 Why are sensory supports and environmental adjustments important? What do you think in terms of the child kind of parent side of things? It means that your child can access their community. It means that they are accessing learning opportunities with the spoon theory. We're using their spoons for the right things. If they are in sensory overload or even approaching sensory overload, we need to be monitoring the environment and making adjustments so that they have a calm nervous system and it means that they are open to connection and they can access communication. It makes life possible for them. It's mental health care. I think in terms of the adult side of things, you could probably say the same just for different things. In a workplace, if there's a difficult sensory environment, like in an open office plan or you're not allowed to listen to music or put earbuds in and stuff while you're working or even shades or reducing the light exposure in an office, all of that stuff adds an element of what is distracting for one. It can cause you a lot of stress and burnout in the long run, especially if you're working like a nine-to-five in an office. It doesn't really allow you space to do the job that you need to do. Yeah, or to do it well. Or to do it well, exactly. I think about that with my daughter's accommodations at school. The accommodations help her to be her most successful and to be able to perform at your best and feel good about what you are producing. I'm hearing a lot of the well-being side of things, but also the productivity side of things because I know that a lot of schools, they're funding their budgets and stuff. They're all determined on what score they get from Offstead in the UK or some other kind of regulator. And there's state testing here. And if you're not giving a child a break to get some pre-acceptive input, they are not going to do the test well. It's unfortunate that's what the standard is, but those accommodations, those sensory breaks are so important. Yeah, I think that's a good element to it because when we think about sensory supports, we think about removing things, but we don't often think about adding things. Which is just as important. As you said, with movement breaks. Some of the schools that I used to work with, they had these amazing... I don't know exactly what to call them, but it's like a piece of park equipment outside where you have a bar that you can hold on and then there's two swinging arms for your legs that you can drop back and forth as two legs or you can do side to side. Kind of like an elliptical machine. Yeah, sort of like that. And all the other teachers used to laugh at me because I used to go on it as well during my breaks and just go on it. That should be in every school. And I feel that way just with that particular piece of equipment that you're describing, that's vestibular and pre-acceptive input, which is so regulating in my daughter's classroom. She and I built a calm down corner. Oh, nice. I put a sheet over a desk to reduce that visual input and put some stim toys in there. Her tools, I should say. And she has access to her noise cancelling headphones. All of those are so important. That's brilliant. The accommodations are sometimes on the parent side of things. I can feel like, does she really need these things? But the truth is she does. And in order for her to be regulated, she needs those things. And for my son, he has very strong sensory needs between taking things away and adding the right things back in. It's a science making sure that his needs are being supported. It's so important. I think a lot of people, if you were to present that to schools or to parents, they would say, how are they going to cope in the real world when there's noises and there's lights and there's all of this stuff. You do know that you can have sensory supports out and about. Absolutely. I think that that's what's so important about promoting these safe practices and teaching parents is because then you have, potentially we can have a whole generation of children who grow up with compassion and who care about mental health and who know how to self advocate for what they need. And they will respect somebody else who needs to access these things. It makes me excited for the long term pay off of if we can raise a generation of kids who know how to advocate for their needs. It would be a much better culture. Hey up. Just popping on to say thank you for listening to this podcast this far. If you could do me a real solid, please make sure to rate the podcast. If you're in a podcasting streaming service and do all that like, subscribe, comment stuff on YouTube. Don't even send a heart in the comments if you don't feel like typing. Make sure to check out my link tree, which is always down below in the description or head over to my Instagram page at Thomas Henley UK for daily blogs, podcast updates and weekly lives. This podcast is sponsored by my favorite noise cancelling noise reducing earbuds that you can adjust the volume on. Really, really great thing. They're called D buds and you can find the affiliate link down in the description of this podcast for a 15% off discount. