~ ~ Profile pic by @froody ~ ~ Serving up a daily helping of cats, mermaids, day-by-day musings, and a rotating collection of fandoms. Please enjoy your stay! Christina~26~She/her & Xe/xyr
i believe deficiencies in set-shifting impact the social life of autistic/adhd people in a way that i have not seen talked about before
this is something i don’t think ive ever seen talked before about adhd/autism socializing. i think a LOT of difficulties maintaining a social life inherent have a lot to do with the difficulties of SET-SHIFTING and how work-life balance may be hard to maintain, going in one extreme or the other.
i don’t even know if this is just my own experience but i think task-switching is very much a large contributor to an adhd/autistic’s social life, and at least in my case much more than “social deficits”
contary to popular belief many of us are disciplined (of course this differs from person to person, like i said some people may go the other extreme), but this discipline often comes at the cost of maintaining an active social life. this metacognition—this awareness of our own cognition and how we think—it makes us KNOW that unconsciously switching our attention between tasks is extremely difficult because it’s like a new executive hurdle is introduced each time that is emotionally/motivationally strenuous to have to climb over each time because we are still attached to what we were hooked into and it’s hard to put the brakes on it. this has a name in psychology and psychiatry, and it’s called “perseveration”.
it is very difficult to intertwine socializing with working. and we know that working on stuff such as assignments takes much more time, energy, and effort than it does for our neurotypical peers. therefore, if we want to succeed we have to sacrifice casual socializing or attending social events. not necessarily because it doesn’t sound fun, but more often than not because we know deep down it would be hard to task-switch back to work, or it would be energetically draining leaving us unable to task-switch back to work, or we would be mentally focused the whole time on “what i have to work on” (perseveration) and not actually fully enjoy it because of that attentional shifting difficulty.
this was affirmed in my dance and parkinson’s class seeing the parallels of adhd to cognitive decline in parkinson’s in task-switching and perseveration (that which in of itself parallels the parkinson’s motor difficulties in executing a motion—while being able to continue after starting a motion, they find it difficult to shift into a different motion; a very similar kind of “executive hurdle” in a slightly different domain.) what really intrigued me was that these all are actually fundamentally similar on the physiological level since they’re all connected by the striatum. different parts of the striatum have dopaminergic projections to the frontal cortex. the motor switching deficiencies in particular happen at the motor cortex (from the top/dorsal striatum); the cognitive/attention-based projections happen at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (from the middle striatum) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (from the lower/ventral striatum). (video of part of this lecture)
THIS is why people with adhd and/or autism just sit and don’t do anything if we are expecting a phone call or know we need to go somewhere in a few hours. we don’t let ourselves get involved in anything so the task-switching won’t be as painful. neurotypical people can find task-switching annoying but not to the extent that it affects adhd and autism. literally we have shape our whole life and everything we do everday around our task-switching difficulty, and this bites into our work-life balance where we have to work to survive and casual socializing must be sacrificed to have any success to survive in this world. i demonstrated the task-switching difficulty with a visual here and talked to my professor about his thoughts (apologies for recording this from my bag pocket).
again, i haven’t seen anyone synthesize this in relation to adhd/autism socializing, but this is definitely a pattern i notice that matches up with my experience. and i want to know if you experience this as well. is this anything
This is by no means a finished work. I’m currently putting together a neurodivergent friendly planner. I created this quickly so I could use it today while i work on my larger projects.
Three priorities, all clearly defined by how big the consequences are and if it’s necessary to be done.
Cups of water tracker with a reminder to set alarms
Meal tracker (with fruit/veggie servings) with a reminder to set alarms
Self check in to prevent holding it, becoming overwhelmed later on with mess, and back/neck pain
Simple reward section with three spots
I figured I’d share it anyways until i’m done with the completed, larger versions. I hope it helps at least a little <3
ok so we know about the need to infodump, but what about the opposite? The need to absorb more information about your special interest like a sponge, but you literally can’t find any new material because you’ve already consumed every fact about it
Hello everybody with summer fast approaching here is your regular reminder that:
Everyone needs to wear sunscreen
SPF 50 is pretty much the best protection you can get, an SPF higher than that will have the same effect
Melanin does not protect you from skin cancer
Tanning is caused by exposure to ultraviolet radiation
Spending the majority of your life receiving regular large doses of UV radiation without any skin protection is a good way to get skin cancer
Don’t use tanning beds, and don’t go sun tanning
Wear your fucking sunscreen
Okay, people are clowning in the replies, so let’s try this again:
Sunburn is an uncomfortable short term problem caused by being out in the sun for too long without sunscreen. Some people are more susceptible to it than others. Melanin does protect you from sunburn, so people with dark skin are less likely to get burned, but also sometimes people just have a natural resistance to sunburn (or lack of resistance) - I’m white as hell, and literally the only time in my life I’ve gotten a sunburn was when I spent a whole day outside in a swimsuit without putting on sunscreen when I was a kid, and all I got was a minor burn across my shoulders. Never experienced that whole ‘peeling’ thing y’all are talking about, sounds super gross and uncomfortable tho. Rip to all the rest of you but i’m different.
Skin cancer is fucking cancer. It has nothing to do with sunburn, apart from both being caused by a lot of unprotected sun exposure. If you have skin, you are at risk of getting skin cancer. I have little to no risk of getting sunburn, but I still wear sunscreen, because I am protecting myself from fucking skin cancer.
If someone is basically immune to sunburn, then that’s awesome, but we still need to use just as much sunscreen as everyone else. Because we can still get skin cancer. Immunity to sunburn is not a sign that you can go easy on the sunscreen. And honestly, if you’ve got dark skin, you should probably be extra paranoid about applying sunscreen, because the majority of information on recognizing skin cancer is meant specifically for recognizing it on white skin. If you’re black/brown, it will probably take you longer to be diagnosed if you get skin cancer. And cancer is one of those things that you want diagnosed and treated very quickly, so you should be extra motivated to not get skin cancer in the first place.
Everyone needs to wear sunscreen. Wear your fucking sun screen.
