A companion to the main ADHD article, written for professors and higher-education professionals.
You built a syllabus with fluorescent lit seminar rooms, mandatory group discussion, and no seating chart flexibility whatsoever, and you have genuinely no idea which of your students' accommodation requests are about sensory load versus something else entirely. Guessing wastes everyone's semester.
What this actually is
A sensory profile is a personal map of exactly what overloads a person and what regulates them, sound, light, touch, movement, mapped individually rather than lumped into one vague "sensitive" label that explains nothing. Every ND brain's map is genuinely different, which is exactly why generic, one size fits all accommodations often miss the actual need entirely, no matter how well intentioned the policy behind them was.
How it shows up
In you, if you run this way, it might mean you've never actually named why open plan faculty offices exhaust you while your home office feels fine, you've just avoided one space and lived in the other without examining why. In your students, it shows up as vague accommodation requests, "I need a quiet space," that are actually quite specific and mappable if someone bothers to ask the right follow up questions instead of applying the same generic fix to every student who raises a hand, regardless of what's actually driving their overload.
What actually helps
When a student requests an accommodation, ask what specifically triggers it, sound, light, crowding, movement, before defaulting to a generic solution that may not fit their actual profile at all, and be willing to adjust the fix mid semester if it clearly isn't working. Offer sensory options directly in your course design: seating choice, whatever lighting control is realistically possible, standing permission to use headphones during independent work. Map your own sensory profile honestly, name it privately to yourself even if you never disclose it to anyone, so your own limits stop ambushing you mid semester when you least expect them. Build genuine UDL flexibility into assignments so students aren't forced to disclose a private, personal sensory map just to access a workable option that should have been available by default. Revisit your own course design each term with this lens, since a fix that worked for one cohort of students may miss the next entirely.
One move this term
Ask your next accommodation request one specific follow up question, is this about sound, light, crowding, or something else, and adjust your fix to match the actual answer.
A mapped need gets solved efficiently. A vague one gets managed badly by everyone involved, including you.
Go deeper
Read the full piece: Mapping Your Sensory Profile
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Written by ND Hive.