Parent Sensory Overload at the End of the Day: Why 5pm Is Shaped by 9am

It’s 5:40. The fan is running, the dog is barking, the TV is on, and someone is asking what’s for dinner. Nothing unusual has happened, but you’re already feeling overwhelmed.

Much of the conversation about sensory processing focuses on children. Parents bring their own nervous systems into every interaction, with sensory needs and limits that shape how they respond to their children.

I wanted to explore that part of the relationship, so I invited Rachel Harrington, COTA/L, CPRCS, as a guest on the ABT Webinar Series. Rachel is a pediatric occupational therapy assistant, educator, and mother of two children born inside two years. Through her work with Sensational Brain and The Sensory Project, she has spent years helping therapists and families understand sensory processing, movement, and nervous system regulation. She is also a certified provider of The Listening Program®.

I asked Rachel what she notices in herself just before she reaches her limit with her children. Her answer took us back to the beginning of the day, long before the noise, demands, and frustrations begin to accumulate.

Where parent sensory overload at the end of the day comes from

Your brain spends the whole day deciding what matters and dismissing what doesn’t. The dishwasher, the car outside, the shirt against your skin, every one of them checked and set aside so you can pay attention to the one thing that needs you. That work is constant, it does not reset between tasks, and the cost of it accumulates. Understanding how the brain handles that load is what I have spent my career on.

The load is close to universal. Lurie Children’s Hospital surveyed 1,000 parents across the US in October 2026, and 60% reported overstimulation, rising to 73% in homes with a child under five. Children arguing topped the list, and the noise level from kids came in close behind. The same build-up happens on the child’s side of the house, which we covered in sensory overload in children.

When I asked Rachel how she recognizes that she is approaching sensory overload, she took me back to the beginning of the day.

“I need to proactively feed my nervous system input that it needs in order to potentially prevent that sensory meltdown at the end of the day.”

Rachel uses the image of a sensory cup to explain why this matters. Throughout the day, noise, activity, interruptions, and everyday demands gradually fill that cup. By late afternoon, something as ordinary as the television playing or a child asking another question can feel overwhelming because there is so little capacity left.

What she does about it starts hours before any of that.

What Rachel noticed when the power went out

The day before our conversation, Rachel experienced something unexpected when the power went out at her house. The air purifiers stopped humming, the fans went quiet, and the familiar background sounds of her home disappeared.

“As soon as everything went out, I didn’t know it at first, but it was like this overwhelming sense of calm.”

Each of those sounds was perfectly ordinary. Their sudden absence brought such relief that she went to ask her son whether he felt the difference too.

Our auditory system monitors the environment constantly, including while we sleep. The brain filters most of what it takes in, letting familiar sounds fade into the background while keeping us alert to what matters. That filtering is work, and it runs whether or not we notice it. For someone sensitive to sound, ordinary household noise accumulates. The relief of a power cut feels like something arriving when it is actually something ending.

During our conversation, I observed that sensory input can be both the trigger and the antidote. Rachel immediately suggested we mark that thought.

For more on why the auditory system reacts the way it does, see the neuroscience of sound sensitivity.

Which kind of input does your system actually want?

Here is the question worth sitting with. When you start to feel the overwhelm build, what are you reaching for?

Rachel describes three sensory modulation patterns that help explain why the same strategy can feel calming to one person and useless to another. Most adults are a mix across the eight senses rather than one type.

If you want silence, dim light, and nobody touching you, that is the over-responsive pattern. Ordinary input arrives at full volume. Competing sounds, bright overheads, the constant low-grade awareness of clothing on your skin, processed consciously instead of fading into the background. Reducing input helps you.

If you feel flat, foggy, and half-present until something sharp cuts through, that points toward under-responsive. Input does not register strongly, so the day blurs.

If what you actually want is to move, push, chew, or turn the music up, that is sensory craving. In Rachel’s words, these are the adults who “want more movement, more deep pressure, we want more tactile input,” who like tight clothing and strong flavors. A craver who spends all day stripping stimulation out of her environment gets more dysregulated as the hours pass, then concludes self-regulation does not work for her.

Sort yourself sense by sense, one at a time. You might need less auditory input at 4pm and considerably more movement and deep pressure at 8am. Rachel keeps free sensory checklists for adults and adolescents on her site for exactly this.

What Rachel does before anyone needs her

She calls it her daily regulation routine: time outside in the morning, red light instead of the bright overheads, a workout on the floor, and crawling. She walks through the full routine in her new book, Grounded: A Nervous System Regulation Guide for Overstimulated Parents.

