Day 10: Sensory Debt and Cognitive Load
The Neurodivergent Philosopher: Daily Meditations
“We should conduct ourselves not as if we ought to live for the body, but as if we could not live without it. Our too great love for it makes us restless with fears, burdens us with cares, and exposes us to insults.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistles 1-65
Your nervous system is not a luxury feature you can ignore. It is the infrastructure upon which everything else stands…and for neurodivergent nervous systems, this infrastructure is operating under constant strain.
Your nervous system is like an accounting system, tracking inputs and outputs that you’re not consciously monitoring. Your body conducts them consciously, expensively, relentlessly.
Every sensory input has a cost:
Fluorescent lights
Background noise
Unexpected touch
Scratchy fabric tags
The smell of someone’s perfume
Overlapping conversations
Visual clutter
Temperature fluctuations
The buzz of electronics
These barely register for most nervous systems, for yours, each environmental insult is a withdrawal from your daily energy budget. It’s something your system cannot ignore, something it must process, something it must manage.
The burden is literal, not metaphorical.
Restless with Fears
Seneca knew that unmanaged burdens create restlessness with fears. When your nervous system is perpetually managing sensory input it cannot filter, it enters a state of chronic vigilance.
This is not anxiety you choose. This is your system defending itself against a world it experiences as hostile.
Your autistic brain may see patterns others miss, but it cannot unsee them. Your ADHD brain may hyperfocus brilliantly, but it cannot control the switching tax between tasks.
The combination creates a state of constant defensive alertness, restless with fears that your system might miss something, might overload or might just fail altogether.
Cognitive Load Cost
Beyond sensory burdens there is ‘cognitive load’ which is the mental effort required for:
Switching between tasks
Making decisions (even small ones: what to eat, what to wear)
Processing social cues
Organising thoughts
Remembering appointments
Filtering relevant from irrelevant information
Maintaining attention on low-interest tasks
Suppressing impulses
Planning and executing sequential steps
You walk into an open-plan office and immediately you are in debt, sensory debt, then add the cognitive load that gets you through…never mind the environmental insults attacking throughout the day.
After work, you navigate a grocery store, again the debt is compounding. Later that evening you attend a social gathering with music, conversation and unpredictable movement…your debt is accelerating faster than you can track.
Sensory debt + Cognitive load + Environmental insult =
…a nervous system running a deficit it can never repay at the current rate of demands. The exhaustion isn’t in your head, it’s real.
Seneca’s wisdom says you should conduct yourself as if you cannot live without this body (because you cannot)…allow yourself to recover. Give yourself a break. Be compassionate towards yourself.
Today:
What sensory input is taxing you? What cognitive demands are real? Where is your environment insulting your nervous system?
What can you eliminate or reduce?
Where are you consistently overdrawn?