24. April 2026

By Dr. Priyal Ranasinghe, PsyD, MBA | Cedrus Counseling

You might be here because grocery stores are now physical events for you. Or because your partner thinks you’re being dramatic about the tag in your shirt, the hum of the refrigerator, or the smell in the office break room. Or because you didn’t realize you were hungry until you were crying over a blood sugar crash at 3:14 p.m. Or because you genuinely can’t tell, sometimes, if the thing you are feeling is a feeling or if you just need to pee. Sensory processing is one of the most common, most under-discussed, and most life-shaping parts of the neurodivergent experience. Let’s talk about it.

Sensory Processing in ADHD, Autism, and AuDHD

Sensory processing differences show up in ADHD, autism, and doubly in AuDHD, with different textures. Autistic sensory processing tends to be more consistently atypical across modalities, with strong hypersensitivity in certain channels (often auditory, tactile, olfactory) and sometimes hyposensitivity in others. ADHD sensory processing tends to be variable, context-dependent, and tied to arousal regulation. A lot of ADHD sensory seeking (loud music, spicy food, constant movement) is the nervous system trying to wake itself up to baseline.

AuDHD usually involves both. Sensory seeking and sensory avoiding, in the same body, often in the same hour. This is not contradictory. It is two regulation systems layered together.

Hypersensitivity: When the Volume Is Always Up

Hypersensitivity means the nervous system treats ordinary sensory input as more intense than it “should” feel. Fluorescent lights hum and flicker in a way many autistic and AuDHD people physically feel. A restaurant that is “a little loud” can be unusable. Certain fabrics feel like sandpaper. A specific smell can make a room unbearable when everyone else barely notices it.

This is a neurological experience, not a preference. If someone tells you a sound is painful and you respond with “it’s not that loud,” you are arguing with their nervous system, not their personality. That kind of invalidation trains neurodivergent people to hide what they are experiencing, which leads straight into masking and burnout.

Across specific modalities, hypersensitivity can show up as auditory sensitivity (certain frequencies, chewing sounds, electronics), visual sensitivity (fluorescent lighting, clutter, bright screens), tactile sensitivity (tags, seams, certain fabrics, light touch), olfactory sensitivity (perfume, cleaning products, cooking smells), gustatory sensitivity (specific textures, temperatures, foods touching each other), and vestibular or proprioceptive sensitivity (motion sickness, crowded spaces).

Hyposensitivity: When the Volume Is Always Down

Hyposensitivity is the less-discussed other side. It is when the nervous system under-registers certain inputs, so you do not fully feel them until they are intense. This is how people end up with an ear infection that became a burst eardrum because “it wasn’t that bad,” a UTI ignored until septic, chronic dehydration where the baseline is a headache they’ve stopped noticing, or a kitchen cut only discovered when blood shows up.

Hyposensitivity can be genuinely dangerous. Autistic and AuDHD individuals have higher rates of medical complications that got caught late because the pain signals simply were not loud. If this is you, please take this seriously: build systems (scheduled meals, water bottles with time markers, routine check-ins with your body) that compensate for the sensory signals that don’t reliably reach you.

Sensory Seeking: The Dopamine Pathway

Sensory seeking is the active pursuit of intense input. Loud music. Bass-heavy speakers. Spicy food. Cold showers. Hot showers. Movement. Spinning. Deep pressure. Weighted blankets. Intense exercise. Strong smells you like.

These aren’t bad habits. They are regulation. ADHD brains often reach for sensory input because it elevates arousal, releases dopamine, and moves the nervous system from “foggy and understimulated” to “online.” Autistic seekers often use intense input to stabilize an over-firing system, to ground, to reset. Both uses are legitimate. The goal isn’t to suppress seeking. The goal is to know your seeking patterns, so you can direct them intentionally (pre-meeting caffeine and music, post-meeting exercise and quiet) instead of crashing into them randomly.

Auditory Processing: Hearing Is Not the Same as Understanding

A specific, often missed feature of many neurodivergent profiles is auditory processing difference. You can hear the words perfectly. Your audiology test is fine. But the translation from sound to meaning slips, especially in environments with competing noise. At a busy dinner, you catch about 60 percent of what is being said. You smile and nod. You ask people to repeat things, sometimes twice. You dread phone calls because there is no face to help you.

This is not bad listening. It is a neurological bottleneck between auditory input and language processing. Supports that help: reducing background noise, sitting in quieter spots at restaurants, using captions on everything, asking for important conversations to happen in quiet spaces, favoring text over phone for anything with logistics.

Interoception: The Invisible Sense

Interoception is the sensory channel pointed inward, the one that reads hunger, thirst, fullness, temperature, pain, bathroom urgency, heart rate, and emotion. Interoceptive differences are common in autism and in ADHD, and they shape daily life more than most people realize.

Low interoception can look like not noticing hunger until you are shaky or dizzy, not noticing fullness until you are uncomfortable, not knowing you are thirsty until you have a headache, not realizing you are anxious until your stomach hurts, or not being able to answer “what are you feeling right now?” because the internal signal for emotion is quiet.

This last one is part of alexithymia, the difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions. Many autistic people experience emotions as body states first and words second, sometimes days later. If “I don’t know what I feel” is a frequent sentence in your life, your interoception may not be broken. It may just be quiet, and deserving of scaffolding.

Sensory Overload: The Cumulative Load Model

Sensory overload is not always triggered by one big input. More often, it is cumulative. Each sensory load (the meeting, the commute, the grocery run, the kid asking a question, the notification, the fluorescent light) spends some nervous system capacity. Once capacity runs out, the next piece of input, even a small one, can tip you into meltdown, shutdown, or full system flood.

This is why a person can be “fine” all day and then inexplicably unravel when their partner asks them a simple question at 7 p.m. They were not fine. They were running on an empty battery, and the simple question was the one input their system could not absorb. Understanding the cumulative load model helps you stop moralizing your own overload and start designing for it.

Building a Sensory Profile

A sensory profile is a map of what your nervous system needs more of, needs less of, and gets tipped over by. Occupational therapists are trained to help build these for adults as well as kids, and the process is genuinely useful.

Practical tools that clients have found helpful include noise-canceling headphones or loop-style earplugs, sunglasses indoors when lighting is bad, weighted blankets, fidget tools, chewable jewelry, compression clothing, dimmer switches, scented candles or the active removal of strong scents, safe-food lists, and a small sensory-regulation kit you carry with you.

For work, school, and home, sensory accommodations are often low-cost and high-impact. Quiet spaces, flexible seating, permission to use headphones, lighting changes, scent-free zones, and predictable schedules are accommodations that change lives and frequently fall under ADA or equivalent international disability protections.

Eating, Sensory Processing, and ARFID

Sensory-based eating difficulties are common in both autism and ADHD, and often misread as “picky eating.” ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) is a real diagnosis, distinct from anorexia, in which sensory features of food make many foods intolerable. Safe foods are not a moral failing. They are an adaptive strategy. Shaming someone out of them rarely expands their diet. Careful work with a neurodivergence-informed feeding specialist sometimes does.

A Closing Invitation

If this is ringing true, notice your comparative sensory strengths. The depth you reach when the environment is right. The clarity of focus in a quiet room with good lighting. The joy of the specific inputs that light you up. Then notice your comparative vulnerabilities. The environments where you consistently go into overload. The bodily signals you routinely miss. The places the gap between your effort and everyone else’s stays wide.

Those patterns are data, not a moral problem. They are a design problem, and you are allowed to design around them. Bring them to a clinician who understands neurodivergent sensory processing. The goal is not to grit your teeth harder. The goal is a life your nervous system is actually built to live.