What Are Your Sensory Triggers?
Have you ever experienced either a rupture, or a desire to self-soothe (hello chocolate!) at the end of the day and not sure why or what happened? When one tiny little thing tipped you over the edge?
It may be that your sensory triggers have piled up over the day and your sensory system has reached an overwhelm point.
The way your brain processes sensory input from the body has the power to impact your mental health.
Often times we look at the end result, the emotions and behaviours that we express when we aren't feeling great. Same goes for our kids, too. But we need to get back to the foundations - and that is, that every sensory input needs to be filtered into the 'safe' or 'threat' baskets in our brain.
And this happens subconsciously through the day (of course unless the input is so great you can literally feel it jarring your whole nervous system - a common one in my practice is kids BANGING TOYS OVER AND OVER).
Imagine you have a brain that thinks every noise / sensation / smell is a threat, and you spend your whole day trying to keep it together. Until the end of the day when you fall apart at something 'small'…. because you haven't noticed all the subconscious threats hitting your system all day.
Or imagine your filter is a bit clogged, and you take extra brain resources than usual to filter into safe vs threat, and by the end of the day? Your brain is TIRED. Tired, from basic processes (that shouldn't take up all our resources).
Our emotions are driven by the state of our nervous system.
So, what if your ability to cope day to day isn't about the emotions you're feeling, or the self-soothing behaviours you feel bad about… but instead is about noticing and developing resilience to the sensory input into your brain?
The first step is becoming aware of the subtle triggers that are usually so small, and subconscious, you don't consider them an issue (until you realise how much effort you put into regulating through them).
And then learn how to support your nervous system, developing resilience and tools to slow the daily build up to explosion/self-soothing.
What are your Sensory Triggers?
How many of these sensory triggers do you have? Have you noticed how much they impact your day to day life?
All the noise in the background is really getting on my nerves
There are too many people talking all at once
Please don’t touch me right now
Loud, repetitive noises are really irritating me
My clothes feel uncomfortable on my body
The smell of that perfume is really overwhelming me
There are too many people around me
The lights and electricity hum make my head hurt
You might like to take me Navigating the Sensory System workshop to learn how your senses are working, how they influence your capacity for regulation, and how to work with your triggers.
