Ava Heartwell

I ordered an ERMI test because I needed certainty. What I learned instead was how easily numbers can scare you when you don’t yet understand what they’re actually measuring.

It wasn’t immediate. The first hour felt fine. Then something shifted. The longer I stayed inside, the more my body felt it — not because anything changed, but because the load kept accumulating without relief.

I didn’t lose stress tolerance all at once. I noticed it in the margins — how much less room there was between feeling okay and feeling taxed by things that once passed easily.

I wasn’t constantly stressed — but I was never fully unstressed either. Indoors, my body seemed to rest on a higher baseline, like calm had a floor it couldn’t drop below.

I didn’t become more bodily aware overnight. It happened slowly — as I stopped overriding sensations and started noticing the quiet information my body had been offering for a long time.

Nothing in my day had changed. Same schedule. Same habits. And yet, indoors, my body felt more strained — not because routines were harmful, but because repetition made the pattern impossible to ignore.

I didn’t think of sensory processing as something active. I noticed it when my body felt overloaded in ways I couldn’t explain — like it was taking in more from a space than I was consciously aware of.

I could still regulate my emotions — it just took more effort. Indoors, managing feelings felt heavier, like my system had less room to absorb and settle what came up.

I didn’t understand internal signaling as communication. I felt it as hints — small, consistent messages from my body that something in a space wasn’t quite right, even when I couldn’t explain why.

I finally stopped pushing. I lay down. I tried to relax. And that’s when my body felt it most — not because relaxation caused the problem, but because nothing was holding it together anymore.