Your Nervous System Is Not Overreacting. It's Doing Exactly What It Was Built to Do.

A Field Guide to Building Your Sensory Toolkit

Nobody handed you a manual for this.

Nobody sat you down and said: here is how your nervous system actually works, here are all eight ways it takes in information about the world, here is why fluorescent lighting makes you want to crawl out of your skin, and here is what to do about it.

Instead, most of us spent years — decades — being told we were too sensitive. Too much. Too difficult. Too dramatic. We developed coping strategies that were really just survival strategies: masking, avoiding, white-knuckling through environments that were quietly destroying us.

A sensory toolkit is not a cure. It’s not a fix. It’s a way of building a relationship with your own nervous system that is based on understanding instead of war.

Here’s what I know: when I stopped fighting my sensory needs and started actually accommodating them, things got measurably better. Not perfect. Better. And for those of us living in bodies and brains that were never designed for the default world, better is not a small thing.

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I share this post as a free resource for AuDHD adults — and have compiled all my other free resources on this page ⤵️

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Let’s start at the beginning.

You don’t have five senses. You have eight. Shocking, right?

Most of us were taught the five: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. These are the external-facing senses, the ones that process information coming in from the outside world.

But there are three more — and they’re the ones that tend to be most relevant to the AuDHD experience, because they’re the ones nobody ever taught us about.

Vestibular is your sense of balance and movement, located in your inner ear. It tells you where your body is in relation to gravity, whether you’re moving, how fast, in which direction. It’s the reason you can walk without thinking about it — and the reason some of us feel car sick, hate elevators, crave rocking, or need to move to think.

Proprioception is your sense of where your body is in space — not in relation to the world, but in relation to itself. Your muscles and joints feed constant information to your brain about where your limbs are, how much force you’re using, what your body is doing right now. This is why some of us seek deep pressure, love weighted blankets, or feel genuinely calmer after carrying something heavy.

Interoception is the one that changes everything when you finally understand it. It’s your internal sense — the system that reads the signals from inside your body. Hunger. Thirst. Temperature. Pain. Heart rate. The need to use the bathroom. The early signals that tell you a meltdown is building before it arrives. And critically: the bodily sensations that are the first language of emotion.

Together, all eight systems are feeding your nervous system constant information. And for most AuDHDers, that system is running at a volume and sensitivity that most people will never experience.

Hypo and hyper: you might be both, at the same time, in different systems.

This is the part that trips people up.

Sensory processing differences come in two directions: hypersensitivity (over-responsive — too much input, too intense) and hyposensitivity (under-responsive — muted signals, seeking more). Most people assume they’re one or the other. Most AuDHDers are actually both, in different systems, sometimes shifting between them depending on their current capacity level.

You can be hypersensitive to sound — a colleague’s chewing is genuinely unbearable — and hyposensitive to proprioception, seeking heavy pressure and crashing into things because you need more feedback from your body about where you are in space. You can be hypersensitive to smell and hyposensitive to pain, not noticing an injury until it’s significant. You can be hypersensitive to light in one context and hyposensitive to temperature in another.

Your sensory profile is yours. It does not have to be consistent. It does not have to make sense to anyone else. It just has to be mapped honestly.

The eight senses, what they do, and where things go sideways.

1. Visual (Sight)

Your visual system processes light, color, movement, pattern, and spatial information. For many AuDHDers, visual processing is one of the most frequently dysregulating channels.

Hypersensitive experiences: Fluorescent lights feel like an assault. Busy, cluttered visual environments cause overload. Movement in peripheral vision is distracting. Screens after a certain point in the day feel unbearable. Bright sunshine is not pleasant — it’s painful.

Hyposensitive experiences: Needing high visual stimulation to feel engaged. Seeking out bright colors, fast movement, flashing patterns. Under-noticing visual information in environments.

To reduce input: Sunglasses (yes, indoors if necessary — not dramatic, adaptive). Dimmer lighting. Removing visual clutter from your workspace. Blue-light glasses. Blackout curtains. An eye mask. Facing a wall rather than an open room.

