What does being overstimulated feel like to you?

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I ask because obviously everyone jumps at loud sounds. That's a thing, I know because I see it in the movies all the time. I've seen people on TV jump and scream at loud noises. So what's the difference between a normal and an abnormal reaction?

When I hear a loud or sudden noise, it feels like I've been electrocuted. Sometimes I scream, sometimes I just jump. Sometimes I'll flap my arms or hit something. But it always feels like I've been shocked, and it usually starts in my head or chest and radiates out to the rest of my body. It leaves me tingling for some time afterward. The tingles slowly fade from the middle of me out, my feet and hands are the last to go.

Is this what an NT person experiences when they jump or scream at loud noises, or is this an atypical sensory perception?

If it's typical, what exactly does an AS person experience when they hear a loud noise or other overstimulation?

Conversely, if it isn't sudden but instead is constant (like at an airport or grocery store) I feel like everything around me gets muted. Things are far off, colors are dulled, lines are hazy. I feel like I'm floating in a dream world. Is this normal, or an AS reaction? (I have always assumed this just happens to everyone at the grocery store.)

I'm sorry if my questions are dumb. I have only recently begun to wonder if all these idiosyncrasies everyone has always treated me like I'm crazy for actually have a real explanation. Course, I could just be hopelessly weird. I haven't ruled that out.

I don't feel like I'm being shocked like that. What I feel like is that loud noises keep replaying in my brain and build up into what feels like clutter and slows down my cognition in general. Usually, most sounds get processed and go away, but the more sounds build up, the slower they all process and the harder it is to think, until I hit shutdown.

Other sensory overload is similar - if someone touches me, I feel the touch for a long time and my skin crawls. Sometimes the touch hurts. With bright lights or a lot of movement, it has a similar feeling - I have a lot of trouble sorting out a lot of movement in a short time and bright light just overwhelms me. Certain smells hit my like I walked into a brick wall - cigarette smoke, perfumes, cologne, the detergent aisle in stores, etc. Just intolerable, and push me toward overload faster than anything.

I can relate to the reaction from sudden loud noises, or someone touching me by surprise. All the muscles in my body will twitch.

But my reaction to a constant over stimulation is different. If it's a lot of chaotic noises, like a crowded movie theater before the show and everyone is having different conversations. All the noise will sound louder and get blurred together. I'll start to get confused and sometimes a panic attack will set in and I will have to flee the situation. And malls at Christmas time..... HELL NO! I stay well away for all of December.

Thinking about this, I remember when I was little, how my sister who is 6 years older than me used to pin me down and tickle me until I was in tears. Sometimes if her friends we're over, they would gang up on me. Though it's mostly a good memory, she never really did it out of malice, just fun. But she had me so traumatized that she could just threaten and gesture to tickle me and I would jump.

But certain kinds of over stimulation I enjoy. I am a metalhead. I love really loud heavy metal music. Thundering heavy metal, the kind that scares animals. I love the way the intense bass rhythms go through my body. I feel energized by it. At concerts I get close to the speakers.

Thanks Sogj,

This is really helpful to me as it goes some way to explain what my son may be experiencing...which based on your description is very different to a NT person.
I feel nothing when I am in a grocery store - I don't feel comfortable if someone stands to close to me as I like my own space and tend to get claustrophobic but I feel the same as I would any other place - sorry, I can't be in more specific than that...
I jump at loud noises if I don't know's coming til after it's happened - again, sorry I can't be more specific..

I don't have a problem with most sounds, motorbikes and gunshots make me jump and make my heart race and my skin tingle but I don't think that's an unusual response.

Too much general noise overwhelms me, like yesterday at my daughter's swimming class I was huddled at a corner table in the waiting / viewing area, the dozen or so other parents were all talking and it was just too much. I felt waves of...I can't explain it but just wrongness washing over me and I wanted to scream out "Shut the F**k up!" but you can't do that. So I sat getting more and more uncomfortable and irritated, I felt dizzy, my head felt compressed, I have this thing about my mouth feeling like it's full of slime and I feel like I'm choking. It gets worst and everything becomes kind of hazy and just wrong and it's like I'm dreaming, everything just seems distant and hazy and it's such a hard thing to describe.

