I make a meltdown post on hexbear, delete it shortly after, scream into the void and then play hexcraft for 8 hours straight.

Fr why is crying like the most reliable way to reset my brain

Unfortunately self-care stuff tends to not be super helpful for neurodivergent folks. Exercise can be helpful if it is rigorous enough to produce a lot of feel good chemicals but sometimes it makes it worse for me. If I'm at home, sometimes all I can do is put an eyemask on and some headphones with some relaxing music and just lay like a potato in bed until it goes away. My animals and my partner comforting me can also really help, but sometimes not.

Since it sounds like you are still figuring out what sensory output messes with you, part of the solution might just learning what consistently bothers you and avoiding it as much as possible. Do you have any sensory input you really like? I personally really like being in water so baths can really help regulate me. Engaging with special interests is also really important and beneficial, but identifying and maintaining special interests can unfortunately be difficult for AuDHDers, well at least it is for me. Sometimes it seems like trying to fight it just makes it worse too and you just have to kinda let it happen and run its course.

I'm in a similar boat so I'm still figuring it out too. I hope these suggestions can be helpful and I'll definitely be checking back in on this thread.

Keeping it in check is one of my greatest struggles and I would be lying if I didn't say that I self medicate with THC. However, I know that is not the answer you wanted. I do a lot of other things throughout the day to help calm my brain.

Frequently changing scenery even for a few minutes helps, like I'll go take a walk around the office or outside around the building.

I also use my Air Pods religiously at work when I am not expected to be engaging with my coworkers. Having a queue of podcasts lined up, or a good playlist helps to detach myself from the environment I'm in and focus on whatever I need to without the office distractions.

Nothing helps it 100%, but it tends to be a mix of various things normally stimulating in some way.

Shut myself in a room with Bach turned up very loud and play Workers and Resources sputnik mode.

I just talk a lot and try and overstimulate till I tire out. I love yoga, but running until you collapse (pain or no) may do something.

Depends a lot on what the source of my stress is

A common one for me is noise, oscillating fans and certain repetitive noises feel like nails on a chalkboard to me. Ideally I get rid of the source of the noise (turn the fan off, move it slightly so it’s not as audible, or move to a different room), if that’s not an option I have airpod pros which have noise cancelling and I just always have a podcast going (words of a podcast grab my attention better than music does)

If I’m out in public and the noise or crowd is bothering me I’ll typically go to the bathroom and just sit and close my eyes and take deep breaths. I usually have my headphones with me so if it’s real bad I’ll put them in for a minute.

If I’m at work I’ll go take a walk around the building. Thankfully I work in a lab so there’s no one watching where I am at any given time. I also get to have my headphones in almost always unless I’m talking to people. Seriously I listen to like 8 hours of podcasts a day on average.

Emergency solution is to activate the mammalian dive reflex; If you stick your face in cold water it activates a part of your lizard brain that slows down a bunch of metabolic functions to make it so you don’t drown. Those metabolic functions conveniently overlap a lot with the things that are hyperactive when you’re anxious.

Also while drugs is not the answer you’re looking for, that is also the answer I have: Medication wise I’m on Buspar and Wellbutrin, and propanalol or Xanax if it gets too bad. Also I smoke a lot of weed and vape nicotine, which in addition to their inherent effects give you a good excuse to step outside for a minute when in public.

Being overwhelmed like you're describing, to me, is like a ratchet – it increases bit by bit, sometimes gradually and sometimes in big increments, but by the time you're verging on a meltdown or a shutdown it's ratcheted up to a critical point.

While self-care after you hit that point is obviously very important, I don't think it's fair on yourself to assume that 1 hour in an overwhelming situation that is so intense that it's pushing you to the point of flipping out can be fixed by spending 1 hour chilling out after the fact.

More than that, when your nervous system is at that point it's very difficult to engage in the activities that are calming and soothing because you're in a state that is too heightened, and I think this is where acute burnout happens. If I'm doing a bad job of explaining what my take is here, imagine a person who is having a panic attack - by their very circumstances they aren't going to be able to have a very deep, rewarding meditation session. If they are able to, engaging in meditative or mindfulness sort of activities can absolutely reap benefits to help loosen the grip of the panic attack, there's no doubt about that, but in the midst of a panic attack calming yourself is only ever likely to reduce the severity/intensity of that heightened state but it's almost certainly not going to be restful or refreshing in the way that it would be if you approached the same exercise from a place where you are feeling regulated and centred.

This is a parallel to being in a state of sensory overload or other experiences of being overwhelmed.

You might take hours or days, perhaps even longer, to gear down from being overwhelmed especially if you've been at that critical point for a prolonged period of time or it's happened repeatedly in fairly short succession.

One of the ways to manage this is to try to find opportunities to take breaks, even if they are brief. Headphones on or earplugs in, sitting in a quiet and calm space, allowing yourself the opportunity to settle somewhat - that sort of thing. If you're out at a function or something like that, it might be that you excuse yourself and spend a few minutes in the bathroom just centering yourself or stepping outside to somewhere quiet for a breather.

The other thing is addressing your sensory diet and auditing your sensory experience. This sounds complicated but it's really not. I need to make a post about this but the shorthand version of it is this: the opposite of negative sensory stimuli isn't the absence of the stimuli but rather the presence of positive sensory stimuli. You want to try and stack up as much positive sensory stimuli as possible (within reason) while limiting and avoiding the negative stimuli where you can. If you can crowd out the bad with the good, your nervous system won't be as overwhelmed and you'll bounce back quicker.

