Freezing Us Out of Spaces: Why Calibration Matters More Than Accommodation
Coffee doesn't fix sleep, and quiet rooms don't fix overload
Imagine walking into a classroom in January and realizing the room is colder than the outdoors. No one announces a problem. The thermostat is set where it always is.
The expectation is simple: bring a coat.
Your workplace decides that 15°C (60°F) indoors is “perfectly reasonable.”
The policy is applied uniformly. For some the cold shift is welcomed, but for many others, they must now do their work wearing thick coats. Some try to type emails with mittens on.
You struggle at work because now you’re too cold to concentrate effectively so your performance reviews tank. You’re too cold to think about office banter or collaboration, so your work relationships become strained. You’re extra tired and grumpy at the end of each work day as your body tries to compensate to keep you warm.
You start looking at job postings because you can’t work like this, but you see that this is now industry standard. You’re stuck. Now what?
This may sound extreme but in a way, this is our currently reality, just not strictly with temperature.
Offices with harsh fluorescent lighting.
Classrooms with stiff, non-ergonomic chairs.
Hospitals with endless machines beeping and announcements on the PA.
Social event spaces with harsh chemical cleaners or air-freshener smells.
Everywhere we turn - there is an over-abundance of sensory input coming our way that our brains have to filter and process.
We are expected to bring special light-filter glasses, noise-cancelling earphones, extra layers - maybe even extricate ourselves to a sensory break space - or just ‘tough it out’.
It’s Not Me or You, It’s The Room
The prevalent narrative out there in the sensory inclusion realm is that sensory issues are only an ‘issue’ for neurodivergent people. The time, money, and effort required to make changes and accommodations isn’t considered ‘worth it’ from an ROI point of view.
Because neurodivergent people are framed as a minority group whose needs are seen as specialized rather than universal..
But this framing assumes sensory strain is fixed to identity rather than being something that fluctuates across people, days, and conditions.
As I have made the case for in other posts on this blog, sensory issues are NOT ‘only’ a neurodivergent issue.
This is because of a critical concept that I call ‘Sensory Resilience’ - aka your nervous system’s ability to withstand stressors, which is continuously shaped by environment, context, and prior load.
Tired? Sick? Hungry? In pain?
These factors and more will make any human less resilient, and sensory overload will impact them more significantly.
To better illustrate this in action, this article includes a series of visualizations.
But before we go further, we need to distinguish between energy and resilience.
In the disability space there is something known as ‘Spoon Theory’. It was created by Christine Miserandino, and an easy way to understand it is to think in video game terms.
‘Spoons’ are like action points (or health points).
For disabled and chronically ill people, action points can be much more limited. For some people, even things like just taking a shower can take several of a limited number of action points. Once you’ve used up all your action points, you can’t do anything else in that round of the game (eg the same day).
Sensory Resilience on the other hand, is more like a wooden shield (armor).
Unlike a steel shield which is quite robust, a wooden shield can degrade more quickly, and the more degraded it is, the more that repeated strikes against it can get past it and deduct hit points.
I sometimes use resilience to mean both shield and hit points, because the more ‘damage’ (sensory over-stimulation) a shield takes, the less it protects you and the faster you will ‘lose hit points’.
To be clear, resilience and energy are technically separate, though closely linked.
Note: When I refer to 'energy depletion,' I'm describing the felt experience of what's actually happening: your nervous system processing excessive environmental load. The space is demanding constant cognitive filtering, and that filtering burns energy.
Designing environments as if only ‘energy’ matters ignores how quickly resilience can be eroded by repeated or poorly calibrated sensory load.
When a person has peak resilience, they can much more easily withstand discomfort. When they have minimal resilience left, discomfort will cause them to retreat rapidly.
For the sake of this set of examples, we are working with a set of 4 fictional ‘avatars’.
Four Avatars:
Person A - High baseline resilience.
Person B - Temporarily reduced resilience.
Person C - Inherently narrower tolerance band. For example, this person has a concussion.
Person D - Significantly reduced tolerance and high support needs. For example, a person with severe autism.
Under different conditions, the same individual could be Person A, B, or C.
The core misconception is treating sensory strain as a personal deficit instead of an environmental load distribution problem.
For the purposes of this example, all four of these avatars are attending a social event that begins in the early evening - ie after at least half of a normal day has already transpired.
For this first example, we can assume that all four avatars did not spend the day working at a job. We pretend this is a Saturday.
The event they are attending is in a space that is not specially treated or prepared for sensory comfort. It is not a ‘good acoustic space’, does not have active ventilation, and has minimal seating options so patrons must stand.
