Pacific University debuts sensory rooms to help students keep calm and succeed in the classroom

College life can be nerve-racking.

There are hard deadlines, final exams, crowded lecture halls and loud assemblies. These are all things that can cause a lot of stress for the average person.

But college can be even more stressful for the growing number of students who identify as autistic or neurodivergent and process information in different ways. Pacific University graduate Nicollet Young recalled a harrowing classroom experience involving a fire drill on campus a few years ago.

“The flashing lights and the blaring noise just really dysregulated my nervous system,” said Young, who identifies as having both autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

“I just felt overwhelmed and anxious, like my body was shaking,” she said.

Young, who received her doctorate degree in occupational therapy from Pacific last school year, said at the time, what she needed was a safe place to calm down.

But that was hard to find.

“What I ended up doing was lying in the back seat of my car for several hours until I felt just OK enough to drive home,” she said. “I missed my classes for the rest of the day.”

After that experience, Young began talking to other Pacific students about similar stressful situations on campus.

She found she wasn’t alone.

“A lot of students were having difficulty with sensory processing and emotional dysregulation due to the stress of higher education,” Young said.

Stretchies, squishies and sound blockers

Young’s conversations eventually turned into her capstone project: a sensory room needs assessment for Pacific University.

Her project helped design the university’s first sensory room, which opened up to students at the Forest Grove campus in February. A second sensory room, on the school’s Hillsboro campus, is set to open in April.

The warm glow of dimmable lights and cream and grey colored acoustic tiles make the space — a converted library study room — feel instantly tranquil.

Other items, all chosen intentionally with input from students, stimulate the five senses: a white noise machine, colorful squishy and stretchy toys, and individually wrapped Warhead candies.

“Sour candy is something that’s been shown to assist people who are having feelings of panic or overwhelm because it can be a really intense sensory input,” said Pacific’s Assistant Director of Student Wellbeing Graham Turner. “It helps folks to bring their attention just to that.”

Other items, like coloring books, a swiveling chair and a balance board, help students ground themselves.

The room also includes several ways for students to connect with the university’s other mental health resources, such as its counseling center.

“Cultivating well-being does not need to look a particular way. It’s going to look very different for different people,” said Turner. “The sensory room adds to our menu of options [for students to] find the tool that fits.”

Students can reserve the room for 30 minutes at a time by scanning a QR code.

“It’s a calming environment,” said Taylor Otnes, a senior and a leader within Pacific’s Disabled Student Union, which helped plan the room’s various features.

“Just being able to have a space where students know they can go to decompress, I find that’s really helpful,” she said.

Meeting the needs of neurodivergent students

Sensory rooms are not a new idea.

Schools across the U.S. have made spaces for students to help regulate themselves for years. Clark College in Vancouver, Wash. opened a sensory room to its students over a year ago.

But the concept is expanding as more students have identified the need for additional mental health resources on campuses.

A 2025 survey of more than 20,000 college students conducted by the American College Health Association found that 18% of students reported an ADHD diagnosis. That’s up nearly 10 percentage points from 2019.

Other mental health conditions, including autism and obsessive compulsive disorder, are also up among students.

Pacific’s leaders say its sensory room is a part of the university’s effort to become a more inclusive campus for these students.

“We’ve known for years that our neurodiverse students and our autistic students have really struggled at times with feeling really dysregulated and not feeling really understood,” said Pacific’s Dean of Student Wellbeing Laura Stallings.

Pacific is nearly a year into a pilot project with the College Autism Network intended to help the university better assess the needs of its neurodivergent and autistic students.

Stallings said the goal of the project is to make Pacific more attentive to these students, while also creating a sense of community and belonging for them.

Surveys from the College Autism Network reveal that doing well in school is very important to neurodivergent students. At the same time, several studies show that these students are less likely to finish college than their neurotypical peers.

“Autistic students are really committed to their academic success. That’s number one,” said Lee Burdette Williams, who leads the nonprofit. “They want to be academically successful.”

Research has shown that sensory rooms have a lot of benefits for neurodivergent students, such as reduced stress and increased attention in the classroom.

Other studies show improvement in academic achievement among all students who attend schools that proactively anticipate different learning styles. That’s a concept known as Universal Design for Learning.

“If schools create an environment where students with learning differences have a better chance of succeeding, that type of setting benefits everybody in the classroom, not just students with diagnosed learning disabilities,” she said.

Burdette Williams said making campuses more inclusive to neurodivergent students will also help break down common learning myths about these students.

“Autistic people have been on the receiving end of a lot of bigotry and misconception their whole lives,” she said, noting that many neurodivergent students want to be successful in school.

“The barriers are a lack of understanding by faculty and others about what autism looks like and why certain behaviors that we would consider unexpected makes perfect sense in the mind of an autistic student,” said Burdette Williams.

Pacific offers special learning accommodations for students who request them, like screen readers, lecture transcriptions, extra time for testing and extended assignment deadlines. The sensory room is the school’s newest resource.

“This is for literally everyone,” said Pacific junior Kailani Ibanez, who helped spread the word about the room through the university’s social media channels. “All students really, really benefit from this type of room.”

Ibanez predicts the sensory room will be a game changer for students. And they hope other schools are taking note.

“This is something we can use to inspire other universities in our surrounding area to show that we should prioritize students so they can take care of themselves a lot better.”