OTS 204: Sensory Wellness for Overwhelmed School-Based OTs
- 7 hours ago
- 33 min read
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 204 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
If you're a school-based occupational therapy practitioner feeling burnt out, dysregulated, or overwhelmed by your caseload, this episode is for you. Robyn Chu, MOT, OTR/L, author of Sensory Wellness: The Art and Science of Thriving, joins us to flip the traditional sensory conversation on its head. Instead of focusing solely on how to support students' sensory needs, Robyn discusses how understanding your own sensory processing can be the foundation for everything else you do.
Robyn discusses why "calm all the time" isn't the goal, how sensory input actively creates emotions (not just reactions to them), and why you have more control over your regulation than you think—even in challenging school environments. Drawing from neuroscience research and years of clinical experience, she offers practical insights on energy management, nervous system regulation, and why addressing your own sensory wellness isn't just another item on your to-do list—it's what makes everything else work.
Whether you're driving between five schools in a week or sitting down to write reports in a fluorescent-lit room, this episode offers practical wisdom on energy management, nervous system regulation, and why "calm all the time" isn't the goal. Listen now to learn how sensory wellness can help you be your best self for your students—and for yourself.
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Learners will identify how your own sensory processing patterns impact your daily regulation and work performance
Learners will recognize the difference between interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory input and why it matters for adults
Learners will apply practical sensory adjustments to your work environment that you can control, even in challenging school settings
Guest(s) Bio
Robyn Chu, MOT, OTR/L, is an occupational therapist, author, and researcher specializing in sensory integration and its impact on emotional regulation, mental health, relationships, and performance. With over twenty years of clinical experience, she is the founder and Executive Director of Growing Healthy Seasons, a therapy practice with more than 75 therapists.
Her work is grounded in research and clinical application, including research conducted with UCLA and UCSF, where she has focused on how sensory processing shapes human behavior and well-being. Robyn is recognized for translating complex neuroscience into practical sensory frameworks that people can apply in daily life. She is the author of Sensory Wellness: The Art and Science of Thriving and the Sensory Wellness Reflection Journal, available at robynchu.com.
Quotes
"Sensory wellness is not one more thing to add to your list. It is the foundation that makes everything else on your list actually work."
— Robyn Chu
"Sensation is a key ingredient of how we actively make emotions and shift our experiences."
— Robyn Chu
"The most energetically costly thing that can happen is your body getting stuck in a fight-or-flight response."
— Robyn Chu
"We still often forget about all the interoception and all the different ways that sensory has an impact on us—and we're the trained ones.”
— Jayson Davies,M.A.,OTR/L
Resources
👉Sensory Wellness: The Art and Science of Thriving by Robyn Chu — Robyn's book on sensory wellness for adults, parents, and practitioners
👉Sensory Wellness on Audible — Audio version of the book, read by Robyn
👉Robyn Chu's website: Growing Healthy Seasons — Free downloads, activities, and links to neuroscience research
👉Future Horizons Publishing — Publisher of Sensory Wellness
👉Star Institute — Sensory processing training and research organization
👉Lisa Feldman Barrett's research on emotion — Neuroscience research on how emotions are actively made through sensation
👉UCSF Neuroscience Research Team — Robyn's research collaboration with Dr. Pratik Mukherjee (radiologist/neuroscientist) and Dr. Elysa Marco (neurologist)
Episode Transcript
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Jayson Davies
Hey there, and welcome back for episode number 204 of the OT School House podcast. I'm your host, Jayson Davies, and today we're doing something a little different, something perfect for summer, whether you are listening to this right when it comes out before Fourth of July or maybe you're listening to it a little bit later as the school year's just about to get started. This is the perfect episode to start with before you kick off the school year. Today, we're spending some time thinking about our own sensory needs, as opposed to the sensory needs of all the students that we serve. So, I want you to kind of let go a little bit of all the students that you're thinking about right now, that you usually think about when we are listening to this podcast, and let's think about ourselves today. Our guest is Robyn Chu, a occupational therapist, author of Sensory Wellness: The Art and Science of Thriving, owner of three OT clinics in Northern California, and someone who has spent the last 20 years at the intersection of sensory integration, clinical practice, and neuroscience research this summer I wanted to take a step back from the day to day grind of school based occupational therapy and as I mentioned before focus a little bit more on us the practitioners and Robyn's book does exactly that she takes everything we know about sensory processing and flips it toward the adults doing the incredible demanding work like us in this conversation, we talk about why sensory wellness isn't just one more thing to add to your already overflowing plate, it's the biological foundation that makes everything else on that plate actually work. We get into what it means to bring the body back to work, why calm all the time is actually not the goal, and how understanding your own sensory system might be the key to preventing burnout and supporting your students. If you've ever driven between schools, skipped a bathroom break, or just sat in silence on the way home simply to decompress after a long, crazy day, this one is for you. Let's get into it with Robyn Chu.
