Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight

What to Do If You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World

Sharon Heller

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062378651
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Neuroscience
• Index: Biological Sciences

With empathy, compassion, and practical tools, a developmental psychologist and sufferer of Sensory Defensive Disorder (SD) sheds light on a little known but common affliction in which sufferers react to harmless stimuli as irritating, distracting, or dangerous

We all know what it feels like to be irritated by loud music, accosted by lights that are too bright, or overwhelmed by a world that moves too quickly. But millions of people suffer from Sensory Defensive Disorder (SD), a common affliction in which people react to harmless stimuli not just as a distracting hindrance, but a potentially dangerous threat. Sharon Heller, Ph.D. is not only a trained psychologist, she is sensory defensive herself. Bringing both personal and professional perspectives, Dr. Heller is the ideal person to tell the world about this problem that will only increase as technology and processed environments take over our lives. In addition to heightening public awareness of this prevalent issue, Dr. Heller provides tools and therapies for alleviating and, in some cases, even eliminating defensiveness altogether.

Until now, the treatment for sensory defensiveness has been successfully implemented in Learning Disabled children in whom defensiveness tends to be extreme. However, the disorder has generally been unidentified in adults who think they are either overstimulated, stressed, weird, or crazy. These sensory defensive sufferers live out their lives stressed and unhappy, never knowing why or what they can do about it. Now, with Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight, they have a compassionate spokesperson and a solution–oriented book of advice.

Part One

Living Outside the Comfort Zone

To be thus is nothing;

But to be safely thus.

MACBETH V:3,

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

1

Senses on the Defense

I do not much like being touched and I have always to make a slight effort not to draw away when someone links his arms in mine.

—SOMERSET MAUGHAM, ENGLISH NOVELIST

Sleeping in a bed makes Emir feel lost in space. So he sleeps on his side on his living room couch, his back against the hard surface and his legs pushed up against the raised end. He thrives on heat and eschews air-conditioning for the breeze of the open window and a ceiling fan. Since the feel of most clothes make him squirm, he wears as few as possible. His car radio blasts with hard rock, but he cringes at the sound of someone chewing their food in a quiet room. When he’s outside, the sun blinds him, and he must wear sunglasses or he gets a headache. Inside, lights must be dim. At night, he illuminates his house mostly with eucalyptus- or jasmine-scented candles, scents that relax him.

In the summer, Shannon sleeps with the air-conditioning set at 60 degrees and weighs herself down with three heavy blankets, which make her feel held; otherwise she wriggles about and can’t sleep. Rock music puts her on edge, and she tunes to the classical station in her car. She likes dim or bright light; anything in between seems dull and annoying. She delights and indulges in musky perfumes and light flower scents, which permeate her apartment. In the morning and before going to bed, she saturates her skin with fruity body lotions, like strawberry or peach. If not, her skin feels too rough, and she dislikes touching her own flesh.

Each sensory-defensive person has a unique set of sensory foes and comforts. People can show symptoms of tactile, oral, movement, visual, and auditory defensiveness or unusual sensitivities to taste or smell.1 (For a detailed list of symptoms, see Appendix B.) One sense might be particularly involved, or hypersensitivity might reflect all the senses. In addition, a person may hyperreact to one sense, such as smell, but underreact to another, such as movement.

TOUCH: TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

A wife, mother, and computer programmer, Madeline is a small woman with striking blue eyes, pale skin, and a nervousness that shows in rapid speech, tapping fingers, and a shaking leg. Introverted and intense, she keeps to herself but becomes friendly when others take the initiative. She seems perfectly normal—until someone gets too close.

Madeline doesn’t like to be touched. When her sister greets her with a light kiss on the cheek, a shiver goes through Madeline, and she wipes the spot, much to her sister’s dismay. When people touch her, Madeline feels like wiping, scratching, or squeezing the spot. In fact, sometimes when she touches herself lightly, she has to rub the spot. She can’t help it—touch bothers her terribly.

Madeline is tactile-defensive, the hallmark of sensory defensiveness. Growing up, she often writhed when her father or mother hugged or kissed her, though both were caring and loving. Today when she hugs her 3-year-old daughter, it can feel like an obligation and she frequently draws back from her husband’s unexpected love tap. When he crushes his powerful body into hers, she feels at once comforted and trapped. When she must hug friends or relatives, she squeezes hard enough so that she doesn’t have to feel the other person touching her.

