How to cope with sensory overload ?

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I have to commute every day for a total of 2 1/2 hour. That time is pure hell for me but i don't have choice. When i reach the office, i'm completly drained, when i'm finaly home at night, i feel suicidal. Most of the time i just collapse in tears and swear i won't do it anymore.

Do you have a way, a trick, something, to minimise the effect of this ? My job is downtown so moving near it would just be worst.

I commute by train. There's still people around me and sensory crap, but at least can bury my face in a book. It might be worth taking some kind of public transport to work if possible, even if it takes longer.

Over here the public transport IS the train

Trying to read a book is impossible. Music must be too loud to cover all conversations. The problem is that i can pick everyting that is said by everybody. I can't stop it.

Have you tried wearing earplugs or listening to music with headphones? Also, I've never tried them, but I was told about these headphones called Bose headphones which are supposed to be very good at blocking out background noise. Unfortunately, they look to be rather expensive.

I used public transportation and earplugs. Earplugs work really well for me, once I put my nose in a book. I am able to block out most of the noise.

I felt so much more relaxed when I reached work and home after wearing my earplugs.

tallgirl

I have a bus ride that is 2 hours forward, 2 hours back a couple times a week. I had a lot of trouble riding the bus, and when I got off I would immediately feel warn out and would want to go just home and sleep.
I found that it makes a big difference if I stop myself from looking out the window, and just stare at the floor, and just drift away in my mind.
Peoples conversations are sometimes hard to filter out, but luckily I live in a very multicultural city so often they will be in a foreign language and I can just ignore them, and focus on the rise and fall of the "white noise" of the voises and the engine and the rain, which becomes soothing.

I have earplugs for when things get unbearable!

The natural way for an Autistic to tolerate an enviromental irritant is to stim.

With noise, the best technique is to try and focus all the different channels of sound coming in into a single channel, this turns it into white noise. You then have to 'twist' it into a pattern, you can do this by humming or thinking of a musical rythym which you then layer the white noise over.

I don't do stimming or whatever that is and never have.

I don't want to think of people on the autistic spectrum like that, I don't think I am like that.

Sensory overload happens to me sometimes. Mainly with touch. Out of the blue anything that touches me will make me itch and bother me intensely. It has something to do with sounds in my left ear which also affects it. That ea is overly sensitive and sounds can create itches and goosebumps all over my body.

Odd... I've never done anything like that. Is this something you do naturally without any thought or is it a technique you devised?

When I become overwhelmed I instinctively tend to press some part of my body hard against something like the edge of a table or a rail so that it is just on the edge of hurting. The harder and colder it is the better. Metal is especially good for this. I also squeeze my fingers between notebook binding wire or rub them against eachother.

I read. I can read no matter how loud the background noise. I "read aloud" in my head. I don't know how to explain it, but I "hear" the words in my head. It blocks out everything else that way.

Unlike some here, I can't read in a moving vehicle since any movement in my peripheral vision triggers dizziness and nausea. Motion sickness is a problem for me. On long commutes, I find that wearing dark glasses and earplugs help a lot. I can close my eyes behind the dark glasses and drift off to someplace pleasant. Good luck.

You Just Need Some Calm Down Time When You Get Home Like Lisen To Nature Sounds In A Place Like Your Bedroom Or Some Where Relaxing To You In Other Words

I've spoken to thousands of Aspies/Autistics on stimming and a pattern emerges.

In The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time, the protagonist believes he can't tell a lie because of Aspergers. The fact is that Aspergers in no way inhibits Aspies from lying, though there is a common general taboo towards it. The character has created a constructive rule in his head which he follows so strictly that he believes he can't not follow it.

Aspies are able to make up rules and build them into themselves, that is stimming. When the world can not follow rules, we make our own.



All people are stimulated by the enviroment and all people have a certain degree of control over that stimulation. The less control a person is permitted over the physical enviroment, the more control they will develop over the very senory input that allows them to percieve that physical enviroment Bruno Bettlhiem first concieved the refriderator mother theory of Autism based on behaviour he observed whilst in a Nazi internment camp. Prisoners locked in cells for 23 hours a day self-stimulate when they think they are not being observed.

Neurotypicals are taught values and articulation of themselves from an early age, the communication barrier often leads to this process being impaired in Autistic children though the impairement is erroneously placed entirely with the Autistic.

The reason why interventions such as ABA often appear to work is because a regime is also imposed on the adults in the child's enviroment; they start following rules and they start making sense and the child learns.

When you choose a preference in food you are stimming, when you massage and aching muscle you are stimming and when you hum as you think you are stimming.

You just scream shut up and say what they where saying back to them to show them how loud they are also I am the exact same way I know how you feel but I don't know what to do about it either

That is quiet interesting, Lucas, but it didn't answer my question. Do you create these stimming "rules" with effort, or is it something that just happens without any thought?

Also, I don't think it is so much about rules as it is about regulating the amount of stimulation that one's body recieves.