Sensory micro-aggressions are the small noises, lights, smells and textures that neurotypical people barely notice but that wear neurodivergent women down all day. If you leave a café because someone is playing a game show on their phone, you're not being difficult. Your nervous system is taking a hit, and it adds up.
Dear fellow neurodivergent woman,
I think people assume I'm joking when I say I dream of a future where sound pollution is a crime, and it's illegal to play music on your phone in public. I'm not.
When we think of micro-aggressions, we tend to picture colleagues touching our backs as they sleaze past or manspreading on public transport. But I want to introduce the concept of sensory micro-aggressions.
Subtle, often difficult to pinpoint, seemingly minor events that neurotypical people likely wouldn't even notice, but for those of us with sensory processing differences, they are overwhelming, exhausting, and limit our daily life experience.
Like last week, I was in a cafe sipping an iced Americano, happily watching the world pass by. A young man plonked down on the table next to me, ordered a coffee, then turned his phone up full to watch an American game show.
I looked around to see if anyone else was alarmed by this (in my opinion, hugely aggressive) behaviour. Nobody was.
I squirmed uneasily. I knew I couldn't remain, or I'd pay the price later. Tinny noise of any kind attacks my nervous system and contributes to burnout, meltdowns, or shutdowns. I sighed. I reluctantly put my squishy earplugs in. I could still hear the awful shouting of the contestants and the host. Ah, well, I thought, maybe he'll leave soon. He didn't. I picked up my stuff and got out of there.
I wish I could say this was a rare occurrence…
Also, last week, at the beach, the father of a family sat nearby, seemed utterly incapable of not loudly verbalising every single thought that entered his mind. Or, taunting his young children, commenting on their every move, even though it was obvious they just wanted to play quietly in the sand.
Then there's the man in the apartment below, who plays the same commercial dance tunes on repeat multiple times a day as he sips Red Bull in Speedos on his balcony.
Just yesterday, while I was getting my nails painted silver, the technician spoke into my face for 40 minutes to a woman beside her. Devastatingly, I'd left my earplugs on my bedside table. The last time I got gel nails, at a different salon, there was a huge TV screen pumping out Shakira.
Yes, I'm currently in Vietnam, and it is a LOUD country, but these experiences are not unique to here.
My GP surgery waiting room in sleepy Hebden Bridge—I was a frequent visitor when dealing with chronic health issues—plays Radio 1 full blast, continuously. I could probably write a whole post about how inappropriate this is, but let's just say….
Life is so unnecessarily loud. People are so unnecessarily loud.
Kindly, shut the fuck up.
And look, for those of us HSP's it doesn't even have to be anything as obvious as the situations I've named to start affecting our nervous system.
It might be a bathroom fan, more than one person talking at once, somebody chewing, or any overlapping noise whatsoever.
Tap tap tap…
And it might not even be sound that affects us.
I'm also highly sensitive to light. Going anywhere with fluorescent strip lighting—the supermarket, airport, or any kind of office or waiting room, basically any public building—means having to lie down in a dark room to recover.
I have a friend who's so sensitive to light that she wears sunglasses at home. She's so sensitive to smell that if she even catches a whiff of a joss stick (never mind a hideous Glade plug-in), she immediately gets a migraine.
So it could be sound and light, but it could also be smell (yes, I do think wearing perfume/aftershave in public should be illegal too), taste, touch, emotions, or all of them combined.
For me, unless I'm in my own home, or deep within the woods, I'm usually being overstimulated in some way, even if it's just by traffic.
My therapist said: Hannah, our nervous systems weren't built to tolerate the sound of engines or machines. Even the sound of a couple of passing cars is difficult for our system to assimilate.
Over time, this constant accumulation of these sensory micro-aggressions leads to chronic stress and anxiety. We remain in a state of high alert, always anticipating the next uncomfortable experience.
We avoid situations or environments, knowing they'll be overwhelming, which leads to social isolation and a myriad of missed opportunities.
These sensory micro-aggressions are difficult to explain to others. People are gonna think we're weird or neurotic. And this is the risk we take every time we advocate for ourselves and mention them. But they are real and valid, and the cumulative effect of these micro-aggressions is making us sick—mentally, physically and spiritually.
I haven't met a single ND woman who, like me, does not have her own, extremely upsetting Autistic Burnout story. For many of us, it's so much more. It's CFS, Fibromyalgia, POTS, and all the rest. Our nervous systems are fucked—both from internal and external overstimulation.
And yes, I'm better from CFS now, but remaining well is almost a full-time job. The hours I have to invest in regulating my nervous system—grounding, walking, meditation, yoga, journaling—every single day, is a huge responsibility and a chore.
I've made a new friend here in Hoi An (yay!), a French entrepreneur. When she invited me to lunch, I had to explain that we would have to sit outside. She asked me: So what do you do in Yorkshire then when you want to go to dinner at a restaurant?
I don't, I said. I can't.
When I meet friends, I can only go to their home, or we meet outside.
I'm unable to engage with life in the way I desire. Everything I do takes meticulous planning, what-ifs, and control freakness. And it is exhausting.
As women in general, we don't complain, we don't ask for things to be different. If we do, we risk being called a difficult woman, or worse, a 'Karen', which I expect most of us would find humiliating.
My understanding is that the 'Karen' insult arose as a response to white women using their privilege to behave like racist arseholes. It later widened its scope to include women complaining about pandemic restrictions. Now it seems to have evolved as an insult to describe a woman (usually of a certain age) speaking out about anything at all. What a genius way to silence women.
For many of us who are late-discovered, when we find community, perhaps for the first time in our lives, we begin to feel that just maybe we might belong somewhere after all. But this is with other ND women in ND spaces, where it would be acceptable to share our concerns about sensory micro-aggressions. It doesn't feel quite safe to do so out there in the wider NT world.
So what do we do? Well, I wish I could paint an image of myself out there in the wild, standing up for myself and my sensitivities, asking people to turn the volume down or off completely, asking for the lights to be dimmed, asking for air fresheners to be unplugged, or for people to lower their voices. But of course I don't do this.
I mainly avoid public life. And when I inadvertently find myself in situations where my sensory boundaries are being breached, I get the hell out of there, like I did in the cafe with the American TV show blaring. Because if I don't, I'll get sick.
I can't provide any solutions today. If you're in this experience with me, you know just how challenging it is.
What I can say is that even just writing this has encouraged me to assert myself more. Yesterday, I went to an outdoor cafe where they were blaring music, and I asked them to turn it down so I could think properly, and they did. It wasn't enough, the sound was still tapping away at my being as I tried to write, so I plucked up more courage and asked them to turn it off completely, and they did.
This is Vietnam, and the Vietnamese are outrageously accommodating. On the few times I've requested a lower volume of music in restaurants or cafes in the UK, or a couple of times in Dublin, I've been advised to move places or deal with it.
One day, I hope to create a Temple of Silence. A peaceful place in the real world. Everything will be made from wood and natural fibers, adorned with plants to filter energy. Devices will be banned, perfume will be banned, small talk will be banned, and the lighting will be natural.
Why this wears you out at the cell level
Noise, light and smell aren't just irritating. Each one tells your body there might be a threat, and your cells respond by switching from making energy to defending. Do that all day, every day, and you end up exhausted for reasons that have nothing to do with your attitude. It's one of the biggest reasons neurodivergent women burn out.
Some other posts you'll like:
Why Neurodivergent Burnout is a Metabolic Issue (Not Just a "Masking" Problem)
Autistic Rage: What It Feels Like and Why Repressed Anger Is Dangerous