It pains her to be so touchy and makes her feel unable to satisfy her family’s need for intimacy. She worries that her family might think that she doesn’t love them, as her parents and sister used to feel when she denied their affection. Yet she loves them deeply and craves their hugs—but on her own terms.

About 18 square feet and weighing in at about 8 pounds, the skin is our boundary between self and world, and a constant source of information about our environment. It is studded with about 5 million tiny nerve endings, or touch receptors, generally larger than those associated with other senses and exquisitely sensitive: our brain registers touch at the slightest pressure.

The top layer, the epidermis, is tough and horny and replaces itself every 28 days, as dead skin cells flake off. The next two levels, the dermis, contain the nerves that set off the defensive reaction, along with blood vessels, glands, and the fibroplastic connective tissue that gives the skin its ability to spring back and retain its shape after a touch.

Touch receptors convey information about pressure, vibration, texture, heat or cold, and pain. Most people process these sensations normally and feel comfortable within their skin, largely unaware of clothes or another person touching their body and other skin sensations.2 When touched lovingly, their body expands with pleasurable excitement, and they reach out to make contact with their world. They tolerate ordinary temperature changes and a normal amount of pain.

The brain of the tactile defensive registers some or all of these tactile sensations as unpleasant or threatening. Clothes feel coarse and pores start to itch; fashion choices are dictated by feel. “I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch,” the late comedian Gilda Radner quipped. The touch of others can prickle and elicit alarm even from the person they love the most, and especially when uninvited. The body shrinks away.

Unable to set their internal thermometer at a comfort zone, some feel hot all the time even in cold weather or cold all the time even when it is warm. Heaven is a hot towel out of the dryer. Quick temperature changes—for example, going from the warm bath into the cold air—throw them. As their nervous system is on high alert and blood leaves the extremities to deliver oxygen to internal organs and muscles, many suffer poor circulation and their hands and feet are always cold. Cold hands and feet might be one reason why the defensive have problems falling asleep. Research at the Psychiatric University Clinic in Basel, Switzerland, found that warm extremities, a sign of dilated blood vessels and healthy blood flow, were linked to falling asleep quickly. Booties, anyone?

Yet warm weather has its own perils as heat and humidity make the defensive feel sticky and clammy; tactile defensiveness increases along with the need for distance from others to cool off. (Moisture also increases sense of smell. When it rains, the low barometric pressure makes fluid spread even faster, and the defensive pick up odors that much more quickly.) Finding the right temperature balance is an endless struggle.

Pain can feel unusually intense. Some will get hysterical from a paper cut or faint from a needle drawing blood. Even the very thin needles used in acupuncture can be nerve-jangling. Certain parts of the body can be extremely sensitive—a minor injury on the foot may feel like a major blow.

Though each person describes unique areas of body sensitivity, different parts of the body are generally more sensitive than other parts and more likely to elicit a defensive response. The hands, dense with receptors for light touch, are more sensitive than the back; anything that feels gritty, sticky, slimy, slippery, gummy, greasy, prickly, or rough gives defensives the heebie-jeebies, and they wash their hands frequently. The fingertips, with 700 touch receptors for every 2 millimeters of skin, are more sensitive than the palm, but nothing like the face and especially the exquisitely sensitive lips. Skim your arm with the palm of your hand and then with your fingertips, and you will feel the difference in sensitivity. Do the same across your cheek and then your lips, and the sensitivity catapults. The area in the brain involved with the lips or the fingertips fills as much space as the area involved with the entire trunk of the body, far less sensitive to touch. Little wonder that many defensives find kissing to feel feathery and unpleasant.

Some parts of the body, like the bottoms of the feet, are ticklish, but they have fewer cold receptors than the tip of our nose or fingers. Other areas of the skin respond more when we itch, shiver, or get gooseflesh. Generally, the hairiest parts of the body are the most sensitive to pressure, as there are many sense receptors at the base of each hair follicle and a nerve ending senses movement. It only takes something pressing or tugging against one hair, or even the skin around it, for the hair to vibrate and spark a nerve. And the skin is thinnest where there’s hair. In this way, displacing hair warns us of danger, like a piece of dirt alighting on our eyelash or a stranger breathing on our neck. It is primarily the light touch of hair displacement that causes the defensive response: If light and coarse, the touch scratches; if light and feathery, it tickles. Deep pressure or firm touch reaches deeper levels of the derma, decreasing arousal and making us feel grounded and calm.

