What happens when you’re overstimulated
Reviewed by Larissa Geleris
From wearing your baby in a carrier, to changing and swaddling your baby, to holding (and potentially breastfeeding) your baby during feedings, you’re consistently giving—and receiving—all kinds of baby touches. The touches you receive range from fingertips tugging your hair to a tongue pulsating along your nipple.
“Touch is how your baby understands calm, love, and attachment,” says Larissa Geleris, an occupational therapist. “Mom and baby both need it to form attachments.” But the frequency and types of touches you receive can create an imbalance in your nervous system—and potentially overwhelm it.
“You’re already hypersensitive to touch because that’s how you co-regulate with the baby,” Geleris says. And if you have other children, such as a toddler or two, you are likely already being greeted with a fair amount of non-calming touch.
A tired and overstimulated nervous system may leave you wanting to say, “Please don’t touch me because I cannot tolerate another piece of stimuli coming in my general direction.”
At this point, Geleris says, you are officially “touched out.”
The different kinds of touch
Touch—from the intentional to the incidental—can impact you in dramatically different ways.
A lighter touch, like a tickle or a gentle stroke, can be stimulating. Deeper pressure, like a strong hug or a massage, can be calming and help to regulate your nervous system. If you’re getting a lot more of the former, you might find yourself craving the latter.
What does light touch tell us?
“Light touch alerts you more to danger,” Geleris says. She says to think about the sensation you feel when your leg accidentally brushes against some poison oak, or when a mosquito lands on your neck. These are unwelcome, alarming touches—the kind you want to shield yourself from.
“When you have a newborn, although you have deep pressure from skin to skin, if you are breastfeeding, they are nibbling on you, they touch you in different ways, and you have to be tuned into a deep or shallow latch,” she says.
If you become overstimulated with baby touches, you may find it hard to decipher safe touches from potentially dangerous ones. Adding to the confusion, Geleris notes, are the other types of postpartum imbalances you are likely experiencing.
“As a new parent, you’re somewhere between being both over- and understimulated,” she says. “You’re not sleeping, and your core is Jell-O…You’re also probably starving and thirsty,” she says. Your many pre-baby habits and patterns, which comprise your broader set of stimuli, are also experiencing disruptions:
- You’re not likely engaging in thought-provoking discussions, reading novels, or leaving the house to socialize with friends and family without your baby—at least not with the same ease and frequency.
- Conversations with your partner, if you have one, are often transactional and logistical in nature. They’re centered around household and baby needs—or your needs to shower, sleep, or eat something (or all of the above!).
- You’re not likely getting the same level of physical exercise you got before or during your pregnancy. Your core muscles and energy levels are likely weaker than normal. And you don’t have as much time to work out.
When your sleep, appetite, intellectual and social stimulation, and even core stability are out of whack, she says, “you can’t make sense of everything else.”
What’s the solution?
The good news is that you are hardwired for baby touches; you and your infant need physical interaction, and you don’t need to touch your baby any less. You do, however, need to attempt to balance the types of stimulation you receive while giving your nervous system meaningful breaks.
Adding deeper-pressure touches to your mix of inputs is helpful, but if you are breastfeeding your baby, the solution to being touched out is a little more complex than adding the opposite kind of touch. For ways to help strike this stimulation balance, check out these tips.
STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
How to cope with being touched out
Larissa Geleris
Occupational therapist
Have constant baby touches left you feeling “touched out”? Try these tips to help you rebalance your nervous system.
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