Sensory sensibility, part two.

Part one concluded with us walking around a corner together…right into the middle of all of this. My brain is starting to power down as a result of overwhelming stimulus; in addition, it is also inducing anxiety, a less-than-subtle cue to the rest of my system that something is really wrong.

So what do we do?  We find a safe place.

It took me a long time to figure out what a safe place for my melting brain should look like, or even that it needed one. I knew something was up; I would come home from a long day at work and my mind would just be done. Sometimes that felt like I had a cement block in my skull; other times, my brain was like a puppy surrounded by squirrels – getting it to focus on anything seemed an insurmountable task.

Recognizing that my brain was overwhelmed and exhausted, I would curl up on the couch in front of the TV – what’s more mindless than television, right?! No matter how mindless whatever I was watching was, I was still unable to quiet my mind and manage my anxiety. I was perplexed by the obvious contradiction: my brain needs a break, yet even with the TV to zone out to, I would still find myself tinkering on my phone or multi-tasking in some other way, as anxiety and restlessness coursed through me. It was a relief when I finally realized a direct correlation between anxiety and stimulus…but if I couldn’t figure out how to respond to sensory overload, I would not be able to actually manage my anxiety. If tinkering on my phone in front of the TV while my leg bounced up and down wasn’t cutting it, what would? What would it take to calm my brain and body, giving both the break they needed? From the beginning, I had looked at the problem purely in terms of numbers: lots of stimulus is bad, so less is good…right?

It took a while, and I stumbled across the solution by accident, but I finally learned that for my broken little brain, it needed a break from unreconciled stimulus. My brain was being drained not so much by the stimuli themselves, but by constantly having to identify each stimulus and figure out where it fit. My brain didn’t want to be placed on a timeout – it just wanted one engaging thing to focus on, and an opportunity to tune everything else out. It may sound simple enough, but identifying this was HUGE. I started off thinking I needed to find a “safe place”…but it turns out that knowing what my brain needs means I can make a lot of spaces safe, giving me one more way I can feel a sense of freedom and control in my recovery process.

I’ll be sharing in another post some of the tools I have found to manage the stimulus and subsequent anxiety (and therefore my brain)…