Amazing Narrator
Hello, and welcome to the OT School House Podcast, your source for school-based occupational therapy tips, interviews, and professional development. Now, to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies. Class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
Robyn, welcome to the to the OT School House podcast. And first of all, congratulations on your brand new book out, Sensory Wellness. So happy for you to get that out. We had the chance to officially meet in person at AOTA in Anaheim. It was wonderful. Thank you so much for the book. I really appreciate it.
Robyn Chu
Of course, and thank you. Yes, this is a huge milestone, and really excited, very, very excited about this.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and you know, as I'm going through the book, a few things really came to my mind, and the first thing was that I wasn't reading a book about how to provide sensory interventions to a child, which is, you know, what most books are about, right?
Robyn Chu
Yeah.
Jayson Davies
and so I just really appreciate how you flipped the script from sensory integration, for you know, kind of that general term, and turned it into sensory wellness and sensory health, presumably for the adult that is reading it, right, and I really want to just kind of let you share a little bit like where that decision came from, because you are a sensory trained occupational therapist, you know sensory very well, you own multiple clinics, and you support children, you know all day, every day, but you flip this to adults, and so I want to just kind of hear your why.
Robyn Chu
Well, my why began in a parent meeting a long time ago, about 10 years ago now. I was talking with some parents about the sensory needs of their child, specifically vestibular needs, one of my favorite systems. And the dad was at this parent meeting, and his eyes got wide, and he said, Oh my goodness, wait, this is all sounding so familiar. And he and his wife went home, and they talked about their own sensory needs, and he dug up this psychologist report from, you know, 40 years before, and found words like super active, really energetic, won't stop talking, bouncing around the room, and they emailed me that night, and they said, Well, okay, so you're going to help our kid, you're going to help our family, but How do we get help? What do we do? And then you layer on that years of mentoring occupational therapists from around the world, starting out with my partnership with the Star Institute in Colorado, and therapists saying I technically know what to do now, and I'm so grateful, but my own regulation is getting in the way, I can't keep thoughts straight. I'm, you know, I'm flipping out, I'm dysregulated in the session, I'm worried, and now I'm getting burnt out, because this is such hard work. So those two things added together, and I thought this book needs to support the helpers. Yeah, it needs to help the helping professionals.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and I think you're right, and this is something that's not just for the parents of the students that we support, either, right? Like, as I, again, as I was reflecting a little bit, I started to wonder, I was like, do we almost kind of have this like branding problem with sensory, and you know, as OT practitioners, we really understand sensory. We understand how a little bit of vestibular or proprioceptive input, you know, around 2o'clock in the afternoon can really keep us going for the rest of the day. But outside of OT, the terms that you might hear that might, you know, make a light bulb go off in the OTs mine might be like stress anxiety, and those are the terms that are being used outside of ot, and I almost feel like somehow we have to merge this, and you know, sensory wellness, the title of your book, I feel like that's kind of meshing those together, and I just wanted to hear your thoughts, kind of as you, you heard me say that.
Robyn Chu
Hopefully I love that. Hopefully it's a bridge. Hopefully it generates questions. Hopefully it helps people to say, well, I was thinking I was overwhelmed, maybe I'm overstimulated and under aware, and start asking their own questions, getting to know their own sensory preferences. Yeah, I hope it generates curiosity for people.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and trying to piggyback off of that, you know, in today's world, for those who don't understand sensory wellness and sensory processing and integration, how do you feel, or if at all, how do you feel that people actually practice sensory wellness at all right now, you know. Before reading your book, and we weren't really understanding sensory.
Robyn Chu
I think that the news and social media point to a lack of awareness, a lack of conscious choice within sensory, so we've got people who are in front of screens more than ever, who are skipping meals, who are working so, so hard, are shoving down even the urge to need to go to the bathroom. I talk to OTs all the time who are like, I don't even know when I need to go to the bathroom anymore, because I just don't go all day long, and then I get home, and I realize, oh my, so right, these bait, right, totally these basic sensory messages that our bodies are trying to send us. I think we might be at an all-time high as a society of ignoring those messages, which, um, I try to look at things glass half full a lot optimistic side that means there's a lot of ways that this can help right like because the needs are so great because people are out of survival ignoring incoming sensory clues we can really help this could be a game changer for people.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, that's really unique. Because I mean, even back in OT school, right, we learn how some of our senses are designed to actually kind of turn off a little bit when we need to focus on something else, but to what extent are we doing this in a way that might, you know, be a little hazardous, as opposed to what our body is really designed for.
