 Hello guys, Thomas Henley here from Aspergers Growth and today we're talking about how to calm someone down with Aspergers. We have training for first aid, what to do if someone's drowning, but there's not a lot of help on what to do when someone is having a panic attack or more specifically to this video when someone is having a meltdown. As you may or may not know, people with Aspergers and autism are a lot more likely to develop generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks and specific phobias. It's just something that comes along with having autism as well as different other factors such as being bullied and past experiences that may have caused us to get more anxious. And the thing is, is that autistic people do deal with anxiety in different ways to normal people. A lot of the time during our teenage years, we learn how to cope with it, how to take it away out of public places and make sure that we're not viewed in a negative light. Things like sensory triggers, autistic usually have hypersensitivities in certain parts of our body such as touch and smell and sight, bright lights. I know personally for me, my eyes are very sensitive and it can cause like migraines and it can cause, you know, over stimulation, stuff like that background noise that can be a big factor that even after 20 years I don't really notice when it's driving my anxiety up. So that's another good one. Miscommunications with people like social anxiety just because of how difficult it is in general to communicate with an anxiety disorder. It's a lot more difficult because of the communication issues that come along with having autism. But don't you worry, I'm here to tell you some ways that you can help someone that you care for or someone in public with asperger's who may be experiencing a meltdown or may be on the brink of experiencing a meltdown and how you can know that they are doing it. Sometimes it can be quite difficult to tell. Number one, you have to remember the hypersensitivity. Each autistic person has a different sensory profile. Some places on our bodies can be very uncomfortable and even painful to touch whereas other places can be very relaxing to touch. So it's important that you ask them if you don't know them very well. So don't think that just because you are close friends and you've known this person for a long time that they are comfortable with you touching them in certain places. That sounds really wrong, but I mean stuff like shoulders and stuff. Particularly with myself, if someone touches my head, my ears, it can make stuff worse in a lot of cases. So it's important to know that before you move on to helping them. Number two, if there are a coil from any attempts for you to help them in any of the ways that I've described, don't take it personally. Make sure you distance yourself from the person so that they feel less anxious. Certain people, certain personalities can make meltdowns worse. Maybe offer them something that might be able to calm them down like sweets or fidget spinners or stuff like that. Only if you know them like specifically. Number three, don't try to empathize or relate to the person too much if they're having a meltdown. If you're not autistic and you've experienced panic attacks before, you might be able to have a little bit of an experience of what it's like to have a meltdown, but it's a little bit different and if you try too much to make them feel like you've experienced it as well, you're more likely to kind of distance yourself from them and they might take it as condescending or ignorant because in the future it can impact your ability to help them with the panic attacks. Number four, don't attach yourself emotionally or personally to what the person says or does during a meltdown. It can be a very traumatic thing to go through and if you're not familiar with the experience yourself, it inhibits a lot of your ability to function properly and logically. Number five, a general rule of thumb is that it's usually not I get a gear. I can't talk today. It's usually not a good idea to press for a response to a question. Same thing as I said before, the functionality is reduced quite a lot. It reduces a lot of your ability to make clear thoughts, make clear decisions, it can make your emotions all up and down, all over the place. So it's hard to answer questions and usually the added thought can be a lot of, can be an even bigger stressor and it can make panic attacks worse. So generally it's good to ask yes or no questions if you need to. And finally, number six, which I think is the most important thing for you in the long term with your relationship with the person that you're trying to help. Make sure that you distance yourself from any judgment when the person is having the meltdown. A person can be really confident and the chair, you know, creative, intelligent, all that kind of stuff. They can have all those really good qualities that make them a very, very good solid person. But when you have a meltdown it can, it can, it can change you quite a lot because all these senses are going all over the place, your anxiety is going over the place, it feels like emotional torture and it's like it's physical, mentally draining. And we stim quite a lot and stimming can be quite embarrassing. Tell them it's completely fine and that it will not affect how you view them and your relationship. So once you understand all the rules that I put out, I know it's already quite a few things to remember, but bear with me, they are important things. I'm going to go through maybe three stages of panic attacks that you might want to, you know, kind of know about. And once you know about this stuff, you can implement it long term wise, short term wise, you can do a lot of, if you know them very well and you go about with them doing your daily activities, there are a few things that you can do to help reduce the chances, so it's prevention and then short term solutions to reducing anxiety during panic attacks or just before panic attacks. So let's start by talking about a scenario where the person is a little bit more stressed than normal. Obviously people with autism and anxiety disorders do generally have a background amount of stress, but I'm talking about more visual, you can tell, you can tell more likely that they are, they're anxious, they're getting distracted, they're getting a bit jittery, a bit darting vision, they're good things to look out for. So the first thing that you probably want to know is that busy places are one of the main