I kind of understand the concept but what is stress and how does sensory overload directly affect it.

Stress, as you’ve guessed, is a combination of mental and physical fatigue. I pastor a Church and deal with it personally and in counseling. I even wrote a short booklet on it. Your mind and body are connected. Worry, fear, anxiety, and such things add to the body’s stress as well. A body that is run down, exhausted, or sick can impact your mental state as well. Stress is unavoidable. It is part of life. We feel it any time there is pressure. Pressure to perform, pressure to be somewhere, pressure to do something, pressure to be something. All of this is stress.

Sensory overload, to culminate in stress, is usually something that is built up over time. For example: Listening to someone chewing loudly will grow more bothersome to some people over time. It focuses the mind on it so that they can’t tune it out. The intense focus on something like that leads to stress.

We live in a society where noise and images are the primary means of gaining attention. You drive down the street and see billboards and signs. You watch TV and have images flashing rapidly at you with the often overwhelming number of sounds and noises. Movies can be stressful for people. They give children nightmares, they can cause sleep deprivation. I go into people’s houses and notice that the TV is on and no one is watching. They don’t even realize that the images and noise is constantly on. You can say that their senses have been overwhelmed.

I’ve even found a correlation between children diagnosed with ADD and their environment at home. When the house is loud, noisy, and generally in a clamor, children can’t seem to absorb it well and often end up with attention spans much less than other children. It is a form of stress. I’ve observed teenagers that have to have music playing all the time, even when they go to sleep, tend to be more nervous and stressed than others.

And you can’t discount a person’s emotional state. The more raw our emotions, the more impact sensory input can affect it. A parent who had a bad day at work and comes home to loud and rambunctious children will quickly grow stressed with the noise and find himself or herself unable to deal with it properly. A wife having a bad marriage will find herself unable to deal with the pressures of her job, especially if she works in a loud environment.

There are many factors, but yes, stress and sensory overload are connected.