Robyn Chu
Right. You mentioned that the OT programs, and that has been my favorite part of the book launch, actually is talking with the OT students and feeling the resonance because they're saying I want to get in a helping profession, right? I want to be the helper, and I'm already burnt out, like I'm already at my max capacity. So, what do I do now? And seeing those dots connect for OT students, I did a guest lecture recently, and one of them came up to me and said, this actually, this lecture, this one class changed the trajectory in my life.
Jayson Davies
Wow.
Robyn Chu
so that was really powerful.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, and that speaks to how things change over time, because I mean, it sounds like you correct me if I'm wrong, but when you wrote this book, were you writing it kind of for that parent that you mentioned, that you know they have a, they have their own student that they're trying to support, and they themselves are overwhelmed, but now you're finding out that this applies to so many more.
Robyn Chu
Yeah, absolutely right. So the parents were the first vision. In my mind of why I wanted to write this book, and then it really expanded from there. OT students, OT practitioners, even 2030 years in the field, are saying, "Oh, I can bring my body to work, I can tune into my own sensory needs, and that'll actually help me be a more effective practitioner.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, you use that term. I can bring my body to work. What do you mean by that?
Robyn Chu
Well, I work with a lot of therapists who go to work with treatment plans that are well thought out that they've spent hours on right, and there's a list of activities that they're going to do, either they're going to have the kid do, or maybe they're going to do them with the kid, but I rarely, when I first start working with a therapist, do I hear that therapist say, well, in the first couple minutes of the session, we both tune into our bodies and figure out what we need from a sensory perspective in order to be ready to play, ready to learn, ready to grow, and include their own body, their own interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory needs in their plan for their day.
Jayson Davies
Wow, yeah, you know, these are things that we, I mean, even us as OT practitioners, who, whether we're SIP trained or gone through Star Institute, or, you know, one year out of OT school, we understand sensory, I don't know, what, 90% more than the general population, you know, and we still don't think about, we still often forget about all the interoception and all the different ways that sensory has an impact on us, and we're the trained ones.
Robyn Chu
Right? Yeah. Well, I often hear we're like, shoulds, you know, the concept of a should, right? Like, I know I should meditate, or I should eat a little nutritious food during the day, but those shoulds are creating kind of like a cognitive dissonance, a push and pull, almost like a fight within their body of well, I know what I should be doing, and I got to just use my brain to think harder and do more, as opposed to starting with what is my body needing and modeling that for and with the clients that we're working with, like as simple as an OT saying, "Wow, I'm just noticing this room is really loud right now, and it's hard for me to hear the words that you're saying, Sam, Johnny, Kate, right? So, ah, what do you think we should do? Right, like I'm modeling that my sensory systems are talking to me in this minute, and they're giving me information about how I can be my best therapist self, and I'm narrating it out loud. I think those can be incredibly powerful words. And then at the end of the day, you don't want to sit in silence. I so many OTs are like, I just drive home and I sit in silence in my car. How about if we don't get to that point where we need that every single day? That would be cool.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, the overwhelm is just so, so real in our profession, and so many other professions.
Robyn Chu
Yeah.
Jayson Davies
you got me thinking a little bit, because we talked about, you know, how OT practitioners, we understand sensory to a degree, most of us, right? And we still forget some of these things, and others don't understand the idea of sensory integration at all, can't even tell you the vestibular and proprioceptive are sensory systems, right?
Robyn Chu
So true.
Jayson Davies
The outside world, and when I say outside world, outside of OT, right, I think really views sensory as a reaction, but we know that we can plan and we can use sensory and we can, I mean, look at, look at sensory integration itself, and just using it as an example, we know that the environment plays a very important role within our treatment, and we know that being child-led makes an impact, and a lot of that is adapting the environment, making the adapting the environment to set it up for the child to succeed, but outside world they don't understand that. So, is that something that you really wanted to try and convey within your book? Is like letting people know, like you can have an impact on your environment.
Robyn Chu
Yes, and so one of the things I really was excited about in this book, another bridge, actually, is taking this momentum that our society has created with all of our sensory founders, Jean Ayres, there's so many of them, our world likes the word sensor. Three, now, so.
Jayson Davies
True.
Robyn Chu
When I started out as an OT, too much, that's says every school-based OT ever, right? So, when I started out as a school-based OT, my boss, a principal, used to be a principal, administrator, special ed director, said, do not put the word sensory in your report, it is a bad word. We don't, so this was 20 plus years ago. We don't use that word. It is a bad word. It is illegal, out of bounds. As a sensory school-based therapist, you may not use it. So now the pendulum has shifted so far that movie theaters have sensory-friendly movie show times. Right, my daughter and I were going to go to the Nutcracker Ballet in San Francisco, sensory friendly offering a matinee.
Jayson Davies
Yeah.
