Do you know that feeling when you try so hard not to focus on something that it becomes impossible to ignore?
That was the trap I found myself in earlier this month, sitting in my therapist’s room, trying to look inwards while my attention kept being pulled outwards.
You see, there was a little bird in my therapist’s garden.
It sang, as birds do. And because the windows were thin, I could hear every whistle and every chirp. The bird seemed cheerful. Understandably so, as it was a beautiful spring day.
But unfortunately, this created a problem for me.
No matter how hard I tried to follow my therapist’s instructions – think back to the moment you felt sad, keep breathing, immerse yourself in the feeling – my mind stayed with the bird. And it was in no rush to leave the garden.
“Try to turn your attention inwards,” my therapist said.
I closed my eyes. Maybe that would help.
It didn’t. I was still outside with the bird.
It’s not just that I was distracted, although that was part of the problem.
I noticed something else inside my body.
I felt unsafe.
Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this sounds like an overreaction. Little birds don’t pose that big a threat, after all.
But as I reflected on my therapy experience later, I realised just how quickly our sense of safety can break down when we don’t have ways to filter out the world around us – especially when we’re at our most vulnerable.
The bird incident doesn’t stand on its own. And its implications extend far beyond the therapy room.
When the world is too loud to feel safe
To understand what happened, it’s helpful to distinguish between two distinct ways our nervous system responds to the world.
One is cognitive. The other is emotional.
Both can create problems for an autistic mind like mine, and for anyone else who is highly sensitive.
The cognitive challenge is one of limited attentional bandwidth.
Most people would be able to filter out the birdsong as irrelevant background noise. But that’s not how an autistic mind works.
For me, there is no background. There’s only foreground. Every sound hits me with the same intensity, whether it’s the bird or the therapist’s voice.
It’s why I can’t stay focused on a conversation in a busy restaurant, and why working in an open office is a particular form of torture. It’s like there’s a swarm of birds circling around me, and they are singing right in my ears.
But this cognitive overload doesn’t tell the full story.
There’s also an emotional layer to how we process our surroundings.
I call it sensory safety.
Sensory safety is the comfortable, reassuring feeling that your environment is predictable and within your control. It’s a bodily sensation that precedes any conscious awareness. Without it, we may feel tense. We have to be constantly on guard, because the environment is too noisy and overwhelming.
That’s how even the singing of a bird can make us feel uncomfortable when we have a hypersensitive nervous system and we are trying to focus elsewhere. Its erratic nature evokes a sensation of being at the mercy of a world we cannot control; a persistent intrusion into our own space that leaves us feeling exposed, especially when the emotional stakes are high.
The radar system that won’t shut down
What I’m learning in therapy is how our sensory safety, or the lack of it, is intimately tied to our early childhood experiences.
When we grow up in a home where the ground beneath us never felt steady, our nervous system learns to scan for threats. Because this response becomes automatic, the tracking never stops, even long after the danger has passed.
It’s as if we develop a hyperattuned radar system. Every unexpected sound is a blip on our radar, and our body instantly registers it as a potential threat, however harmless it may be.
Not only does this hypervigilance put our bodies under constant stress, it also makes it difficult to fully open up to ourselves and to others.
When our inner radar system is constantly tracking sensory intrusions from the outside world, we have no capacity left to turn to our inner world and feel our own feelings.
Because my mind was so preoccupied with the bird during that therapy session, it was physically impossible for me to access the vulnerability my therapist was asking for. My body was too busy protecting itself, scanning the environment.
When this happens across a lifetime, a lack of sensory safety can make us feel incredibly lonely. We can never be fully present with others because we are always on guard, always tracking signals of possible danger. We may be with a loved one in the same room but unable to surrender to their embrace because it would mean dropping our guard for a moment.
Self-protection gets in the way of the very thing we long for most: connection.
Reclaiming our sensory safety
Last week, as I went to visit my therapist for another session, I was worried the same pattern would repeat again. So I did what I’m also doing in this article:
I named the issue.
I told my therapist I struggle with sensory safety, that unpredictable sounds keep me on guard, and that this makes it hard to settle into my own feelings.
And sure enough, there were moments I found myself outside with the birds again, drifting out of the conversation.
But recognising and naming the challenge made a difference. It released some of the emotional tension. And it gave my therapist and me a language to explore what kind of conditions and practices would help me start feeling safer.
We agreed I needed more time to ground myself in the room, and that I would benefit from regular pauses to reorient myself whenever my inner radar is activated by external distractions.
It’s the same kind of conversation I wish we could have more openly in the workplace, without shame or judgment. We can’t expect people to feel safe and included when they are constantly fighting sensory battles inside, sometimes carrying the weight of past trauma.
To build psychological safety, we have to create sensory safety first.
That could be as simple as asking someone what makes them feel comfortable in a space. Perhaps noise-cancelling headphones can help them shut out background noise. Or maybe you could choose a quiet corner for your next one-to-one rather than an echoey cafeteria.
For some, silence really is safety.
We can’t always keep the birds at bay. But when we become more aware of our sensory needs, and find a shared language to honour them, perhaps we can finally start finding some peace.
Leave a Reply