Music is playing loudly (volume in excess of 70db), lighting is uneven (bright in some areas, dim in others), and there is minor added scent from materials on site. None of these conditions are extreme on their own, but together they create continuous ‘background load’. Approximately 100 people are attending this event.
Over the course of several hours with no special accommodation or intervention, the cumulative load of the sensory factors present ‘build up’.
Guests strain to hear each other over the music and so many competing voices speaking in the same frequency bands. Their bodies fatigue from the ergonomic stress of standing with no relief, no way to lean or sit.
The uneven lighting causes constant cognitive processing to filter - there is no ‘neutral’ place to rest their eyes. The build up of body heat and humidity in the space makes some people sweat and strain more.
Effects by Person
The graphic above shows each of the 4 avatars, with a colour-matched line tracing their ‘starting energy’ to the end of the day.
The graphic depicts the environment as having high sound and temperature ‘load accumulation’, medium-high light and physical discomfort load accumulation, and mild olfactory load.
Under these conditions, Person A is not consciously bothered, but silently their brain and nervous system is filtering, and slowly but surely their energy depletes by approximately 10-12% over a few hours.
Person B attends and remains despite feeling unwell, to support a friend. But due to their already reduced resilience, the same conditions that only drain Person A by 10%, drain their energy by approx 25%.
Person C has already depleted approximately half of their available energy after just a couple of hours. If they choose to remain in the space until the very end, they will be severely depleted and even a ‘good night sleep’ will likely not return them to full capacity. They’ve ‘over-extended’, a common outcome when people are required to remain in over-stimulating environments without sufficient regulation built into the space.
Person D has a sharp and rapid energy drop and would not be able to remain in the space for very long, perhaps 30 minutes before they would experience processing collapse.
This is when there are no in-built, or venue-provided accommodations.
Adding the Sensory Break Space
It seems very logical on its face - if people are overwhelmed and it is draining their energy, give them a space where they can get away from the overstimulation and they can ‘recharge’.
Here’s a visualization of this idea:
It seems that a lot of people believe this is the same as plugging in a rechargeable battery. It doesn’t exactly work like that.
In reality, the sensory break space ‘pauses’ the energy drain, but does not fully reverse it.
In the above visualization, we can see that Person A does not utilize the break space. Their energy remains quite high right up until the end of the event.
Persons B and C do utilize the break space, and we can see in this depiction that their energy line ‘rebounds’, before dropping again after.
Person D does not last long enough to utilize the break space.
This is another aspect of these sensory break spaces - they are very often separated from the event space. So if a person is trying to attend a social event or enjoy an experience, and they need to leave the experience in order to regulate, participation itself becomes conditional.
In effect, the system is choosing continuity for the environment over continuity for the person. The burden of regulation is offloaded onto the individual, producing temporary exclusion as a predictable outcome.
This visualization is more accurate for what really occurs:
As you can see, the use of the sensory break space by Person B and Person C ‘pauses’ their cognitive load, but it declines again after exiting the space.
This is because they are re-entering an overwhelming environment.
The impact on a person’s nervous system making this transition can be compared to the physical temperature shock of going from a cold or luke warm pool, to a hot tub or jacuzzi, and then after a time re-entering the pool.
For those with sensory sensitivity - re-entering the overwhelmed space after having calmed and re-regulated their nervous system can be even more of a jolt.
Often times, they may not be able to re-enter the overstimulating space at all.
Survey data and lived experience both show that many people will simply just leave when they feel overwhelmed. Because their body is telling them ‘I can’t handle this anymore’.
Consider that 2/3rds of survey respondents said they can only handle an overstimulating environment for up to two hours.
Many social events run for 2 hours at minimum. But an all day conference? Or even just a two plus hour long event after a person has already had a full, perhaps intense day at work?
We Need Solace
If the problem is baseline load, then the intervention must be baseline calibration.
That is the core issue of what the SOLACE Model is designed to address.
The core environment needs to be calibrated to reduce baseline sensory load, both so that people are not forced to exclude themselves socially for the sake of their sensory comfort, and so that people can enjoy events for longer.
Many people are feeling lonely and isolated, so being able to attend more social events and stay longer is a really worthwhile goal and outcome.
Here is a visualization of what the same event environment would be like for the same four people, if it were calibrated via the SOLACE Model to be within human sensory ‘comfort bands’:
These figures are illustrative, not empirical. They demonstrate relative load, not precise measurement.
I’ve included ‘ghost lines’ that show the original trajectories without the SOLACE calibration, for reference.
In this example:
Person A loses 1-2% energy instead of ~10%
Person B loses 4-5% energy instead of ~25%
Person C loses 8-10% energy instead of ~40%
Person D has their energy last approximately twice as long, though still can’t endure the full event.
Once again, the above examples assume the four avatars attending an event on a weekend, so not after a full day of work.