Robyn Chu
Our world is wanting to and using the word sensory a whole bunch, and they don't necessarily know what it means, so then as school-based OTs, we get referral after referral after hot potato thrown right at us. Ah, they said the word sensory, so could you take this now, and can we sign an assessment plan immediately? And so our poor school-based OTs are like, what do I even do? How do I survive this huge wave that started out as exciting momentum? Right, we want to acknowledge that sensory plays a role, a huge role in behavior, in success, in learning, and yet it doesn't mean that every single kid that we work with needs one on one direct services and assessment plan signed. So, anyways.
Jayson Davies
Robyn, don't you do this to us. I love this. I love, I mean, like, there's so many rabbit holes that I could go down with just in the last two sentences that you said, because absolutely right, we are getting overloaded with these evaluations, and the concern is sensory. It's not that the student is overwhelmed because of an environmental factor in the classroom, it is simply the referral reason is sensory, and you know, right, there's at least eight different sensory systems that can be in play, and it can be very difficult to tease out which sensory system is, and you also alluded, right, sensory and behavior are very connected, and we understand that, but others don't necessarily understand that. Gosh, I like.. I'm talking right now, like I don't even know where I'm going with the question, right? Absolutely, but it's hard, and I think that it leads to the, like, you mentioned, right, the overwhelmed of the school-based OT practitioner themselves, right. So to kind of get us back on track here, I want to kind of bring the focus back to the overwhelmed, you know, school-based OT practitioner, and you know, again, we have a general idea of sensory integration, but in your book you still really dive into the eight different systems, but as I mentioned earlier, this is not a textbook where we're talking about supporting school-based or not, where we're talking about our clients, we're talking about adults themselves. So, right, when you're talking about the sensories and you're taught the sensory systems in reference to adults rather than the children that we serve, is it all still the same information, or does it feel like, you know, us as adults need slightly different information about sensory processing than when we're working with our students?
Robyn Chu
Oh, that's a really good question. Is it all the same information? Yes, and I would say most occupational therapists are not fully up to date on what the research is saying about sensory integration and processing, so is it the same as you know for your students? Yes, and that information is ready to evolve with the help of neuroscience, with the help of fMRIs, of DTI analysis, of understanding more this division between interoceptive sensory input, including proprioceptive and vestibular input, information that represents what's going on in your body, and extra receptive, and by starting to understand that as the initial division, we can understand more how to take care of our bodies and. No matter what environment we're in, right? So a school-based practitioner says all these external factors, some of them sensory, some of them not, are impacting my regulation. Yeah, yes, that is true. Absolutely. Can I change how many assessment plans you have on your desk right now. No, I cannot. Can you change the amount of fluorescent lights in the classroom that you have been assigned?
Amazing Narrator
No,
Robyn Chu
but you can turn them off. You can use natural light, so you can adjust some of the extra receptive sensory input, and you can, no matter what environment you're in, adjust your interoceptive sensory inputs, so we, as adults, can understand sensory at a more complex level, even dividing interoception into visceral organs, giving us input and the other interoceptive components, and I know this is a huge hot topic. We could talk about this for a whole hour, but this is important for the adult trying to understand their own sensory needs.
Jayson Davies
So, what I'm hearing is we understand that a sensory integration type of framework can work when we're supporting our children, you know, given that we have the training and everything, but that will look different if we are trying to support ourselves, partially because, you know, we are adults, our brains are different, we have a general more control over our own selves and our actions, you know, it doesn't matter who you're supporting, you have more action over yourself than you do anyone else, right? And so we hope so. Yeah, we hope so, right?
Robyn Chu
We, we really hope so. Yes.
Jayson Davies
yeah.
Robyn Chu
No. Well, I'm making a joke only because I think this is something important to emphasize here. We have more of an internal locus of control, we hope, than the kids that we're working with. Right, we hope that we've gotten to a point in our own development, and yet I think in this post-COVID world, a lot of people are feeling like the world is just happening to them, it's hitting them like wave after wave of hard and so finding our way back to that internal locus of control can be done through sensation, so that's why I feel like I made the joke, because it's so real right now.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And a term that I've heard, you know, within sensory wellness is that this is not just, how do I want to say this? I feel like we are framing sensory wellness as a biological foundation, per se, and not just a strategy. And so, how is it that if we have this foundation within sensory, that it can improve our entire life, per se, and what does that foundation really hold true to be? That's a very limited question.
Robyn Chu
So, that's such a great.. so, okay, here's the first place I want to go with it, and then you can back me up from here. So, Lisa Feldman Barrett has done a lot of research on emotion, right, and, and some people might jump to when they hear the word regulation, they jump to emotion, right. I'm frustrated. I just, I just talked to some moms that were talking about rage cleaning, right, like they people feel like, okay, emotions are driving my actions.
