Weather Systems Inside

The internal auroras of my AuDHD body

Photo by Conner Darnell on Unsplash

I’m AuDHD and, true to form, have numerous sensory processing differences that make me far more sensitive to various internal and external factors than what I gather is “usual”. I suspect my readership here is likely familiar with the idea of being sensitive to fluorescent lights, getting easily overstimulated in supermarkets or noisy cafés and being hyperaware of fabrics, aromas and so on… and yes, I get all of those effects in spades. But that’s not my focus here because today I’m going much broader than that to examine more covert sensory effects that, for all they are much harder to pinpoint, overtly affect me on a regular basis. Then, I’m trying to weave these experiences together with those other overlaps of my world - the hEDS, POTS, MCAS, the boom and bust energy patterns of chronic fatigue etc. - which sounds like a long list of labels to cover but they’re really just expressions of the same neurodivergent wiring, showing up through brain, body, neurology, defence and energy systems. In the same way as my non-conformist brain demonstrates every day, they’re all versions of my body taking things to extremes, being hyper-flexible and not always playing by the so-called rules.

So, I’ve always been minutely sensitive to things going on in the wider (beyond man-made) environment: subtle and less subtle weather effects in the broadest sense, a foible that made me feel utterly weird, judging by people’s reactions, when I first told my parents or close friends about any of these everyday experiences (or, those parts of them that were even vaguely translatable into words).

Thus, at a fairly early age, I largely stopped trying to talk about them at all.

Which can make things extra hard when (for you) they’re a highly affecting obstacle to being able to show up in all the ways that other people expect you to. Even if it’s “just” the way you get a pressure headache or migraine whenever a new weather front is coming in, it can make it very hard to “perform” in expectable ways.

Later in life, I realised how often I came across as “woo-woo”, for instance whenever I talked about not being able to do something on the same day as the full moon (I’ve been having to avoid scheduling anything important on these moon dates for years, knowing full well that my sensory tolerance and energy bandwidth will be exceedingly low and unpredictable on such days). These experiences are examples of what I allude to here when I say I’m more than a bit sensitive to the environment.

Of course, I also have various dysautonomias such as POTS and orthostatic intolerance, temperature dysregulation, various GI and circulatory issues, occasional heart palpitations and arrhythmia etc. going on, plus mast cell activation syndrome which can flare at the slightest provocation. I’m also hypermobile in my joints and various connective tissues throughout my whole body, not always the obvious ones.

You should try having teeth that feel loose when air pressure alters, for instance, or optic nerves that randomly change your glasses prescription due to tautness or bagginess to do with the weather. Even the pain from hEDS doesn’t take just one form but manifests in joints, muscles, nerves, fascia, organs and flesh, migrating from place to place and shape-shifting all the time. Cervical instability can make contrary pressure zones of head versus body, setting the scene for intracranial pressure and nerve compression.

Like I said, this is like a sort of neurodivergence of the body, a syndrome of “curly tubes” connecting things (ear tubes, digestive tubes…even sound or food don’t process through smoothly and without glitch) that go about the business of performing bodily things their own unique and long-winded way.

All of these factors would likely go some way towards explaining why I am over-responsive to subtle environmental effects that other people don’t even seem to notice.

When collagen is less robust, and given it is sensitive to ambient humidity and barometric pressure, you would expect that there would be some physiological effects in such a body, triggered by shifts in the atmosphere.

For many years, I was only vaguely aware of my hypermobility trait, and had no idea about hEDS, so these other effects hit me as extremely weird and worryingly unpredictable for a very long time (for instance, the way I would become suddenly lax as though someone had shot my legs off below the knees or my body would become suddenly much more fascinatingly bendy and mobile, which can have its pluses, but also more prone to random injuries at certain times). Similar to getting an autism diagnosis, it was almost a relief to discover I had hEDS as a logical excuse.

It also became pretty apparent, once chronic pain joined the party of everything else I already had going on, from my late 30s onwards, that my worst pain episodes would often correlate with times of sudden air pressure shifts, much like it’s already well known that arthritic joints can sometimes predict a change in the weather. Later, I began to notice another correlation that felt even stranger at first, that these heightened pain episodes kept lining up with times when higher amounts of solar activity were occurring.