To increase input: Bright, saturated colors in your environment. Lamps instead of overhead lighting (more controllable, warmer tone). Visual stims that feel good — lava lamps, liquid timers, candles, moving water.

2. Auditory (Sound)

Your auditory system processes not just volume, but frequency, texture, pattern, and unpredictability. For AuDHDers, sound is often the most frequently cited source of overload — and the most socially fraught to accommodate, because people think you’re being rude when you wear headphones.

Hypersensitive experiences: Background conversations you can’t tune out. Specific frequencies that feel like needles. Chewing, breathing, lip-smacking (misophonia — a specific sound sensitivity that creates strong emotional and physical reactions to certain sounds). Music with lyrics when you need to think. The refrigerator hum. A coworker’s keyboard. The HVAC system.

Hyposensitive experiences: Needing loud music, white noise, or constant sound to focus. Not noticing sounds that others find obvious.

To reduce input: Noise-canceling headphones (treat them like a medical device, because functionally they are). Earplugs. White noise or brown noise machines. Working in quieter time slots. Soft furnishings that absorb sound. Communicating clearly that headphones are a regulation tool, not antisocial behavior.

To increase input: Music that’s familiar enough to not demand attention but stimulating enough to engage. Specific sound textures — lo-fi beats, rain sounds, binaural audio. Controlled auditory input that you choose, rather than ambient input you can’t predict.

3. Olfactory (Smell)

Your olfactory system is more directly wired to the emotional centers of your brain than any other sense. Smell bypasses the cognitive pathways and lands in the limbic system first. This means smell can regulate or dysregulate you faster than almost anything else — and many AuDHDers either don’t know this or have been told their smell sensitivity is excessive.

Hypersensitive experiences: Perfume in an elevator. Cleaning products. Candles that other people find pleasant. Food smells from a distance. Hospitals. Other people’s hair products. Body odor. The inside of a new car.

Hyposensitive experiences: Seeking out strong smells. Not noticing smells that others find obvious or overwhelming.

To reduce input: Fragrance-free home products. Asking for scent-free spaces where possible. Strategic seating (away from the kitchen, near an exit, next to a window). Carrying a small container of a safe, familiar scent to smell when surrounded by overwhelming smells — this gives your brain something it trusts to process, which creates a brief circuit break.

To increase input: Aromatherapy with specific, intentionally chosen scents. Essential oils. Cooking with aromatic herbs and spices. Scent as a specific stim.

4. Gustatory (Taste)

Taste is more complex than it appears, because it’s deeply intertwined with texture, temperature, smell, and proprioception in the mouth. Food “issues” in AuDHD are often dismissed as fussiness. They are frequently legitimate sensory processing differences that affect what is literally safe and tolerable to eat.

Hypersensitive experiences: Strong aversion to certain textures (mushy, slimy, grainy). Sensitivity to bitter or sour. Food that has “wrong” temperatures. Mixed textures being intolerable. Certain tastes leaving a physical sensation that doesn’t resolve.

Hyposensitive experiences: Seeking very intense flavors — extremely spicy, salty, sour, strong. Difficulty noticing mild flavors. Using eating as a sensory stim (not always a disorder — sometimes just accurate information about what your nervous system is doing).

To reduce input: Honoring your safe foods without shame. Not forcing yourself or others to eat textures that cause physical distress. Eating separately from strong-smelling foods if needed. Controlling temperature and texture combinations.

To increase input: Intentionally incorporating strong, specific flavors. Crunchy textures — chewing is a significant regulator for the nervous system. Gum, raw vegetables, chewy foods.

5. Tactile (Touch)

The tactile system processes information from your skin — pressure, texture, temperature, pain, and movement on the body. It is the largest sensory system in the body. And for many AuDHDers, it is the one most consistently misunderstood by others, because touch aversions look like behavioral preferences from the outside.

Hypersensitive experiences: Clothing tags. Seams in socks that hit the wrong place. Fabrics that don’t move the right way. Unexpected touch. Specific temperatures of water. Hugs that weren’t consented to in advance. Wet hands. Textures of certain materials.

Hyposensitive experiences: Seeking deep pressure — heavy blankets, tight clothing, being squeezed. Enjoying rough textures. Not noticing minor injuries. Craving tactile input and seeking out objects with specific textures.