Jayson Davies
Okay.
Robyn Chu
Sensory is such a biological foundation that it actually is helping you actively make emotions. So, Lisa Feldman Barrett's work turned the whole mental health world on its head, because she came out and said, look, the research is saying emotions don't just happen to you, they are made. How are they made? They're made through sensation and past experiences coming together in your brain, and your brain then predicting what might happen next. Sensation is a key ingredient, so the biological foundation is not just it is fight or flight versus rest and digest. Obviously, it is autonomic nervous system that we learn in school. Yes, and it is the key ingredient of how we actively make emotions and shift our experiences.
Jayson Davies
Wow, wow. Thank you for the, for the knowledge on that research. I appreciate it.
Robyn Chu
We can go backwards and talk about more of, more other things of about the. Components, the biological foundation of sensation, but that is just where my heart wanted to jump to for the listeners.
Jayson Davies
I think it's interesting, because when you've looked at the development over time, all sorts of programs have leaned heavily on emotions, right, and I know there is kind of this this movement right now about sensory versus emotions, you know, the type of language that we use really matters, and that kind of, you know, is very much ingrained in what you just said, but I hadn't heard about the research that really kind of where that comes from, to a degree, and so I guess, how do we use that with ourselves, you know, if we're having a bad day, right? Right, how do we.. how do we use sensory approaches, if we want to call them that, to, you know, make our day better, as opposed to, you know, thinking to myself, think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts. How do we go about using this?
Robyn Chu
Just look for the bright side, really, really hard. Where's the silver lining? Oh, it's not working. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm thinking about our sensory world, and I'm thinking about environmental adaptations, adjustments that we can make to incoming actively seeking input, right. So, so you're having a bad day, you don't quite know why you're having a bad day, but the sky is no longer blue, there's no rainbows or unicorns, and you know, and you let's say that you are a. I just have a thought, you know, how we have emotional intelligence, like your EQ. What if we have your SQ? So, what if you are a highly intelligent sensory? You're, you have a high sensory quotient, your SQ is off the charts, all right, and, and you know that the temperature outside, the sweat that comes on your eyelids and your upper lip, it just drives you insane. It's so frustrating. You might also know that you can adjust other systems in order to be able to tolerate that external input that you really, really don't like, that is maybe having being a key driver in your bad day. So, the higher your, we're going to do this now, the higher your SQ, your sensory sensory quotient gets, the more tools you have, the more you're able to adapt your environment, but also adapt the active drivers that you're adding to your day, without feeling like it's just another thing on my to-do list, or man, if I was just more capable of thinking happy thoughts, I would be a better person, because that's not real. Your brain is doing its very best job of predicting with the incoming information from your sensory systems, but you can now change that incoming information both in what you're doing and where you're doing it.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, I think the same thing kind of holds true, like we can't in the moment change our processing ability of the sensory stimuli, but we can absolutely turn up the AC, or you know, change our current environment, and yeah, we can't, you know, if you're at Disneyland, you can't just leave 100 degree day in Anaheim, but like to an extent we can absolutely have control over the environment and make changes based upon that. One of the chapters in your book, as we get into more of the, you know, actionable ideas, you talk about energy, and this is something that I know autism level up, they have really talked about energy rather than emotions, so I just want to pick your brain on, you know, how does sensory, all the things in our life, and how we process it, to what degree, or how does that impact energy?
Robyn Chu
Oh, okay, so you get a whole bunch of sensory input that is triggering to you, whether it is triggering because of the way you are wired genetically or past trauma experiences, you now go into a fight or flight response. The most energetically costly thing that can happen is your body getting stuck in a fight or flight response, then your energy level goes way, way down. Adrenaline has been going for too long, cortisol levels have been high for too long. Now your immune system is compromised, and now your energy level drops even more because your body's fighting whatever every single kid in the class. Classroom had that day as they're sniffling and wiping their nose, right. So, so there is the energy, there's the micro level of wow. If I have more colors on my walls, I feel more alert. If I put a little drop of peppermint in my water, I feel more energetic, sensory arousal level, right. There's also the cumulative effect of a lack of sensory wellness. If you get stuck in fight or flight, if you don't have the fluctuations that define health, the heart rate variability level, like my, my aura ring, or you know, your, your watch could tell you right, if your heart rate variability is low, and you don't have these fluctuations between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, your energy level is going to drop substantially, and I think this is something those beginning programs that teach about energy understandably simplify, right. We want to teach kids about what it feels like to have lots of energy and be super tired, and how to adjust that. I think that's a noble effort, that's a really good start. And to your point, as OT practitioners, for ourselves, we can add to that, we can work a layer above that too.