The first time this happened was during the newsworthy solar uptick of 2001-2003 when I made a break for freedom and tore up my life to start again rather than put up with a toxic marriage that was slowly killing me (I was also under a level of stress that was rapidly translating into chronic pain). However, this was an unprecedented bold move for someone who usually grips hard to the familiar and I have often wondered about how out of character it seemed to just “do it” like that. Yes, solar events can act like a call to arms, an impluse to take action, a course-correction, in ways that can be as life-affirming as they could probably use a little more forethought and planning but this knee-jerk decision paid dividends in my case and was the liberty break-out of my life.

This alignment of solar events with strong physical (actionable…) pain episodes was something that I really started to keep tabs on from about 2012 onwards, at the peak of the last solar cycle, when my symptom rhythms would so obviously correspond with strong geomagnetic storms and solar flares that there was really no denying a correlation, even if I had my work cut out trying to convince anybody else.

I continued to track this through the double-peaking Solar Cycle 24 and into the solar minimum phase when extreme physical pain calmed down…only to be replaced by more regular fatigue and lacklustre motivation levels, a sort of general downturn of creativity and inspiration (after one final flurry, I stopped painting for three years…bizarre given I’m a painter) yet somewhat better executive function for the next few years, which I used to my advantage to strategise a major lifestyle change (this also coincided with the post COVID era when everything was a bit odd). By the way, a study has demonstrated that, historically, pandemics tend to line up with either solar maxima or minima and also human conflict spikes with solar maxima; and guess where we are in Cycle 25 right now.

It began to feel like I was the sun, running to a distinct eleven year cycle that was trackable backwards through all the boom-and-bust rhythms of my life. The biggest boldest moves, yet generally more overstimulation and (physical and emotional) pain, would tend to occur across blocks of time alternating with lower-profile phases on a rhythm of about a decade’s duration, over an over again. Yes, there goes my autistic love of spotting patterns again and, thankfully, my spatial sequence synaesthesia made it all the easier for me to visualise all the necessary details of my life as needed for shape-sorting this information, right back to my earliest childhood memories.

So the fact remains that I’m acutely sensitive to a whole slew of invisible influencers such as, yes, the phases of the moon, changes in air pressure, geomagnetic storms, solar cycles and the whole gamut of solar-related space weather, windy days, shifts in humidity, storms brewing, heatwaves, excessively cloudy days, upticks in the Schumann resonance, the list goes on.

I can even feel it in my body, like an acute push-pull tension building for a few days and relief afterwards, when the summer solstice is about to happen (less intense but still there…usually a more fluey effect, like a whole-body migraine…for winter solstice). Every equinox and even cross-quarter day, marking a new stage in the planet’s tilted position relative to the sun’s axis (these shifts create the seasons) is an event to tread most carefully around, striving to keep my diary clear in the knowledge that I will very likely have to cancel anything planned due to the high probability of a short-sharp symptom spike around these times.

I frequently walk around the house, or sleep, in hats and scarves when the weather is unsettled or air-pressure shifts are happening, leaving my slow adjusting autonomic system in one of its lag phases and thus my hypermobile joints prone to extra pain and laxity, even when I am indoors leading a sheltered life. Trying to achieve consistency through layers of clothing is my way of trying to buffer the worst of these effects, even indoors.

Because the fact of having the walls of my house around me and the heating on is no adequate buffer when extremes are happening outside or the night sky is extra high and cloudless on a frigid winter’s night, leaving me with compromised circulation in response to the cold snap or a stiff neck from draughts that are imperceptible to anyone else in my living space. How is it that I can have blue fingers indoors when it’s 20 degrees in the house (yet bitterly cold outside, especially at 20 miles altitude)? Don’t ask me but it’s possible.

It’s as though my nervous system has its antennae coiled far outside of the building, basing its responses on a far bigger picture of circumstance than it should really be bothered with or capable of detecting…but then that’s my hypervigilant neurodivergent nervous system all over. It somehow tunes in to things it shouldn’t even know or care about; the same as I pick up on other people’s moods as if they are my own or can feel the smallest pet hair stuck in the weave of my underwear. I just know.