causes of panic attacks or the background noise or the sensory information can unknown to the person create a lot of anxiety. So it's not something that we know and we can, we can think, oh there's a lot of background noise, I'm getting anxious. It's more of a build up over the course of 15 to 20 minutes. It's not an instantaneous thing. It might seem like that, but if you have the eyes for it and you know what to look for, you can see it building up and you can get in at this point and make sure that they don't get upset. So the best thing to do in this scenario is to make sure you remove that background noise. I don't mean go and stop all the cars from running, go stop people from talking, that would be silly. What I mean is headphones. Headphones are the savior of people of Asperger's. Firstly, it gives you something to concentrate on. Remusia concentration, Remusia concentration. Remusia, you're concentrating on, anxiety is high because of the background noise. So if you give them something to listen to, take their attention away from outside worlds, reduce the background noise and replace it with one singular noise. It doesn't have to be any specific music, it doesn't have to be relaxing zen music. Give me heavy metal. I've got anxious and I've listened to heavy metal and it's helped a lot. Just make sure that you remove the background noise and the anxiety will usually go down quite quickly. If you feel comfortable enough with the person and they feel comfortable enough with you and you've exchanged physical content in the past, one of the great things that you can do is applying pressure. Now, there is a known thing that applying pressure to our bodies during times of stress can relieve a lot of anxiety, hence all the weighted blankets that you can buy, like the strange t-shirts that you can buy that squeeze and coats and stuff like that. So one of the ways that you can do that is through the shoulders. So the shoulders are a good way to apply pressure to. You can get them to do it themselves if they want to, but they usually know about it. What you can do is you can get one hand and you can just kind of push down quite a bit as you're making sure that they're all right. Just people in general actually, making sure that they're all right. You can do that action. Apply a bit more pressure than usual. It kind of relieves a lot of anxiety. Obviously, you can't really do that when you walk in and stuff. You can probably make sure that they're all right. Make sure that it's not patronizing, they're not going, it's all right, you're okay. But that's one thing that you could try or you could ask them if they'd be happy with that. Another thing you can do is offer a really tight hug. Obviously, if you're not very close to the person or you haven't exchanged a lot of physical contacts, it's just probably a no-no. But if you're in a relationship with them or you're very good friends or you have a lot of physical contacts, just regular physical contacts. Tight hugs. You can get all the pressure from the shoulders through the body. It helps a lot and that can be something that you could consider. Physical exercise. Physical exercise is a good shout for reducing anxiety. Walking, biking, more intense physical activity like team sports like football, badminton. Just go and just even go to the gym, maybe not the gym because of the people and the background noise. But you understand what I mean. Exercise is shown to release endorphins and these kind of opioids that you release when the muscles become flames from exercise and that's shown to cause a relaxing effect both on the muscle and on your mental state. So next time you go out you want to do something. If you incorporate a little bit of physical exercise into it, it's likely to reduce the anxiety and reduce the chances of panic attacks. Next thing, stick to quite places like parks and quite restaurants. Stick to back streets and stuff like that rather than the main roads. By doing that you're reducing the background noise just as you would if you had headphones on. But you're also reducing the visual stimuli as well if you do this kind of thing and that'll just general dampen down the anxiety quite a bit. As well as dampening down the anxiety, if there is less people about they'll feel more comfortable with generally doing some quite mild stimming. A little bit of rocking, a little bit of just stretching the neck, stuff like that. It can reduce a lot of social stress. So if you're in a bad place and there's not many people to judge them, they're more likely to do that stuff and reduce their anxiety themselves. As I said before, panic attacks can build up anywhere from 10 to 20 to 30 minutes just generally just building on the anxiety until it becomes too much and the body needs, you know, goes into shock and it's like, ah, yeah, yeah. So if the person has generally high cortisol levels that day, it can have a higher chance of causing panic attacks. But you need to know how to deal with someone who is on the verge of a panic attack. So I've already talked about the signs that you can look for, such as the darting movement of the eyes, the irritability, irritable body language, lack of concentration on tasks or communication, generally heavy breathing, putting earphones on that can be another good sign that someone's, you know, having a bad time. So when it really does seem to be more apparent, there are some things that you can do in order to make sure that they're progressing to an actual panic attack. As I said, if you're in a busy place, even if you're in a quiet place, take into a quieter place, such as a bathroom, a park, anywhere that's available. Get the headphones out if they want, if they want to listen to music, obviously that's another good shout. It's still going to work because they're not having a panic attack. They'll be likely to want to stim a lot when they're, you know, reaching panic attack levels. So if you're in a quiet place, you'll just be able to let them stim away as much as they want and you can even leave them alone if you want to or if they want to and that'll let them feel more comfortable. While they're stimming and doing their own thing, trying to, you know, control the breathing and stuff like that, they'll know, they'll have enough functionality right now to deal with it, deal with it themselves. So as long as they're not harming themselves with the stimming, just keep away, keep a bit of distance, you know, let them do their own thing. But there are some other things that you can, you can