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Tips and Tools for the Sensory Defensive, Part II

Going to sling one final post at you with information on the condition known as “sensory defensiveness.” If you haven’t heard about this condition, you can find the basics in my introductory post on what it means to be sensory defensive. The first batch of tips and tools are in this Part I post.

Today, I’m covering the last part of Dr. Sharon Heller’s book Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight. The reason I’ve devoted three posts to sensory defensiveness is because I suspect there are more of us walking around with it than we realize. I hadn’t heard of it until recently, but boy, do some of the triggers resonate! And as I mentioned in Part I, even if you’re not sensory defensive, Dr. Heller’s tools are helpful all the way around for living well, and living well means living healthy and living long.

These points are taken from the section titled “Removing Treatment Obstacles.”

Your GI tract is highly sensitive (over 30 gut hormones!), and certain foods can exacerbate sensory defensiveness: caffeine, simple sugars, starches and high glycemic foods, to name the biggest culprits. Food allergies may also be lurking. To test for this, start by eliminating all sugar, alcohol, wheat, dairy and corn from your diet for three weeks, then slowly reintroduce them, one at a time. You might be surprised by what you find; I was.
Sensory defensives often suffer from leaky gut syndrome, candida overgrowth, and acidity. Maintaining balance in the gut is vital for modulating your nervous system and managing sensory defensiveness. Remember the song that goes “hip bone is connected to the thigh bone,” and then take it even further.
In the chronically tense body that is the bane of most sensory defensives, breathing tends toward fast and shallow. Practice breathing from the diaphragm instead of the chest. To go a bit deeper (pun intended), look into special exercise that use alternate nostrils, Pranayama or Ujjayi breathing. There are lots of techniques to try, and all will lead to a more relaxed mind and body.
Tense body often means poor posture. Does your neck hurt? Tight shoulders? Do you feel frozen in your current posture? Heller recommends a variety of bodywork: craniosacral therapy (especially good for TMJ), neurocranial restructuring, Tragerwork and Rolfing. (She also mentions massage, but I’ll tell you from firsthand experience, massage rarely results in permanent structural change the way these other modalities can.)
After bodywork, how about retraining your movement to match your new posture so the results stay with you forevah? Some to check into are Feldenkrais, Hanna Somatic Education, the Alexander Technique, yoga, Qi Gong, and bioenergetics. Spoiler: somewhere along the way, you might be told to ditch those four-inch stilettos. Consider yourself forewarned.
Another avenue for deep relaxation is mind-body practices. Progressive relaxation, where you start at your head or feet and then clench and release each major muscle group one at a time is a good one. Another is meditation, where you move your focus away from thoughts and onto sensations. Both have major medical results: lower blood pressure, a slower heart rate, relaxed muscles, and slower brain waves. Bonus: you can practice them at your desk, on the subway, or during the Annual General Meeting of <insert organization of your choice here.>
Hypnotherapy, where you are deeply relaxed and open to suggestion, can be effective in desensitizing a sensory defensive to fear, phobias and pain. Look for someone trained in analytical hypnotherapy; this approach regresses you so you can tap into buried memories or emotions that might be playing a role in your stimuli responses.

Some of the practices listed above might be foreign and freaky sounding to you, as they were to me. I felt it was important to list them because each one works differently, although sometimes the differences are subtle. But because they are different, they also work well together, as part of an integrated approach. Just trust me on this. The more you play in this sandbox, the more you’ll find yourself dipping your toes into multiple pools (and yes, I freaking LOVE mixing my metaphors).

If your mind and body are suffering a little or a lot, these practices are worth exploring. And don’t be discouraged if sometimes it feels like the changes are too big to handle. Bite off a bit at a time, and course correct as needed. Wellness is a continual journey, because your body is always changing.

Are any of these tools your personal faves, or on your to-do list? What has your experience with them been?

Tips and Tools for the Sensory Defensive, Part I

By Laura Zera 11 Comments

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what it means to be sensory defensive. The basic definition, as provided by Dr. Sharon Heller in Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight, is this: “sensory defensiveness is a condition that encompasses a constellation of symptoms, including tension, anxiety, avoidance, stress, anger, and even violence, that result from aversive or defensive reactions to what most people consider nonirritating stimuli.”

As promised, this post is a summary of Dr. Heller’s recommendations for living well in an overstimulating world. Whether sensory defensive or not (I am in some areas, not in others), her tools are helpful for everybody, and I highly recommend the book. Dr. Heller has covered all the bases, and created a timeless guide for a healthy life.

Your Sensory Diet

The last part of the book is divided into two sections, “Your Sensory Diet,” and “Removing Treatment Obstacles.” These bullet points will highlight information from the first section. I’ll save the latter section for a future post.