I should probably go and work for the meteorology department…except these heightened senses only work efficiently against the baseline of my version of normal in my home environment. If I’m in some unfamiliar place, it gets harder to sense wood for trees because my brain is an expert at spotting anomalies…that’s what it does…whether I’m picking up four-leaf clovers, without even slowing my pace, on my walk or scanning for typos (I used to be a copyeditor in a context where turnaround was the name of the game). So if I’m already having to process an unfamiliar environment, I’m generally less aware of weather triggers, or, they get lost in amongst all the other triggers going on and, at that point, it all just becomes sensory “noise”. However, as most of my life is pretty withdrawn and spent largely at home, I’m almost always dialled into what’s going on in the bigger picture and it floods my inner environment, whether I notice or not.

So this week has been a roller coaster of the senses because there’s been quite a line-up of environmental triggers for a few days now.

First, the biggest supermoon of the year has been waxing away for days and, now at its peak (as I lie here writing this on my phone at 5 a.m. (6 Nov), keeping me feeling thoroughly tired but electrically wired every night from the minute it comes up over the horizon. I respond like this every month for about 3 to 4 days before and a couple of days after it reaches fullness, though supermoons are the most impactful.

This moon has been coinciding with the peak of the Taurid meteor shower, an annual event I experience every year as a moderate-to-high impact disruption to my nervous system for a few nights, especially if it happens to coincide with geomagnetic disturbances, as it has been this week. The Taurids leave a trail of debris that increases ionisation in the upper atmosphere and can subtly disturb the geomagnetic field. So then yesterday, on top of these two simultaneously peaking events, the sun decided to launch two X-flares and an M-flare in the same day, with three Earth-directed CMEs now expected over the next couple of days (and no surprise when I tell you I feel CMEs as soon as they launch, not just when or if they impact Earth, along with the emergence of holes in the sun’s atmosphere, especially if they are large or especially complex; there’s one of those growing right now).

So tonight has turned out to be one extremely geo-effective night, which is exactly how I am experiencing it as I lie here wide awake feeling too uncomfortable, mentally wired and sensorily overstimulated to sleep.

As I lie here checking the live geomagnetic activity report on the British Geological Survey (BGS) website, I see that there has been a massive uptick of geomagnetic activity from quiet to G3 (Kp 7) in a matter of just a few hours today. This is exactly the kind of event that impacts me hugely and the line-up with the full supermoon and Taurids makes it into a whopper kind of a night for my nervous system.

But how could any of this possibly affect me?

Well, emerging evidence suggests that geomagnetic activity (of Kp 4–6 levels and higher) can meaningfully interact with ADHD-type brain patterns, particularly through the effect on dopamine, circadian rhythm regulation and autonomic arousal.

Animal and human studies show transient drops or rebounds in dopamine and serotonin metabolites during geomagnetic storms, which may be what presents as “mental over-activity” or racing associative thinking in people whose dopamine systems are already compensating for low baseline tone.

Another effect is to influence the pineal gland and melatonin release, often by suppressing melatonin at Kp ≥ 4.

All of that scientific backdrop lines up uncannily with what I notice in myself when space weather gets active. (As this is a lived experience piece, citations aren’t included here but I’m happy to share.)

Translated into my personal experience, these effects can typically result in increased mental activity, racing thoughts and much reduced sleep efficiency as the Kp levels of geomagnetic disturbance go up. Other effects such as visual noise and light flashes sometimes occur, also more-shrill-than-usual tinnitus and, sometimes, migraine type headaches, suggesting brain activity is amping up and becoming more volatile as the Kp levels increase and especially if auroras are active (never mind that they are countless miles away, although the few times they have happened overhead where I live, I’ve spent the night vacillating between awe and excitement…and holding my head in agony).

Because a period of even more mental volatility can occur once levels get to around Kp 5 (I feel so incredibly wired at these times that it often translates into wholesale pain throughout my entire nervous system; one of those “everything hurts” and “nothing I can possibly do will make me feel any more comfortable” kinds of episode that leave me wishing I could escape my own body). They can also stimulate extremely fast-moving connective thought processes that are almost too rapid for me to keep up with, struggling to get nuggets of insight transcribed before I forget them again, adding to panic and frustration and certainly not aiding sleep.

So whilst these heady heights could, theoretically, make for high levels of insight, creativity and flow, the fact they are combined with poor task initiation or, indeed, no inhibition at all once they start (a case of too much information coming in too fast, like a fire hose, and apparently no “off” switch) including a high distraction-level of extremely unpleasant physical sensations hitting my body all at once, it’s far more likely that my system will flip out like an overloaded switchboard than drop into some sort of marvellous genius mode.

