Assessment options
Formal sensory processing assessment is by occupational therapist — particularly OTs trained in sensory integration. Adult sensory assessment is less developed than child assessment and harder to find but does exist. Many adults benefit from the framing without formal diagnosis.
What to do without formal diagnosis
Build sensory accommodations into work, home, and relationships. Find sensory-friendly environments. Reduce exposure to known triggers. Get the right tools (headphones, sunglasses, fabrics that work for you, lighting that suits). Connect with other sensory-aware adults. The framing itself often substantially improves daily quality of life.
Map your channels before changing anything
Before spending money or renegotiating your life, spend two weeks mapping. The moderate band nearly always hides a mixed profile — some channels avoiding, some seeking, some fine — and accommodation aimed at the wrong channel is wasted. Keep a note on your phone with the eight channels listed: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, vestibular, proprioceptive, interoceptive. Each evening, tick which ones got aggravated that day and which ones you found yourself feeding — the loud music in the car, the leg bouncing, the second chilli-heavy meal.
After a fortnight the shape is usually obvious: most moderate-band adults find two channels doing most of the damage and one or two doing most of the soothing. That shape is your priority list. Fix the top avoiding channel first (it’s costing you daily), then formalise the top seeking channel (it’s your cheapest regulation tool), and ignore the baseline channels entirely. A map beats a mood: ‘Wednesdays are bad because Wednesdays are open-office days and my auditory channel pays for it’ is actionable in a way ‘I’m sensitive lately’ never is.
How to tell whether accommodations are working
Sensory accommodations work slowly and quietly, so decide in advance what you’re measuring, or you’ll abandon good changes for lack of drama. Useful markers at the moderate band: how irritable you are in the last two hours before bed, how long it takes to fall asleep, how often you snap at household noise, how much you dread specific recurring events, and how fast you bounce back after a loud or crowded day.
Pick two or three, rate them weekly, and give any change four to six weeks before judging it — a quieter desk doesn’t feel like anything on day two; it shows up as a slightly less scraped-out October. Expect the improvement to be subtractive: fewer bad evenings rather than new euphoria. If a change shows nothing after six weeks, drop it and reroute the effort to another channel — no accommodation is sacred. And when something does work, protect it deliberately, because working accommodations become invisible precisely because they work, and they’re usually the first thing sacrificed the next time life gets busy.