 When we have a child who is overwhelmed by sensory input, how can we help them to calm things down and prevent re-eaching that stage of shutdown or meltdown? That's what we're exploring in today's podcast. Let's dive straight in. Okay, so today's episode of the podcast is really for those of us, you who are autistic or otherwise find that sometimes sensory input becomes too much. So if you have a child or young person in your care for things for whom things feel big and loud or hot and cold very much at the time, or the kind of the visual stimulation can get a little bit much. We've got childhood tries to move themselves away if they can from too much input. These ideas really are for them for you and things that we can do relatively easily in our sort of day-to-day life. Try to just calm things down a little bit and hopefully they'll help. And as always with my kind of ideas and strategies, the idea isn't that you take them all and do them all and that everything will work for everyone. No. Just have a little listen and just think, yeah, that one could work. That fits with our lives and how we work. We've got the things we need to do that. Let's give it a go. And revisit at another time if you might need some additional ones. So the first one. If we are overwhelmed by visual input, the simplest thing we can do is just shut our eyes. Actually, training, teaching, encouraging a child, sometimes ourselves as an adult too, every now and then just take a break from all that visual noise and stimulation by just shutting our eyes and going inwards can be an incredibly helpful strategy. In just a few seconds of that, when the world feels overwhelming, it can make a huge difference. It's like the equivalent of just taking a breath. You know, when you feel a bit like, I'm not managing, I'm not managing, and you're like, right, pull yourself together, take that breath, centre yourself. This is a bit like that, but for your visual system. So you're just going to close your eyes and look inwards and just forget about the thousand different colours and all that different sensory input that's going on around you. Just focus in on the nice, calm, nothing. You might go further and take different kind of calming images to mind or have something particular that you want to look at and focus on. Often I'll have something in my pocket and I'll become deeply interested in every little detail about that thing. And I'll focus in on that rather than the world around me. But simplest one, just close your eyes. The other thing that can help here is if you are going to a situation that is going to be big and loud and noisy in a visual sense, actually wearing sunglasses, dark glasses can be, again, really, really helpful. In the summer, these can be an absolute must and having sunglasses for when we're going out when it's really bright outside. I mean, good for your eyes anyway, but really helpful in terms of just cutting down some of that brightness, that glare, which even those people who are not too sensitive to sensory input will find the sun can be a bit overwhelming sometimes and just think then therefore if you've got a child who's very sensitive to this kind of light and bright and visual noise, that that sunlight is going to be more of an issue. So pair of sunglasses, if your child's happy to wear them, pretty simple way to wring that down to reduce that input. And they look cool too, I think so. OK, so we can close our eyes, wear our sunglasses. Next idea is kind of same thing, but for our ears. So wearing headphones or ear protectors just to dampen out the actual auditory sound that's going on around us. We're just looking to reduce that input. We want less sound coming into our ears. Now there's a few different trains of thought here. So I find ear defenders or big headphones like these kind of like cans that everyone can see can be really helpful in some situations because they're like a big visual cue to other people that basically I'm offline right now. I'm not available to you. I'm listening to my music. You may or may not be listening to my music. Don't disturb me. These can be particularly helpful if we're trying to manage in like really busy situations and we don't want lots and lots of social interaction or input. Or if we're in a shared working environment, be that at school or at home, having our headphones on can show I'm concentrating. I'm listening to this right now. Please don't disturb me. So back when I used to work in shared office space and heaven knows now how I manage that at all. But when I did do that, I would often quite visibly have headphones on and that's a good social cue. Some workplaces don't like you doing it and they ask you not to. This is a question for a whole another day. But for some of us, the ability to listen to music or just to dampen out the surroundings makes a big difference. One thing here, if you're going to use headphones to help you in this way, actually investing in a pair of noise cancelling headphones can make a big difference. Now, some children don't like like ear protectors ear defenders. You can get stuff that looks quite big and they don't want to look different than their mates, particularly if they're, I don't know, sitting in a geography lesson, they just want to look normal. And that's the thing kids don't always want to stand out. And that's totally understandable and fine. This is where loops come in. So loops we've discovered as a family relatively recently and they revolutionize things for my children. So loops are not sponsored by a loop, by the way, have no affiliation with them whatsoever. Just this was something that we found out about and found to be very, very helpful. So loops are little that you put them in your ears and when you're wearing them, no one kind of really knows you're wearing them. So you're less likely to get in trouble with other teachers. You don't look different than your mates and they're just very small. There's a couple of different kinds and it's worth looking them up. I can't remember what they're called now, but there's essentially two different kinds. One just basically blocks out everything. And that's what this pair is. This is why they're in my drawer as a backup because we found the better pair since then. But they are very small