3 Steps to Soothe Overstimulation

Let’s face it, sometimes, we live in a world that doesn’t know how to be quiet. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not always a bad thing. So many amazing parts of existence come from the busyness around us — birdsong, children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, a roommate reciting poetry romantically at two in the morning.

They’re all uniquely great, but if you’re like me, sometimes you have a sudden, intense need for silence. Auditory, light, and tactile sensitivity alongside frequent irritability can all be signs that your brain has, simply put, had too much.(1) This is often referred to as overstimulation or sensory overload.

Have you ever been inexplicably annoyed about the tag of your shirt itching your neck, so much so that you consider going naked for the rest of the day? Maybe you’ve cut off your tag or scoured your closet for a less itchy alternative, and after the heat of the moment, you may have asked yourself, “Why did that bother me so much?” When searching for the root cause, you might realize that you’ve felt anxious or stressed recently.

When your brain is going a-mile-a-minute, it can short circuit. Sensations that are often easy to process some days may stay in this purgatory of oversensitivity while your brain is metaphorically on fire trying to figure out what to process first. It’s like when more than one person is talking in a conversation. They’ll keep babbling over each other, confusing everything until there’s at least a brief moment of silence in which they can decide who is going to talk first. Sometimes, your brain needs that little moment of silence to make sense of everything.

So, if you find yourself like a brooding vampire, desperate to discover the darkest quiet place in your house to just … exist, you may benefit from trying to soothe the overstimulation and give your mind that chance to breathe. “But how?” I’m going to share 3 steps that have helped me tremendously throughout my years of dealing with overstimulation.

1. Desensitize

I like to approach this in a step-by-step process. So, if I’m feeling overstimulated, I will most likely start at the first step, desensitize. It might be helpful to understand what I mean by desensitize. If you can identify which of your senses are overwhelmed, what would calm them?

When I’m anxious or stressed, noises are almost always over stimulating — the tap dripping, dog barking, roommate talking downstairs. The queller for my overstimulated hearing is usually earplugs. For the sun shy vampire, this could be dim lighting, and for the itchy shirt person, this could be tagless clothing.

This may not work the same all the time. Usually, blocking auditory sensations does the trick for me, but as a highly sensitive person (₂), I sometimes get an even more chaotic cocktail of multiple overstimulated senses. It’s good to find a balance of being prepared with your usual solutions and also being open to trying new things. At this point, we’re doing whatever we can to soothe the irritation.

A desensitize routine for me may look something like this: ear plugs and find a quiet place to relax, put my hair up so it’s not itching my neck, close the blinds to avoid distraction, and find a way to isolate myself from others for a moment. (Passive aggressive door signs are great for this).

An important thing to remember is that stress can be fuel to the fire of your overstimulated brain. I often struggle with focusing on work because my senses have metaphorically combusted. This can be frustrating when considering deadlines, (oh, how I wish we had all the time in the world to do everything we wanted), so I find myself becoming even more stressed about missing work and screwing over my future self, who will have to deal with it eventually. But, entertaining that stress is actually feeding the interposing voices in my head.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a similar mindset, the best thing to do in these moments is try to counteract your stress. I have two dogs. When I begin my overthinking spiral, which almost always leads to sensory overload, I call one of them over to play, and almost instantly, my stress is soothed. For you, this could be something like taking a bath, reading an article, or going on a jog. Feed your body and soul, not the stress.

2. Simplify

Now that you’ve begun to soothe your overstimulated senses, you can start to think about how to preserve that balance. You can risk overstimulation again by throwing yourself back into a stressful situation. Firstly, it’s helpful to try and identify what may be causing your stress.

Stress can come from multiple sources that aren’t so easily identifiable. When approaching the simplify step, I like to start by tracking the breadcrumbs of the events that led up to my feeling of overstimulation. You may find that complex or chaotic situations which require you to divide your focus or make a lot of quick decisions like a project at work, social events, or even something like cleaning your house was causing you anxiety. After a while, that uneasy feeling can build up, and, perhaps without you even realizing, it can turn into an episode of sensory overload.

Now that you’re no longer in the heat of the moment, and your senses have been somewhat soothed, it’s good to approach the stress inducing situation with a mindset of simplicity. Let’s take, for example, the sun shy vampire. We’ll call her Ruby.

Ruby has just finished isolating in her cool, dark coffin. When she rises from her slumber, she is faced with the situation that previously led her to overstimulation; Her mansion, after years of neglect, is a gunky, cluttered mess. How can Ruby approach this situation with a mindset of simplicity?

To begin the simplify step, Ruby will want to identify her main goal. Ultimately, she wants her whole house to look pristine enough to host a ball, but her mansion has 24 rooms, 12 bathrooms, 3 living rooms, and a formal dining room. That’s a big task to approach, and thinking about how to clean all the rooms at once is making Ruby want to jump back in her coffin.

What may be helpful to Ruby is if she sets a smaller goal first like cleaning just one of the bedrooms. Perhaps considering just the master bedroom can even be overwhelming when Ruby looks at the decades worth of piled up journals, dead flowers, and a disorganized collection of weird rocks she found in the garden. She may even be disgusted by the layers of caked dust on the dresser and cobwebs in the corner.