Then as levels dip back down below Kp 2 again, there can be some relief but also massive mood flatness (a kind of serotonin hangover…that same drained, paper-thin state that I often have after massive social or sensory overstimulation), cognitive sluggishness and even profound brain fog along with the kind of flu-legged fatigue that can last for days.

So when these storms come close together, the patterns compound fast.

It’s not always terrible because, when space weather events continue on for a few days, my system can get acclimatised to this new feeling, I can even start to find my groove and actually feel more switched on, more “me”cognitively than on an average day if the physical aspects don’t hit too hard…like I’m on a constant drip-feed of dopamine, even managing to sleep more deeply with more colourful and coherent dreams and better quality than usual (I guess it’s like Nature’s Ritalin and gives some respite, at least for a while).

Problems arise from how long I have to endure this marathon without respite or from the constant changing of pace, back and forth, when a series of events happens in quick succession. Sandwich me between more than one of these geomagnetic “spikes”, with slow-down pauses in between, and I can go for days vacillating between tired-but-wired states and what I refer to as “flatlining”, when I become all but zombified for hours. It all demands far too much adaptability from me and isn’t my strong suit…at all…leading to meltdowns and shutdowns that are as physically expressed as they are pure AuDHD.

This is an experiential roller coaster that can spew me out the other side feeling like I’ve flown off the side of the ride when it was at full pelt, leaving me bewildered why nobody else seems to be affected. It can make me doubt my own sanity to experience something so impactful yet for everyone else to be carrying on as per normal but then that could so easily describe everything about an AuDHD version of life.

And space weather related topics don’t exactly make for accessible small talk when people ask you how you’ve been lately, though I’ve tried to bring them up to spark interest. It’s a lonely and isolating thing to experience so many things that others don’t relate to. It can feel like you live in a different dimension to those who don’t feel all the nuances.

“The combination of CME arrivals and the high-speed solar wind from a coronal hole increases the likelihood of geomagnetic disturbance. STORM conditions up to STORM G3 are likely. There is also a possibility of reaching STORM G4 if one, or more, of the CME arrivals is significant.”

- (British Geological Survey (BGS) Geomagnetism Team, Nov 6 2025, space weather three-day forecast)

With more of this geomagnetic instability to come over the next couple of days, as the triple effect of three CMEs headed this way brings more geomagnetic storms, I know I’m in line for a few more incredibly bumpy days and especially nights and that I might as well scrub my diary clean in the daytimes.

This pattern of sensory sensitivity and related health effects has gone on for just so long now that I consider it (rather bizarrely) my version of normal.

One of the worst effects is what it does to my (already abysmal) sleep patterns.

This kind of environmental disruption can lead to early-morning awakenings, heightened mental alertness, and delayed fatigue (exactly the “awake since 4 am, mind racing” pattern I’m describing as my experience tonight) which is an effect I suffer from, somewhat, all of the time, as is very typical for ADHD folk, but these geomagnetically loaded episodes take the sleep deprivation effects to a whole new extreme.

“Normally” I can hope to get back to sleep within an hour or so after waking in the early hours but, on nights like these…fat chance!

Melatonin disruption triggered by geomagnetic activity feeds back into the dopamine circuits, reinforcing ADHD-like hyperfocus and restlessness, and sympathetic dominance also feeds back into the same symptom profile that already determines my tricky life living with MCAS, dysautonomia and POTS.

In fact, EEG studies during geomagnetic storms show increased beta and gamma activity, reduced heart-rate variability, and greater sympathetic dominance, exactly the effects I am already dealing with every day with my chronic health profile, and especially my propensity for long phases with chronic fatigue (where heart-rate variability can remain chronically low for months on end) so the very last thing I need is a series of weather effects likely to worsen these trends.

It’s therefore no surprise that POTS can become very active for me around the time of autumn’s most active geomagnetic storms (they are always more geo-effective around the time of the equinoxes due to the Russell-McPherron effect) even though I more typically experience my worst orthostatic issues in summer during the warmer weather conditions which naturally lower blood pressure due to vasodilation.

