 Good afternoon and welcome back to the Asperger's Growth Channel with your boy Mr Tommy Boy over here. Thomas Henley, if you didn't know. Why am I saying this? Today we're going to be talking about making your house a home. It's one of those phrases that you hear a lot on all of those renovating shows but it's very catchy and it makes a good title for a video. Today we're going to be looking at the autistic experience. The sensory experiences that we all share and all have in some varying levels. We all have hypersensitivities and hyposensitivities and if you don't know about these then just look them up. You basically, bright things are brighter or bright things are not as bright. That's the basics of it. Tedious explanations over, let's talk about ways that you can improve your home to make it a more sensory inviting place. Number one, pretty much the best thing that you can do is to get yourself a dimmable light in every single room of your house if you can or if you're in the bedroom and you've got your own room, you have other people, get yourself a light for your room especially. If you are feeling extra spicy and you want to further improve the sensory environment make sure that you get one that's a warm light. You know, not these bright fluorescent white lights that I've got shining in my face that are causing me extreme stress and anxiety. I mean obviously I can put these on but you know they're a bit bluey. One of the problems with normal lighting is that it can often be too white. Yeah, that's a problem that we have in all stages of society. The light is too bright and white. White light is inherently quite sensory provoking for a lot of autistic people. It's not great to look at. It makes it sort of drives our anxiety up. We can't spend long periods of time under those, you know, lights at the library or in particular service stations or bus stations or anything like that. Any place that has those horrible white lights just doesn't, it's not compatible with the autistic brain. Making sure that you get something that's dimmable and you can turn white and you can turn warm for whatever situation you find yourself in the day is a very good thing. For one, it stops you from getting overstimulated in a place that's meant to be for rest. It's meant to be comforting. It's meant to be your house, your home, a place that you feel comfortable in and whether you know it or not, whether you realize that this light is affecting you or maybe you don't know when it's just secretly raising your anxiety for the day. It's important to make these adjustments and I think the best thing that I've done for myself for my room is to get a dimmable warm light. That's number one. Number two, if you have anything, anything that's plugged in most of the time that's in your room that produces that horrible electric buzz. I can't replicate it because my vocal cords are scarred by all the testosterone. It's horrible. It's not good. Most autistic people find it incredibly distracting. If you have some ADHD kind of tendencies, then it can really hamper any concentration that you have just having this horrible noise in the background and this can come from anything. Most of the time it comes from lights. As I said, I have a dimmable light in my room, but one of the problems is if I go above about 40%, this horrible electric hum or buzz or whatever you want to call it just increases. So I've always got to keep it slightly low, which is annoying. If you can manage to change your environment and get rid of those hums, it will do wonders for you. I mean, as with everything on this list, sort of removing things and replacing things is going to cost money, but if you want to sacrifice your long-term levels of stress and anxiety or annoyance towards your room for that money that's needed to replace it, then you've got to question some things. You know what I mean? Numero three. It's going to do two hands then, but switch to one. It's skillful. Make your environment stimulating to thine eyes. Make sure that you incorporate your sensory experience, but if you want to go even deeper into that tunnel and further down that line and make more improvements, finding things that are stimulating to you is good. It could be anything from getting a piece of art, maybe like a UV painting or something along those lines or some wacky drawing or anything like that. It can also be things like textures, maybe a soft rug, something that you like to run your fingers in or something that you want to lay down on. That's a really good thing to do. There's one downstairs in the living room and it was a delightful sensory experience to lay down on that rug. For me in particular, I love bright flashing colourful lights, so what I like to do is I like to cover my room in bright flashing colourful lights. Anything from little star, creating devices, projectors, whether from strip lights, LED strip lights that have a disco mode, anything like that. I absolutely love it. I have them on all the time. I mean obviously not now. Now I've got these horrible fluorescent white lights, but most of the time when I'm relaxing, those things just make my room feel cosy and inviting and fun and stimulating and good. That's a good word. Good is a good word. Very good. Quite appetising. Other things that you could do is get a spinning chair, a swivel chair or something that you can spin around with, making yourself a little bit of space so that you can spin. It could be getting different textures and putting them on your wall and your desk and any sort of place that you spend a lot of time in. And if you want an inexpensive option to make your room feel more sensory stimulating, just get some fairy lights, get some strip