When the Shopping Centre Breaks Your Brain: A Neurodivergent Experience of Sensory Overload
There are moments when life gives us a very unexpected, very unfiltered mirror into our own brain. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago I found myself standing in one of the least soothing environments imaginable, having one of the most clarifying neurodivergent experiences I’ve had in years. If you live in Melbourne, you probably already have a visceral reaction just hearing the words ‘Chadstone Shopping Centre’. At one point it was the largest shopping centre in the Southern Hemisphere, but I am not sure if it currently holds this epithet. For some people their reaction is thrilling, a place filled with stimulation and possibility. For many neurodivergent people, it is a place that induces fear, tension, or at minimum a strong desire to turn around and go home.
I have never been someone who enjoys large shopping centres. Long before the internet existed I was a catalogue shopper because even as a teenager I found shopping centres overwhelming. I could never name why, only that something about them felt confusing and energetically expensive. Now, with a lifetime of neurodivergent living behind me and a diagnosis of ADHD, those early instincts make perfect sense. My brain was not being dramatic. It was doing what neurodivergent brains do when they encounter environments that were not designed with our wiring in mind.
Because of that, I simply don’t go to Chadstone. I avoid it unless absolutely necessary. So finding myself there on Black Friday, in the early evening when the after-work crowd combined with the sales crowd, was a kind of accidental plunge into fresh hell. In my defence, I wasn’t planning to go shopping. I was going on a date. The plan was to go to Hijinx Hotel, a puzzle-based game experience located inside the centre (super fun, highly recommend it), play for a while, then grab something quick to eat and head home. In my mind this was a fun activity and dinner, not a shopping trip. And I genuinely forgot it was Black Friday until I arrived and felt the buzzing, saturated energy that only mega-centres can generate on major sale days.
I felt a moment of panic, but it was small and contained. I reassured myself that Hijinx Hotel was a known destination and that I could make a beeline there. Plus I was with someone who I knew wouldn’t be dragging me around on a tortuous tour of the sales. The first twenty to thirty minutes of the date were fun, engaging and surprisingly easeful. It wasn’t until afterwards, when we headed towards the food court, that the environment began to push against my internal bandwidth.
The food court was what food courts always are. Loud, visually busy, full of smells, sounds and movement. Not pleasant but tolerable. I could sit, eat my dumplings and manage the environment just fine. It was on the way to Elite 11, a quick stop my date wanted to make, that something inside me began to shift. At the time I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but on reflection it was the beginning of cognitive overload.
Neither of us knew the layout of Chadstone well. And this is where the underlying neurobiology of ADHD wiring became extremely clear. My struggle wasn’t simply that there was a lot going on. It was that my brain could not easily prioritise what information was worth attending to in order to complete the task of getting to the store. ADHD research consistently shows that difficulty with prioritisation, filtering, and selecting relevant stimuli is a distinguishing neurological difference. Tasks that require distinguishing signal from noise are inherently more effortful for us. When the environment contains multiple competing layers of noise, the system becomes overloaded quickly.
If we consider sound alone, my brain was being asked to parse Christmas carols, background music from dozens of shops, crowds of people talking, children laughing and crying, chairs scraping, cutlery clattering, and general shopping mall ambience. None of these sounds were dangerous or meaningful, yet my brain couldn’t sort them into important versus irrelevant categories quickly enough. Every sound carried equal weight. Meanwhile the visual field was equally saturated, full of twinkling lights, Black Friday signs, bright colours, reflections, and an architectural layout that split into multiple corridors. I needed to know which direction to walk, and without an internal map of the centre my brain was analysing every corridor, every light source, every clue that might indicate the right precinct of shops.
This is something neurodivergent people know intimately but often can’t articulate. When you know an environment well, your brain doesn’t have to work so hard. It already has a mental map. It knows where salient information will appear. It can filter out known irrelevant stimuli with much less effort. In an unfamiliar environment, especially a chaotic one, none of the filtering is automatic. It happens manually, piece by piece, millisecond by millisecond, and the energy cost is astronomical.
As I moved through the centre, my brain began scanning frantically for an information kiosk. I knew that if I could anchor myself to a map the overwhelm would reduce. But even this involved rapid filtering of all the black rectangles in my visual field, most of which were Black Friday sale signs rather than directional information. All of this was happening beneath conscious awareness, but the cost of that constant micro-sorting was building.
My body started to tense. Irritability rose. The urge to yell at people to get out of my way was almost visceral. This is not because I’m rude or impatient. It is simply the behavioural expression of a brain pushed too far past its processing capacity. Fortunately I recognised the feeling early enough to put behavioural brakes on, but what did emerge was a sharp, directive tone with my date. I became task-focused, clipped, and almost militaristic. We need to go here. I think the map is over there. Let’s move. I strode ahead without checking if he was with me because my brain didn’t have enough bandwidth left for social referencing. It had one job: get to the shop and get out.