The sensory domains are tactile (touch/texture), visual (sight), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), auditory (sound), vestibular (your body's balance and orientation in space), and proprioceptive (your sense of your body itself).

If you feel inclined, make pages (virtual or physical) with two columns, one for good and one for bad, with a heading for each sensory domain. Try to fill out each column as best you can. You'll likely do better with the bad than the good especially to begin with. Remember to record when you encounter a particularly strong sensory experience in your day-to-day life, then add it to the appropriate page and column. You might find a particular smell like an essential oil, a perfume, or a type of incense especially positive or negative when you experience it. Record it. If you find the smell of peppermint to be positive then you will almost certainly find the taste of it good, so test it and record that too. Try to chase those leads where they take you. For example if you like the smell of sandalwood (or if you hate it) then the same probably applies for cedarwood. If you like sour candy then you will probably like lemon, lime, and tamarind (also amchur because I'm on a crusade to raise awareness of amchur on this site so I am trying to find any opportunity to mention it.) If you don't like the feeling of microfibre then you probably won't like the feeling of velour or velvet. If you like the feeling of rocking then you'll probably like the feeling of swinging. If you like the feeling of water flowing over your skin then you'll probably like the feeling of air flowing over your skin. And so on.

Once you've mapped out a good deal of the things that you like then the next step is to try and find ways to incorporate these sensory experiences into your everyday life. Maybe that means having a lava lamp or ceiling projector on a timer in your bedroom so that when you're winding down in the evening, you get compulsory positive sensory stimuli time. Or maybe it's about putting some diffusers around your house with the right fragrance or having an electric essential oil burner on a timer in your space etc.

This will help a lot in the long term but it's probably not going to be an immediate fix for you.

On the bad side, once you've fleshed out your lists the next step is to strategise for mitigating and avoiding these things. Maybe it means changing your wardrobe, getting ear defenders or loop-style devices (there are cheap knockoffs on aliexpress and similar sites!) or active noise cancelling headphones, catching public transport to avoid peak hour, preparing in advance so you can avoid tobacco smoke because you know you hate it so when someone nearby is about to light up you move away from them before the smell becomes overwhelming for you etc. By taking this approach, you will be more proactive at managing the things that overwhelm you and push you into a state or being overwhelmed and shutting down/melting down/burning out. If we imagine a scale from 0-10, with 10 being excruciating and 0 being the absence of the bad stimuli, maybe it takes for that experience to hit a 5 or a 6 before you typically take steps to deal with it. Maybe you don't even get that chance and it immediately hits a 7 or 8 because you suddenly find yourself in a cloud of second-hand cigarette smoke or really bad traffic noise. That's going to really strain your nervous system much more than it would if you have something to manage that traffic noise and you're using it before you even get exposed to it, so that way you only experience it at a 2 or a 3. Same goes for getting out of the way when someone pulls out a cigarette - instead of being caught unawares and finding yourself breathing in that smoke, you will be able to move away before they light up and you'll only experience the bad smell at 3 or a 4 instead of an 8 or 9.

(To overcomplicate this somewhat, I don't think that sensory experiences scale linearly for us and it's more exponential, sort of like how decibels or pH works, where a low-level bad stimuli at a 1 or 2 is going to be tolerable for a very long time, and perhaps all day or longer, whereas a 7 or 8 is going to be tolerable for only a brief amount of time before it completely overwhelms you. If you can preempt the bad sensory stimuli or you are more attuned to your sensory experience then it won't take until it's at a 6 before you become aware of it and start trying to deal with it. In this way you're going to incur less damage to your sensory health bar, if that makes sense.)

Over time you want to create habits or maybe even instinctual responses to address negative sensory stimuli and to experience more positive sensory stimuli, and in this way you'll have a healthier sensory diet so you will find that you cope better overall.

that's the neat part, I don't

Physical contact helps, personally, with another person. Or a cat.

I have to remove any loud or bright stimulus, and usually end up lying in bed or on the couch in the dark wrapped in a blanket or a big hoodie, with a squishy stim toy. Stimming really grounds me and brings me back to focus, since I tend to dissociate when super stressed. If I'm gonna cry I'll just sit in the shower until the tears stop and I'm too dehydrated and worn out to do anything but sit quietly or sleep. I always try to kind of check in with myself and question my feelings and thoughts, because it helps me process whatever is going on, kind of like an imagined therapy session. Figuring out what your body AND your mind need is a weird and tricky thing. Lot of good advice and comments here though. Hope you can find some peace.

Starting with the classics: box breathing (breathe in 4 seconds, hold 4, out 4, hold 4) is a great way of centering yourself and steadying your heart rate. I'm also big into visualization. I have a very vivid imagination. As such I've been able to visualize mechanisms inside of myself and connect them to my feelings as a way of adjusting them. I envisioned a tightening clock spring attached to the inside of my sternum that I could loosen with a key. I even mimed turning it to help me. I visualize stress and frustration as static electricity crackling around my head and heart that I gather into my hand and forcibly discharge to the ground as lightning bolts, paired with a long slow breath out. Focusing on these images helps me get away from the sources of stress around me.