Jayson Davies
Okay, so you were talking about the heart rate activity and the parasympathetic and sympathetic, and to me, what I heard was, I feel like you're saying actually going between the two can make you, am I oversimplifying this, making you more alert by going between the two? Is that accurate?
Robyn Chu
Yes, absolutely. So, there is a huge..
Jayson Davies
Go ahead.
Robyn Chu
there's a huge misunderstanding that I feel like occupational therapists are doing a noble, wonderful job of trying to fix, and that is that calm all the time is best. We don't want calm all the time. Calm all the time is a serial killer, that is not what we are going for, right? So when we're thinking about energy demands, if I find, let's say I'm amazing, and I find my energy level up, and I do them all the time, and I am just at that brink of alert, but not dysregulated, I'm just going, going, and I get 10 reports done with those awesome sensory inputs that have kept my energy level up right at that calm alert state. I also need tools to come back down from that, because at some point I want to be able to go to sleep at night, so the most advanced energy adjuster is someone who fluctuates between different energy states that match what they need to do that day.
Jayson Davies
That makes sense, right? Like, who? Yeah, it's if you're at a pool party, being calm, you know, sometimes is good, and some, if you want to lay out by the pool, com is great. If you want to, you know, do a cannonball, column is not great. So, and it's okay, obviously, to be at different alertness levels, have different energy levels. Sometimes it feels like we don't have control over that, right? Like, if it is a mundane day at, you know, school is out, and we just have two and a half hours, or an hour and a half, even, just to write reports, it can sometimes be difficult to muster up that energy and bring up our arousal level a little bit to kind of get through the work day, you know. Some of us turn to caffeine. Cheers, right, and but there's, but there's other ways, and I feel like we're really good at kind of sharing those other ways with our teachers and the kids that we support, but we're not always great at doing that ourselves, hence the caffeine, so I guess I kind of bring this full circle. Is that kind of your goal with this entire book, is to help you know the adults in our lives, and us included, to help us better understand our own sensory systems and how we can impact that?
Robyn Chu
Yes. yes, with a so what? So I absolutely got a different it wasn't, and
Jayson Davies
that time it was so what this time. Okay, let's go
Robyn Chu
So, well, who cares if you understand your sensory needs if you're not getting to do what you love to do and want to do. In life, so this is this is why I get so excited, because I feel I hope that sensory wellness is actually touching on the heart of what occupational therapists do, and that is we connect foundational body functions with meaningful life participation in the things we care about most, being our best selves for our clients, and I want us to do that for ourselves too.
Jayson Davies
Yeah.
Robyn Chu
So I'm hoping that people understand their sensory needs and preferences, and then that helps them to do what they want to do the most and connect with others.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, the reason that we care about our well-being is so that we can do the things we love.
Robyn Chu
So, yeah, exactly.
Jayson Davies
Do you feel like your book reads differently from an OT perspective versus a non-OT perspective.
Robyn Chu
Well, my editor would say maybe so, and I hope that putting all those definitions in there helped, so that helped so that people could understand and benefit from it, either.
Jayson Davies
Yeah.
Robyn Chu
as occupational therapists or non-OTS.
Jayson Davies
Yeah.
Robyn Chu
That was it. Was a, it was a battle that I was facing while writing it. Right, is I want this to help occupational therapists, even if they've done every sensory training ever.
Jayson Davies
Yeah.
Robyn Chu
And I don't want to lose the parents and the non-OTS in the process of helping them.
Jayson Davies
And that's the hard part, right, because I mean, even if you go on to school-based OT communities, we see sensory become, you know, complex and difficult to understand, and that's from people who have to some degree sensory training, and kind of goes back to the big getting, you know, one of the first questions I asked you about, like sensory branding, like sensory is not easy to understand, and so I love the idea of your book, because for that exact reason, because it kind of is bringing a understanding of sensory and the so what piece to it to you know the non-OT practitioners out there, and that's important, along with two OT practitioners.
Robyn Chu
Yeah.
Jayson Davies
You know that, like, this is the type of book that you could, you know, hand to your friend that isn't an OT and is feeling a little overwhelmed, and so I think that's, that's a, that makes it great.