when you have children who are not great with the old executive function and they lose things a lot, might need a backup pair. So these just block everything out. Like you can still hear some stuff, but they basically just act as a general dumpener. So like your ear defenders, but they're really clever ones. I think they're called loop experience, I think. And they're slightly different. They've got like metal little rings on them rather than just rubber. And you pop them in your ear. A loop experience are actually specifically designed to very cleverly kind of block out most of the background noise, but still allow you to hear very clearly if someone's speaking directly to you. So those are particularly brilliant in a school scenario where you need to be able to focus on the main thing, but block out all the background noise. So it's very, very, very clever. But so yeah, so loops, I would recommend having a look at them. They're small, they're discreet. They're quite cool, actually. They come in different colors and you can get little different cases for them and stuff. And the kids like them. So loops would be worth looking up if you've got a child who doesn't want to look different than their friends. And yeah, my two daughters who are currently year eight age absolutely rave about them and they take them everywhere they go. It is worth just knowing about any kind of ear protection like that, that it becomes less effective if you wear it too much. So it's ideal if you're able to put it in for the really intense period. So within a school setting that might be moving between classes or if you have a particularly overwhelming class, maybe the music lesson when everybody's playing different instruments might be a time that we'd put them in. But if we leave them in all the time, then what happens is our body just sort of adjusts. And then when you take them out, the world is totally overwhelming. So really little short periods of 10, 20, 30 minutes at a time is optimal for the loops rather than leaving them in all the time. My kids do use them a bit differently than that. Sometimes if we're going out on a kind of a busy day and there's going to be lots of people and hubbub, they might put them in for much of the duration and then kind of take them out when they're safely in the car or home. So you need to find what works for you, but just be aware of that. Essentially, your body's ability to habituate and get used to something will mean that just essentially it kind of mixes around with its old internal mixing desk. And then when you take them out, everything feels really, really loud. Just like when you take your sunglasses off, how bright everything suddenly feels. It's the same thing, but for your ears. So with closed your eyes or worn our sunglasses, we thought about ear protectors of some kind. Next thing can be music or sounds to calm things down. Music is amazing. So either music like classical music or other calming music and creating playlists of music that makes me feel calm can be a lovely connecting activity with a child or else things like white noise. So there were actually quite a lot of apps that you can get that will generate white noise for you. That might be water or the sound of like hairdryers that can feel calming and soothing and different people need different noises. This is about giving us something to focus in on that feels for us calming and manageable, rather than all the many noises that are going around us all the time. And again, using something like noise cancelling headphones to be able to have these noises coming directly into us can be incredibly helpful. And you may find that with some children who struggle to concentrate, then for some the ability to listen to music, to listen to a familiar calming playlist of some kind through noise cancelling headphones might be the difference between them actually being able to engage with an activity with reading, with learning, with getting on with things and not. So we might think about allowing them to listen to music and use that as a calming focusing strategy within the classroom setting for that child can make a big difference. Doesn't work for everyone. For some, they find it distracting. So we're all different. And it's about finding what works for the particular child. But calming music, soothing sounds can really get things feeling good. And a kind of tip for families. We find as a family that we've kind of got used to knowing, right, this is a situation where we need to calm things down and we'll just whack on some classical music. So we'll just tell Alexa to play classic FM, but looking to one side there, making sure that I say that too loud. Is she going to start now? No, we're good. So we'll ask her to play classic FM and we'll just have some general lovely calming music piped into the atmosphere. So we'd often use that whilst we were getting ready for school in the morning, which is definitely like emotionally overwhelming time in our household. But if there are other times when we just need to bring the mood down to calm, we'll think about getting some music on in the room that is going to calm. We do also use music for activating at other times when we need to change the mood. Music and the noises that we've got going on in the background can make such a difference. But always be mindful when you're playing music in kind of public spaces in your home that not everyone responds to these things in the same way. So it's good to have some sort of mutual agreement. But yeah, within our family, it's kind of an unwritten rule, basically. If classic FM is playing, we're just trying to calm things down a bit. We're trying to keep a bit chilled here. We're not going to do anything too stressful. We're not going to have any big conversations or any of that sort of thing. We're just trying to get through the next 20 minutes without losing it. So it's a good kind of social cue as well. OK, closed eyes, ear protectors, calming music or our sounds and white noise. Next one is hood up. This one divides people, but hear me out. If we are wearing a hoodie and lots of our kids love them. So do I. I've got a hoodie on right now. A hood can create an instant, small safe space. So this is called containment. You can go and Google it and