About Sensory Breaks and Recharging Stations

A few days ago, a friend came over for lunch. She told me that she had taken her 2½-year-old twins to Efteling theme park for two days. The girls had had a really good time, but when they got home, one of them suddenly asked for a bottle. My friend found this remarkable, because the children had long since passed the bottle stage, and yet there they were, sucking on a bottle of milk like babies, happily in their own little world.

I couldn't say exactly why, but instinctively I knew that the children's reaction was very healthy. They were overstimulated and tired, and intuitively knew that they had to seek refuge and safety in something they knew so well in their first year of life: a bottle of milk. Their comfort, their safety, their nest. And after nesting, they could come out again and crawl into their beds. A night's sleep, and they were good to go.

I looked it up on the internet afterwards (okay, no, I asked Gemini. It's 2026, after all! I wanted to know if my instinctive feeling was right (of course it was, that's why it's called instinct!). AI told me that the children's nervous systems were overstimulated, that there were too many stimuli for them to process, and that they had therefore reverted to a previous stage of development, namely baby mode. This is not a regression but a survival mechanism that allows the children to regulate their overstimulated nervous systems. It's a bit like a charging station they return to: they recharge their batteries for a moment and then continue on their way. Very safe, and above all very healthy of them.

This reminds me of the Window of Tolerance, a concept I learned about in therapy. Because I consider myself reasonably skilled in applying it to my own life, but feel a little less confident when it comes to the theory, I have included a short video below. (Watching it is not necessary to understand the rest of the blog post, but it does provide some more background information.)

In short: we all have our window of tolerance, the mental space in which we can move smoothly. As long as we stay within that window, we can cope with stimuli, the world, life, and setbacks. But circumstances can cause us to ‘shoot outside our window’: we then go into hyperarousal or hypoarousal. In both cases, we (temporarily) lose touch with ourselves, and it is important that we regain control so that we can return to our tolerance window. In hyperarousal, our nervous system is overactive. We experience fear, panic, overstimulation, anger, restlessness, or hypersensitivity. In hypoarousal, the opposite is true and our nervous system is ‘underactive’. We then feel lethargic, listless, depressed, emotionally flat, and we dissociate and freeze. Anyone who has experienced major trauma or grief will surely recognise the latter.

Today, my own tolerance window is slightly larger than it used to be, but it is still fairly small. I quickly slip into hyperarousal, and when I experience severe pain, I also slip into hypoarousal (as is clearly shown in the video). A year and a half ago, I lost two loved ones within eight days. Two deaths in just over a week was simply too much for my nervous system to process. I was in a state of hypoarousal for a long time after that. I walked through the world in a daze. The grief was so painful that my brain protected me by not letting me feel it fully. It's a very strange feeling.
It hurts a lot, and at the same time it doesn't. But it is a protection mechanism of our brilliant brain, to protect us from the full extent of the situation. Crazy how that works, isn't it?

Every day, I do everything I can to stay within my window of tolerance. Only then I can cope with life.
In therapy, I am discovering how to do this. By taking good care of myself, I am getting better and better at coping with life. I can really see the progress I am making. A concrete example is family gatherings. Two years ago, I found them very difficult and overwhelming. After just an hour and a half, my head was ‘overheating’ from all the conversations and stimuli, and I felt myself going into a kind of energy-saving mode. It was also visible to others, and they mentioned that they could see it was becoming too much for me. But because I didn't want to isolate myself and I also like being with my family, it was something I wanted to push through. Once I got home, I used all my tools to get back from hyperarousal to ‘my window’: rest, short walks, sleep, crocheting and embroidery, etc. After about four days, I started to feel like myself again. Today, it's still the same, except now I only get overstimulated after about five hours (or even longer!), I can genuinely enjoy the people and conversations around me, and it usually only takes about two days to get back into my window. What definitely helps is that I take breaks from stimulation in between, such as spending an hour in my dad and stepmom's mobile home (which they bring to family gatherings especially for me!), or going for a walk with my sister's dog. These are all techniques that help to make it more ‘manageable’.

Yesterday, I had an experience that I can use perfectly for this blog post (thank you, God!).

I've been able to rest well this past week. I noticed that I had some “extra energy,” which finally allowed me to do what I'd been wanting to do for weeks: go buy new jeans. So, I took the tram to the thrift shop. Of course, I applied my tools so that I could make this as low-stimulus and spiritually nourishing as possible, primarily by using noise-canceling headphones and listening to worship music. I wouldn't even dream of exposing myself to all those stimuli on the tram and in the store! Anyway, so I went to the thrift store, in my own nice spiritual bubble. I genuinely enjoyed my search and went home with two really nice pairs of jeans and a cozy warm ochre yellow sweater. Yes! After that I decided to run a few other errands. But on the tram home, my head suddenly went into shutdown. I was done. I was as overstimulated as I could possibly be, and therefore in hyperarousal.

What did I do specifically to ‘calm down’ again?

• I put my cell phone on mute and put it away. During those moments, I cannot handle the hustle and bustle of the world and just need to be alone for a while. This is very healthy and absolutely not a form of isolation (which I sometimes hear others say!).
• I sat down on the sofa with a cup of tea and started embroidering. At times like this, crocheting is too active and reading is impossible (filling my overstimulated brain with even more information? No, thank you!). Embroidering allows the dust in my head to settle, which was exactly what I needed.
• Now that it was quieter in my head, I could meditate. Except: I fell asleep. I used to hate this, falling asleep during meditation session. I thought it was a failure on my part, because that's not how it's supposed to be, right? It was my psychiatrist who told me that it doesn't matter what I think, if my body is crying out for sleep, then I should just give in. And if I fall asleep during every meditation session, then that's perfectly fine. It was her voice I heard yesterday when I decided to just give in to sleep.
• When I woke up an hour later, I felt very vulnerable. Very tired, too. Like a child, actually. I thought of my friend's twins and decided to do the same and fall back a number of stages. Just for a moment, because it was necessary. And I noticed something special...
  - I immediately put on a different sweater. A warm, spongy turtleneck. That's something I seem to do every time I feel vulnerable and overwhelmed; I put on cozy, very covering clothes, which are often three sizes too big. The same goes for my blanket, which just has to cover me. A month and a half ago, when it was still freezing outside, I replaced my own crocheted blanket with a down blanket. Well, that wasn't it! A few hours later, the down blanket was back in the closet and my own homemade and emotionally safe blanket was where it belonged: on my couch. (see photo)
  - I made myself a large bowl of broth. Yes, broth. Something I rediscovered just a few months ago. I was feeling a bit ill, so I went out to buy some broth, and it suddenly made me feel very safe. I felt like a child again, and very loved and protected. The strange thing is that I have no rational memories of drinking broth as a child, but my body remembers it perfectly. And the body never lies... (I'll have to check with my mom!).
  - A long, warm shower. That works wonders!
  
  

After that, I was back to myself: I was back inside my Window of Tolerance, and for the rest of the evening I could cope with life again and felt like my usual, happy self. But that was only possible by taking the right recovery actions, by giving myself the time and space to recharge. And just like a charged cell phone, I can then go back to doing what I'm supposed to do, without having to stay plugged in. Both are necessary, charging as well as functioning in the world. Too much of one or the other is not good, but neither is too little. Finding that balance turns out to be one of the key concepts of my recovery.

How is this for you? Do you have any experiences with this? And do you have any tips and tricks for recharging? Feel free to leave them in the comments!