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the rest of the podcast. That's all from me. I think that's that's a really important thing that you touch on in terms of self advocacy because it's often sort of due to the nature of autism being autistic and it's kind of not really fitting fitting in per se and struggling a bit in terms of communication. That can be really, really tough. I mean, it's tough for any, any child or any adult as well. Sometimes to advocate for your own needs. When there's this kind of no set of normative rules that you have to apply to and, you know, each time you deviate from that normative role, people kind of point it out and say, get back in line and do this. I've been masking for your whole life and you start to unmask and that's a whole conversation too. But if you can, if you can support kids to where they don't have to mask or you teach them, you know, I know that there's a whole demographic of people who teach their children how to mask when it's necessary and, but for me, I think it's, I mean, the bottom line in our home is I want everybody to feel safe with not masking and if we can move with compassion and feel positive about accommodations, then we're helping each other to have calm nervous systems and be able to be open to connection. And I think as well, it's worth touching on the point that, you know, what do you think people, we do have different sensory systems, some things are hypersensitive, some things are hyposensitive, insensitive or oversensitive. And the, but the thing is, is the sensory things affect everybody. They just affect everybody at different levels. And it's, it's quite interesting talking to neurotypicals about things like stimming because, you know, there's that, there's different categories of stimming. I talked to Auti and Al about sort of the sensory worlds and stimming and stuff. And there's that, there's like little stems and there's like those things that everyone does, like rubbing their hands or like tapping their hair. Yeah. Yeah. Or having a snack or having a drink or, you know, there's, there's so many things that people do in their life, whether they are autistic or not, that are regulating in terms of sensory. Yes. It's just when you, when you're autistic, it's a bit different and your sensory needs are kind of, some of them are a lot more, you know, you need a lot more input. And so we get these kind of big stems like rocking and spinning. And the sensory joy or the autistic joy that comes from some stimming as well. That's a really interesting thing that like differs from neurotypical people. Oh yeah, like I was. Hey, YouTube. Hope you have enjoyed this podcast clip so far. If you want to check out the full episode, you can find it here on my YouTube channel under the podcast section. Or you can go to Spotify, Apple, Google to check it out on different podcasting streaming services. If you have enjoyed this video this far, please make sure to like, perhaps drop me a subscribe if you want to see some more content from me and drop a comment down below, even if it's something simple like an emoji or a heart. It really does help satisfy those big YouTube algorithm gods in the sky. Anyway, I'll let you go back to it. I was at this presentation in Birmingham. It's called the Emotional Disregulation something, association maybe, EDA. And it was kind of, it was funded by the Commonwealth Games which is, it was a really cool opportunity to kind of go and speak. I did like a talk about like a lexifying year and there was this dancer called Kaia who does this, who does like aerial based like movements and stuff. And they brought this hoop, this like structure with like sandbags and stuff. My daughter wants to try that. Like a string with like a hoop on. Yeah, that's so cool. And after I did my presentation, I just went to Kaia and I was like, you know, can I have a go on this? And she was like, yeah, sure. And then I just sat on it and she was like showing me different techniques and stuff and then at the end she like, spanned me around like multiple times. It was like really, really fast. It must have looked really funny for a six foot guy. Did you love it though? It was amazing. It's the same with like roller coasters and theme parks and stuff. There is just no comparison to the amount of euphoria that I feel from spinning and like moving and rocking. I will never forget snorkeling and Maui and like snorkeling with fish and turtles and coral and just like, that was the ultimate experience, like sensory experience for me and I will never forget that. You got like the noise being dulled by the water and you see all the light and the... Yeah. There was no getting me out of the water. I saw a turtle for the first time in the wild in Turkey. It was really cool. We thought it was a rock. We're kind of on these like pedal boats called the horrible to use but we're on these pedal boats in this like massive lake and stuff and there was these, there was this like sort of thing just poking up and we were like is that a turtle or is that a rock? Because we know that turtles are around here and it was a turtle and we basically just followed it around for about an hour. We weren't getting too close and like we weren't touching it or anything but or touching it. But I was just kind of observing it was really cool. I love stuff like that. I mean we could talk about the morals and stuff implications for aquatics places with like green spaces and nature. That's a big part of our life. I love aquariums but I'm also very aware that they use excessive amounts of volume on a lot of their creatures so it's not to go anywhere. No. You should look into it. It's a bit insane what they do. My new special interest. Yeah. So we kind of have an idea of why they're important and we know that for a fact you know it doesn't matter if the world has other sensory things that are going to occur. You can always have your sensory aids with you. It's something that I do. Something that I do as a autistic adult. We don't leave the house without the headphones sunglasses. I just got my son some new lenses. It's called FL41 lens. FL41. It's kind of like a rose colored lens and it does eliminate certain wavelengths of light. His neurologist and ophthalmologist both recommended it and it has alleviated his migraines. He doesn't need pain medication anymore because he's wearing him which is really interesting. I have some blue light glasses. I actually got them. The computer blue light glasses it's different from that but it shows the value of these tools and that it's alleviating pain. If you can look at sensory overwhelm as a painful experience and help parents to register that our kids aren't just being dramatic or picky they are genuinely experiencing life in a different way and in distress.