learn a bit more about it. But essentially when we are feeling overwhelmed, the world feels too much either physically in terms of the input that we're getting or emotionally, we're just feeling internally kind of overwhelmed, making our world as small as possible so that there's less that we kind of need to control and take in can just make things feel a bit more manageable. So this is the same reason my children will go and seek small spaces and why they like little nooks and calming. You know, you might have a little teepee in your classroom or in child's bedroom where they might like to go and hide or you might find that they like to sit under the desk or like just find nooks. Little nooks often feel very comforting for children who get overwhelmed. And this is because we're trying to make our world as small as possible. Now, the quickest, easiest way to do that is to just put our hoods up. And this is one of the reasons why the children who do find the world overwhelming sometimes will put a hood up. And it does make everything feel more manageable for them. And hopefully as things begin to calm for them internally or things begin to come externally, that hood may come down and they feel able to make their world a little bit bigger again. But popping our hood up or finding a little nook to go squish ourselves into can really make things feel more manageable. So this is another one where it's worth a kind of healthy challenge. We have a lot of discussions about this in our house. Is it OK to wear your hood up at the dinner table? Actually, sometimes, yeah, it is. If it's because right now, you're not really managing, but you think you could come and join the family for dinner if you've got your hood up, and maybe you're not going to like really, really engage in conversation, but you sort of want to be there. You want to be part of it in the way that you can manage today. Then that's the time when we do allow the hood up at the table. If it's not for that reason, if it's just that, you know, that's just how you have your hood right now and it's not particularly bothering you one way or another and everything feels kind of OK. Then we would have to have the hood down and we try and engage in the conversation. So it's about judging the situation, really, and you might have rules around hoods within your school. You're setting your home and that's cool. We can have general rules and that's fine. But just think about when you might be flexible on those rules because sometimes that hood is not a child being somehow, I don't know, defiant or difficult or I don't know. It's just seen as a really negative thing and I'm not quite sure for why it's not always a bad thing. Sometimes this is a child managing in the way that they are able to right now and sometimes just being allowed to have that hood up will mean that that child can continue to engage relatively well in stuff rather than melt down, shut down or withdraw themselves from the situation. So have a think about hoods, people. Hoods are good. So close eyes, ear protectors, coming music, hoods. Next thing, if we want to kind of calm things down and make things feel better is to use our stems or our special interests. So when we're overwhelmed, turning to those things that just we know feel good. So many autistic people will have particular stems. This might be something that they do with their body or a kind of sensory input that they seek. Now just understanding a tiny bit about stems because again, they get a bit of a bad rap and we often spend a lot of time trying to stop children doing things that feel good for them. So I'm a rocker. If you ever watch me speak, you'll probably notice that I move back and forwards on my feet some of the time and I do it without even realising I'm doing it. But rocking and pacing for me just feels good. It's very regulatory, helps me to calm down. But in certain situations, I've been told throughout my life not to do it. And now I'm a grown up and I can advocate for myself and I understand more about why I do it because it's never been a conscious thing. I'm able to say, actually, it really helps me. Is it causing a particular problem? If not, is it OK if I continue? So an example would be when I sang in a choir, my choir director would be, could you stop rocking back and forth while we're singing? And it probably was, you know, not perfect in our lovely robed choir that someone was doing that. But it was something that I found very hard not to do. And particularly when I was really in the zone with the music and I love it, I love to sing. Then I would it's almost like I just I just love it. I'm right here in this moment and this feels so good and I'd be rocking and it just all felt amazing. And trying not to do that, trying to overcome that is like asking someone not to breathe if it's something that came really, really naturally and it felt really, really good and it made everything less pleasurable for me. So in the end, I was like, actually, it's really hard for me not to. It's making it harder for me to focus on singing. Not going to get the perfect tenor line for me. If I'm not rocking, so let's just do it. And it was fine. But recognising that those stims and everyone has different ones rather than trying to stop them, thinking, are they doing any harm and how does it feel for the child? But in this situation, we're thinking about how we can use them to calm things down. So going naturally to those things that do feel good. So the reason that we have stims because they feel good, they feel nice, like the child that flaps or plays with their fingers in a certain way, or like rubs a particular piece of material again and again and again, whatever it is that they might be doing, this is because for them, it feels good. So rather than trying to stop doing it, when we need things to calm down, actually inviting a child to engage with their stims can be really helpful. You might have a kind of happy box that child or car self-sooth type box that a child can go to and use regularly in order to engage with their stims. You might have things in there that they like to use or just a reminder, you know, oh, why don't you, you know, let's rock together for a moment if it's a child that rocks or whatever and actually doing these