The sudden unseasonal return of joint laxity and low blood pressure for a few days, whenever certain space weather events or sudden air pressure shifts dictate, can be almost more discombobulating than when it’s the seasonal norm to have these symptoms in the warmer part of the year because it’s not what you expect or prepare for in autumn or winter. Also, space weather can trigger mast cell flares so there you have yet another potential trigger of connective tissue laxity, inflammation and dysautonomia. Then the sharp return of compensatory muscle rigidity, thus pain, after the weather event ceases, results in a horrible see-saw effect between extremes that forces me to adapt to living in a whole new body-sphere every few days. It involves switching back and forth between two different coping protocols (for instance, sodium-loaded electrolytes, tight compression garments etc. when laxity is most active then looser, less aggravating clothing and muscle relaxation protocols for comfort’s sake when pain is very high) which can be both physically and emotionally strenuous to deal with!

So this feels like a highly personal “lived experience” post written from an AuDHD meets hEDS-POTS-MCAS perspective and may not be immediately relatable to a lot of people unless, maybe, you are one of those people that experiences the symptom swing like I do (with or without having identified some of these possible triggers).

So do I risk losing all credibility by sharing these theories out loud, will eyes roll at my topic and should I therefore desist…or is it just another form of gaslighting when people refuse to believe me when I assert that I experience these profound sensitivities to environmental effects that most other people don’t even notice or think about?

Does it come across as though I’ve made a fixation out of weather systems and imagined my own correlations (rather than noticing these coincidences after the fact because, of course, I had to put my brain to work, searching for patterns, to make sense of all this)?

Believe me, most responses have been incredulous whenever I have brought these things up in the past.

Yet it always astonishes me that most people seem to think we’re not affected by the wider environment that we live in, as though we exist in a bubble; surely, it’s far weirder to assume we are merrily immune to whatever influences the sun, moon and barometric pressure systems have on our biology (in spite of various effects on cardiovascular, autonomic, neurological, cognitive, immune, reproductive and circadian biology being widely researched and reported).

I guess, the degree to which I am minutely sensitive to these things is the most unusual part here and I’m guessing that’s to do with my neurodivergent, highly sensitive and dominantly hypervigilant sensory profile. But I surely can’t be the only one out of my neurodivergent, chronically ill peers to notice these effects?

As regards hypervigilance, I’ve often wondered how much of this is down to my genetic make-up and how much to do with the epigenetics of early life trauma, especially as I was born in a highly geo-effective phase when the sun was being especially active, with some milestone solar flares occurring in the very week I was born (I was fascinated to find out).

Or, another consideration, is this a version of alexithymia…a case of being so profoundly aware of sensations originating outside of my body that I get confused about my boundaries and about what comes from outside versus what’s actually mine? It’s as though the bigger sensations overwhelm me and claim space within me, similar to when I pick up on all the emotions, the very atmosphere, in a room.

Or, is this yet another iteration of my synaesthesia (I have more than one version), where the most subtle of felt sensations available from the environment are converted into alternate sensations with more attention-seeking clout (for instance, translated into strong-tactile, visual and auditory effects) thus drawing far more attention to themselves than they normally ought?

Synaesthesia certainly contributes more drama and special effects to some of my sensory experiences, for instance the multi-sensory way I sometimes experience powerful music and the colourful way I encounter letters and numbers, my visual-spatial experience of time etc. So if there’s a possibility my synesthete-brain is bringing in visual, audible and other effects to interpret what would normally remain subconscious electrical impulses from the environment (my pet theory is that my tinnitus is a version of this, translating inaudible frequencies that I’m not “meant” to be picking up on into head-tones) this could certainly make them seem more real and impactful. And yes there is a known correlation between synaesthesia and neurodivergence.

Whatever the reason, they are triggers that routinely throw the dice on how my week is going to go.

This week, for example, the arrival of strong winds and changeability in air pressure have, as is typical for me, triggered cervical instability plus extreme neuralgic headaches for a few days to start with, followed by a period of marked joint and connective tissue laxity (leading to more random injuries and much increased muscle, joint and nerve pain) throughout the whole body, plus very much GI distress with the sudden, otherwise inexplicable, return of SIBO in response to foods that I normally consider to be on my safe list. There is no rhyme or reason to some of the flare-ups that occur under sudden weather conditions and it wastes far less time to assume they will pass by in their own time to suddenly change a whole diet protocol (though strategic adaptation for a few days is the name of the coping game).

