Managing workplace sensory issues
Sensory issues have a huge impact on my day-to-day anxiety levels. Understanding this has been a real benefit of getting my autism diagnosis.
Our sensory worlds are complex, and everyone responds to different things differently. My general approach to improve things for myself is:
- Map out which things help and which things hinder against each individual sense
- Maximise the good, and minimise the bad
Obviously, there has been a lot of trial and error within that… for example, I discovered during my diagnosis that I don’t get enough proprioceptive input (your sense of where your body is in space).
I will go through each sense and explain the impact that this can have at work and what I do to help myself. A lot of this is now second nature. When I was first experimenting to find out what works, I used a lot of visual reminders. To nudge me to do things or to avoid things that I wasn’t used to paying attention to. Those reminders ranged from a little picture on my whiteboard to calendar reminders at key points during the day.
However I do travel for work from time to time and sometimes need to be in an office. I will mention which things are only relevant to one of those contexts.
Hypersensitivities (things I am over-sensitive to)
I am hypersensitive to most “external” senses (hearing, sight, touch, smell) – the only exception is taste, where I’m a under-sensitive, which doesn’t cause me much trouble.
Although being extra sensitive has downsides, it also means that the good things can be extra good. For example certain smells can massively calm me down just as much as others can stress me out.
Visual
Challenges: being in a busy or untidy environment, badly formatted documents, busy backgrounds on other people’s video call screens
Things that help: closing my eyes, keeping my desk clear, taking the lead on design of any documents that I am struggling with, using assistive software to read documents aloud to me if I am struggling to process them.
Auditory
Challenges: drilling or other external noise, people talking in the office
Things that help: noise cancelling headphones, asking someone to address talking in the office especially if this is impacting my other colleagues as well (we’re a pretty neurodivergent bunch, so chances are, it is!), joining meetings on my phone outside somewhere quiet if there is lots of noise in my building, accepting that I don’t have control over something like drilling outside and giving myself permission to do less work that day
Touch
Challenges: uncomfortable clothing, socks or tights with seams over my toes, major issues with the feeling of my hands and nails e.g. if I don’t have enough moisturiser or my nails are too long
Things that help: when I do have to go to the office, I wear the most comfortable version of the dress code that I can. If that isn’t possible for whatever reason, I will agree with my manager that we can make an exception. So far this hasn’t caused an issue. Usually for me this looks like: black jeans with a plain, long sleeve top and maybe a plain jumper or cardigan. Issues with my hands and nails are a constant struggle, so I always make sure that I have hand cream with me whenever I’m travelling, and cut my nails before I go away. Otherwise this can completely throw me off.
Smell
Challenges: when I’m working from home, this isn’t a huge problem… my house always smells nice because I am in control of the environment! In the office or while travelling, smells like people drinking tea or eating strongly smelling foods can take up a lot of brain space and make me feel a bit nauseous.
Things that help: I always have some kind of perfume with me in a smell that I find calming. I might get it out just to smell it, or spray it onto a scarf/jumper that I know will be close to my face during the day, so I can cover my face a bit if needed.
Hyposensitivities (things I am under-sensitive to)
Proprioception and vestibular
Challenges: Proprioception is your sense of where you are in space and where your limbs are, and your vestibular sense is all about sensing movement. These challenges can be a bit harder to spot. I don’t always notice that there is an issue until I am feeling anxious, but I’m not quite sure why. Your proprioceptive and vestibular senses are very “organising” for all of your other senses. This means that they help make sense of all the other input you’re getting. So, when these are not being stimulated in the right way, it can make everything around you harder to process. For me this leads to a lot of anxiety building up, and I need to balance things out.
Things that help: moving as much as I want to, sitting in weird positions in my chair, using my standing desk so I can fidget more, getting extra pressure, sometimes wearing tighter clothing or an underlayer can help with giving low level proprioceptive input throughout the day. Things like yoga and stretching once away from the office can also be helpful as these give your joints a bit of extra input.
Interoception
Challenges: Interoception is your internal sense of what is happening in your body. I am not very good at noticing when I am hungry, thirsty, hot cold, for example. This gets a lot more difficult when I am overwhelmed, including when I am in the office or travelling. Sometimes that means I end up feeling sick or unwell and not really knowing why. Half the time it’s just because I have unknowingly been ignoring some basic need that my body has!
Things that help: I have built in manual workarounds for this because I know that I can’t rely on instinct, especially at stressful times.
I look in the mirror to check if I’m red which might mean I’m too warm. I always eat my meals and snacks at the same time every day and I try really hard to maintain the timings and the rough amounts that I eat even when I’m travelling (e.g. using reminders in my calendar). I don’t get this right every time, but when I do it makes a big difference in levelling out my anxiety. In the past I have almost tricked myself into thinking that this won’t be an issue because I don’t tend to feel hungry while travelling. Later down the line I realise that no, it’s just that I was so overwhelmed and anxious, I didn’t notice I was feeling hungry. And by ignoring that I’ve ended up feeling shaky and tired and sick later on in the journey.
November 2023
