I’ve had severe demand avoidance my whole life. If people interrupt me or keep trying to get my attention without considerable breaks, I get quite overwhelmed. I mean that I can easily go into a complete meltdown if someone continues to interrupt me after I’ve asked them to please stop, even if their interruption is seemingly helpful and selfless.
I seriously broke up with a girl that loved the hell out of me because she just couldn’t stop interrupting me when I was engaged in something. I completely blocked another friend I had for ~17 years after going on an international trip with him because after asking him repeatedly to please stop blurting out every single idea he has, to save them until I seem like I want to hear it. Nope, he just couldn’t do that. It is just completely unbearable for me, and after leaving the trip on my own earlier than planned, I blocked all opportunities for him to contact me. I would be happy to never hear from or of him ever again. That’s how much I cannot tolerate demands.
Aside from that, the best part of my day is when I go to bed to lie down for the night. It is my safe place where I know no one will interrupt me because everyone is asleep. This happens even if I live alone.
Unfortunately, the way this plays out is that I end up isolating myself and have pretty bad sleep issues since I basically stay in bed awake for hours at night. It’s like my body wakes up once I hit the bed, which is terrible for sleep hygiene. Last night, I went to best at midnight and didn’t fall asleep until 5am, so I’m exhausted-tired today.
I’m working with a therapist to develop a social circle that is healthier for me, so that’s on the horizon…hopefully. When I review my life, my favorite relationships are ones where I just co-exist with someone in the same space without much direct verbal interaction. I enjoy touch and sharing, but not if they talk a lot. And if they do talk a lot, I prefer if they keep the talking consolidated rather than spreading it out throughout the day. I can tolerate 2 hour conversations wayyy better than 6 hours of talking for 5 mins repeatedly.
Any other suggestions on how to manage this?
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Sounds pretty familiar. Relationships take energy for everyone but for some it’s a bigger burden than others.
It seems that you are taking the appropriate steps in seeking different friends. Do you understand the mechanism of this sensitivity? For instance, say a deaf person were to interact with you via sign language, would it make any difference? Are you bothered by electronic messages, how do you manage a barrage of texts?
Thanks! I’m trying 🤷♂️
Those are great questions!
Regarding the mechanism, I’m writing out my real-time thought process to hopefully get me some insight. I’m trying to understand myself better since I’ve accepted my autistic traits early this year and started learning about it. Until then, I would convince myself that I was too sensitive/too much and needed to figure a way around that, which led to unhealthy coping strategies that eventually failed anyway. They just delayed the inevitable.
The sensitivity seems to fall under a limited amount of mental energy that I can to dedicate to others. I really need time to let my mind be free in order to recharge. That’s not to say that all social interaction is exhausting. Far from it. I also need the ability to help others in order to feel happy with myself. I think I need to figure out my healthy balance and implement it.
As far as sign language, I don’t know it, so I’m assuming it would be more taxing at first. However, once I become fluent, I could see it being less taxing than verbal communication just because it is so audibly quiet. Loud noises seem to be more intense for me than other people.
A barrage of text would depend on my mental resources and the topic. If I’m out of social energy for the day, then I might just ignore them. However, this adds to their energy consumption when I do address them because I will feel guilty for ignoring them. If the topic is something I am interested in or helping someone, then I tend to be excited to engage.
While thinking this through, I thought of what is quite exhausting for me. That is when people are unnecessarily antagonistic. So baiting, contrarianism, dismissiveness, manipulation, outright deception, etc. I have a very low tolerance for that.
I’m also new to this game. It’s been a strange few years and it still feels like barely scratching the surface. I remember complaining about the noise and bustle in the open office on multiple occasions, only to be met with blank stares. At some point I realised that the common denominator was my perception, that was a turning point. Since then I treat a quiet workspace as an inviolable requirement and it’s made a huge difference to productivity. I have limited capacity for social interaction and small talk but since accepting that is the way I am, it’s not a problem. I don’t care if my unread email piles up, if people want to talk they will find me. It used to be a source of anxiety but now I just let people know they won’t get a quick response and people are fine with it.
Meditation has been a game changer, huge difference for anxiety and general happiness. I think we can be happy if we find our way and our people. Part of that is letting go of the things that hold us back.
Meta note: It’s become obvious that RkWgorza is a troll. They’ve admitted that they’re not trained in anything, despite claiming to treat clients for disabilities, presumably mental disabilities. If true, they are practicing unlicensed medicine and guilty of several felonies. In any event, it’s evident that they’re just here to spew nonsense and to bully this community.
Until they are banned, it may be best to avoid feeding the troll. Block them and move on.
I had a big problem with sleep hygiene as well since I often would turn in early at night to rest when I lived with others in order to be in a quiet space where I will likely not be disturbed until morning. I found that I had to set some rules for myself if I wasn’t feeling tired enough to fall asleep. My rules were: 1) do not go under the covers, 2) since i hate wearing socks to sleep I made sure to keep them on until I was ready to get under the covers, 3) make sure I feel relaxed. I often have to have a hot shower before bed to raise my body temperature before I get into bed because the feeling of my body temp dropping makes me sleepy.
As for the tolerance issue, I would say that there’s a lot of factors in finding success for it. Someone else in the comments said that you have to change. I think maybe there’s some skills for you to work on, but fundamentally I don’t believe you need to change. I think that I can sense a feeling that your friend and former girlfriend didn’t seem to respect what you were requesting of them. I can understand how that can be a tough subject to tackle, especially when you’re actively overwhelmed. With the people I care about, I have discussed with them that there will be times where I can’t really speak or be spoken to and that I’ll give them a signal/codeword so they understand when I am in that state. I bring some earplugs with my everywhere to help against overstimulation since I am particularly sensitive to sounds. Most people seem to respect when I request some quiet. I often will discuss with them after the overwhelming feelings pass about why I got overwhelmed, if I know why, so that if it was something that they did that we can talk about how to avoid that going forward. Though I do believe that this makes me hard to be around as it makes others feel like they walk on eggshells around me, at times.
I believe that there’s a few things that you should talk over with your therapist about. The first thing that I found helped me a lot was getting better at recognising my limits. I know it night not be the case for you, but for me I really struggled to recognise getting overwhelmed until it was too late and I was melting down. This skill is necessary for the second thing to consider. The second thing to talk about would be gaining some more effective communication skills. Of course, it takes two to have a conversation, but doing your best to convey your thoughts, feelings, and intentions is important.
Let me know what you think. I hope something in my comment helps!
All of that helped, thank you! 😀
I can relate to the sleep hygiene part a lot. I like those ideas to still be able to use the bed for relax time, while still reserving some signals for my body to know when it’s time to sleep. Btw, I also shower right before bed, but that’s because I can’t fall asleep if my thighs feel dirty in the sheets lol. It’s like a rough-sticky feeling that’s activating.
Thanks for addressing the other comment. After a lifetime of people telling me that I’m the problem and need to change to meet their expectations while withholding the autism info from me, it didn’t seem to match my experiences and situation, so I didn’t take much from it.
I have been working on sensation sensitivity and started taking noise cancelling earphones around at the advice of my therapist. They have saved me a lot of stress at times. I like your compassionate and considerate description of your situation. It helps me learn to be that way too. I noted down the discussion points to discuss with my therapist because I think they’re great ideas that match the benefits I’ve received from autism therapy (really, more like autism self -awareness and -accommodation discussions). She’s already used to me coming in with my notes 😅
