Description
This final workshop brings together key themes from the modulation and arousal section by exploring how sensory reactivity is linked with emotion, stress, internal body awareness and participation. It examines how limbic structures help shape emotional responses to sensory input, and why sensory hyperreactivity can become closely connected with anxiety, fear, distress, avoidance and reduced occupational choice.
Participants are introduced to the role of the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, cingulate cortex and related limbic structures in emotion, memory, motivation, prediction and stress responses. The session also explores the fast sympathetic stress response and the slower hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, helping participants understand why some individuals with sensory reactivity differences may appear to live in a more chronic state of stress.
The workshop then examines interoception as the processing of internal body signals, including how it supports physiological regulation, emotional awareness, sense of self, sleep, social connection, eating, toileting, pain perception and mental health. It considers the relationship between interoception, sensory processing, social touch, body awareness and self-regulation, while also recognising the complexity of measuring and intervening in this area.
The session gives particular attention to autistic individuals, highlighting differences in sensory reactivity, limbic processing, social touch, interoceptive accuracy, body awareness and emotional interpretation. Through clinical discussion and video examples, participants are encouraged to think carefully about how sensory reactivity and interoceptive differences affect real lives, relationships, confidence, mental health and participation across the lifespan.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- describe how limbic structures contribute to emotional responses, motivation, memory and sensory reactivity
- explain how sensory hyperreactivity may trigger stress responses, anxiety and changes in arousal
- differentiate between fast sympathetic stress responses and slower endocrine stress responses
- recognise how chronic stress may affect sleep, mood, pain, fatigue, digestion, learning and participation
- describe interoception as a multidimensional system that supports internal body awareness, regulation and sense of self
- discuss how interoceptive differences may influence eating, toileting, sleep, pain, anxiety, depression and social connection
- consider how sensory reactivity and interoceptive processing may present differently in autistic individuals
- reflect on how sensory integration, deep pressure, proprioception, graded sensory experiences, breathing and mindful awareness may support regulation in practice
Participants will learn it through focused teaching, neuroscience explanation, clinical discussion and video observation, connect sensory reactivity with emotion, stress and interoception, apply the ideas to real clinical presentations, reflect on the impact of sensory and body-awareness differences across the lifespan, and take the learning back into practice through more integrated regulation-focused reasoning.
