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?

  • whzfux@discuss.tchncs.deOP
    1·
    5 months ago

    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 :)