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?
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!