To reduce input: Tagless clothing. Seamless socks. Soft, predictable fabrics. Communicating your touch preferences to people you’re close to. Controlling your tactile environment at home — the one place you get to make the rules.

To increase input: Weighted blankets (one of the most consistently effective regulation tools for proprioceptive and tactile seekers). Fidget tools with specific textures. Massage. Self-massage. Clothing with compression. Tight hugs when you want them.

6. Vestibular (Balance and Movement)

The vestibular system lives in your inner ear and it is the master regulator of the nervous system. It connects to almost every other sensory system. When it’s not getting the input it needs, your brain struggles to regulate everything else.

Hypersensitive experiences: Motion sickness. Dizziness from elevators, escalators, cars. Discomfort on stairs or heights. Feeling destabilized by unpredictable movement. Visual movement that triggers nausea.

Hyposensitive experiences: Needing to rock, sway, spin. Seeking intense movement. Rocking while thinking or reading. Loving swings, roller coasters, spinning. Feeling more calm and regulated while moving.

To reduce input: Stable seating. Avoiding situations with unpredictable motion. Sitting with your back to a wall. Keeping visual input stable when you need to regulate.

To increase input: Rocking chairs. Hammock chairs. Swinging. Bouncing on a trampoline or exercise ball. Yoga. Walking while thinking. A wobble cushion at a desk. Rocking while reading — this is not immature, this is regulatory.

7. Proprioceptive (Body Awareness)

Proprioception is the body’s internal positioning system — the one that tells you where your limbs are without looking, how much force to apply, how to move through space. Heavy work — activities that push, pull, carry, and compress — feeds this system most directly, and it has a calming, organizing effect on the whole nervous system.

Hypersensitive experiences: Discomfort with unexpected physical contact. Over-registration of the body’s position. Being easily startled by physical sensations.

Hyposensitive experiences: Bumping into things. Applying too much or too little force. Not knowing where your body is in space without looking. Seeking compression, pressure, weight. Needing heavy work to feel regulated and grounded.

To reduce input: Slow, gentle movement. Avoiding chaotic physical environments. Predictable, controlled physical experiences.

To increase input: Weighted blankets and lap pads. Compression clothing. Carrying bags with intentional weight. Wall push-ups. Carrying groceries (legitimately useful). Lifting. Kneading dough. Gardening. Physical work that demands full-body engagement.

8. Interoception (Internal Body Signals)

And here we are — the sense that is most often underdeveloped in AuDHDers and most directly relevant to everything else in this toolkit.

Interoception is the system that reads what is happening inside your body: hunger, thirst, temperature, pain, heart rate, fullness, fatigue, and — critically — the early, subtle physical signals that emotions send before they become recognizable feelings.

When interoception is under-responsive, you don’t notice you’re hungry until you’re crashing. You don’t realize you’re exhausted until you’re completely non-functional. You don’t feel the building pressure of overwhelm until the meltdown is already happening. You miss the early signals that would have let you intervene.

When interoception is over-responsive, your body’s internal signals feel loud and confusing and hard to sort out from each other. Every sensation demands attention. Physical sensations and emotional states blur together.

To support interoceptive awareness: Regular, scheduled check-ins with yourself — not relying on your body to spontaneously send a clear signal, but actively pausing to ask: am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I warm or cold? Am I tired? What is my energy level right now? Apps and alarms can scaffold this, especially for ADHD brains that don’t do spontaneous self-checking reliably.

The part nobody talks about: alexithymia.

Alexithymia literally means “no words for emotions.” It’s estimated that around 40–65% of Autistic people experience it, and it occurs in significant numbers of ADHDers too.

It is not the same as not having emotions. AuDHDers tend to feel things deeply and intensely. Alexithymia is specifically the difficulty connecting the physical experience of an emotion — the tight chest, the racing heart, the heavy limbs — to the name of the feeling that’s causing it.