It’s led to nights of such generalised sensitivity and pain that my usually lovely pillow and mattress feel like they are made of bricks and my nerve endings feel affronted by the very air quality in the room, hanging on the edge of aggravation like that point when the car alarm outside your house simply won’t stop…only there’s no sound to be heard here since this is all about extreme and unnamable felt sensations, more of an instinct of distress than a describable symptom, and I seem to be pushed to the very limit by them this week.

Attempts to pacify my nervous system at these times only backfire - am I the only one to experience a kind of demand avoidance to calming bedtime stories and ambient sounds (or indeed anything that attempts to soothe or sedate me)?

The best I can hope for is to breathe my way through it and meet the cosmic stim with more stim, allowing myself to use whatever it takes (rabidly writing out my thoughts like this in what began as free-form stream of consciousness, tightened-up…if useful…later or listening to lively podcast discussions or thought-provoking audiobooks that genuinely engage me) just to get through this night of sensory awfulness.

The impulse to say outloud, in written form, what I’m going through has always been a strong impulse in me and can be hugely self-regulating. Perhaps because it translates as “taking action” of sorts to a body that needs to feel safer through doing something on its own behalf; to take steps to save itself, and not just be soothed into complicity and submission.

That simple act of breathing can be one of the most impactful things…short breath in, longer breath out. There have been countless times that this practice has enabled me to self-regulate against all odds and reclaim the smaller domain of myself versus the bigness that is asserting its power over me.

So yes, the vagus nerve is clearly involved but don’t try and sell me a device to “fix” that (I’ve tried at least two of the ones you’re likely to have seen pushed hard on social media and I sent them both back for a refund within a matter of days for making me feel even worse somehow). As per usual, you can’t fix AuDHD, you have to deal with it as it is and accept this weirdly wired, often painfully hypersensitive state of being along with its moments of peculiar genius. The only way forwards is to make peace with it or enter a doom loop of feeling broken and at the mercy of influencers pushing quick-fix solutions. The best vagal reset trick I’ve ever found for interrupting the onset of intense dysautonomic episodes, by the way, is a cheap neck fan with vents at the front to blow cool air up towards the face (but not at the back of the neck since that can trigger the spasming of sensitive occipital nerves, leading to more neuralgic headaches, as I learned the hard way…) so I always have one handy, day and night.

These are simple things I’ve learned how to do because I’ve spent years now, especially this last decade or so of also dealing with the overlaps of chronic illness, working hard to accept these ups and downs (and the sheer randomness of them). Basically, my experiences change like the actual weather and are just as unpredictable and uncontrollable (a hard reality for a control freak like me).

Feeling comfortable in my body can never be taken for granted since it rarely ever happens and can get whipped away with a propensity that is just as annoying as the rain shower, almost inevitably, coming through to douse all the washing you just put on the line.

Which, of course, means nothing can ever be forecasted with a sense of reasonable certainty and I can never plan for how I’m going to be on a particular day because the weather can take it all from me in a moment.

In a paradigm where I already struggle to be an occasional “yes” person (I’m far more inclined to say “no” to most things that constitute social demands) and given I need to be able to visualise how things will likely turn out before I will ever commit, this changeability makes it incredibly hard.

Windy conditions, especially, can mean I have very few resources left for anything else because of the way they systemically unpick the fragile reliability of my joints and connective tissues, thieve away my orthostatic tolerance, mightily mess with my vision and my hearing, destroy any vague semblance of sleep consistency that I may have clawed together through the extreme effort of weeks, wreck even my ability to digest the blandest of “safe” diets I’ve made into my latest routine and even my ability to pay attention or behave in a passingly normal manner (since nothing whatsoever is left over for masking on such a day).

My distractibility is at record high when all these symptoms go off at once so there’s no chance I have any reserves left for anything else going on, usually not even for those things I would like to be doing, that bring me some respite or joy. Maybe, just maybe, I can get to spend some painting time, assuming I can manage to sit up at an easel for an hour or so or, like this, I sometimes cope with it all by writing.