The crawling came from a packet her midwife handed her while she was pregnant with her daughter, which mentioned crawling to help get the baby into position. She kept thinking about it. In 2023 she started writing the Crawling for Brain Development curriculum for the children on her caseload, and partway through it landed differently:

“I was just like, oh my gosh, this is more for me than it is for the kids that I’m writing it for.”

Crawling connects to her clinical specialty. Rachel is a certified primitive reflex clinical specialist, and in her practice she sees heavy overlap between retained primitive reflexes and sensory processing difficulties in both children and adults.

“It takes five minutes to do it and it has such a powerful impact on the nervous system.”

She is candid that she does not hit the routine every day. Her husband once asked her to please go to the gym, for everyone’s sake. She also tells him why she is going, so it reads as household maintenance.

I have been through a version of this myself. I had a routine, it fell apart during a long stretch of change, and rebuilding it taught me to protect it harder than I did the first time. The days I check the boxes are the days I have longer fuses and more attention to give.

What changes for your child when you have more room

All of this would be a wellness exercise if it stopped at feeling better.

A parent who notices the build at 4:30 and takes five minutes to do something about it comes back into the kitchen with more patience available, a slower voice, and more flexibility about the thing that is about to go wrong. The interaction that would have escalated has a different adult in it. As Rachel put it:

“What it comes down to is that connection with ourselves and with those around us.”Rachel Harrington, COTA/L, CPRCS

This does not make one person responsible for keeping everyone regulated. It means the adult nervous system is part of the interaction, which gives you one more place where change is possible. Children are reading your state before either of you has words for it.

Try one input for one week

Pick one morning input and protect it for seven days:

• Outside before screens
• Five minutes of movement on the floor
• A single workout you do not negotiate with

Then pay attention to 5:40 rather than to the morning.

Where The Listening Program fits

The relationship between sound and how we feel is the thinking behind The Listening Program.

Music calms us, energizes us, brings back memories, makes us want to move. It engages brain systems involved in emotion, attention, and movement at once, which makes it a particularly interesting form of sensory input.

The Listening Program is a neuroscience-based music listening therapy built on that relationship, using acoustically modified classical and world music in progressive listening sessions designed to support auditory processing and sensory regulation. It is one way to be more intentional about the sensory experiences we give our brains, something Rachel encourages parents to consider in their everyday lives.

Sensitivity to sound can involve how the brain interprets and responds to what it hears, even when hearing itself is normal. In research I published with Dr. Jay R. Lucker, we explored the neural pathways connecting hearing with the brain’s emotional systems, particularly in children with autism who experience sound sensitivity. The response we were describing is a human one.

Think about how quickly a sudden alarm puts you on edge, or how a familiar piece of music changes your mood.

There is also research involving adults. In a randomized study conducted in Swedish primary care, adults with stress-related symptoms received either The Listening Program or treatment from a psychologist. The TLP participants’ stress and burnout scores dropped over the 20-week program, and the improvements were still there at eight months. By the end of the study, the group’s average stress score had reached the normal range.

This was a public healthcare setting, with adults under sustained stress rather than children. That is what makes it relevant here. It also sits alongside more than two decades of independent research on The Listening Program across six populations.

Rachel brings another perspective through her work with clients. She uses TLP in her practice and describes one of the responses she has observed:

“It was almost like their nervous system was exhaling.”

For anyone interested in experiencing TLP, the free 7-day TLP Online trial offers an opportunity to become familiar with the music and establish a listening routine. Seven days is an introduction to the program, with meaningful changes generally requiring more time to evaluate.

Rachel’s own answer, when I asked what she most wanted people to take from her work, was about expectations:

Common questions

Watch the conversation

The full hour with Rachel is on the regulated parent and sensory overload replay page.

About Rachel Harrington

If you are a therapist or educator who wants to use this with clients, TLP Provider Certification is the path in.

About Alex Doman

Alex Doman is the founder and CEO of Advanced Brain Technologies and the creator of The Listening Program, a neuroscience-based music listening therapy that supports learning, emotional regulation, and cognitive development. A third-generation pioneer in brain health and neurodevelopment, Alex has more than 30 years of experience helping families and professionals worldwide. He is the bestselling co-author of Healing at the Speed of Sound®, co-author of peer-reviewed research on hearing, sound sensitivity, and the brain, and the speaker behind the TEDx talk “Your Brain Is Better on Music.”