um, have them understood as enabling participation rather than special treatment for people. The world in general already accommodates the average person by pure virtue of the fact that it was built by the average person. Accommodations are not special treatment for us, they're just allowing us to catch up with the rest of the community and have our needs and our profiles, our cognitive and sensory differences accommodated in the world in the same way the majority are. Well, I guess the task here is not to prove that you can tolerate every single environment. The job we want to do is understand our own profiles well enough to build a life that improves our well being, that costs us less to engage in it. So I guess as a nice little closing, I want to highlight that sensory overwhelm is not you being fragile. It's not you overreacting. It's simply what happens when the demands of our Our environment are mismatched with our particular nervous system or sensory profile. In the same way, disorder is not inherent to our characteristics. It's an interaction between our characteristics and what the environment demands. The same is true of the difficulties that we have with our sensory differences and our sensory profile. The sensory profile isn't inherently broken. The disconnect between it and what the typical community and typical environments require or bring is what causes the difficulties that we have. So thank you all for listening. I would invite you all to just do a little one-week sensory audit, noting one environment that typically, often or regularly drains you. And what's the channel most responsible for that drain? Is it that it's distraction? Is it noise distraction? Is it visual distraction? Is it temperature? Is it unpredictability? And when you've identified that, I'll ask you to think: what's one change that can be made in that space that makes the load lighter for you? Finally, if ordinary spaces exhaust you, that's not evidence of laziness, of weakness, of fragility, of overreactivity. It's not a reflection of your character. It's probably actually evidence that you've been doing so much more work than the average person all day and possibly every day for a long time. Many neurodivergent people realize that or discover that once sensory load is named and managed to some degree, what looked like irritability, irrationality, inconsistency, and emotional overreaction often becomes an understandable response to cumulative stress that's building up day-to-day for us. Well, thank you very much for your time again today, team. It's been a pleasure to monologue one more time. I look forward to having Dan or Emma to help me out next time. And remember, we are different, not less. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not inherently broken. You're as worthy and valuable as every other human. Different, not defective. I'll see you next time.