 Hello people! Welcome back to another video today. We're going to be talking about Anxiety and autism. What is the link? Why are autistic so anxious in comparison to our neuro-typical counterparts? Today, I'm gonna give you a few little personal stories about anxiety in my own life and also some of the research and statistics on anxiety in autistic people and why this may occur so often in autistic individuals. So if you've been following my YouTube channel for any sort of amount of time, you will probably realize that I am... I have gone through a lot of very poor states of mental health in my life for a long time now. One of the biggest things for me was anxiety. I started getting anxiety problems when I went to secondary school. There's a very big place. There was a lot of hormones going along. There was a lot of older people who were a bit kind of mean and bully-ish. And so it was a very stressful environment for me and it was also a lot bigger of a school and there was a lot more noise. There was a lot more people and this was the point at which I was diagnosed with anxiety. I went to the psychiatrist around 13 or 14 years of age and they told me, Tom, you have depression and anxiety. And I was sort of new to all of this. I didn't really know what they were. I knew that anxiety was just sort of an uncomfortable feeling of terror even when there's nothing going on. And ever since then it's been quite a big part of my life and it's really sort of put a dampener on how I perform at university, how I performed at school, how I did in social interactions and how it affected my sport and the things that I wanted to do. Now anxiety is known as quite a bit common occurrence in autistics. I think it's around 40% of people on the spectrum have some form of anxiety disorder. Now anxiety for people with autism can be quite, it's a lot more sort of severe if you want to classify like that because of a lot of the components of autism into playing with the anxiety. Anxiety in general, generalising anxiety is just a constant feeling of tension and comfortability and it can lead up to panic attacks in a lot of cases and for autistic people it can lead to meltdowns which are a little bit more different than panic attacks. There's more sort of typical autism-like responses in meltdowns when compared to panic attacks but I won't go into that too much. One of the biggest factors in anxiety in autistic people is the sensory components or people on the spectrum generally have a different sensory profile when compared to neurotypical people. This means that we can have very heightened senses in a lot of different areas which can impact our daily life in a negative way but we also have hyposensitivities, we've worn hyposensitivities, hyposensitivities which means that our senses are dulled. Now for myself I'm hyposensitive in pretty much everything apart from what's called vestibular, the vestibular system, so vestibular hyposensitivity which is all to do with balance so I'm very sensitive to everything and I've got terrible balance so it's you know nature's done the nice thing and given me a nice little sensory profile to deal with. A lot of people on the spectrum can their anxiety in general can be aggravated on a near constant basis especially when they're going to school and this can sort of aggravate any sort of seeded anxiety that they may have and make it worse in the long term. Long term anxiety is a form of you know form of long term pain or chronic pain and this can lead to depression which is not a good thing. Anxiety can also come from the difficulties that we have with social interaction. Again if you're at school I'm going to bring this this topic up very a lot of times because school is the worst environment for us in general that's what I believe teaches us a lot of stuff about dealing with life but it's it's absolutely horrific for a lot of us and one of the people that I know described it as most autistic people are traumatised by their events at school their experiences at school and you can kind of see why. So interaction for us is very anxiety-driving eye contacts can make us very uncomfortable and can add to that just general social interaction negative experiences with socially interacting with people and particularly people if you like someone more than a friend if you know what I mean and you mess it up and you don't know why it's messed up and they're weirdly and they stop talking to you and stuff that can be quite anxiety-driving because every time that you talk to someone that you like goes up you just you've got no idea what you did wrong and you just feel like every time you talk to that person your anxiety is skyrocketing because you just there's no way that you can deal with it. The same thing can be applied to friends if you're in a social group with a lot of people we find it very difficult to know when it's our time to speak so we can come across as quite rude and direct and stuff and then that can impact us badly because if you know that someone's rude and you can see why being rude is going to give you more negative experiences with people and that negative experience is going to impact your anxiety because you're not going to feel comfortable in the circle of friends or circle of people that you are interacting with on a on a daily basis. One in three autistics have a severe mental health condition. A lot of the time that can be anxiety disorders talking severe anxiety disorders so it's not something to be taken lightly if you've just heard about it and maybe if you're autistic and you're listening to this you you can sort of empathize with that experience because the whole school thing going out in public can be very very hard for us even at a very young age going to places like supermarkets with our parents can stimulate a lot of meltdowns in those scenarios and that is inherently driven by anxiety. Another thing that we struggle with is panic attacks. Panic attacks are quite a big thing for autistic people or you may have heard of it being called the meltdown because it's a little bit different as I said but the main thing is is that we are very poor at emotional regulation. I've come up with a lot of theories of why we have the problems that we have in life why we have some certain difficulties if you draw back to one of my other videos on the triad of impairments. I think it's a lot to do with being able to realize and perceive your own emotions. I think there's a very high threshold for us to perceive something if it's if our emotions aren't skyrocketed in any sort of area whether it's anger or anxiety or love or happiness love. We're not going to be able to perceive them until it's sort of too late and we have panic attack or something and that can be a very another very big factor in driving the the amount of anxiety in autistic people. To round it up autistic people we're more likely to have anxiety disorders and whether that's just an inherent thing because of our biology the differences in our biology could be to do with receptors for cortisol, the stress hormone, I've seen a few research papers that highlighted that but I think it's also the main thing is the fact that it's aggravated by the difficulties that we have in life in general whether it be sensory difficulties or difficulties communicating with people. So I hope this helps it's been a bit of a short video I'm trying to cut my videos down as much as possible but it's not working it's not work I like to talk I like to explain things um but anyway if you like the video make sure to like it and if you have any experiences with anxiety you have any theories to why autistic people generally are a bit more anxious that's kind of a it's kind of detracting from the severe anxiety but if you have any experiences with anxiety please let me know so let me know how you deal with it how do you sort your anxiety out do you wear headphones wear them noise canceling headphones are best just saying that okay make sure to subscribe if you want to see some more videos by me and make sure to hit the notification bell dingaling and that will help you get more notifications for when my very infrequent videos come out and trying to make it a bit more regular life is half though I hope you guys are having a great day hope you're taking some time to relax to chill out and I'll see you guys in the next video see you later