Jot down (and rate from 1-3) the objects, people and/or situations that stress your senses and which you find yourself avoiding. Heller provides a list, but you could do just fine if you aim to be specific when you create this inventory.
Get used to body scanning for tension throughout the day. Start at the feet or head, and go up or down. Where do you feel tight, clenched, compressed, etc.? Are you frequently tense? Once you’ve found the tension, part of the exercise is to let go of it by allowing that part of your body soften.
If you have severe sensory defensiveness, seeing an occupational therapist (OT) could help. Seek one who is a specialist in sensory integration.
Engage in proprioceptive activities (“priming the pump,” as Heller calls it). Deep pressure on your body and heavy work that engages your body helps you feel grounded. This can be done in many ways, such as house work, exercise, standing in front of a wall and pushing into it with straight arms, or pushing your hands together in prayer position. What you are doing is stimulating the brain’s cerebellum, which communicates with the reticular activating system to inhibit arousal to a normal level. Our bodies were designed for movement and exercise. Heller points out how active our early ancestors were, and that exercise purges stress chemicals and helps organize the brain to do its job effectively.
Slow down the music and turn down the volume. Music that is fast and loud creates internal chaos for the sensory defensive. Perhaps even try baroque or New Age music, which shift brain consciousness toward alpha waves, enhancing overall well-being (I’ve been listening to alpha wave music for six months and it has made a giant difference for me!).
Chant, hum or sing. It creates vibration in the upper body that leads to deeper breathing, a more relaxed jaw and throat, and released tension.
Replace your lightbulbs with the full-spectrum variety. They’re available for fluorescents, too. (Heller includes a fascinating section on light therapy, e.g., the work of optometrist John Downing and the Lumatron phototherapy device.)
Carpets, paints, cleaning products, self-care products, etc. should all be as chemically free as possible. Besides the fact that chemicals are far from harmless, they can set off olfactory alarms for the sensory defensive which others are able to ignore. (I adore the smell of essential-oil-based stuff, but can’t tolerate perfume at all).
Pay attention to your physical environment. Feng shui your home to allow natural flow of energy (de-clutter!), and choose paint colors based on mood impacts (this information can be easily found online; green has the most restful effect). Also, escape to nature as often as you can, and bring nature into your home.

The important thing to remember is that there is science behind these tips. Brain waves, pulse, breath, etc. have been measured and compared when exposed to different sensory inputs, such as fast, drum-based music versus music with a slower (or no) beat, and different types of light. And while some of us might be painfully aware of our adverse reactions to some stimuli, others may have been living with the discomfort for so long that we have accepted it as “normal.” I invite you to play with this information: take a baseline of your body’s stimuli responses, incorporate some changes into your sensory diet, and see what happens.

Have you incorporated any of these types of changes into your daily life? What effects have you felt?

Mental Health: What Is Sensory Defensiveness?

By Laura Zera 25 Comments

I’m currently reading a book called Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight by Sharon Heller. Sounds like erotica, I know, but it’s actually about what it’s like to be a sensory defensive person in the world, and how to cope. My coach recommended it a few weeks ago after I told her how spending a half day in a noisy, busy hair academy (chosen because it was cheap), getting my gray colored over AND foils AND a haircut, left me completely shattered. My plan had been to go to my office afterward and work for the rest of the day, but when I got there, I lay curled in fetal position on my beanbag chair for 30 minutes before I could even attempt to look at words on a page. I considered shaving my head and getting a nice wig, rather than ever go through that kind of torture again (I have way too much hair; the foils pushed me over the edge).

A surge of books and articles have been written recently about what it means to be an introvert; as it turns out, the concept has historically been rather misunderstood, so the material filled an information need. It helped a lot of people, me included, understand why we have no problem engaging with groups of people—leading meetings, facilitating workshops, public speaking, etc.—but then require anywhere between hours and days of quiet time to restore our energy balance. Many of us have also heard of highly sensitive people (HSPs), a term introduced by Dr. Elaine Aron in 1996. But sensory defensive? That’s a term we don’t see kicked around as much, even though it has been around since the 1960s (although called “tactile defensive” until the 1980s).

As defined by Dr. Heller, “sensory defensiveness is a condition that encompasses a constellation of symptoms, including tension, anxiety, avoidance, stress, anger, and even violence, that result from aversive or defensive reactions to what most people consider nonirritating stimuli.” The stimuli can include anything from irritation to tags in clothing, to touching dirt, to an aversion to cutting your nails, to getting carsick.

There’s some science behind why some people can find themselves with this condition. Three particularly important senses are involved, and those are the “proximal,” which tell you what’s going on inside your own body: 1) the tactile system, responsible for information on touch, pain, temperature and pressure, 2) the vestibular system, which involves inner ear structures and is used to detect movement and changes in the position of your head and 3) the proprioceptive system, which provides feedback from your muscles, joints, and tendons that enables you to know your body’s position in space. Then, these three sensory systems send messages to the three parts of your brain: 1) the brain stem, or primitive brain, 2) the limbic system, or emotional brain, and 3) the neocortex, or thinking brain.

When integration is lacking between the proximal systems, and/or connectivity blips in the three brain parts make it difficult for the brain to organize the inputs from the proximal systems, you find people who are sensory defensive. This isn’t to say that the other senses – touch, vision, hearing, smell and taste – aren’t also involved. Oh yes, throw them all into the sensory defensive stew!

From the reading I’ve done about introverts, HSPs, empaths, people with anxiety disorder, and the sensory defensive condition, there is an unsurprising amount of overlap in symptoms and traits. In fact, sensory defensiveness is often misdiagnosed as anxiety, Heller writes. And, it largely boils down to one core concept: our brains receive and process signals differently, then tell our bodies how to respond. For whatever reason—biological, environmental, psychological—some people’s brains and bodies respond in a more dramatic way than others. That could range from having physiological reactions of nausea, headaches, etc. to stimuli such as light, smells, and touch, all the way to a fight-or-flight cortisol spree, which, while unpleasant at the moment of occurrence, also has long-term health implications.

Having read about a third of the book so far, I’m not convinced either way yet as to whether I’m sensory defensive or not, and while I may be, I’d certainly fall in the “mild” category in terms of symptoms (some with this condition find things such as the sound of a bag of potato chips being opened excruciating!). However, I’m about to get into the tips and tricks section for how to cope as a sensory defensive in a stimulating world, and given that I do know I’m an introverted empath who has had anxiety disorder, something tells me the information will be useful in some capacity or another! I will be sure to share the highlights in a future blog post.

Have you had experience with sensory defensiveness, or any of the other conditions I’ve listed? Whether diagnosis-driven or anecdotal, I’m interested to hear stories of your experience in a world that can feel too loud, too bright, too fast, too tight.