New Year, New Opportunities to Make Your Space More Sensory Friendly
by Kat Harhai on December 28, 2021
Accommodating sensory needs is one of many important components of making a space accessible to disabled individuals. The best time to increase access is yesterday, but the second-best time is today. As we move into this new year, we encourage you to consider how your space can better accommodate sensory needs as a way to increase access for the neurodivergent individuals you serve.
For individuals with sensory processing differences, certain stimuli can feel uncomfortable at best and painful at worst.
For me (Autistic, ADHD, and auditory processing disorder), overhead fluorescent lighting and spaces with little sound absorption make me fatigued and even trigger migraines if I’m exposed to the stimuli for long enough.
On the other hand, the sensation I experience from being under a weighted blanket or while underwater is a rejuvenating one. I often feel disconnected from my body and lose track of where I am in space, and experiencing increased pressure allows me to “organize”— reorient myself and really feel my body. If I don’t get enough opportunities to regulate via these soothing stimuli, small tasks or triggers can be challenging to manage or even completely overwhelming.
These are just a handful of examples of stimuli that I personally avoid and actively seek out because of what works for my nervous system. While there are certainly trends among many neurodivergent people—for example, I have yet to meet a neurodivergent person who likes fluorescent lighting—the reality is that everyone’s unique nervous system has its own unique needs.
Creating a space that allows your neurodivergent and autistic clients to engage with stimuli in a way that works for them is a win-win for everyone involved. You get to work with your clients at their best, most regulated self because their needs are met. You are able to build rapport because they begin to trust that you’ll prioritize their sensory needs, which often get overlooked, ignored, or misunderstood. They get to deepen their understanding of themselves and what works/doesn’t work for their nervous system.
All of that said, here are my top five tips to make your space more sensory-friendly.
1. Provide options of stimuli for individuals to engage with or disengage from depending on what they need.
Sensory needs can be vastly different from one person to the next. Providing as many options as you can for individuals to engage with, or disengage from, is crucial to balancing the potentially conflicting needs of different folks in a single group.
Examples of what providing these options might look like:
- Have a stash of scented items that your autistic and neurodivergent clients can engage with if they want. Do not use items like diffusers or air fresheners as these often permeate the air and cannot be disengaged from, if needed.
- Orient your space to provide options on how your clients may sit, stand, lay, move, etc. In a small space, this might involve multi-purpose or easy-to-move furniture.
- If possible, create multiple options of lighting within a single space. In a classroom or large office, this could look like leaving the larger space open to natural light and/or with lights on, but have a sectioned-off area (using fabric, curtains, a tall bookshelf, etc.) that is darker and has softer lighting.
Allowing individuals to choose what works for them at any given moment is crucial. Within a group of people, you will certainly find a range of sensory needs, and even within an individual, needs might look different depending on what else they have going on. Someone who is typically a sensory seeker may have overloaded their system and need a break from intense sensory stimuli when they come into your space on a given day. Providing these options and the autonomy to choose honors these varying and changing needs.
2. Create the space with sensory avoiders in mind, and provide opportunities for sensory seekers to engage with additional, non-disruptive stimuli on top of that.
For your autistic and neurodivergent clients who need more stimuli to be regulated (which is often the case for many ADHDers) they are going to need increased sensory input. To balance this need in a group with sensory avoiders (such as folks with noise sensitivities), design the space for those sensory avoiders, and add on according to individual needs from there.
It’s much easier to balance these conflicting needs by catering to the avoiders and then finding non-disruptive options for the seekers to engage with. Otherwise, spaces created for sensory seekers require avoiders to disengage or even leave the space entirely to get what they need. Options for the seekers include fidget toys, coloring pages, opportunities to sit/stand/move how they need, weighted blankets/lap pads/wraps, among many other sensory tools.
Some tricks to cater your space to sensory avoiders:
- Make sure your space has lots of sound absorbing materials to minimize noise pollution such as fabric, upholstery, carpet, blankets, or acoustic panels.
- Minimize visual clutter as much as possible. Minimize the items you keep out and on display, and keep items you use irregularly in storage that is visually separated (i.e. in a bin rather than just on a shelf).
- Avoid the use of overhead fluorescent lighting, if possible, and instead, take advantage of natural light and/or use lamps or string lights. If you have to use fluorescent lighting, fire-safe fluorescent light covers are a good way to soften their impact.
- Create a designated “calm corner” for individuals to decompress. This creates an opportunity for individuals to get a break without requiring them to completely disengage or leave the space entirely.
3. Be mindful of all forms of sensory engagement— including interoception.
When most people think of sensory stimuli, they tend to focus almost exclusively on exteroception— the sensitivity to stimuli outside of the body. This includes sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. Creating options to manage these stimuli is crucial, and at the same time, hyper- or hypo-sensitive interoception can be just as difficult to manage, and often goes overlooked.
Interoception is our felt experience of the internal workings of the body. This includes awareness of breath, hunger, thirst, tiredness, heart rate, and how full your bladder is. An ideal sensory-friendly space has opportunities to manage the stimuli we experience both inside and outside of the body.
Examples of how you might make your space friendly to individuals who struggle with interoception:
- Get rid of unnecessary bathroom rules such as hall passes or only bathroom breaks when on a break from the activity. Autonomy to use the bathroom at any time is a non-negotiable need for many people who struggle with interoception. This applies to all age groups, including adults.
- Provide opportunities AND reminders to snack and hydrate. I personally am hypo-sensitive to hunger and thirst, which means I often don’t recognize those sensations without external cues like looking at the clock and seeing that it’s the time I should eat lunch or until my body lets me know that I have been deprived of the need for too long like getting a headache after not drinking water all day. Providing both opportunities to snack and hydrate through break times or making it explicit that it’s okay to snack quietly during class time and reminders to do so can make all the difference for people like me who struggle with interoception.
4. Reflect on how your rules might not be sensory friendly, and do away with them or find alternatives.
There are some common rules in classrooms and other spaces that (usually) exist for a good reason, but can prevent individuals from getting their sensory needs met. For example, no gum, no cell phones, no snacks, ask if you have to go to the bathroom, to name just a few.
Thinking about any explicit or implicit rules you have in your classroom or practice, do any of them inadvertently take away a student’s ability to manage their sensory needs? And, if there is a good reason the rule needs to exist, what is an alternative?
For example, if your classroom is a gum-free zone because someone always ends up with gum stuck on their shoe or wrappers everywhere, use plastic cups as mini trash cans at each table so that students are more likely to throw them away. Or, ensure that students who need the sensory input from chewing have the option to do so, such as with food grade chewable stim toys or having a chewable straw.
5. Validate your students’ sensory needs, and create space for them to explore more of what works for them. This is extra important for those with intersecting marginalized identities.
Your neurodivergent clients have more than likely gotten messages from various people/systems in their lives that invalidate sensory needs. This is all the more true for neurodivergent BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ+ folks.
Multiply marginalized neurodivergent folks are socialized to suppress our ND traits, and are taught from a young age that there are consequences if we don’t. Understanding one’s own sensory needs are, for many neurodivergent women, LGBTQ+ folks, and BIPOC, a process of relearning innate tools that we were taught to forget or suppress.
Part of meeting the sensory needs of all neurodivergent folks is creating a space where those individuals feel empowered to meet their needs how they need to. Your role in that process is to be the voice that says, “That need is valid,” and to create safe spaces for your clients to explore what works for them.
