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identifying triggers for overload

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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  • 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.

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