Robyn Chu
Thank you. Yeah, I recently talked with a group of athletes at a college, a local college, and heard from them how much they feel this is going to be helpful in their competition, in their training schedule, in their competitions, because you think about it, each and every one of us have things, hopefully, that we love doing, and for the athlete, the college athlete, it can be really tricky. They're balancing a lot, it's different things that they're balancing, but they're also trying to come down from the high of competition to be able to fall asleep at some point, and then gather the energy to do the next day of double day training, so that's been kind of a fun eye opener of hopefully this is for everyone, hopefully we can all reconnect with our senses and be our best self.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, exactly. Earlier I didn't dive into it, but you talked about, you know, how there's studies going on the fMRIs and whatnot, and like those are things that OT research doesn't have necessarily the resources or even potentially just the the knowledge of even how to make it happen, but we are seeing that in other research realms outside of occupational therapy to a degree, we're seeing it in OT, but not nearly as much as I think we really need to, because I think those are the types of studies that really connect with the world outside of OT, and you know, those are the types of things, oh, that you could see on news, like, honestly, like, how often do you see on the news, like this new FR, FMRI study, right? Like, I don't know, I would love to see more of that. It is difficult, but I think that that is the kind of shift that needs to happen for the general public to use sensory in a way that is, you know, not every single aisle is filled with sensory toys at Target. We need to, we need to develop this, this understanding of sensory, and so that's what's great about your book. It really can help with that. It is not an OT textbook. It is a book that you know someone can pick up and really start to understand the different systems and how to, how they interact, but also how to.. what's the word I'm looking for.. actually have an impact on their own sensory system. So, really appreciate that.
Robyn Chu
Love it. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping. And yes, if anyone listening is excited about doing neuroscience research, we have a couple of great teams across a couple universities, and there is room for you. This is an important field. We need to start looking at what is happening neurologically and physiologically before, during, and after occupational therapy interventions, so these are expensive studies, but they're very, very fun studies, and they have to be inclusive of multi-discipline collaboration, so it's, it's been really fun, but there's more to come.
Jayson Davies
When you say multidisciplinary, are you saying multidisciplinary in the sense of like multiple people, different disciplines that are treating the student, or multidisciplinary in the sense of like the OT working with neuroscience, who is doing kind of the data piece,
Robyn Chu
the second one, so on our team at UCSF right now we have Prateek Mukherjee, who is an incredible radiologist and neuroscientist. We've got Elisa Marco, who is a neurologist. She's working with these families in a clinic as a neurologist, practicing medicine, but also doing the research, looking at the brains, and then we've got incredible neuroscience students, PhD students who are crunching numbers, and oh my goodness, knee deep, waist deep in computer code, analyzing the data with incredible computer power, so it does take everyone. I'm not going to be the one that is running a whole bunch of code and saying, okay, I got this number for you guys, but I am going to help as the occupational therapist to say that's really interesting that we're seeing an increase in connections in the brain within in brain connections and decrease in out of brain connections. What does that mean for resilience building within our intervention? So this is, I think, this is where the field is going. This is the exciting stuff, but that's just me.
Jayson Davies
It kind of has to, everything, yeah, I mean, everything's being data driven, and we have, I mean.
Robyn Chu
yeah.
Jayson Davies
With the, with neuroscience advancements in the last, what, 50 years, if not even 20-25, years.
Robyn Chu
Even five years, right?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and then you, you bring AI in as a data analysis tool, I mean, we are going to start, yeah, we're going to see, so it's going to be possible, not just easier, it's going to be possible to see connections that couldn't be seen a decade ago, and yeah, we have to, let's be honest, like we know that data is important, we as OTs are not always great at data, you know, our goals are very functional. Yes, and they are very, they're hard to track sometimes. I'll just say that they are hard, they're difficult, but we need to, and if we can get the neuroscience to help back us up, it only makes it even better. So that's awesome. See, another, another topic for another day, we should dive into the research behind OT and fMRI, that'd be great, but.
Robyn Chu
Absolutely.
Jayson Davies
Robyn. Before, before I let you go earlier, I kind of asked you a little bit about how most adults practice sensory wellness, and to a degree, it was kind of, you know, a little not non-existent, but you know, it varies, really. It does. What is your goal? For you know, after someone reads your book, you know, what is your hope that their few weeks after that start to look like?
Robyn Chu
I hope that after someone reads my book, they will daily be thinking about how they might not be able to change the whole world immediately, but they can change their world that's right around them. I hope that someone will recognize that there are adjustments, and even if they feel slight, they will know that they are important, and that that occupational therapist is worth the two extra minutes that it takes to adjust the sensory input, because of what they will be able to do and who they will be able to help in the middle of that day.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna ask you one more follow-up, pie in the sky type of question.
Robyn Chu
Love it.
Jayson Davies
Where should occupational therapists be in the medical world in order to support others in doing the same thing, not just through a book, but actually through like a service as occupational therapy? Does that make sense?
Robyn Chu
Where should we be?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, traditionally occupational therapy lives in certain worlds, right? There's school-based occupational therapy, there's acute health. Where do you feel that occupational therapy needs to be if we truly want to make an impact on the general public well-being? I mean, this could be, you know, yeah, in our, in our, you know, in Kaiser, in our, whatever, medical offices, this could be in the government somewhere. Where do you feel like we need to be?
