 The Thoughty Autie podcast. Now, what are the similarities and, like, crossovers between, like, the two diagnoses? Like, whether it be something to do with the actual, like, diagnostic profile or whether it's to do with your own sort of professional experience. Yeah. So, they are very similar. And sometimes people confuse the two, and sometimes people are diagnosed with one and not the other, and then they realize they have both. So I know we were speaking before, now, and there's over 50% of individuals with autism who also have ADHD. Some studies show 50 to 70% of individuals with autism have ADHD. So both ADHD and autism affect the central nervous system, which is responsible for movement, language, memory, social and focusing skills. But the amazing thing about it is if you get the services that you need and you find out that you have autism at an earlier age, there are so many things that you can do to help your language, your memory, your movement, you know, social interactions. So it can, like, it doesn't go away, but it's just like ADHD doesn't go away. But there are so many ways to empower yourself and to, you know, get the help you need. I think it's less about sort of getting over it more like in terms of making adjustments, like, within your own life, like how you, you know, you know, it's, you know, it's for me, for me, particularly, I like to be pretty much, I don't tend to have a lot of social interaction. It doesn't mean I don't tend to like it. It's something that I do quite enjoy, just in very small bursts. So like there's that adjustment and then there's things like sensory adjustments that I make pretty much on a daily basis. Where would those, you know, if we were to kind of look at it in a sort of broad sense, where would those like two things sort of crossover, like, because obviously there are sort of those similarities, but which kind of diagnostic criteria would you, would you say that? Yeah. That kind of crossover. Yeah. So both individuals with ADHD and autism can have intense fixations with interest. So, you know, we can get very excited and hyper fixated on a hobby and an interest and then it bores us and then we move on. So there's one crossover. We both have emotional dysregulation. So we have difficulty regulating our emotions due to the third thing, executive functioning issues. My enemy. So there is where you see a lot of overlap. And then of course I'm happy to share the differences, but that is part of the reason why sometimes it can be challenging to know, you know, if you have autism or ADHD or both. It's interesting to kind of, I think it would be cool to kind of zoom in on like the particulars of those things because I think for me, when I've talked to people who are just ADHD or know that they're ADHD, but maybe, maybe you might be able to stick. I don't know. You never know. But they tend to say that the sort of fixations and interest tend to be like a lot more. They tend to shift quite a lot. And one sort of comparison that I've found with autistic people is that we tend to have more stable sort of longer term fixations, interests on things. Yeah. I did a post recently on a concept called autistic monotropism. Oh, I saw that pop up today. Yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of a sort of quite a simple sort of concept that has a very complicated sounding name. But it's basically someone's predilection to be like, you know, when we're, when we're focusing on something, when we're interested in something, we get more of that sort of, we get more of those blinders, that kind of tunnel vision on our interests. And for a lot of people, particularly myself, in terms of hyper fixation, I'm like, getting really focused on something. I can often spend an entire day not, not eating, not, not drinking, not feeling like I need to go to the toilet because I'm so focused on like a project that I'm doing or a video that I'm doing. And quite often I have the real big issue of finding a cutoff point, particularly in the evenings. I do, I have full fell into the trap many, many times in my life of allowing myself to go past a certain time that I've set for myself. Because once I kind of go when I'm prolonged working for like over my set designated time, it's like those rules that I had to kind of blown out the water and I'll just, I'll just continue working and working and working until I am, you know, I get migraines or I get tired or, you know, there's some like external force on me. Yeah, Thomas, can I ask you a question? Does that help you relax too, by getting hyper fixated on any interest of yours? Yeah, it's, I mean, it can definitely be work. I mean, it's interesting because when, whenever I've done sort of psychotherapy and stuff around anxiety and sleep and such, they always recommend that I try and reduce the amount of stimulation that I get sort of during the nighttime and they're saying like, oh, listen to an audiobook or read a book. But for me, I need to do something. So I need to write or, you know, what I tend to do it during the evenings that works pretty, pretty much every time is I'll set my phone at the lowest brightness, I'll turn on the, the warm, the warm setting on it. And I'll just like tilt the screen away from me and I'll play like a game and then I'll just tend to kind of drift asleep when my meds cook in, but definitely there's a battle between stimulation, because sometimes we don't have enough stimulation and sometimes it's too much stimulation, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I get kind of restless if I'm not doing something like I'm not sort of having a particular focus on something. I definitely have that. Sometimes it didn't go so well and it didn't go so well last night. And I had a really sort of intense kind of feeling of an, you know, we call it autistic inertia where, you know, the longer that you kind of stay hyper fixated on something, you know, the longer that that goes on, the harder it is to kind of break out of that, that thing, you know, where things like issues with like transitions and things like that routine changes come in