Published on 12, July, 2020
I would like to know if anyone else gets the same type of sensory overload shut down as me.
I get overloaded most days and often it goes on to cause a shut down by which I mean I physically can’t talk because that would be too painful even though I often feel guilty of being rude around people. It’s an episode of intense fear where I then have to hide under bed clothes even if it is the height of summer.
Occasionally I get one other symptom which is that I cannot move any muscle of my body and am paralyzed in my bed for up to 2 hours.
All I can do is wait for the overload feeling to go, and afterwards I have to move and talk exaggeratedly slowly as to not set off another shut down.
Does anyone else have similar experience and how do they deal with it?
Clare
Hi Clare,
The first thing to say is that you are not alone in having shut-downs like these, and I have them myself. From what I have seen here and on other forums, shut-downs are almost as common for autistic people as the "explosive meltdowns" which are more often described as part of autism - I think shut-downs just get less attention from medical folk because they look less dramatic from the outside.
Shut-downs can take many forms, and each of us will experience them slightly differently, or have a different kind of shut-down at different times. You might find the article at the following link helps you to understand what is happening when you shut down - <link> Guide to Shutdowns.
From your description, it sounds like you more often have "partial shutdowns", with the "paralysis" that you describe being an occasional "full shutdown". This is similar to my experience. With most shut-downs I remain able to get myself to a safe place, but I'm often unable to speak and/or unable to understand other people's speech. However, if I can't easily escape from the situation, a full shut-down can follow, in which case I remain conscious, but completely unresponsive and unable to move or collect my thoughts. Afterwards, I desperately feel the need to sleep, and it can sometimes take several hours to recover.
In my opinion, the most important thing to begin with is to work out exactly which things cause the stress which begins a shutdown, and to try to understand how much tolerance to those things you have. There isn't always a single "trigger event" that causes a shutdown, it can sometimes be that things are slowly wearing us away until one last little tiny thing finally tips us over the edge. Sometimes dealing with other people can be one of these "slow build up" stresses, which can lower our tolerance to any sensory issues that we have. Other causes of stress in our lives, or even just a poor night's sleep, can also lower our tolerance. A shut-down is much more likely if we go into a situation with our stress levels already sky-high to begin with.
For many autistic people, the link between our body and our mind is sometimes not too good. This can mean that we easily miss the early warning signs that a shut-down is coming - we can get so focused on appearing "normal" to everyone else that we forget to read the sensations from our body that would tell us how stressed we are, or we might deliberately try to ignore them. As you say, once the shut-down begins, there is little that can be done until we recover naturally, so learning to spot the warning signs allows us to take action before that happens.
How to manage this so that it doesn't impair our lives so much will vary from person to person, but here are a few of the tactics which I use, which may give you some ideas to begin tackling your own shutdowns.
It may take some time to work out exactly what works for you, so be kind to yourself, and be sure to congratulate yourself for even the smallest improvements at first. Learning to manage the problem by itself helps to lower stress levels, as it reduces the "fear of shut-downs" and gives a sense of being more in control, so each small improvement makes other improvement easier to gain.
You do need to be realistic that maybe not every single shut-down can be avoided - it still happens to me from time to time when circumstances are too unpredictable to respond in time. But hopefully, by asking your question, you have set yourself on the road to some significant improvements.
Best wishes.
thank you so much for all that imfomation. its helped me so much as have now been able to show details to my family so they can understand a bit better what I go through. I've never been able to explain before and its reassuring that I'm not alone and its very common - No doctor or psychiatrist has ever known what it was that was going on in 35 years
all the best to you and may grateful thanks again