Navigating daily life means sorting through countless sights, sounds, and sensations. For most, this process happens quietly in the background, allowing focus, comfort, and safety. For some, the world brings too much input, too loudly, all at once.
When the brain misreads or struggles to manage this flood of information, the experience can spark or worsen anxiety. A strong link connects sensory processing and anxiety, creating cycles that shape mood, behavior, and even physical health. Since millions live with sensory and anxiety issues, understanding this connection can unlock real relief.
How Sensory Processing and Anxiety Work in the Brain
To understand the tie between anxiety and sensory experiences, it helps to first look at how the brain handles sensations and stress. Sensory processing happens every waking minute, as the brain sorts out what’s important and what can be ignored. Anxiety, though, hits like a sudden flood, throwing the nervous system into defense mode. These forces often meet, feed each other, and sometimes spiral out of control.
What Is Sensory Processing?
Sensory processing is how your brain sorts and reacts to information from your senses. These include sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, balance, body awareness, and signals like hunger or pain. Most people react calmly to things like loud noises or cold air. For some, their brains get overwhelmed or miss important signals, leading to strong reactions or a lack of response. This can make daily life more challenging.
Processing this constant stream of multi-sensory information requires energy from the brain. To help protect the brain’s energy reserves, the brain learns to prioritize information by identifying what information is pertinent and what is not. This allows the resources to last longer, supporting efficient and accurate processing of sensory information.
Learning how to prioritize sensory information is something that happens subconsciously, and is the result of experiencing the same thing multiple times, so your brain knows what information is important and what is extraneous.
What Is Anxiety and How Does It Impact the Brain?
“Anxiety gets your body ready to face danger,” says Dr. Jackson, Chief Programs Officer for Brain Balance, a leader in brain-based programming that addresses behavioral, social, and academic struggles using evidence-based methods to optimize brain health and development without medication. “A little stress helps you react fast, but too much can make things worse. You might notice your heart racing, fast breathing, shaking, or chest pain. Anxiety disorders extend beyond normal worry. They bring fear that sticks around and can control your choices and daily life.”
Common types of anxiety include constant worry (generalized anxiety), fear of social situations, sudden intense panic, fears of certain things, and worrying about being apart from loved ones.
When anxiety is high, your brain focuses on finding threats. You may forget things, feel confused, or struggle to stay calm. This cycle can leave you tired and overwhelmed.
Dr. Jackson explains, “When your brain is in a state of anxiety, it is on high alert, which means the brain will be taking in and processing all sensory input, rather than prioritizing the important information. The result is that the brain’s resources are burned through faster, leading to increased fatigue and decreased accuracy in sensory processing. This, in turn, can heighten the anxiety.”
The Cycle Between Sensory Processing Difficulties and Anxiety
Sensory sensitivities and anxiety often go hand in hand, especially for kids and those with neurodevelopmental differences. The anticipation of how you may feel when your brain is on high alert, taking in too much noise, bright lights, or crowded spaces, can cause stress. Knowing that you may feel overwhelmed, tired, irritable, and may miss important cues leading to confusion, can lead to wanting to avoid an activity.
Anxiety then makes people even more sensitive, so small triggers feel worse. This creates a cycle. Avoiding triggers only increases fear over time. For some kids, even thinking about loud parties or busy rooms can make their anxiety and sensory issues harder to handle.
Science and Solutions: Understanding New Research and Interventions
As brain research has advanced, scientists have shed new light on why sensory processing and anxiety interact so strongly. This knowledge has led to fresh approaches aimed at addressing both challenges together.
What Research Reveals About the Link Between Sensory Processing and Anxiety
Functional brain imaging studies show that both sensory processing issues and anxiety activate the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system. People with sensory problems show more activity in the amygdala when exposed to certain input, much like those with anxiety disorders. This suggests the brain reacts to a loud noise or scratchy shirt much like it does to real danger.
Another key player is the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls heart rate, digestion, and other automatic functions. In people with high sensory sensitivity, the ANS stays switched on, making even small triggers feel like emergencies. It’s the same system that causes sweaty palms before a speech or brings a stomachache before an exam.
Sensory and anxiety problems often run together in people with autism or ADHD. Studies suggest up to 80% of children with autism have sensory processing issues, while anxiety is among the most common struggles for adults and kids with ADHD.
The Role of Retained Reflexes in Sensory and Emotional Challenges
Some problems in sensory processing tie back to early movement patterns called developmental reflexes. Babies are born with reflexes that help with survival—involuntary actions like gripping, turning the head, or startling. As children grow, these reflexes should fade as the brain matures.
However, for some, these reflexes never fully fade. Known as retained reflexes, they can make the body stay on alert, much like pressing a car’s gas pedal without a break. A child with a retained Moro reflex (the startle reflex) may jump or freeze at loud sounds, while a retained ATNR (a head-turning reflex) can make writing or reading hard. These patterns use up brain resources, keeping the nervous system in defense mode and setting the stage for anxiety and sensory overload.
Targeted activities can help integrate these reflexes, allowing the brain to mature, providing greater control and ease in shifting out of fight-or-flight more reliably. This can open the door for better emotional regulation and calmer sensory responses.
Comprehensive Support: Programs That Address the Brain and Body
The search for effective solutions has moved beyond medication alone. Holistic programs now target both sensory and emotional needs, aiming at the underlying causes.
One example is Brain Balance, a non-medical program that blends multi-sensory exercises, motor skills training, reflex integration, and nutrition advice. Here’s how these approaches help:
Customized Sensory Activities: Providing input to the brain from many different sensory systems simultaneously – light, touch, sound, and even smell – exercises the pathways in the brain that process and integrate that information. These activities are then repeated to continue to strengthen the related neural networks, while building in intensity and duration over time to build endurance in multi-sensory processing. Combined with activities that require the brain’s perception of balance, body control, and movement, can further exercise and strengthen a wide array of sensory processing.
Motor Skills Training: Physical activity strengthens connections between the brain and body. By working on skills like balance and coordination, children or adults can improve how their bodies respond to sensory messages, easing both physical clumsiness and emotional strain.
Reflex Integration: Special movements help to mature functions in the brain, which can shift some reflexive responses to a conscious choice to act, enhancing the brain’s control over actions and behaviors. This increased maturity contributes to increasing the threshold for what someone can tolerate before their brain kicks into the high-alert state of fight, flight, or freeze, in turn, lowering baseline anxiety.
Nutrition Recommendations: The foods you eat provide the resources that create the fuel for the brain, and not all fuel is created equally. By learning more about how the foods you eat daily contribute to mood and energy can help minimize some of the peaks and valleys in energy, attention, and anxiety. Small, but important shifts in daily nutrition can lead to improvements in mood and energy levels.
These full-body approaches work to strengthen the brain’s ability to handle input, not just numb symptoms, but change the underlying process. Over time, many find increased resilience, calmer days, and new confidence in daily activities.
Sensory processing and anxiety are two sides of the same coin for many people. When the brain struggles to handle incoming information, anxiety often follows, leading to cycles that affect health, learning, and happiness. Recent advances in neuroscience and intervention programs show that it’s possible to address the core issues by training the brain and body together.
With proper support, people facing these challenges can build more comfort and confidence. Families should know that help exists and progress is within reach. Taking steps to address sensory sensitivities and retained reflexes at their root can lead to real, lasting relief from anxiety. Early support with modern, research-backed methods brings a brighter path forward for adults and children alike.
