Sensory Overload in Adults: You Have Eight Channels, Not Five
"Why am I exhausted when I didn't do anything?" You did do something. You processed a nightclub's worth of fluorescent hum, other people's perfume, and a waistband that declared war at 9 a.m. Sensory load is real load; it just never makes it onto the to-do list.
The hidden three
Beyond the kindergarten five: vestibular (motion and balance), proprioception (body position, the channel that loves pressure and weighted blankets), and interoception (the internal feed of hunger, temperature, and emotion-as-body-sensation). Interoception running late is why you discover at 4 p.m. that you are starving, freezing, and furious all at once.
Seeking and avoiding are both requests
You might flee sound and crave pressure in the same hour. Neither is a malfunction; both are your nervous system asking for something. Requests honored on purpose stop being honored by meltdown.
Log readings, then renegotiate rooms
Two minutes a day, morning and evening, for eight weeks produces something priceless: a spec sheet for your own senses that you can hand to the people who share your rooms. Lightbulbs are negotiable. Seating is negotiable. More is negotiable than the mask ever let you ask.
The Sensory Regulation Tracker is the field kit: an eight-channel profile builder, 54 daily logs, a soothe kit, and an overload protocol in steps, not sentences.