It is not proof of autism.
Sensory sensitivity, and the harder-to-name sense of what is happening inside your own body, are just as common in ADHD as in autism. The assumption that they belong only to autism has sent a lot of people down the wrong path.
The myth in the middle of this.
Because sensory differences are written into the autism criteria and left out of the ADHD ones, a quiet assumption has taken hold, in clinics as much as anywhere: if you cannot bear certain textures, if noise overwhelms you, if you forget to eat until you are shaking, then it must be autism. It is one of the most common reasons people are sent down the wrong assessment path, or told their ADHD diagnosis must be wrong, or left feeling they do not fit anywhere.
The evidence does not support the assumption. Sensory processing differences run right through ADHD too, at rates that look a great deal like autism. They were simply never built into the checklist. So the experience is real, it is common, and on its own it tells you very little about which label fits. That is exactly why we assess it properly rather than using it as a shortcut.
Turned up, turned down, often at once.
Sensitivity is not one setting. The same person can be overwhelmed by sound and barely register hunger, raw to a scratchy label yet slow to feel pain. It moves by sense, by day, by how tired and stretched you already are. Most people recognise themselves somewhere in here.
Hypersensitivity is the world arriving too loud. Hyposensitivity is it arriving too faint, so you seek more input, or miss the signal entirely. Both are forms of the same thing: a nervous system that filters and weights the world differently.
Two directions of sensing.
It helps to split the body’s sensing into two directions. One faces outward, the other inward. Most attention goes to the outward one, but for a lot of people it is the inward sense that has quietly caused the most trouble.
The world, turned up or down.
This is the outward sense, everything coming in from outside: sound, light, touch, smell, taste, temperature. It is the part people usually mean by sensory sensitivity. In ADHD it shows as distraction that is not really a choice, a brain that cannot stop registering the strip light, the chatter, the chair, and an environment that quietly drains the energy needed for everything else.
The signals from inside.
This is the inward sense, the reading of your own body: hunger, thirst, needing the loo, a racing heart, tension, tiredness. When it runs quiet, you miss the cues until they are urgent, eating at 4pm because you finally noticed, mistaking a pounding heart for nothing, or for panic. And because emotion is built on these same bodily signals, a quiet interoceptive sense often means a feeling is not noticed until it is already overwhelming.
When the body is hard to read.
That last point matters more than it first sounds. We work out what we feel partly by reading what the body is doing, a tight chest, a dropped stomach, a flush of heat. When those signals come through faintly or get scrambled, naming the emotion becomes genuinely hard. This is alexithymia, difficulty identifying and describing feelings, and it is common in both ADHD and autism, closely tied to how well the inner sense is working.
It is not coldness and it is not a lack of feeling. The feelings are there, often very strongly. What is missing is the clear channel between body and word, so emotion can arrive as a sudden flood, or as a physical symptom with no obvious cause, rather than as something you can see coming and put into language.
Why we assess it, and why it is not a dividing line.
We look at all of this carefully in a Sanctum assessment: how you respond across each sense, where you are turned up and where you are turned down, how well you read your own body, and how that connects to attention, to eating and sleep, to emotion and to the hormonal picture in women. Not to score you against a checklist, and not to decide autism by the back door, but because it shapes daily life so much and is asked about so rarely.
The honest position is this. Sensory and interoceptive differences are part of being neurodivergent, across ADHD and autism both. They help us understand the whole of how your brain meets the world. They were never meant to be the single clue that settles which path you are on, and we do not treat them that way.
Talk to us.
If this is a part of your life that has never quite been explained, it is worth bringing to an assessment that actually looks at it. Send an enquiry and we will be in touch, or start with a free screening.
Prefer to talk? Call 0161 768 7634 or email clinics@sanctumhealthcare.co.uk.
The whole of how your brain meets the world.
A Sanctum assessment looks at sensory processing and body awareness alongside attention, emotion and the rest, because that is what a full picture actually needs. Start with a free screening, or explore the assessment built for you.
Start with a free screening
