Explaining Sensory Overload to Family: Need Help!

The feeling I get when overloaded feels exactly the same to me as frustration, so I start there. "You know that feeling you get when you're really frustrated? Your heart beat is fast, and you can't breathe fully, and your stomach feels bad. You want to scream, throw something, or both?" I've never had anyone tell me they have never felt that. So, then I can say, "that's how I feel when I have a lot of sensory input, so when it's over, I'm exhausted and need to go be somewhere calm and just crash for a while." I don't think they totally get it, still, but that's been enough for most people to respect it when I say I'm done with a situation.

Sensory overload for me is like, every single sensory input is amplified ten times over, so I’m now the background chatter which is normally at abt a 4/10 is now a 12/10, but I can also hear other noises like the hum of the lightbulb or the subtle hissing of my laptop ventilator, my socks feel restricting but no socks feels too loose, my shoes are either too tight or too loose, the lights are too bright and I can see every single slight flicker, I feel unfocused and spaced out coz my brain can’t process everything that is going into it, so it shuts down on itself so I am left to feel and hear and see everything without being able to process and translate it into something not as scary.

ASD burn out is running out of emotional stamina. For example when people grief they expirence physicly tiredness, same as burn out. When body is trying to function after emotional exhoustion, so brain might for example cut off non essential functions, like forgetting skills you knew yesterday. They exist, but are turned off. But unlinke grief it doesn't go away with time, but until the stamina is fixed. Sometimes you might have good days, sometimes worse, but it doesn't mean it has gone away.

Like permanently spacing out and not being able to focus (dissociation), extreme anxiety or discomfort under my skin or in my chest area, panicking and not knowing how to make my brain stop paying attention to everything at once

Everything is too much. Questions are overwhelming and turn my brain immediately to stop sign. My brain is mush, my senses are heightened to insane intensity. Voices feel like cat claws scraping down my insides. Usually I end up shutting down as words are hard to find and put together. There's more, but that is a decent description for my experience.

To explain it to someone who doesn't experience it, I'd ask them to imagine that the TV volume is on 100, a spotlight is being shined in their face, and 10 different people are asking them questions all at once, and they have to answer every question quickly and accurately, or they'll get a static shock. It's the panic and loudness that that situation would have.