Hi ppl,
I am really new to the idea of being autism and since it becomes clearer to me to understand what this means to my life today and in the past, i am feeling a lot more stressed which leads to shutdown over shutdown.
Oft course I can name some triggers like public transport without ANC or some situations at work where I need to talk to customer I really dislike. Those were things I ever hated.
Thankfully I built up a collective working environment and being my own boss , which means that I can change at least everything in my working day pretty easy. BUT it is really hard for me to unterstand what is good for me and what is not good, cause this was nothing I ever learned in my life before. It was more often like “eat that frog, life is hard!”. I now try to reduce stressful activity and find more time for me and try to guess my needings but struggling in figure out what is not good for me. I dont feel it in the Moment it happens but shutting down a few hours or days later.
How did you isolate triggers and how do you handle them, if they are not that easy to cancel or you dont want to lose sbd? What do you do in a shutdown situation when you cant escape easily?
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Maybe start with what you like, as I found it easier to determine. A lot of time, it just meant following my impulses.
The more stressed I felt, the more I wanted to be in bed. And when I was in bed, I realized I preferred the softest blanket on my skin. So I looked for soft textures to touch when I’m stressed and found it helped me regulate a lot.
Maybe this will help you a) be less stressed and b) if soft textures soothe you, rough ones probably stress you. So it can also be a way to discover your stressors in a roundabout way.
Same problem here! I’ve been doing my own self discovery via introspection. I started a list on my phone literally called “shit I don’t like” and have built it up from there.
I started with “windy days” and put it in my phone. Mulled it over a few more days and I could expand and reflect. I connected the dots, so to speak, about other things I don’t like…hair dryers, fans pointing directly at me, vacuums, hair in my face, blenders. The grouping of these things can be given broader labels that are more overarching such as “loud bursts of noises” (too much audio stimuli), and “wind propulsion at/near me” (too much physical stimuli).
Took me a few months to build up a substantial list; and I’m still adding things every few weeks as I experience the world around me now more aware of “me” in the world.
I don’t have a lot of advice on how to identify triggers, it’s a crap shoot, but here is what I do about them when I feel overwhelm coming on.
One: Belly breathing. This is beyond a doubt the greatest skill I learned in therapy. Plenty of tutorials online for it and few different versions.
Two: Imagine a dial on your stomach with the numbers 1-10. 10 being meltdown and 1 being completely calm. Picture yourself slowly turning down the dial while taking deep breaths.
Three: I started carrying a small fidget toy in my pocket that I can play with when I feel like I want to rip off my skin and run screaming out of the biulding.
Hope this helps!
I don’t really have an answer, but I am pretty much in the same situation. A big problem for me is the troggers I cannot avoid, like economic problems, the heat wave, having sleep issues due to leaving in a noisy area.
I have noticed that sometimes I get an intense feeling, I cannot describe it, but it happens sometimes when I am triggered. When I notice it, which is rarely the case, I try to look for potential triggers.
Hopefully, someone will have a better answer, I am interested in reading the answers myself.
Most autistic people struggle with sensoric overload due to a decreased ability to filter stimuli. In my case there are almost no special triggers but the multitude of stimuli, foremost accoustic ones, followed by visual ones, followed by haptic ones. For me it is very important to minimize them by using ANC, a basecap and/or sunglasses as well as large and soft clothes
Apart from that he most important thing is to recognize when I’m starting to melt down and then to grant myself a timeout as soon as possible. Therefore I had to learn what helps me to relax the most. Being in a room with only a little light and sound, read a book, play a game, watch my favourite TV series … If in the office or the public I sometimes retreat to the toilet, which is embarassing to admit but kind of helps.
Start expanding your fundamental understanding of what is happening. Words give power over problems, prior to understanding triggers were even a thing you weren’t looking for them. Read experiences of others, what triggers them. Consider that you can alter your relationship to the triggers, not just avoid them. I hated almost all music as a kid, that changed once I started playing music rhythm games like DDR and guitar hero. I’ll argue that music was information I didn’t understand how to process, which dysregulated me. The unwanted information of songs being stuck in my head really upset me. Improved understanding of the sensory input opened ways to stim in response to it.
Expand what you consider to be inputs, expand what you consider to be a stim. Inputs are anything happening to you, including your own thoughts and actions. Stims are your outputs, including thoughts. Inputs you don’t understand cause frustration. Your brain expends energy to find the correct response and gets nothing for it. Pressure builds up and if we don’t do something in response we blow up. There are so many things that get better once you can understand them.
