Do Your Sensory Issues Ever Depend On Context?

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I only figured out I have AS last fall, so this is the first summer I've dealt with the dreaded problem of eating during a heat wave. Now, I am, always and under any circumstances, a picky eater. Taste, texture, and smell are important enough to me that there is a fairly short list of things I can eat (and when I cross off the things I can't afford regularly, that list gets shorter). But in the heat, I get picky, even by my own standards. Of course, I've always been told I'm just being a difficult jerk.

But today, shopping and trying to figure out what I could eat, I finally figured out what was going on. When I am hot, on top of all the other issues I have, there are certain textures I just can't stand to swallow. Not while it is hot. If it is too dry, dense, or hard to swallow, forget it! Also, if it is something I can eat, but am not enthusiastic about, I can't make myself eat it, not while I'm overheated.

Do any of the rest of you have issues like this? Not necessarily the same exact things, of course, but does the environment around you, or your own condition, tend to affect you this strongly?

Stress makes my hearing get sharper.

Also, sparkling/flashing lights are fun to stim with, but they're so attention-grabbing that if I try to do anything other than stare at them, I get overloaded.

Absolutely. As with everything, it fluctuates.

I've got to tell you, my first reaction when I read this was, "Who doesn't have trouble eating when it's too hot?" Especially with things that are dry or hard to swallow.

But then I remembered something. Whenever I filled out evaluation forms for my kids, I asked a lot of the same kinds of questions. "Who doesn't act like that?"

It was precisely because I thought that way, that my kids for years were never found to have Autism. It wasn't until I started wondering if I had it too, and that might be why I thought so much of it was perfectly normal, because I was like that, that the answer to those questions, "Who isn't like that," became clearer. It also helped to start asking more people around me who didn't seem to be Autistic-like at all.

Turns out a lot of what I thought was typical of everyone, wasn't.

So, yeah, there are quite a lot of weird things I'm extremely sensitive too. Hair. I hate hair. cleaning up hair makes me gag sometimes strongly enough to actually vomit. There are many others too, but I don't think about them much anymore because I just tend to keep the stuff that bothers me that much out of my life. There are a lot though.

Oh. A huge one, and I just thought of this because I'm about to go to bed and deal with it, is lumps in my blankets. I need to lie in bed falling asleep, on my back, with both arms at each side of me. If there are ANY creases or lumps in the blankets under my arms, it hurts. It's not just uncomfortable, it HURTS. I drive my wife nuts fixing the blankets every night, because she hates to be covered, so she throws them to my side of the bed, and it takes me up to fifteen minutes of pulling, stretching and monkeying with them to get them just right so I can relax.

Then, I have to have something fairly interesting to watch on TV, but I can't stand the racket of advertisements so if there's nothing good on PBS, there's a lot of channel hopping, which causes lots of flashing on the TV, which is one of my wife's pet peeves. Most of the time it doesn't bother her, but if the context is just right (we haven't figured out what the "just right context" is yet), it'll drive her so nuts, I'll come downstairs and sleep on the couch so it she doesn't have to deal with it.

Yes, heat is one of the "accumulating" over-sensory inputs. That is, the more heat and the longer, the worse. The following may each be minor but the extent of time and combinations of these accumulate:

- Heat and humidity
- Certain noises
- Certain touch, smell
- Certain bright light and high-contrast
- Too much social interaction and listening (the analysis, processing, and short term memory strain)
- Stress and pressure

These all add up. The reason I have found this self-analysis to be critical is that I absolutely have to notice that this accumulation is happening in order to prevent very rude reactions that can socially stigmatize me as "not a team player", "has to have own way", "weird". I prevent the fight (verbal) or flight by catching the build up before it is too late and leaving the situation for a while.

And, perhaps, not unrelated, I always have trouble eating un-moist food. I don't know if heat affects swallowing, because in enough heat and humidity (76F and 100% will do it), I slowly shutdown. I think my brain just cannot cool itself so in self-protection it switches to low-power mode. Maybe my brain is even burning hard trying to analyze how to cool itself, causing itself to overheat?!