To avoid delving right back into overstimulation, something that was soothed by a good old coffin hibernation, Ruby may want to start by focusing on just one task like chronologically organizing her journals on her bookshelf. By reducing her focus to one thing, she is reducing possible distractions. Divided attention can lead to a building sense of confusion, internal conflict, and eventually overstimulation. Remember the analogy of the two people talking at once? When Ruby is focusing on one task at a time, it’s like only one person is talking in that moment; It’s concise and easy to follow.

If Ruby finds that she is still feeling a little anxious or stressed when focusing on one task, it may help to break that task down into more manageable sections like firstly dividing the journals into groups based on the years and months they were written. If Ruby just can’t stand the journals anymore, perhaps she can take a break from that and start dusting or making potpourri boxes out of her dry flower petals. Similarly, it could help make a timeline for Ruby’s projects that span over a few days. Like the desensitize step, it may take a bit of experimentation to find out how best to simplify the situation.

The great thing about this step is that you can continue to build on the simplified tasks and work toward your end goal. I’m in the process of writing several novels. It can be overwhelming to think of all the different projects I should focus on. When considering how to simplify a project, I may identify my end goal as publishing a novel. However, I’ll almost always simplify that down to the first step of deciding which story I want to focus on and building an outline of the first chapter.

After completing the first step, I can enjoy a little serotonin boost of meeting my goal and continue with the simplify process by finishing the outline for another chapter and another until all the chapters are outlined. Eventually, I’ll build off that and write the rough draft of the manuscript. Then, I’ll move on to the revision, proofreading, formatting, and publishing steps.

By simplifying the process and allowing myself to focus on one step at a time, not only am I giving myself several milestones to celebrate within the project, but I am reducing the need to multitask and process several things at once, which will help to prevent being overstimulated by the project again.

This step will hopefully continue to soothe your overstimulation. However, if you find that you are still experiencing signs of sensory overload, it might be a good time to go back to the desensitize step and do what you can to promote a calm, stress-free environment. Remember, feed your body and soul, not the stress. If this step is making you anxious, then focus first on regulating or balancing your senses. You can always try the simplify step again when you’re not feeling so overwhelmed.

3. Organize

Once you’ve soothed your senses in the desensitize step and de-stressed the situation in the simplify step, then you can consider the larger scope of things. In the organize step, you want to think about how you can organize your life with structures and systems that will continue to promote balance and help you avoid overstimulation on a daily basis. For this step, it can be helpful to understand what may be causing your overstimulation.

I find that clutter is often my enemy. If my house is disorganized, it feels like I’m going to be buried alive in stuff. It also tends to lead to future stresses like not being able to find anything when I need it, feeling like I can’t host gatherings, or that I don’t have a comfortable place to go when I need to isolate. Similarly, if my workspace is cluttered, that surrounding mess usually permeates into my thoughts and puts me in a chaotic mindset, making it difficult to focus.

Other causes of stress could be not having your budget in order, desperately needing a schedule to keep track of all your appointments, or not having any sort of established system to get your household chores done regularly. If these kinds of things remain unorganized, they can eventually lead to future stressful situations, which can cause overstimulation.

Ruby the vampire may decide to hire a maid, who can help her keep her mansion organized and pristine so that she is always ready to host a ball. An ambitious business owner may develop a scheduling system to make sure all their deadlines are being tracked and they can be prepared for their next meeting. A scatterbrained writer may put her story notes into categorized folders to help alleviate the chaos of multiple plot lines tangling in her thoughts.

Like the first two steps, this can take some experimentation to understand what works best for you. Simply put, you are trying to stress proof your life instead of feeding the stress. So, if you can think ahead to a scenario that could cause you stress and sensory overload in the future, you want to take the necessary steps to either prevent that potential stress or make a plan to alleviate it in the future. This step will hopefully help you steer clear of overstimulation in the future, or if you do find yourself risking sensory overload, it will prepare you to more easily navigate it and find that balance.

I’m sharing these steps because I want to help anyone who may be struggling with the frustration of being overstimulated but not knowing how to overcome it. I am not a licensed psychologist. This is not a peer reviewed process. It’s simply a system that has worked for me over the years and a tool I hope will help you too.

If you’ve reached the last step but still feel overwhelmed, please don’t give up. Like any learning process, it can take some time to adjust and work into a good rhythm. You may also find through discussion with a therapist or health care professional that another system may work better for you. If this is a resource that is available to you, I encourage you to keep having these discussions and find the best program to help you find peace with your senses. Even so, I hope there are pieces of this process that you find helpful during those times of frustration when you just want the world to be quiet for a moment.

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REFERENCES

1. Watson, Kathryn. “Sensory Overload: Symptoms, Causes, Related Conditions, and More.” Healthline, Healthline Media, 19 Nov. 2021, https://www.healthline.com/health/sensory-overload.

2. Psychology Today Staff. “Highly Sensitive Person.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/highly-sensitive-person.