Your body is always talking. Most of us just haven't learned to listen.

Written By Ellise Barnier

Take a moment. Tune in.

What can you hear? 

A hum. Maybe it’s the air conditioning. Music. Or maybe a podcast playing in the background. 

What about cars passing outside? Someone rustling in the next room? Your own breath? Or the electricity in the charging cable beside you?

Your sensory system is working constantly. Adjusting to the brightness of your screen and the temperature of the room. Filtering out the feeling of the tag in your shirt and the sweat in your socks. 

Most of the time, it happens without us noticing, without us even trying.

We all have a sensory system.

It’s a fundamental feature of being alive.

Most of us learned about the five senses in school. Touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste.
But have you heard of:

  • Proprioception - body position and movement

  • Vestibular - balance and spatial orientation

  • Interoception- internal body signals like thirst, hunger, heart rate, and the need to pee or poop. 

  • Thermoception - temperature

  • Nociception - pain

Sensory systems can become overwhelmed.

We feel it, even when we don't have the language for what’s happening.

That restlessness after a long day in a noisy classroom or open-plan office. The irritability that settles in around the third hour under fluorescent lighting. The way certain textures, sounds, or rooms make it genuinely hard to think.

It is your body telling you something. 

When your sensory system is not getting what it needs, or receiving more than it can handle, the effects go well beyond discomfort. 

Sensory regulation shares a budget with other systems. This means that when the nervous system is working too hard to process our senses, there can be less capacity for thinking and regulating. Attention becomes harder to maintain. Emotions feel harder to manage. Abilities drop. 

This can build over time.

Exhaustion that comes from a day of sensory overload is not quite the same as a physical tiredness.

It can be a depletion that rest alone can’t fix, because the environment that produced it doesn't change.

Sensory experiences don’t work the same way for everyone.

Some people seek more sensory input. Some are oversensitive to things that others barely register. Many can experience both, in different senses, at different times. 

For many neurodivergent people, and particularly those with autism, ADHD, or conditions like dyspraxia, the sensory systems operate differently. They often process sensory information:

  • more intensely,

  • less predictably,

  • in a way that is harder for the body to filter and sort out. “Feeling everything at once.”

Sensory needs that others meet without thinking may require deliberate, conscious effort to address.

The differences in the way sensory information is processed can also lead to panic, physical pain, or an uncontrollable fight, flight, or freeze response.

Neurodivergent people are not overreacting, these are not quirks or preferences. It is a reality of the brain experiencing the world differently.

And it has very real consequences for comfort, focus, and functioning.

Addressing sensory needs.

This is not a matter of tolerating discomfort in our senses better, we’ve had these needs since infancy. It is a matter of understanding that the nervous system has genuine requirements, and that ignoring them has a cost.

Meeting sensory needs is not indulgence. It is maintenance.

And it requires mindfulness.

Sensory check in:

  • Stop.

  • Take a breath.

  • Name what your senses are sensing.

  • Identify whether something might be causing discomfort in the background.

  • Meet a sensory need. Any of them. Just one.

For some people, it might mean movement, natural light, or noise-reducing headphones.

For others, it might mean you begin to recognise the environments that support your focus and regulation and the ones that deplete it. 

When sensory needs are genuinely met, our regulation, focus, and capacity improve. People can bring more to the world in front of them rather than spending energy tolerating an environment working against them.

Make it part of your routine.

Check in with your senses and respond to what you discover. Experiment and find what helps you function best.

  • Craig A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 3(8), 655-66. doi: 10.1038/nrn894. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0959-4388(03)00090-4

    Marco, E. J., Hinkley, L. B., Hill, S. S., & Nagarajan, S. S. (2011). Sensory processing in autism: a review of neurophysiologic findings. Pediatric research, 69(5 Pt 2), 48R–54R. https://doi.org/10.1203/PDR.0b013e3182130c54

    Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Santos, A. D., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew”: Defining Autistic Burnout. Autism in Adulthood. https://doi.org/10.1089_aut.2019.0079

    Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285. https://doi.org/10.1016/0364-0213(88)90023-7

Ellise Barnier