Overstimulation is stealing your right to choose where to pay attention.
When you have small children, your attention can feel like it doesn’t even belong to you. Instead, it’s pulled in all directions, sometimes all at once. The baby cries, the toddler crashes something, the dog barks, your phone makes a noise, the television is entertaining and advertising and beneath it all is the constant thrum of your thoughts. If they’re criticizing or directing, demanding or shrieking an alarm, they, too, are competing for your attention.
Focusing attention to any single place can feel impossible under the circumstances. Part of the solution can be to change the circumstances.
Take a moment to sort out the stimulation in your environment. What is happening right now that stimulates your vision, hearing, senses of smell, touch? Can you turn off or turn down any of the stimulation?
Our culture has become screen-saturated to the degree that it can be difficult to separate yourself from them. The dentist, the airport, the restaurant, your car all have screens and often they are offering competing stimulation. Music or a facsimile accompanies your every step while shopping or eating out. These are sensory assaults that are so commonplace we barely notice them, but our nervous systems do notice. If your nervous system is overstimulated, it’s a lot harder to tell when something is soothing or comforting. It’s easier to become overwhelmed, extremely irritable, or even enraged by something you might otherwise have taken in stride.
Turn down the sensory attack and see what happens to you. Notice how you feel.
Turn down the volume on the stimulation in your environment. Quiet the noise. Clear some spaces, so you’re not always gazing on visual clutter. Make your body comfortable. Notice what it is like to have a quieter, calmer space. Obviously, you don’t get to remove the toddler or the baby from your environment, but a break of a few minutes when someone is available to watch the kids can help. Give yourself a break from excessive stimulation and see how that feels.
Remember that your children are also affected by overstimulating environments. See if making your home a calmer, quieter place shifts things for them. People who are overstimulated find it hard to relax even when the pressure is off. Ramping down the stimulation on an everyday basis might help. Remember, too, relaxation is a continuum, just as stimulation is. Relaxing is relative. If you can even relax a little, that’s great.
When you have decreased the overstimulation, you can practice paying attention on each sensory channel. This is a great exercise for anyone, including children, and helps develop sensory awareness and vocabulary.
Auditory: First, listen for a sound in your environment and focus your attention on it for a few breaths. Maybe it’s the sound of a robin outside the window. Notice what happens to the sound as you focus. Notice what happens to the competing sounds. Now bring your attention away from the robin and back to the room. What was that like? What does paying attention do to the quality of your attention?
Family activity: Listen for different sounds, and describe them. Vary sounds by volume and talk about what you notice.
Visual: Wherever you are, notice what you see. Just allow your attention to rest on a particular object and take it in. What does your mind want to do with that? We often want to label or categorize or assign value to what we see. Can you just rest in the object without doing that? Does it change your experience to label? What do you notice?
When you are ready to leave this object, can you gently remove your gaze? Is another object calling for your attention? Is it possible to let that object come to you?
Family activity: practice noticing as much as you can about an object. Notice that each person will have different experiences of the same object. If you share your observations, does that change them? Do you see things differently when someone has commented on it?
Smell: allow yourself to orient to your sense of smell. What do you notice? What comes up for you as a result of this noticing?
Family activity: Find some items with distinctive scents and explore the various smells together. It is fun to do with your eyes closed. It’s not about naming or labeling, but just about experiencing and if your kids can put words to what they experience, that’s fun too.
Skin Sensations: Bring your attention to your body as a whole. Allow your awareness to rest in the envelope of your skin, that amazing organ that holds your viscera, bones, muscles, connective tissues, gases and fluids in a receptive resilient container. You skin has many receptors. Notice how your attention deepens into awareness of subtle sensations. Notice, for example, the breath on your upper lip as you exhale. Just let the experience happen.
Family activity: Gather objects with different textures to apply to skin in different parts of the body. What is each experience like? A cotton ball on the cheek is different from one touching the palm. Let everyone try and feel deeply into the experience.
TLDR:
At home, turn off the screens and the music. Listen to your house. Invite the children to notice silence. Silence is a special kind of stimulation, not simply a lack.
In the silence of your home, what do you hear? Perhaps the heating system makes sounds. Birds chirp from outside. A car or many cars pass by. All of that happens all the time, under the blanket of stimulation, and your brain and body pick it all up, even if you don’t process it consciously.
Notice other sensations. Touch, for example, and temperature. Can you arrange the environment so you are able to notice what your body touches without being irritated by it? Is the temperature suitable for your body, so you can pay attention to other things? If you are too hot or cold, you can’t focus.
My book, Helping Mothers, Helping Babies: Somatic Perinatal Psychotherapy, has 46 exercises to help you get into your body experience and help your clients, too. This exercise is taken from chapters 4 & 5.