Mostly, all of my attention goes to the arbitrary sense-explosion of Mother Nature’s weather channel when big weathery things happen and I am left waiting for the all-clear so I can resume some semblance of my more comforting daily routines. By this time, my autism is hanging on by a thread, desperate to resume its more predictable rhythms and, meanwhile, my ADHD is so burned out by its excitable sensory binge that it too longs for a shutdown followed by the more gentle dopamine menus of my usual life, carefully curated for AuDHD.

In any case, the best thing I can do is know about all this (tracking helps me to avoid over-thinking special effects when they happen or worrying that there’s something more sinister going on with my health) and then pull out all those tricks that have helped me to self-regulate in the past.

These, for me, include taking magnesium taurate or taurine before bed or in the night if I wake up feeling horribly wired, applying magnesium lotion onto stiff or restless muscles, lemon balm tea, using GABA supplements as needed (low dose though, as too much makes me feel worse), taking l-theanine day or night during the whole of these disruptive phases, dosing with CBD or PEA as pain demands and using blue-blocking lights before bed and phone filters if I’m awake scrolling for self-preservation at 4 a.m.

Also allowing myself to stim as much as I need to, including breaking my own rules to allow brain stimulating activities on these kinds of nights because…frankly…attempts at sedating myself with anything that has those qualities (such as valerian or passionflower) backfires the same way as sitting down to meditate would be unnerving if a volcano was going off half a mile away.

If anything, it helps more to get up out of bed and vigorously shake myself down, or frisk myself roughly with a towel, allowing the closing of the loop of the fight-or-flight chemistry that has been let loose into my system, giving me some hope that it will start to dissipate now, once I climb back into bed.

Then, if I’m still awake a while later, it’s best to direct my brain at something engaging like a non-triggering but interesting audiobook read in a calm, consistent voice. Something that makes me feel good about myself and less alone such as AuDHD lived experiences will usually do the trick. That way my brain can hook onto both the steadying voice and the interesting subject matter and may eventually drop back into sleep or at least a state of calm restfulness until morning.

Using a weighted blanket can also help and hydration, especially with electrolytes, can make a positive difference.

The reality is, I don’t think these sensory effects will ever go away (and they may even get more pronounced as I age, which seems to be the trend) since I believe they are part of my AuDHD and because I can recall having episodes somewhat like these before, even as a child and teenager, though they have never been more bothersome than since menopause and the era when chronic health issues joined in with my AuDHD party.

I also suspect that these weather effects don’t do anything to me that they don’t also do to all human beings but, due to my neurodivergent wiring, they amplify what is already true in my case…the pre-existing restlessness, the dopamine deficits, the propensity to experience high creativity and over excitability in sharp spikes, at less than convenient times, that can be just as overwhelming as they are occasionally euphoric, followed then by the crashes once all my resources have been used up.

Then the back and forth pendulum swings that such episodes bring only exacerbate the pre-existent pendulum of my AuDHD personality and the “really switched on” followed by “really switched off” trend of my neurotype - the all-or-nothing blueprint that can sometimes be very hard to live with.

Also, this way of being forces upon me the need to handle many more adjustment phases, which are some of the hardest things for me to handle, in all aspects of life. My nervous system lives for consistency so oh how I struggle with constant changes and transitions.

These shifting sands of experience throw my routines out and leave me in a constant state of unexpectedness and flux, which easily translates into feeling unsettled or unsafe, especially while I continue to regard the constant flux itself as though it is something new in my life, a “symptom” of chronic health to be tackled, rather than my AuDHD version of normal.

Such a mindset keeps me in struggle with myself and is an attitude I’m working to drop across all aspects of my neurodivergent profile.

The fact is, I am simply noticing these things the more as I unmask everything, even my own heightened sensory experiences becoming more completely revealed to myself the more I own up to my neuro-complexity one unmasked day at a time.

I therefore owe it to myself to cease seeing these trends as anti-normal but as my particular version of normal so I can, once and for all, get used to them and feel less wrong-footed by their ups and downs. If I could only learn to expect these sensory highs and lows then I could start to shut down the feeling of wrongness when big sensations blow in for a few days.

I can stop comparing my experiences with some ridiculous benchmark of “normal” that has nothing to do with me and start making some real peace with my version of a sensory life, without the internalised ableism that expects any different from my highly-wired system.

The steady and consistent way I handle these experiences, both during the episodes and afterwards, with my protocols well rehearsed in my mind, helps to set this new trend.

