The Sensory Experience Is Central to Neurodivergent Life. Here’s What I’ve Created to Help.
Two years ago I took my sons to a San Francisco 49ers football game. My first one, ever, after almost fifty years of being a fan without ever seeing my team play in person.
I lost it in the parking lot, before we even entered the stadium.
Not “lost it” like a tantrum. Lost it as in, I was no longer in my body.
Thousands of people moving in every direction, tailgate smoke, a hundred conversations layered on top of each other, struggling to keep track of my kids and my wife in the crowd.
Somewhere in the last hundred yards to the gate I stopped being able to process any of it as a coherent scene. I had to ask two of my sons to help guide me to our seats. They gave me a weird look, but didn’t protest. Each of them took an elbow and walked me the rest of the way, the way you’d guide someone who couldn’t see.
I didn’t really surface again or process anything about the game until halfway through the second quarter.
That day is the reason I sought an autism assessment, after years of denial in the face of my wife’s repeated opinions that I was probably autistic. (She’s a therapist with more than 20 years of experience. I should have listened sooner.) It’s also the reason the chapter I’m writing right now has been the hardest one so far.
I’m working on the sensory chapter of A Field Guide to the Wrong Planet — my book for late-identified neurodivergent adults. Every chapter in this book has been personal. This one’s required me to go much deeper into confusing territory than any of the others so far. Writing about sensory processing means going back into moments like that stadium and actually staying there long enough to understand the mechanics, instead of just surviving them again.
Here’s what I keep running into: almost everyone I talk to about sensory stuff — clients, readers, other late-diagnosed adults — describes their experience the same vague way. “I’m sensitive to noise.” “I don’t like crowds.” As if sensory processing were one dial, turned up too high.
It isn’t. And that single misunderstanding costs people a lot.
You Don’t Get One Setting. You Get Eight.
Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell — these are the five senses everyone learns about in school. There are at least three more that nobody teaches you: vestibular (movement and balance), proprioception (where your body is in space), and interoception (hunger, heartbeat, the first flicker of an emotion before you have a word for it).
Eight channels. Not one.
What we often don’t realize, in talking about sensory sensitivities, is that each channel runs on its own settings, and they can look completely contradictory sitting next to each other.
I avoid almost all sound. Loud noise, background conversations, many people talking at once, are all highly dysregulating for me. Yet bass-heavy, low-frequency sound is the exception — it calms me down instead of grating on me.
I have almost no sense of smell, which was genuinely useful when my kids were still in diapers. But I crave intensely spicy food, maybe because it’s one of the only flavors that reliably registers.
I bruise myself without noticing the impact because my sense of where my own body is in space runs so low — and at the same time, touch is one of my only reliable ways to self-regulate. I need it like a physiological requirement, not a preference. Being touch-deprived is, for me, like stumbling through Death Valley in July with an empty canteen.
None of that fits on a single dial. It only makes sense once you stop asking “how sensitive am I” and start asking a different question for each sensory channel: how much does it take for this one to register, and what do I do once it does?
That’s not my framework, by the way. It’s Winnie Dunn’s — an occupational therapist who spent her career mapping exactly this. Cross those two questions (threshold and response) and you get four patterns instead of one: you either need a lot of input before you notice something and don’t do much about it once you do (low registration), need a lot of input and actively go looking for more (seeking), notice everything and it wears on you (sensitivity), or notice everything and actively route around it (avoiding).
You don’t get one of those. You get one per channel. Mine looks nothing like a clean profile. I doubt yours will either. That’s the point.
Here’s why I think this matters beyond being an interesting model.
Most of us who grew up sensory-different received exactly one response from those around us: complaint. “Don’t be so sensitive.” “You’re being dramatic.” “It’s just a noise.” By the time we’re adults, a lot of us have quietly stopped mentioning it at all. Not because it stopped happening. Because naming it didn’t get us anywhere good.
