Dear fellow neurodivergent woman,
The fridge hum. The neighbour's strimmer. The label scratching the back of your neck. The tap, tap, tap of someone's pen three desks away.
You used to cope with all of it. You didn't love it, but you coped. Now it feels as if someone has turned the dial on the world up to eleven, and you're the only one who can hear it.
Honestly if one more person sits down next to me in a cafe and starts watching reels on their phone with the sound on full I think I'm going to throttle them.
If you're in your forties and this has come out of nowhere, you're not imagining it, and you're not going mad. Plenty of us notice it.
So let me say it plainly: it is your senses. They really are getting louder, and it isn't in your head.
Why it happens
Estrogen helps keep the nervous system steady. As it starts to fall and swing about in perimenopause, some of that steadiness goes. The filter that used to quietly sort the important sounds from the background hum gets leaky.
Plenty of autistic and ADHD women describe exactly this. The world hasn't got louder. Your nervous system has lost some of its cushioning.
Estrogen acts on the brain chemicals that help decide how much sensory information gets through, including serotonin, dopamine and GABA. In perimenopause estrogen doesn't just fall, it swings up and down, so that control gets less steady from one week to the next. There's very little research on this in autistic and ADHD women specifically, but the pattern is what many of us describe.
Your cells are sensory processors too
Here's the part that changed how I think about all this. Dr Robert Naviaux's work shows that mitochondria, the energy engines inside every cell, also act as the cell's sensors. They're constantly reading the environment for signs of danger: toxins, infection, stress, threat.
When they sense danger, they stop prioritising energy and switch to defence. That's the cell danger response. A cell in defence mode is on alert, so it picks up more and spends more.
For a sensitive woman, that matters. If your cells have been through illness, long stress or a hormonal shake-up, they may be sitting in that guarded state. Then ordinary sound, light and touch don't just register, they land as a warning. You aren't being dramatic. Your whole body is doing the sensing.
And why it's worse on some days
Filtering is hard work, and it runs on energy. When your energy's low, because you slept badly, skipped lunch or crashed after a carb-heavy one, there's less left to do the filtering. That's when the fridge hum turns into a siren.
Energy isn't the whole story. But it's the part we can sometimes do something about.
What's worth knowing
Your sensitivity is real. You don't need to talk yourself out of it or call yourself dramatic. Making your world quieter isn't giving up, it's sensible.
And for me, looking after the other half, my energy, has made some difference too.
What helped me
I'll tell you what I noticed, not what you should do.
When I looked after my blood sugar and gave my nervous system proper rest, traffic bothered me less. I didn't always need earplugs. Social events stopped feeling like being punched in the stomach.
L-theanine, an amino acid in green tea, helped some of that for me. It gave me a bit more room to breathe in my own body. I wrote about it in Could L-Theanine Save the World?.
I'm not telling you it'll work for you. I'm telling you what happened to me, because a lot of us were handed the wrong explanation.
A small experiment
This week, notice what your sensory tolerance is like when you've eaten and rested, and when you haven't. Same noise, different day. Write down what you see.
Your senses aren't lying to you. They might just be telling you the truth about how much you've got left in the tank.
If this one landed, you might also like Why You Crash After a Good Day and Plummeting Estrogen. Starving Mitochondria.
I hope you have a gentle week,
Love Hannah xoxo