So when I get up (probably later than usual) after such a night as this one has been, I can easily feel overwhelmed or even badly dysregulated by my night’s experiences plus lack of sleep. How I manage this is key and my first step is to head to my yoga mat, where I always spend some morning time reacquainting myself with my body (I follow the Integral Movement Method designed for hEDS, offered by The Zebra Club).

Basically, the best thing I can do is get back to my usual morning routines (assuming it’s not so late that to do so would throw my whole day off-kilter and risk dysregulating me any further) and then get myself outside for a while. Just sitting outside in the fresh morning air listening to the birds can be enough to start regulating my nervous system again and is the best favour I can ever do for myself first thing every day, however good or bad my night was.

Better this than acting out some impulse to be manically busy, as often happens when the residual “wired feeling” of the night before tries to play itself out to conclusion in my system. So if I’m to be found running around the house squirting detergent at random things (manic cleaning is one of the ways I self-regulate but there are pitfalls…), or announcing I want to do something highly impulsive with my day, it’s likely the aftermath of big weather effects playing out equally big emotions and impulses and best sidestepped in favour of quieter pursuits to start with. Which isn’t to say that mindful movement isn’t a good idea at some point in the aftermath, in fact it’s strongly advisable, but nothing driven by such manic energy as this slightly unhinged version will help settle me down after such a big night.

Far better that I should put on some music and dance or go for a good walk in nature later, if I still feel like I have some genuine reserves to spare, in spite of such broken sleep. More typically, the sensation of having surplus energy is an illusion left over from the high-stimulation of the night before and extremely short-lived, to be followed by a crash.

Also, writing down my thoughts can really help with self-regulation. I don’t need to do anything with these thoughts, they don’t have to be complete sentences and can be a series of fragments in note form but they can sometimes turn out to be especially inspired or insightful at these times and this is when some of the genius of a having a weather-triggered dopamine bomb going off in my head for a few hours can come to fruition. I can sometimes find all-new enthusiasm for my interests, or develop brand new ones, which is great, just as long as I don’t expect myself to be able to act on this burst of enthusiasm immediately in the aftermath of very little sleep or a flare-up of symptoms.

In fact, as a lifelong pattern finder and pursuer of meaning beyond the obvious, these blasts of energy from cosmic encounters can seem to fuel a whole other level of awareness that lights up my brain like a switchboard, even if I haven’t yet managed to extract the exact purpose of some of the patterns I glean at these times (it matters not…sometimes just realising the patterns, if only fleetingly, is all that is called for and can be enough to facilitate some important shift in my consciousness, either now or sometime later). Expect the unexpected is all I can really say to myself about what they deliver.

Appreciating that this often happens on the back of these big experiences can take some of the fear out of the unpredictability and sheer sensory potency of such episodes and turn them into more of “a ride”.

Non-linear realisations join up in constellations at these times. The feeling of knowing something new without the language to express it happens frequently in the aftermath (writing this post is difficult enough to do and hardly touches on the actual experience of it). Just allowing myself the space to feel it is the most important thing.

By contrast, times of solar minimum, when regular sun-based activity dies down for a few years, can feel sluggish by comparison, as though I’m languishing without the necessary sparks to light my touchpaper for months on end (yes, that’s another pattern I’ve noticed).

Likewise, when the aftermath shutdowns happen, I try to allow these almost inevitable phases to play out without judgement or the need to seek more relatable…to other people…excuses for feeling this way… because I know how much I just went through, therefore no explanations necessary for needing this recovery time and space.

I could even argue that allowing the ups and downs of these internalised weather systems, without resistance, allows me to get closer to nature’s rhythms and helps me to break out of some of the man-made structures I was done with anyway. Why do I need such a reliably predictable life except to serve the machine (as I no longer do)?

My life was never so eager to conform to what was expected or normal; not then, not now, not ever and this wild sensory ride is just another iteration of that.

With each one of these episodes I take a few steps forwards on some invisible non-linear life map that’s not all about productivity but much more about having the experience of my own existence, however that happens to turn out.

Who’s to say my sensory experiences are in any way wrong or faulty; they’re just different, often more intense, frequently more colourful than is average.

So I’m sharing this slightly left-field AuDHD “lived experience” from the midst of being in it, just in case any part of it sparks some recognition for anyone else. Please feel welcome to share below if it does.