Robyn Chu
Okay, so I think occupational therapists need to be a part of wellness programs, so we can start within our own profession, we can make sure that we're prioritizing wellness amongst our immediate team, right? So we have IEP meetings, we can also have meetings with our current team to support their wellness, but what I hope is from there you said pie in the sky, Google will call me up and say, man, our wellness program as an organization is missing the boat. We are teaching time management and executive functioning, and we're buying pizza for everyone on Fridays, and yet it's all falling flat. Help us bridge the gap. Help us make our wellness program effective. This is a whole industry that we, as occupational therapists, have a unique ability to help in. So, I see us going there.
Jayson Davies
I, that's fantastic. I love the, I love big ideas. I love big ideas, and I love even more when I see on LinkedIn, like that has been achieved, right? Like, I love seeing on LinkedIn, like, someone's like, "Oh, I got a new job working at this tech firm. I'm like, "You're an OT, what are you doing at a tech firm? And, like, yeah, they're in the wellness department, or they're helping with improving accessibility for users of a product. Like, I love that. Go ahead.
Robyn Chu
Can I tell it? Well, there's something that's already happening right now, but it's just really small. I met an OT at AOTA that works at a college, and she's supporting the college students from a regulation standpoint. Can we do more of that? Right, like, why can't we do more of that? Because we know college students are asking for accommodations more than ever before, and the rates of anxiety and depression amongst college students is skyrocketed in the last 10 years, five years. So, where are we? There's, there's like a health department within a college. Why are we not there? So, I would say that's a place that we already are a tiny bit, but could we expand that? Could we do more? Can we help more?
Jayson Davies
Yeah.
Robyn Chu
And the answer is yes, obviously.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely. Yeah, and you notice it's not uncommon for various departments in a university to kind of like create student clinics and whatnot, so it's very doable, especially with every college that has an OT program, right? It could turn it into a field work experience, and all that good stuff. Yeah, no, I agree. I've heard of a few people doing something to that degree, and I think it's just, just awesome. And then it leads to people, you know, once they leave the college, I'm talking about the outside general public, if they, you know, appreciate that program at college. Well, it's something that is in their mind when they go to work, when they become an administrator at Google, or when they become, you know, some person who can make an impact somewhere. Yeah, they recall, you know, occupational therapy had an impact on me, and this wellness program back in college. You know, let's, let's hire an OT, so great.
Robyn Chu
Let's hire an OT, right? Yes, absolutely. Yes, Robin, I think that's amazing.
Jayson Davies
Yes, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Where is the best place for people to learn more about you and your book?
Robyn Chu
All right, well, I would say for the school-based occupational therapists listening who drive between five to 10 schools in a week, Audible is the easiest way of accessing my book. And then, in the moments you have in between sessions, my website has links to all the neuroscience research that I've gotten to be a part of, and that website is robinchu.com It also has free downloads too, so there's activities that you can do even if you don't buy the journal or the book. So.
Jayson Davies
Awesome, we'll be sure to link to both of those. Great idea with Audible book, because yes, all the time, all the time I use Audible. Me too.
Robyn Chu
I'm right with you.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, all right, Robyn. Well, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. And I can't wait to continue diving into your book and also see how it's going to make more impact in all the OTs, as well as the general public that we talked about today. So, thank you. Really appreciate it.
Robyn Chu
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been a blast.
Jayson Davies
All right, and that wraps it. Up for today, Robyn. Thank you so much for joining me on the OT School House podcast. Your passion for sensory wellness through your book and through everything that you've done in your OT career is not just wonderful for the students that we serve, but also for us practitioners, and we really appreciate it. It's really something that we, as school-based OT practitioners, need to hear from time to time, so I'm glad we were able to do this episode. And if you haven't already picked up your copy of Sensory Wellness, the art and science of thriving, do yourself a favor and grab the audible version. It is perfect for listening between schools or on your commute home. If you enjoy the audible version, go grab the physical version. It's nice to have to actually reference from time to time when you just need to read a page or two to get back in this mindset of we can do amazing things. Thank you so much for spending a part of your day with us, Robin, and I really appreciate it. You pour so much into your students, and I hope this conversation reminded you that your own sensory needs matter as well, if you're looking for more support, more professional development, and maybe even a community of school-based OT practitioners who genuinely get what you do every single day. I would love to have you join us inside the OT School Houses School-Based OT Collaborative. It's where we share resources, host live and recorded professional development sessions, and connect with practitioners just like you. You can learn more about the OT schoolhouse over at OT schoolhouse.com/collab And remember, if you join the impact here, you also get access to the back to school conference. Until next time, take care of yourselves just as much as you take care of your students. You deserve it. I'll see you next time. Take care.
Amazing Narrator
Thank you for listening to the OT School House podcast. For more ways to help you and your students succeed, right now head on over to OT schoolhouse.com Until next time, class is dismissed.
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