lights, just go crazy. You know, it's your room or it's your house. You can do whatever you want with it. Number four. There comes a point in every autistic person's life. Well actually there comes many points in an autistic person's life where things get a little bit too overwhelming. Things get a bit too stressful. You can't function as well. You get stressed, you're anxious, you can't think, you can't do anything. And sometimes it's really important to have a place to go to that you feel comfortable and that just helps, that does help you. You know, if you're having a tough time, you know, maybe there's people in your house that's socialising and you feel overloaded by that. It becomes too much. Going up to your room is a great place to sort of stay because it's supposed to be something that's relaxing. Supposed to be something that's yours, something that represents you. Getting things like blackout curtains. You know, I've got some here. Blackout curtains. So at any point during the day, you can make sure that there is no light in your room and sometimes reducing all of that sensory stimulation is very important. Other things that you can do is have a speaker. You know, have something on hand, have some headphones on hand. Other things that you could look at is maybe weighted blankets or elasticated blankets, something that I like. You can get those from FidgetBum. I've partnered with them a few times and I absolutely love their blankets. It's not an ad. They're not paying for me for this. I'm just making you aware of these things in a non-sponsored way. Lastly, something that pretty much ties in with a lot of these things. Blue light glasses. Now you may have heard of noise-canceling headphones and of course those are an amazing thing to have if you have the money for them. But something that's relatively inexpensive and will last you a very long time, providing you look after them, is blue light glasses. So basically, white light, the thing that we're surrounded by in many places during the day. There is a component of that light called blue light, of course. I don't think you're an idiot. I'm just piecing it together in my head. But blue light glasses are good because they filter out a large majority of that blue light and the ones that I have are so good that sometimes I forget that I'm wearing them. It's not like a sheet of blue glass. It's like polarised and very, very dirty. Very dirty. A lot of the time we don't really consider that lighting can have such an effect. As I've said in the first point, having some blue light glasses for any time that you're watching TV, any time that you're on your phone, any time that you're doing work at your computer is a very good thing to invest in. Not only does it help your eyesight in the long run, prevent eye strain and all that jazz, but it also reduces the amount of sensory stimulation that you get. Blue light is not the most fun thing for an autistic person. And these things, these blue light glasses that are very dirty and mucky, have been really helping me sort of reduce my levels of stress, especially when I'm spending days at my computer, working on podcasts and videos and playing Rootscape. They're really good and I would honestly recommend anybody to go and find some. I'm not going to include any brand names because I feel like as soon as you include any brand names, you know, even with the fidget bum that people jump down your throat and say that it's sponsored content, it's not going to fall for it. Blue light glasses, I've said that like hundreds of times. I do notice a notable difference when I don't have my blue light glasses on. I don't know if it's a lot calmer, not a lot calmer, but it's very subtle. And I guess this is the thing for all of these points. Subtle small improvements to your living space equals a significant improvement to your living space. The problem with changing your environment in most people's eyes is that many people are held to these expectations of how you should decorate or how you should live, where you should live, what you should put in your room. And it doesn't often address what you want. Everything in your room is an expression of you, just how your clothing is. You know, you wear stuff that represents you and you feel like that's you. You need to do the same for your environment. You don't want it to be bound by gender. You don't want it to be bound by your social status or your age. If you want to put childish things in your room or childish things, not everything's for certain age brackets. If you want to put things in your room that most people wouldn't, if you want to have flashing lights everywhere, do it. It's your room, something that's personal to you, something that incorporates your sensory sensitivities, something that plays to the likes and things that you like to do and is a place for you to go to when you're feeling stressed and tired and worn out by the everyday stresses of real life. Do all this and you will truly make your house a home. Anyway, I hope you guys are doing good. Social medias are all at Asperger's Gryff. You want to go follow me, 4TOT podcast available on Apple and Spotify, podcasts, Google podcasts, whatever. Go check those out. The podcast is getting very popular at the moment and it's even overtaking the channel. Although I do have some of the podcasts on here. Check out the new website, thomashenley.co.uk. Let me know your thoughts on that and let me know what your tips are for making your house a home. Tell me what they are. How do you incorporate your autistic existence into every being, every fiber of your life, the fiber of your being and on that note, I will see you later. You can go now. It's over. The video is over.