suggest if that stuff's not helping, you can get them to put their head, bring the knees up to the chest, right to the chest, put the head in the knees. It's scientific to be improving that the body positioning like this in a kind of curled position can reduce anxiety and if they feel comfortable about it, place both of your hands on their shoulders for either from behind or in front on the arms, squeezing, holding, if they want to they can hold your hands, squeezing your hands that can be very helpful or even something as simple as, you know, letting their head go on your shoulder and just like them just pushing against your shoulder that can put a lot of pressure on their body and make them a lot more relaxed. And then if you're a little bit more intimate and if you both feel comfortable that I suppose you can, you know, just like stroke the hair, obviously if it's not something that they like, don't do it. But if they do, some people find it quite soothing. If that stuff doesn't seem to be working, you can try things that simulate stimming such as you can push against the ball of their feet, you can get them to straighten their legs out, push against the ball of the feet and get them to push against your hands, that can stimulate the sensation of rocking. It's usually when we rock we make sure that all the pressure goes on to our ankles and that can be quite relaxing. And you can also do stuff like intermittent contractions so you can get them to tense up all the muscles in the body for about 15 second times as they can and then untense. And that can has been shown to relax muscles a lot more. One of the most important things that I've personally experienced that helps me with anxiety is not really that no, but facial expressions and body language, tone of voice can be very helpful in situations like this, especially when the person is very involved with you or gets very embarrassed about having anxiety attacks. And so one of the more beneficial things that you can do is making sure that you over exaggerate your facial expressions. It's very hard for us to understand facial expressions in general and body language, stuff like that and interpret it in our daily lives. So it can become quite a source of anxiety because we're not completely sure how the person is feeling. So we still have to put effort into understanding whether they are okay with this, whether they are getting annoyed at us, angry at us. So one thing that you can do to remove all that ambiguity and make sure that they know everything is fine and everything is calm is to firstly, but face expressions, nice, you know, happy face expression, not just by that but like really content, it's okay, no worries, like seriously, it's okay. That's really good. The tone of voice, making sure that it's very light, making sure that it's, you're very slow, you're not getting anxious, you're not getting anxious, they're not going to get more anxious. And if you think it's all right, they're going to think it's okay. As long as you make sure that you over exaggerate the body language, facial expressions can be very helpful. And I think you'll find that once you've done that, if they get anxious, they're more likely to feel more comfortable around you and more likely to come to you and you know, stop them from having panic attacks in the future. So finally, during the actual panic attacks, this is when the person is experiencing a lot of intense stimming, such as twitches, like twitches, muscle, muscle twitches, hyperventilating, breathing very fast, like those are sounds that someone is experiencing panic attack, such a really fast darting movement of the eyes, not really much responsiveness to questions, stuff like that. And a lot more kind of emotional rawness and what they do is looking at it very angry, very easily, very scared, very easily, and just generally lose a lot of functionality and brain function that they usually have. The best things to do, if you're not very close to them and you see someone having panic attack is to take them away to somewhere quiet, try and control the breathing by telling them, try and follow my breathing, breathe very slowly in, out, and make sure that they copy you. Give them some space, don't ask too many questions, let them stim on their own time and get it out of the system, making sure that you have some sort of visual to make sure they're not hurting themselves while they're stimming. And once the stimming becomes less intense, you can apply some of the things that I've talked about in the previous stages where they're just about to have panic attacks. You can give them about 20 to 30 minutes, that's a good estimate of how long it takes to kind of come down. Give them something to do, give them something they like, something to concentrate on, because they can get relapses if their anxiety and their thoughts is always quite high after as well. Once they've achieved resting state again, they're usually a lot more likely to go below that, so they're likely to feel a lot of fatigue, a lot of tiredness, a lot of lack of concentration, generally because all their energy's being used, all the mental, physical, emotional energy's just being depleted fully. So don't take them out and do anything stressful, because they're probably quite sensitive to it after, as I said, you don't want them to have a relapse. Just make sure that you do something very calm in quiet places, and after the experience they're probably going to be quite uncoordinated, tired, sleepy, all that kind of stuff, and just try and go, go through the rest of the day and wait until they've got their energy back, and then you can start to do more stuff. So congratulations, you made it through the video, you've been fully taken into, you know, my a few step programs of how to deal with someone who is having a metal down or a panic attack. There are obviously other stuff that you can do, such as sensory items that I'm not going to go into in this video, but might go into in a previous video, in a previous video, in a future video. Make sure you don't treat them badly for what they're doing, don't get annoyed at them. It's not something that can be helped, but it is something that you can help, if you know what I mean. So if you liked the video, make sure to drop a like below on the video, make sure to subscribe, click in the little bell icon in the corner to make sure that you get notifications when my next videos come out. I love you guys, and I hope that the sun shines brightly for you today, and always. Peace, peace.