Consider cilantro, wiki says between 3 and 21 percent of people have a gene mutation that makes it taste unpleasant, I’m in that lucky pool of soapy disgust. Before gaining this understanding I simply could not process how my family enjoyed food with cilantro. In fact, I didn’t even know it was cilantro at fault, I just hated some of the food and my family loved it. Lack of knowledge let me believe it was a subjective taste preference, and I would suffer for that, going hungry or being forced to eat soap. Learning in my late teens of this genre mutation empowered me to avoid my own disgust while explaining how others aren’t disgusted by it.
So much in life is improved by expanded understanding. I think that’s the core of why kids dysregulate more often, they have less tools to explain the world. I think that’s why super smart kids with this brain don’t dysregulate as often, they pull themselves out of the darkness.
I’ll leave you with this link about how words literally grant your brain power to process inputs. https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-language-1102
I agreed with your entire comment up until this point:
I think that’s why super smart kids with this brain don’t dysregulate as often, they pull themselves out of the darkness.
Autism is a spectrum. What you are seeing are kids that have a higher capacity to learn maladaptive coping mechanisms. They’re still dysregulated, they’re just better at hiding it from others. As far as being “smart”, this often gets used against them. The number of times my parents were told “She’s not applying herself enough” when I was getting Bs & Cs with an A here and there. They all thought I was coasting, but if my sensory needs were ever addressed I probably would have been getting straight As.
Based on your response I’m not clear what we didn’t agree on. I’m a former smart kid that only realized he is autistic at 33. I’m hopeful that my kids will have more support in school than I did, and that the world outside of school will continue to become more accommodating for us. The world wasn’t built for people in wheelchairs, but it’s slowly being rebuilt with accommodations. Our curb cuts will take a lot of different shapes.
The attribution that it has to do with intelligence, when in my eyes it comes down to luck (as far as how severe it impairs someone)? Labelling the existences of ‘low-functioning’ autistic people as a “darkness”? It feels like this is buying into the concept that if you just try hard enough, you won’t be disabled.
The point of curb cuts is that the world was redesigned to accomodate those in wheelchairs. We need society to meet us where we’re at, not the other way around.
Ah, thank you for the clarity. My view of things, intelligence comes down to luck as it’s a measure of brain capability (not IQ), which I believe is fixed. Darkness was strictly meant as ignorance. Highly intelligent people will be more likely to learn, synthesize new ideas from previous experiences. When faced with the struggles of this existence, high intellect might invent a functioning coping mechanism where low intellect will fail and leave you to meltdown. Considering I believe we also become frustrated over a lack of understanding, not strictly from undesirable sensations, I think intellect plays a huge role in why people say autism is a spectrum. The compounding failure for an average intelligence autistic kid to learn to cope results in daily meltdowns and placement in special needs classes where they are seen as incapable. If society better understood their problems, helped them process and learn coping mechanisms, healthy stims, and what to avoid, they might be able to live a more normal life. That’s not what happens today, and it’s fucking tragic.
I don’t really like any of the words that exist to talk about the issues unique to autism. Sorry if that caused any confusion.
Thanks for your shared experience and tips :) I followed a few of them, like Introspektion everytime I realized I feel stressed or rushed or pushed to anything. It worked out quiet well. I also changed my working habit to evening / night time when it was possible due appointments. This way I created timeslots during the morning and afternoon to have enough energy to meet up friends or getting shit done Iam pushing way to long around. When I saw friends as explained them about my autism behaviours and what my plans are right now to reduce overload. They all react with a lot of understanding and asked theirself if they could do change anything on their behaviour to support me.
All this gave me the setting to accept me more and helped me to do the work in the evening with a more or less free head, cause I had everything I planned for the day done already
Working during night was sth I ever loved but gave up by time cause of external demands and so it became standard routine. For me, the biggest advantage of working late is, there a mostly no interruptions of Mails, calls, chats or workmates. So i can completly focus on my tasks, what makes me more aware of what i am actually doing or needing. Plus i was full of ressource cause I could follow myself during the day, like I normally do afterwork. So whoever can manage to shift worktimes and struggling with those things, should give it a try IMO.
As we have a birthday in our shared flat on saturday, i felt yesterday like needing time for myself to leave the week behind, so yesterday evening I took me time, explained to my girlfriend, that Iam feeling stressed of the week even as it all went out quiet well and to save energy for the birthday party and try to avoid a shutdown on sunday or monday, which was alright as always. She gave me the space i need since day one. Now after 4 years we manage to build a save zone where we can really talk everything and sharing even the deepest thoughts and moments with each other.
All together I had a great week which I wanted to share :)
