AuDHD

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A place for those that got both Autism and ADHD, those confirmed as one and are suspecting they got the other as well, and also everyone who is neither and just genuinely curious.

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DAE experience unstoppable energy drain from being perceived (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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in my past crusing thru autism posts on the bad site, once in a while somebody would post something talking about this and it was like reading my own experience in somebody else's words.

for those of you who read the subject line and know exactly what I'm talking about: can you also never shut off masking except when alone and in fact can't even relate to the concept of being able to "not mask" around others? or maybe around 99.99999% of the human race apart from a few people you know well and have known for years?

I've found (thru being homeless and couchsurfing starting well into adulthood haha do not recommend) that I can't live with most people, even introverts, because their activity pattern is not like my parents that I grew up with, and so my brain fixates on what they're doing and then I hear every. human. sound. in the house. at full attentional processing. every waking moment of my life. forever.

this decimates my ability to work because I touch computers for a living and I can only touch them correctly in 1 of 2 ways, either collab with others using tools like kanban and a ticket system, or solo hyperfocus for days on end, which has 0% chance of happening without the above going on...

but I got off topic. the question I am curious about is: if you relate to the subject line of the post, do you think the mental energy drain comes from being unable to shut off your awareness of (potentially) being perceived by others in the house; by your having to keep your mask on standby, warmed up and ready to go at all times when others are in the house; or, both? and do you have other thoughts on this particular topic which I suspect is related to a subtle but extremely impactful neurotrait some few tortured souls among us have???

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

I can relate to this, infact in addition to these experiences I have chronic muscle pain from tension which primarily comes from being in contact with others.

Being isolated and in control of my environment has been pretty much the only way to minimize it.

As for which of the causes you described are behind the energy drain; for me being perceived automatically turns on what feels like a background awareness that cannot be turned off until no one is there.

I consider masking to be part of this awareness; a self-defense mechanism that we learn early in our development to protect ourselves from harm by calculating how we react in order to minimize potential harm. In those situations it is impossible to feel entirely safe because we cannot control our environment and if we won't react carefully we might end up with even more interaction we desperately don't want.

Perhaps it is similar in nature to how something that lives in the wild has to maintain a constant awareness to avoid being caught off guard and potentially killed. An activation of fight-or-flight/primitive brain centers in the brain.

That is one source of energy drain in itself

There is also the energy drain from the much higher amount of sensory input we are being fed from our brains having many more synapses than those without autism. We can't simply filter out or ignore everything we are receiving, there's simply too much of it. It has to be stopped at the source before it can become sensory input. Isolation is the easiest way to accomplish this.