The music is too loud, the light too harsh, the smells too intense. When does sensitivity to sensory stimuli turn into a problem?
Contents:
Our senses put us in full contact with our environment. Every day, we use them to receive an enormous package of information about our environment, often without even realising it. Our largest sensory organ is... the skin, which covers the entire body and is equipped with millions of nerve cells responding to touch or temperature. The importance of a sense is most often fully revealed when its functions are impaired, e.g. due to illness. A blocked nose not only prevents the perception of odours, but also means that we cannot taste food.
Too much!
The opposite can happen, however: when environmental stimuli are perceived too strongly, even at low (or average) intensity. This level of sensitivity can result in more frequent fatigue, an "overload" caused by an excess of stimuli. Headaches may occur as a reaction to sounds that are too loud or light levels that are too high. Other people can become difficult for us to handle: they become 'generators' of smells, sounds, visual stimuli. For those who have never experienced this, I invite you to take a ride on public transport during the morning rush hour: the crowds, the conversations of fellow passengers or loud music, the smells of perfume (at best) will quickly make you realise how overly sensitive people can feel on a daily basis.
Help!
How do you cope when you find yourself suffering from this condition? The first step is to become aware of one's own nature, observing oneself in different situations to know which ones are problematic. This "diagnosis" can also be facilitated by taking a psychological temperament test. A tool called "Formal Behavioural Characteristics" by Bogdan Zawadzki and Jan Strelau, where one of the subscales is Sensory Sensitivity, will prove useful here. This survey has the added advantage over self-observation that we can see how we compare with others.