Now let’s look at an example that includes a full work day.
First, an illustration of how some people may think our energy levels work: a steady linear process with no sudden spikes or dips.
Of course reality is not that ideal, and there are any number of factors that can surprise us, stress us, make us emotional, etc.
A more realistic portrayal would be this:
here’s a slight zoom in to help read the small text in the graphic:
In this illustration, we’re looking at Person A who starts the day with very high resilience (shield) and full energy (hit points).
The day starts smoothly, with their commute depleting a bit of energy through the diverted cognitive bandwidth of staying alert in traffic.
At 11am they have a meeting at work that is highly stressful which chips off some of their resilience and drains some energy. They begin to get hungry which further diminishes their resilience.
They eat a rushed and unhealthy lunch - the food does restore a bit of resilience but since it was rushed and unhealthy it lessens the effect.
Immediately after lunch, Person A has a very busy and stressful afternoon include another stressful meeting, and by the end of the workday they’ve dropped to just a hair above 50% resilience and energy.
Then they commute home and make dinner, but the cooking takes energy. Then they must go back out to an after-work event.
Since this is Person A who does not have any health factors making them more inherently sensitive, the highly stimulating environment of the event has a relatively linear impact on them, but by the end they are tired and hungry and down to 30% by the time they get home and go to bed.
This illustration shows a relatively smooth decline over time, until a particularly stressful experience. They finish the work day with around 50% energy which is good, but could be higher.
What if the same person starts their day poorly rested? Maybe a fire alarm was pulled in their building and woke them up at 2am and they never got back to sleep.
Now they are starting from 65% instead of 95%.
Starting the day with 30% less resilience will make a notable difference. Now they end their work day at 30% energy instead of 50%. Again, in reality it won’t always be so cut and dry.
In this example, Person A has to skip the after work event because their processing bandwidth has already maxed out and they don’t have the energy reserves to hold up.
If SOLACE were applied in the venue where the after-work event takes place, the result might look more like this (once again with a ghost line to show the original energy trajectory).
Having a calibrated, comfortable sensory environment doesn’t make everything perfect, but it allows someone with less sensory resilience to engage in a space for longer without filtering as much baseline sensory-cognitive load, thus maintaining more focus, comfort, and connection.
Quiet rooms are better than nothing, but they still leave the core conditions unchanged, and ask individuals to adapt to environments that could be designed differently.
The Caffeine Con
There are two related and relevant myths to discuss here.
The first is that ‘quiet rooms recharge peoples’ sensory battery.
The second is how we think about and treat fatigue.
Some people think that stimulants (such as caffeine) undo being tired.
But the reality is that stimulants just ‘add a layer’ of artificial energy boost.
In the following illustration, we see a person starting their day with low-moderate resilience, and having coffee before heading to work.
Their ‘baseline’ (if they didn’t use a stimulant aid) will behave as normal, while the artificial boost will peak over a few hours and then begin to wear off.
The issue with relying on stimulants is that underneath that mirage of alertness and energy, your ‘real battery’ continues to drain, especially if you’re in a stressful (or overstimulating) environment.
When the stimulant wears off, we come back to the analogy of going from warm jacuzzi to cold pool. It’s not pleasant.
Because the illusion of the energy boost from the stimulant fools the body into thinking it has more capacity than it does, and you can run yourself into a deficit - which can hit hard when the boost wears off.
The same kind pattern often happens with sensory break spaces at especially-intense events. Sometimes the person just can’t return to the main space.
This is why the real solution to being under-slept is to get more sleep, rather than always compensating with stimulants.
Coffee helps in a pinch, but no amount of coffee fixes a chronically underslept society.
Likewise, the solution to overwhelming sensory environments is not to just put sensory break rooms in every building. It’s to reduce baseline sensory load across all spaces.
In an ideal world, every day would be calm, easily managed, and we would experience a steady but gentle energy decline through the day. Our energy would get a big refill when we eat lunch and dinner, commutes (if we had them) would be calm and relaxing.
Basically, the factors contributing to additional, unnecessary cognitive filtering would be minimal, and you would not lose more than half of your total energy from wake to bed time.
We do not live in such an ideal world yet, but we can take real steps to reduce baseline sensory load and calibrate environments into better balance. Recalibrating spaces so that participation is not conditional on self-extraction, exhaustion, or chemical compensation.
Accommodation mitigates harm. Calibration prevents it.
Designing for sensory resilience is designing for the full spectrum of human capacity across real days, real bodies, and real conditions.
Lacey Artemis (she/they) is a neurodivergent researcher, speaker, and consultant focused on systems-level sensory inclusion and design. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting, where her applied research and advisory work supports more comfortable, accessible public spaces.
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