This matters for sensory toolkit building because interoception and alexithymia are directly linked. When your internal sense doesn’t deliver clear signals, emotions don’t come through clearly either. You might feel a vague wrongness, a kind of off-ness, a low-grade agitation that doesn’t have a label. You might feel physically sick without understanding why. You might get to meltdown or shutdown without any clear warning, because the warning signals were there — your heart rate was elevated, your shoulders were up around your ears, your jaw was clenched — but the signal between “body” and “brain” wasn’t translating.

This also explains why so many AuDHDers are constantly surprised by their own dysregulation. It’s not that they weren’t dysregulating. They just weren’t receiving the memo.

What helps with alexithymia is not trying harder to feel things. It’s building vocabulary for body states rather than emotional states. Instead of asking “what am I feeling?” — which requires an emotional label you may not have access to — try asking: where in my body am I holding tension right now? Is my breathing slow or fast? Does my chest feel tight or open? Is there any part of my body that feels uncomfortable?

Body states are more accessible than emotional labels when interoception is compromised. Over time, you start to map: when my chest is tight and my shoulders are raised and I’m avoiding eye contact, I’m probably approaching overwhelm. That map is the beginning of early intervention.

Journaling works for some people. Body scans, even clumsy ones. Movement practices that require body attention — yoga, swimming, slow walks without headphones (or slow walks with a cape and a sword perhaps? IYKYK 😂) Therapists who work with interoceptive awareness specifically. None of this is fast. All of it is cumulative.

How to notice your sensory triggers.

This is less about creating a list of bad things and more about becoming a scientist of your own nervous system.

Start by noticing what happens after, not during. After a difficult experience — a meltdown, a crash, a day that went sideways — trace backward. Where were you? What was the lighting like? Had you eaten? How loud was it? Who was there? What were you wearing? How long had you been there? What happened right before the shift?

The trigger is often not the last thing that happened. It’s the accumulation of everything before it that crossed the threshold. This is the sensory bucket model: your capacity for input is a bucket. Every sensory demand adds something to that bucket. When it overflows, that’s not because the last thing was too much — it’s because the bucket was already full.

This is why you can handle the grocery store on Tuesday and fall apart in the same grocery store on Friday. The store didn’t change. The bucket capacity did.

Track patterns over time. Time of day matters. Hunger and fatigue deplete tolerance significantly. Hormonal cycles affect sensory sensitivity. Being in a novel environment costs more than a familiar one. Social interaction costs in ways that are cumulative and invisible until they aren’t.

You are not unpredictable. You are just operating on a system most people haven’t been taught to read.

Building the toolkit: this is not one-size-fits-all.

A sensory toolkit is a personalized collection of strategies, tools, and environmental accommodations that help regulate your nervous system across different contexts. The goal is not to eliminate all sensory input — it’s to maintain what occupational therapists call the “just right” zone: enough input to feel alert and engaged, not so much that the system is overwhelmed.

Your toolkit will probably include things in three categories:

Regulation tools — things you actively use to shift your nervous system state. Weighted blankets. Fidgets. Movement. Specific sounds. Safe foods. Deep pressure. Cold water. Heat. Specific textures.

Environmental modifications — things you change about the spaces you’re in to reduce unnecessary sensory load. Lighting. Seating position. Noise levels. Scent control. Clutter reduction. Temperature.

Preventive strategies — things you do proactively to keep the bucket from filling too fast. Scheduling recovery time. Eating and hydrating consistently. Building transition time between demands. Protecting your low-stimulation time like it’s a non-negotiable appointment. Because it is.

You will not figure out your toolkit in one sitting. It evolves as your life changes, as your capacity changes, as you learn more about your specific sensory profile. Start with the sense that costs you the most right now. Build from there.

One last thing.

If you have spent your entire life being told you are too sensitive — that your reactions are disproportionate, that other people don’t seem to have this problem, that you should be able to manage better by now — I want to name something clearly.

Your nervous system is not broken. It is built differently. It has real access needs that have been consistently unmet, often because nobody knew to name them, including you.

Building a sensory toolkit is not a weakness. It is the most practical form of self-knowledge available to us. You are not accommodating a character flaw. You are designing a life that fits the nervous system you actually have.

Start there. The rest follows.

Doubt Yourself Do It Anyway,

Patrick