I'm usually okay with most smells apart from smoke and if someone has way too much perfume on, in which case I feel like I'm chocking like the smell is blocking the back of my throat.

Visually I'm fine, I can't think of anything visual that overloads me(bright lights or anything like that).

Touch, I don't get overloaded with just irritated and a feeling of wrongness, like someone touching me over my clothes just makes me feel yuk and will pester me until I have to do a hand pattern or my toes to rectify it.

Of course everybody jumps at loud noises. But when I know a loud sudden noise is about to happen but I don't know when, I sit there on edge with a dry mouth, being afraid to swallow in case it happens when I swallow and I choke. And I go all shakey and sick and just cannot concentrate on ANYTHING, whereas everybody else around me are chatting (then they jump when the loud noise happens!)

It's like I fuss over the smoke alarm in our house. When we cook something that sends out a lot of smoke, I have to walk around with earplugs in to get past it, or I just stay away in my room and politely ask my mum to pass my dinner to my room so that I won't have to pass the smoke alarm to get my dinner. But I saw my brother walk under the smoke alarm and it went off the second he went under it, and it didn't seem to make him jump at all. Well, it might of, but he didn't react very strongly to it. He just laughed, got his dinner and went into the other room. And I'm standing there thinking, ''how the f**k did he not jump? If that was me I would've jumped through the roof, whether I was expecting it or not!''

It is a 'creepy crawly' sensation on the skin that I don't like.

It feels like a drug overdose. Like my brain is melting and veering off track, and I feel very angry/confused.

My brain feels like its clogging up from too much trying to pass through pipes at the same time, and then the pipes burst and I have no sense of anything other than the need to sob.

I don't jump when I hear a loud noise because of my auditory processing issues, but it still goes in and usually stays in my brain to freak me out later. With a lot of my sensory overloads it is when I have collected too much sensory information, kind of like filling a computer's hard drive to max, and I crash. Another thing I use to describe my sensory overloads is like shaking up a bottle of fizz. It's going to explode if you shake it hard enough! Because of my lagged response to sensory information, I become overloaded at strange times which can be unpredictable and distressing.

Being overstimulated feels like there is too much clutter all around me and in my mind as well. Everything becomes extremely cluttered and gibberished, and I can't think at all. The cognitive functions of my brain stop working. If I took an IQ test in this state, then I would score very poorly on it. This is probably one of the reasons why many autistic people score poorly on IQ tests. Perhaps other tests too, e.g. lab tests in autism research studies.

when I've been in company where there's been a lot of chattering and noise and chaos it's as though my head is still full of that noise for ages after, it can last for 24 hrs, then I start processing it, it's a slow process, I go through each thought, everything thats been said, I see facial expressions in my head that I can't figure out what they meant. I start stimming and repeating things. yes it's quite an exhausting process, it's no wonder I need to spend a lot of time on my own.

[quote="sogj"But it always feels like I've been shocked, and it usually starts in my head or chest and radiates out to the rest of my body. It leaves me tingling for some time afterward. The tingles slowly fade from the middle of me out, my feet and hands are the last to go.[/quote]

It's the shot of adrenalin that gets put into your system by a gland behind the stomach, which then radiates out.

Constant stress can produce it much more slowly, which puts a strain on your system and probably accounts for the dull feeling.

I always get that tingling thing though I can't really pinpoint anything that specifically sets it off. I like it, it's like a warm rush and a tingle normally on the back of my head.

I just feel lost and totally confused when overstimulated. I can't concentrate on what I want to do or need to do.

i wrote a poem that describes how i feel when over stimulated

http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2785820/1 ... y_Overload