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?
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.