because we kind of build up that speed. It's like, yeah, you build, it's like a steam train. It's like you sit in there, the steam train and you just, the more that you go on, the like faster that it gets. And then like, if you want to break, it doesn't really sound like so much. You got to, yeah. Yeah, Dr. Hallowell talked about the Ferrari brain, right? The end, the Chrysler breaks. It's really hard to stop. Yeah. And quite often, if you, if you know in a good place and you kind of let it run rampant, you can lose a tire. Definitely big blowout. But like in terms of like hyper fixation, what, what kind of differences have you seen sort of between autistic and ADHD is? So my specialty really is ADHD. And I would also say that, and this doesn't go for everyone because it's a spectrum, right? So this is in a one size ADHD or one size autism, but I've seen more like anime and Legos and trains and what else. Like comic. This, yeah. Yeah, like Comic Con, I forget, I guess it's anime, but more like fantasy for the autism. But again, you know, I have children with ADHD and they're not diagnosed with autism and, you know, one of them loves anime and loves Legos. So I don't, I don't really know the, if there is like a huge difference, but I do know I meant more as like the, the kind of like the presentation of the hyper focus. Like I know with ADHD, you have like the, the focus, the focusing tends to be a little bit more erratic. And, you know, if I'll probably give the example for me, you know, if I'm, if I'm focused on something and I hear a noise in the corner or someone shouts my name or I get a text message, I just don't, I just don't know. So I just continue in that focus mode. But yes. Yeah, I think that's, I don't know. It's the answer, but I do know in like when someone in my experience, and again, this is not everybody in when someone is hyper focused or hyper fixated on something with autism and you interrupt them and you like really try to get them out of that. It's a, that transition can be intense. Hey, YouTube. I hope you have enjoyed this podcast clip so far. And if you have, why not check out the full episode, which you can find on my YouTube channel or on other streaming services like Google, Apple, Spotify, you can find it pretty much anywhere you want to. If you have enjoyed this, make sure to like, subscribe, drop a comment down below. Even if it's something simple like sending me a heart or an emoji, it really, really does help me with the algorithm. All of my links to my socials like my daily Instagram blog posts are down in the description. But other than that, I hope you enjoy the rest of this clip. Yes. It could be really difficult, right? That anxiety, the frustration, all of that. Where they, they need that preparation. Now individuals with ADHD also can have difficulties with transitions as well. So, but yeah, I believe that individuals that I've seen with that transition in who have autism have a harder time transitioning, for sure. And what about sort of the aspects of emotional regulation? Like I know for autistic people, there's quite a high sort of co-occurrence of this. I don't know if you can, I think it's more of a trait, it's less of a like a diagnosed condition, but more of like the Alexa phymic kind of experience of struggling to focus yourself internally and understand or realize or identify what emotion you're feeling, particularly in the moment. Yeah, I think that in order to gain more of a sensory stimulation or like to stim due to what you're talking about, like individuals with ADHD might flap their hands, might rock, like those repetitive behaviors, the echolalia, repeat that same sound over and over again. And it's, it's to help them stay focused. And yes, yeah, right. And at the same time, they can have difficulty with like intense sensory sensitivity. So someone I'm close to who does have autism, little things might really bother him, you know, whether it be chewing, you know, yeah, noises from far away, misophonia, misophonia, exactly, exactly. So might have an intense reaction to those types of sounds. In terms of like ADHD, would you find that? Because I mean, just as a sort of guess, because I haven't done a lot of sort of research or work around ADHD. Would the emotional regulation, the most modest dysfunction kind of aspect of ADHD be more around things to do with like positive emotions or, you know, like. The so. Yeah, a lot of I don't know if this is answering your question, but even neurotypical. Oh, excited. Yes, we get impulsive, although not, you know, everyone with ADHD has impulsivity. We have a lot of mental or physical activity. We're quick, like you said, before to jump to different hobbies and tasks and jobs where maybe someone with autism will hyper fixate on something for a little bit longer than someone with ADHD. And as far as negative thoughts go, we, you know, all individuals have negative thoughts and then neurodiverse brains have a negativity bias on top of that. I mean, I'd imagine that a lot of the sort of the emotional dysregulation with ADHD would be like more akin to like not stopping and just continuing to like burn for you. You're like your gas tank constantly. Well, yes, with autism, it's more like. I mean, to be honest, I experienced the same that same kind of feeling of, you know, burning yourself up by doing too much. But I think a lot of the emotional overwhelm that I experience, it tends to be with a sensory like almost always like 99 percent of the time the sensory and the social stuff. Yeah, is less less as much of me kind of just absolutely taxing my brain, if that makes sense. Yeah, the person I was describing before loves to tax their brain, but also has ADHD and autism. But, you know, both ADHDers and individuals with autism thrive on routine, even though we hate it at the same time, going back to those transitions. Yeah, you know, we like doing our own thing. We don't like following rules. We don't like other people telling us what to do. But at the same time, we like that preparation. We like to know what's coming that can emotionally calm our brains.