To understand the difference between light touch and deep pressure, squeeze the back of your hand. Now take your finger and very lightly catch a few hair cells. The light touch is more intense. If you are scratching, you likely have some degree of tactile defensiveness.

Timing, interval, tempo, duration, and quality of sensation also determine intensity of touch.3 Slow touch as a rule soothes, while fast touch excites. Continuous and steady touch calms, while intermittent or vibratory touch arouses. (The skin is able to pick up a break of about ten-thousandths of a second in a steady mechanical pressure or tactile buzz, which is why the tiniest ant crawling along our arm bothers us.4) Touch of short duration excites, while prolonged touch calms. Rhythmic touch comforts, while arrhythmic touch stimulates. The quality of the sensation—silky or gritty, dry or wet—changes perception, as does the part of the body touched—e.g., the back or more sensitive neck.

Context matters. Relationship between the persons involved is crucial—lovers, strangers—as is the situation in which the touch occurs—at home, in a crowd.5 Control is another variable—is the touch a surprise or expected, is one touching or being touched? If a person initiates when, where, and how long the touch is, it’s more easy to tolerate. One defensive woman would draw back if her baby touched her, but she could hug her baby all day. Also important is the person’s current level of arousal—drowsy, in overload.

Imagine the ramifications of tactile defensiveness. Rather than being calmed by a cuddle or gentle stroke across the brow, a tactile-defensive infant may become more agitated. Rather than melting from a loved one’s tender caress, a tactile-defensive spouse may tense up.

Body language speaks volumes. Somerset Maugham, the English novelist, hated to be touched and would greet his guests, “coming forward with arms outstretched in welcome, then dropping them to his sides to avoid contact.”6 These gestures represented his powerful need for human contact and also his terror of being touched. Even the anticipation of being touched can evoke a flight, fight, or freeze response, and the body begins to cave inward in self-protection.

To alleviate discomfort, some defensives rub and scratch at their skin until it reddens and even bleeds. For the severely tactile defensive, the skin feels like a pincushion. Touch can be perceived as pain and they may scream—recall Dustin Hoffman’s autistic character in Rain Man. These people feel constantly vulnerable and imprisoned in their skin.

Touchy Mouth

For Manuel, eating a banana feels like eating mush and eating coconut or tuna is like eating hay. Gumbo soup feels slimy, like a raw egg. As for oysters, “God, if I even watch someone eat an oyster, I cringe with disgust.” Manuel won’t eat or drink anything too hot.

In some, tactile defensiveness extends to the mouth and certain food textures or temperatures irritate, as do some taste sensations, and the person gags easily. These picky eaters have long lists of food fetishes. Some seek crunchy food, like chips, or chewy food, like licorice, or squishy foods, like ripe bananas. Others feel repulsed by these textures. Some oral defensives need intense taste and pour on the salt, pepper, and chili sauce, while others find spicy foods irritating and need blander tastes.

Many dislike brushing or flossing their teeth or going to the dentist and will request novocaine, even when it’s unnecessary. It’s less the pain than the sensation of something in their mouth—the instruments, the dentist’s finger, or the vibration of the drill.7 One woman described it as feeling like her teeth had the “chills.” Kissing may tickle unpleasantly.

Does any of this touchiness seem familiar to you? If so, chances are that you also feel out of balance: the senses of touch and movement form a close partnership.

LACKING TERRA FIRMA

Peggy remembers well her first roller coaster ride at age 13. It was a moment of sheer terror. Forty years later, she feels similar vertigo (dizziness, faintness, or lightheadedness that results from an impaired sense of balance and equilibrium) and anxiety going up and down escalators or walking down stairs. Yet she doesn’t mind taking an elevator or traveling by air.

Her balance and equilibrium are off and she feels thrown when her head is tipped forward or backward. In an elevator her head stays level, so she feels fine. This sensation probably existed before her roller coaster ride and reflects less a learned fear than basic instability in her physical sense of space. Though she’s probably unaware of its impact on her functioning, this primal fear creates insecurity in all aspects of her life.

We lose balance and orientation unless we know at every moment the relationship of our body to gravit...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Too Sensitive for Your Own Good
• Part 1: Living Outside the Comfort Zone
• Part 2: Secondary Effects: From Dis-Ease to Disease
• Part 3: Your Sensory Diet
• Part 4: Removing Treatment Obstacles
• Appendix A: Sensory Defensiveness Survival Kit
• Appendix B: Defensive Reactions to Sensation
• Notes
• Glossary
• Resource Guide
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Sharon Heller
• Copyright
• About the Publisher