We eventually found the store. The queue just to get into the store was long and the thought of now waiting in line, in that environment, made me want to lay down and admit defeat (it would also mean I could shut my eyes, have a little nap, restore some cognitive energy and I would be lying to you if I said the thought didn’t cross my mind. I could lay down while we queued couldn’t I? What was wrong with that?). Thankfully my date very practically saw that the item he was after appeared to be sold out so after nearly an hour of extreme cognitive demand inside that sensory landscape, we returned to the car.
This was the moment my nervous system collapsed. Quietly, inwardly, without fuss, but unmistakably. My executive functioning was gone. I felt numb, dissociated, slow, unable to think clearly. My date asked a simple question about whether to turn right at an intersection and it took my brain a long time to even understand what he was asking, let alone form an answer. This slowed cognitive response is a hallmark of cognitive overload and dissociation. It does not indicate lack of intelligence. It indicates a system that has exceeded capacity and is temporarily down-regulating in order to survive.
Thankfully my date knows me, and knows my brain. He turned off the radio and simply said “Home to snuggle on the couch?”. That simple act of understanding created enough safety for my system to begin recovering. I knew sensory ‘calm’ was on its way!
This experience has stayed with me not only because it was traumatic, but because it was profoundly educational. It helped me understand my brain in an embodied, practical way, and it gave me insights that I think many neurodivergent people resonate with.
The reason I struggled so intensely was simple brain biology. My brain could not prioritise what information mattered for the task, and therefore had to analyse everything. After an hour of filtering, scanning, decision making and suppressing impulses, my brain was fried. It needed rest. It needed fewer stimuli and fewer decisions.
What struck me on reflection was the contrast with my experience at smaller shopping centres. I still don’t enjoy them. They are not relaxing for me . But I can tolerate them without collapsing afterwards. The reason is familiarity. I know the layout. I know the lighting, the sounds, the basic rhythms of the space. My brain does not have to analyse every piece of sensory information. It already knows what to ignore. It can lock onto the task of getting to a particular store, using a map that already exists in my memory. The energy cost is dramatically lower.
This is not about preference. It is about cognitive load theory. Human brains, and especially neurodivergent brains, have limited working memory capacity. When we exceed that capacity, performance drops and overwhelm occurs. In familiar environments, intrinsic cognitive load is much lower. In unfamiliar environments, extraneous cognitive load skyrockets.
This made me think about other times when this understanding might be useful. After a cognitively heavy workday, I often feel spaced out and mentally depleted. Most days I can sit quietly for a few minutes to recharge before shifting into the next task. But sometimes life does not allow that. Sometimes I have to leave work and immediately go to a dinner I’ve committed to. In the past, I may have wondered why those evenings sometimes feel so much harder, or why I may seem quieter, flatter or more irritable without meaning to be.
Using the insight from Black Friday at Chadstone, the answer is now obvious. If my brain is already depleted, the demand of navigating an unfamiliar venue, scanning a new map, interpreting acoustics, reading social cues and engaging in conversation becomes too heavy a load. Now in this particular example the solutions may be to remember to avoid Chadstone on big sale days or shop the sales online. In other circumstances, the solution may be to shift the venue to somewhere familiar. A restaurant I know well rather than the one that has just opened. A place where the noise is predictable, the menu is known, and my brain can conserve energy for connection. Another option is to suggest that people come to my home instead, where the sensory environment is safe and predictable.
And when these changes are not possible, such as a 21st birthday dinner at a hired venue, then knowledge becomes protective. If I know in advance that my brain will not have the capacity for sustained engagement, I can make choices that support my wellbeing. I can sit somewhere quieter, take breaks outside, set a time limit for myself and give myself permission to leave earlier than usual. None of this is avoidance. It is honouring the reality of how my brain functions.
This experience has also reinforced something I often say in therapy. Neurodivergent brains are not broken. They are simply wired differently. They process the world intensely, richly and sometimes exhaustingly. There is nothing wrong with needing to manage the environments you enter, or the cognitive demands you take on. Understanding your own patterns allows you to build a life that fits your nervous system rather than constantly forcing your nervous system to fit your life.
There is also a deeper emotional layer. Many neurodivergent adults have grown up masking, pushing themselves through overwhelm and misunderstanding why they struggle in situations that others seem to navigate easily. Experiences like mine at Chadstone, although uncomfortable, can offer profound compassion for ourselves. They show us that what looks like difficulty is often simply the predictable response of a brain doing its best with far too much data.
Therapy can be a place to explore these patterns gently and without judgement. We can map out the environments and situations that drain you, learn how to recognise early signs of overload, and develop strategies that support you to move through the world with more understanding and less shame. We can also unpack the emotional residue that comes from years of feeling like you were supposed to cope better than you did.
If this story resonates with you, or if you find yourself wondering why certain environments leave you exhausted or irritable, it may be worth exploring your neurodivergent wiring more deeply. You’re welcome to book an appointment with a psychologist who understands these experiences and can help you make sense of your own patterns with curiosity, compassion and respect.