That’s the shame thread that runs through this whole book, and sensory processing is where it shows up earliest, usually before a kid has any language to defend themselves with. A flat “I’m sensitive to noise” isn’t just an inaccurate description. It’s often the smallest, safest version of the truth a person learned they were allowed to say out loud. Getting specific — this channel, this pattern, this exception — is part of getting that back.
A Tool I Built From This
In the process of working on this chapter, I got curious enough about this framework that I built something around it — a free, private, self-guided tool that walks you through all eight channels and gives you back a personal map.
For each channel, you rate two things: how much input it takes before you notice it, and what you tend to do once you have. That’s the whole mechanism behind the four patterns. Then you get a checklist — specific things you prefer, and specific things that trigger you, kept as two separate lists rather than one vague “sensitivities” box, because those aren’t the same question and conflating them was always part of the problem.
That checklist part isn’t mine. It’s built on the excellent framework Dr. Megan Anna Neff put together at Neurodivergent Insights — her Complete Adult Sensory Checklist is one of the better sensory resources out there, and if you want an even deeper dive after this, go there next.
What I built adds the quadrant scoring on top — the threshold-and-response framework from the OT literature — plus a closing section I’ve been calling “Ideas Worth Trying,” which provides a handful of starting-point strategies tied to your specific pattern on each channel. Not a plan. Not prescriptive. Things worth testing for yourself, with an honest note pointing you toward an actual occupational therapist if sensory regulation is a significant daily struggle, because that’s a different and more individualized kind of work than any self-report tool can do.
I want to be straight with you about what this is and isn’t.
It isn’t a diagnostic tool. It won’t tell you anything a clinician’s assessment would.
It’s not a personalized sensory diet either — that’s a real clinical intervention an occupational therapist builds with you over time, by watching how you actually respond to specific input, not from a sixteen-question self-report. What this gives you is a starting point. A structured way to notice your own patterns instead of flattening eight different systems into “I guess I’m sensitive.”
Nothing you enter is saved anywhere. Not by me, not by any server, not by anyone. It runs entirely in your browser and disappears the moment you close the tab. I built it that way on purpose — sensory stuff is personal, and I didn’t want to ask anyone to trust a database with it.
Try It
https://thriving-family-therapy-sensory-tool.netlify.app/
It takes about twelve to fifteen minutes. Go with your gut on the first pass — you can always come back and take it again later and watch how the shape shifts.
If you try it, I’d genuinely love to hear what you find, especially anything that surprised you. Contradictions are the most interesting part — the channel where you’re avoiding almost everything except one specific exception, the pattern you never had language for until you saw it mapped out. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to capture in the chapter, and hearing how this lands for other people is part of how I’m making sure it actually holds up outside my own head.
I think about that stadium a lot while I’m writing this chapter. Not the overload itself — I’ve had plenty of those, before and since. What I think about is how long it took me to have a framework specific enough to explain it to myself as anything other than a personal failing.
It wasn’t one thing going wrong. It was eight systems, each running its own settings, all maxing out within about a hundred yards of each other, while I was also trying to keep track of three kids and my wife, while trying to pull up our tickets on a phone screen in direct sunlight. Sound and light and crowd density and unpredictable movement and the sheer cognitive load of finding my way through a place I’d never been, stacked on top of each other until there wasn’t any capacity left. My nervous system did the only thing it had left to do.
Having language for that didn’t undo the day. But it stopped the story I told myself about it from being a story about a personal failing, and started it being a story about a body doing exactly what an overwhelmed nervous system does. That shift is most of what I want this chapter, and this tool, to hand to someone else.
💙 Help shape the book
I’m writing a book for late-identified neurodivergent adults, and I want it grounded in real lived experience — not just mine. If you have a few minutes, I’d love your voice in it.
👉 Contribute to the community survey: https://tally.so/r/7RE8ga
📓 Free guide: “5 Stress Regulation Strategies for Neurodivergent Adults”
