Sensory Overload in Autistic, ADHD and AuDHD adults: How to defeat your Sensory Overlord
I had meant to write about overload but let’s turn a typo into something official: The Sensory Overlord and how to defeat them!
Imagine this
You have spent three hours in a humongous shopping centre you’ve never been to before. You’ve run laps between the department store, big brands and the food court. You have ridden countless escalators, navigated crowded lifts and trapsed endless aisles, adjusting your eyes and ears to those conflicting fluorescent lights and shop playlists.
You still haven’t found what you came for. You are completely spent and stranded between the middle of somewhere extremely vast and vague.
Cue the Sensory Overlord.
What is a Sensory Overlord?
To be honest, up until about 20 seconds before writing this, it was just a typo that’s grown a personality of its own.
A ‘Sensory Overlord’ is a tyrant that stops you in your tracks from living a life in full colour. It’s the alarm ringer in your nervous system that clumsily bulldozes its way in when your sensory experience goes from uncomfortable to critical overwhelm.
Think of it as your Godzilla of the sensory world that rears its ugly head when you’re on the verge of flailing.
Sensory overload happens when your nervous system takes in more input than it can process, triggering shutdown, irritation, or fight or flight. for neurodivergent adults, especially those of us with heightened sensory sensitivity, these episodes are a sharp, daily reality. while well studied in Autistic people and recognized in AuDHD profiles, this kind of overload frequently hits ADHD adults too, something researchers at King’s College London are now actively investigating.
So how do you defeat an overlord that only shows up when you have zero capacity to fight?
The short answer is: you don’t defeat them in battle. Instead, you learn how to recognise the sound of their footsteps, so you can stop them before they’re fully charged and ready to mobilise.
Forget “name it to tame it” let’s personify it to face it
The default emotional regulation advice to ‘Name to tame it’ is often misaligned with neurodivergent thinking. Naming an experience requires top-down processing where you identify the overall meaning of an experience to better understand your response to it. As neurodivergents we tend to (not everyone) assemble meaning from the fragmented details first, for example: noticing a knot in the stomach, suddenly feeling the discomfort of your clothes, heat travelling to your hands, background music sounding deafening and an urge to move or leave. Asking someone who notices the smaller parts to name the experience is asking them to zoom out before they’ve made sense of what’s happening to them.
Instead of naming it, we personify it – a powerful practice known as externalisation. By constructing a character based on what you’re experiencing, you develop a more comprehensive understanding while remaining one step removed from the self-blame that often clouds our reflections.
Constructing your Sensory Overlord (Sensory Overload)
When you treat sensory distress as a separate character, you get to investigate it with curiosity instead of high-stakes shame. The kinds of questions we can ask sound like:
When does it stand to attention?
What does it look and sound like?
How does it move – fast and nimble, or slow and heavy?
What energy does it have?
What exhausts it?
What is it afraid of?
What is it protecting?
How does it interact with others?
Answering these questions gives you a somatic pattern recognition of what’s happening in your body so you can act before a meltdown alarm is sounded. We get to exercise your reflective muscles and deploy low-effort tactics to keep it at bay.
So how do you actually tame it?
In all honesty, trying to challenge your overlord is a battle no one wins. It isn’t the enemy, it’s an emergency protocol that’s missing the regulation skills to keep you grounded when things get too much. It’s ballsy but clumsy, a fiery flame that’s self-destructive and burns out quickly.
You do not tame it by matching its energy, you catch it by surprise and de-armour it with the practical supports you’ve already anticipated so it feels more capable. OPur approach is to notice, simplify, respond and retreat. For example:
Wearing softer clothing during busier days to provide a comfort net
Having something to occupy the hands knowing you’ll be sitting for a long time
Listening to music to prevent overstimulation from background noise
Pacing your exposure to high-stress environments
Giving yourself plenty of recovery time to soften the sensory hangover
You feed your sensory needs while starving your sensory triggers.
If you’re exhausted from fighting
When you’re depleted from the constant boxing match, something needs to change. My 1:1 coaching supports you to put down the gloves, the judgement and offers permission to retreat from hypervigilance and make room for something softer and supportive.
Picture a Godzilla that now resembles a fluffier oversized teddy.
In my coaching sessions, we work with your wiring instead of against it. We map your unique sensory profile, identify early warning signals, and build low-effort adjustments that work in the moment, so you do not have to isolate yourself from the things that bring you joy.
Your first session is free. Let’s make what’s overwhelming manageable.
