Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.
Happy Wednesday, founders,
“A bulldog just jumped out of his fence and attacked our dog,” my husband panted to me 6.30 am in the morning with a swollen eye.
Luckily, our dog Milo was fine, but it was traumatizing for my partner to pull two biting dogs apart in a span of a few seconds - he explained to me during the car ride as we were dropping our son off for his first day back at school… It was a month and a half into the school break amid the Middle East conflict, and the words from the principal's safety briefing were still echoing in my head. Every parent looked a little tense at drop off…
Hours later, after my partner’s doctor's check-up for his infected eye, I thought the day would finally calm down; little did I know my printer would stop working, followed by a power plus water cut in the house…
You get it now. This was one of those days: an extremely overstimulating yet nothing significantly bad actually happened… but you felt utterly exhausted…
In the following days, more stressful life and work events came my way, and I started noticing that every little sound would make me jump, and loud places would give me bad headaches for hours.
That’s when I knew my sensory overload had returned…
The next week, I decided to run a little experiment: I wore noise-canceling earplugs throughout the day and night, regardless of whether I was in a loud place.
The result surprised me: my constant headaches were gone, my sleep improved, and I had so much more energy at the end of the day. It even showed up on my Whoop (fitness tracker) as a 7-day high recovery score in green.
I thought about how important it is to understand our body and manage it when life gives us a lemon - so, let’s dive into the business of sensory overload again and how to best get it under control.
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The thalamus: your brain's sensory filter
Every sensation we receive: sound, light, touch, taste, the awareness of our own body in space, passes through the thalamus before it reaches the cortex, which works like a filter. Under normal conditions, it decides what's useful and directs it.
Where is the thalamus?
That filter deteriorates when you're under constant stress. The thalamus passes excessive amounts of irrelevant information through, and heightens your experience in the 6 senses that feel too much:
Sound: You become hyper-aware of background noise that others filter automatically. Busy cafes, or meetings with multiple voices, can all set you off instantly.
Sight: Bright lights, screens, busy visual environments. The overstimulated brain struggles with contrast and complexity in ways it didn't before.
Smell: Scents that once registered neutrally become intrusive. Many people notice this most in confined spaces like lifts, cars, and meeting rooms.
Touch: A hand on your shoulder makes you jump; your most comfortable clothing makes you itch.
Taste: Less commonly discussed, but appetite and food intensity can shift significantly during high-stress periods. Some people find eating becomes mechanical; others find previously tolerable foods suddenly taste too much.
Proprioception: The sixth sense: your brain's awareness of where your body is in space. When the nervous system is overwhelmed, this can manifest as physical restlessness, difficulty sitting still, or a constant low-level tension with no obvious source.
Not everyone experiences all of these. But most people living with sensory overload are managing a combination of several, without ever connecting them to a single cause.
This is more common than we admit
The pandemic increased anxiety disorder cases by an estimated 76 million globally in 2020 alone, a 26% increase above pre-pandemic baselines (COVID-19 Mental Disorders Collaborators, 2021). Approximately 30% of the general population already exhibits high levels of sensory processing sensitivity as a trait. Chronic stress can push anyone across that threshold temporarily, regardless of where they start.
One study showed highly sensitive individuals (those high in Sensory Processing Sensitivity) experience significantly more overstimulation than less sensitive people when exposed to unpleasant stimuli, fatigue, or negative mood - but also experience greater relief from overstimulation than their less sensitive counterparts when conditions are positive (pleasant sounds/visuals, low fatigue, good mood).
In short, the same heightened responsiveness that makes HSPs more vulnerable to stimulating environments also makes them more responsive to good ones.
Highly sensitive persons (HSPs) experience more overstimulation than non-HSPs. (Weyn et al., 2026)
The shame is its own stressor
We often have a sense of guilt and shame if we feel ‘sensitive’.
The internal monologue goes: I should be able to handle this, I don't know why I'm like this, everyone else seems fine.
This self-criticism, in itself, is counterproductive. It triggers cortisol production and activates the threat response. And they are the last things an already-overwhelmed nervous system needs.
We often manage two problems at once: the sensory overload itself and our own judgment about having it.
Self-compassion has been linked to greater vagally mediated heart rate variability and reduced cortisol levels (Kirschner et al., 2019). It helps lower the stress hormone cortisol and supports the brain's emotion-regulation centers, facilitating a calmer and more adaptive response to stressors (Cowand et al., 2024).
Dr. Kristin Neff describes one of self-compassion's core components as common humanity: the recognition that struggle is not evidence of personal inadequacy, but a shared experience of being human, a problem we are, by numbers, not alone in.
What this means for founders
We live and work in environments that are, by design, highly stimulating, without giving us a chance to recover. Back-to-back calls, open offices, and constant context-switching. The sensory load of a founder's day is genuinely high, and most of us treat managing it as a weakness rather than maintenance.
I sometimes hear people praising high-functioning founders as ‘high energy’, and that ‘I could never do that much in a day.’ What we don’t see is how these founders are highly disciplined in how they spend or conserve their energy.
For founders, if time is the asset, then energy is the currency.
A nervous system running on chronic overload makes worse decisions, or misreads situations or people. For founders, learning how to recover is actually part of the work.
Soothing each sense practically
Our nervous system needs specific conditions to downregulate, and most of them are simpler to adjust than we think:
Sound: Try wearing noise-canceling earplugs for any crowded places (I love them). Try silence or slow music (60–80bpm, no lyrics) before important calls or decisions.
Sight: Wear blue-light blocking glasses. Reduce overhead lighting, lamps, and natural light are genuinely different inputs to the visual cortex. Step outside between long screen sessions.
Smell: Familiar, neutral scents calm the nervous system faster than you'd expect. If certain environments are reliably overwhelming.
Touch: Weighted blankets, loose clothing during recovery periods, and deliberate physical grounding activate the parasympathetic system (feet flat on the floor, hands on a surface).
Taste: Eat slowly and without screens. Rushed, distracted eating while the nervous system is already dysregulated adds sensory stress and prevents the gut-brain signaling that tells your body it's actually safe.
Proprioception: This sense specifically craves slow, intentional movement: walking without a destination, stretching, yoga, and swimming.
Key takeaways
When you feel triggered - before attributing irritability or overwhelm to something relational or situational, check how stimulated you feel. More often than we expect, the cause is environmental.
The self-criticism about being sensitive is counterproductive. The research is clear that self-compassion reduces cortisol, and harshness does NOT make us tougher.
Don’t get irritated when recovery is slow; we can’t treat healing a nervous system like hitting a project milestone. It’s about the long-term sustained health.
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Until next week,
Lavena
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