things alongside a child sometimes can make it feel more okay for them. So engaging with stims, actually encouraging the seeking of that sensory input that feels so good for us. And because the thing is, so for autistic people, we experience the world more intensely than everyone else. And so lots of what we talked about just now is about trying to block the world out because it's too much. But that kind of superpower of being overly sensorily activated can sometimes be great because a certain thing might smell amazing in a way that it just doesn't for a neurotypical person because you've got that superpower of additional ability to smell. And so when you can seek that thing that smells really good or feels really good or sounds really good, you want more of it because it's kind of like a drug. It feels absolutely great. So why not use that to our benefit sometimes? So that's why we seek out these stims because they just feel really good. They're not doing any harm usually. And then the other thing on that similar vein is seeking out anything to do with our special interest. So we've got a special interest, a hyper focus, a deep passion, something that we really want to engage with or talk about all the time, often boring others to tears, but being allowed or encouraged to talk about or otherwise engage in that special interest, that passion, that thing that we would spend 24 hours a day doing right now, if only we could, being allowed and encouraged to do that can again really make us feel happy and calm things down and give us a bit of a break from the rest of the world when it's needed. So encouraging autistic people to go down the route of their stims and their special interest, those things that we find ourselves drawn to and wanting to do anyway, actually encouraging that, creating space for that can provide happiness and respite from an overwhelming world. And then the final strategy today is breathing strategies. I love them. I talk about breathing all the time. Breathing is amazing. And there are loads and loads of different breathing strategies out there. And it's all about finding the one that works for you and for the child in your care. But the reason that this is good is because it helps us to take control. When we take control of our breathing, it's sending really strong psychological messages to our brain. It's okay, I've got this, I'm in control of this situation. No need to activate the panic mode. All is good because it's very clear, I've got this, I'm in control. And equally when we take control of our breathing, things will change physiologically as well. Heart rate will change, body begins to change in terms of the balance of what's going on. And so we began to actually physiologically feel calmer as well. So we begin to feel psychologically calmer, panic button deactivated, no need for that. Clearly this person's in control and physiologically, things are beginning to calm, heart rate is getting more normal, breathing is getting more regular, things can begin to slow down and reach a natural nice rhythm in the body. So things begin to feel different, great way of kind of pressing the reset button. And also breathing strategies that might have a little script or a way of walking through them are also incredibly helpful because they can give us something to focus in on that takes us away from the wider world. So you might, for example, do one of my old favorites, your five finger breathing where you put your finger, do it with me, at the base of your thumb. And as you run your finger up your thumb, you'd breathe in and then pause as your finger gets to the top of your thumb and as you run your finger down, your thumb, you breathe out. And then you repeat this for each of your fingers breathing in as you run up the finger and pausing at the top and breathing out as you run your finger down the finger. So you're kind of running, you're tracing around your hand slowly breathing in and out as you go around. And this is something that you can do anywhere. You take your hands everywhere with you. So five finger breathing is brilliant for that regard. You can do it under a desk and nobody can see you're doing it. But it's kind of tactile and it takes you right into that zone of focusing on your breathing and not thinking about anything else. So when the world is overwhelming, a little bit of that kind of breathing strategy, particularly one that's gonna engage you physically as well, makes a big, big difference. So there we go. Our strategies for calming things down when the world feels overwhelming and we've got too much sensory input if we are autistic or otherwise just a bit overwhelmed. We're gonna close our eyes. We're gonna wear our sunglasses. We're gonna wear ear protectors or noise-canceling headphones. We're gonna engage with calming music or sounds like white noise. We might put our hood up or seek a nook to make our world feel smaller and more manageable using containment. We are going to engage with our stims and our special interests, those things that bring us joy and make us feel good for a little while. And we're gonna think about our breathing and engaging with a breathing strategy to send strong messages both to our brain and our body that we're in control. Hopefully some ideas in there that you can give a go, take away, work with with the children and young people in your care. Remember, you don't have to use them all. It's about cherry picking what you think might work for you right now. Good luck with it. Contact me on the socials. Let me know what worked, what didn't, what you would add and what topics you would like another time. Hope there was something in here for you. As ever, if you would like to support my work, then please do head over to Patreon where you may join me for a pound a week if you have it and if you want to and if you don't, that's also fine. You can also invite me to come and speak at your setting or event or if you want to support me in a final way, just share my work. The further that it can get, the happier that I am, the more impact that what I'm doing can have on children and young people then the more it makes me smile. So thank you so much for all that you are doing. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time. Until then, over and out.