 And I'm not saying that I'm like disregarding like the points that Meg's making, that's not what I'm trying to do. I think it's a good theory and I think it explains a lot of our behaviours. I don't think it explains everything. I'm kind of covering it, just me move myself. Hey! YouTube channel called I'm Autistic Now What, which has been gaining quite a bit of traction at the moment. Particularly with this video, which seems to be popping up everywhere on my recommended feed. The best theory of autism you've probably never heard of. What even is autism anyway? Have you ever been asked that by somebody in your life? What is autism? How would you even go about explaining that? It just feels like autism is so much. I feel like I would need an hour. Would you get up the DSM-5 criteria and be like, this is me, I don't really think so. I really used to struggle if I was asked that question and then I was on a Facebook group for autistic women and somebody mentioned the word monotropism and so I looked it up. It was like learning about autism all over again from the beginning. It was like crazy aha moment of this is it. Monotropism is a theory of autism that has to explain how the autistic... From the autistic community actually as well, which is quite interesting. Mind works and what being autistic really means for how you experience the world around you. There has been some very recent research, found an autism diagnosis to be very consistent with fitting this kind of monotropic profile. And it also suggests that ADHD's are more monotropic than neurotypical people. Slightly left so than autistic people, but they're definitely on the monotropic spectrum, which is really interesting. So if you're an ADHD these might apply to you as well. In this video I'm going to talk about 12 different ways that monotropism can explain the autistic experience. Monotropism for anybody who doesn't know about it, I think it's best described as the tendency of our brains to be pulled into one thing as autistic people, even ADHD as we tend to have a lot of experiences where we're like somewhat hyper focused for long periods of time on a certain thing or a specific quality in our sensory environment that we really focus in. It's quite an interesting concept because it really does demonstrate. It's very in tune with the posts and videos that I'm putting out at the moment. But it is sourced from the autistic community. It was kind of a created term and then it was looked into a little bit more. So it's really great to see the efforts of the autistic community kind of realized in a medical setting. And link all these weird little random threads that seem completely unconnected. All the hell does sensory differences and feeling like things are a bit stinky sometimes. Linking to the fact that you have really intense interest. If you feel like this theory of autism resonates with you, I think it can be a really lovely way to explain autism to other people because I feel like it's really easy to understand when you read about monotropism how this could be disabling, how this is a disability, how it can be debilitating, particularly in this society and in the way we expect people to operate and to behave, but then it also makes sense as like a natural variation in human minds. And both of those things I think can be true at the same time. Before I start, I want to emphasize that monotropism is not new. Even though it's been, you know, being a bit viral on TikTok at the moment, it wasn't created last week. The word monotropism was proposed in 1991 in the original paper describing the theory of monotropism was published in 2005. That's a long time. I get comments all the time on particularly my videos related to PDA, the pathological demand avoidance profile of autism, from people who seem to have like slipped on a banana peel and fallen into my content. They're always like, everyone's coming up with a new illness every week these days. PDA, pathological demand avoidance, very misunderstood term. I do realize as well that, you know, the information that she's presenting sort of contradicts what I said. Apparently, yes. OK, so it is a theory that the scientists and medical professionals did come up with. But I have seen a lot of it kind of fleshed out a lot more in the autistic community. That is probably where I got that assumption from. But PDA, very misunderstood thing. It's basically avoiding demands from people. I experienced it quite a bit. I didn't really experience it a lot when I was younger. It's a misunderstood thing because some people kind of view it in a sense of, all right, you just want to have like power over people and you don't want people to have power over you. And it's kind of this, you know, egocentric kind of experience. But it's a lot about expectations that people have on you. If you have a PDA profile, you tend to really struggle with people's expectations on you. One of the more interesting kind of, I guess, consequences of being more PDA is my experience of birthdays, you know, you have, you know, you could say, oh, it's great that I have people around me wanting me to be happy and wanting me to feel good and stuff on my birthday. But that usually, most of the time, my birthdays are like my mood is just awful on those days because I feel like there is a lot of expectation for me to feel good and that causes me like some level of difficulty. It's kind of one of those things that, you know, there's levels to it. It's not like if someone tells me to do something or asked me to do something and immediately like a PDA alert goes off and I'm all over the place and I can't do it and I just won't and I'm just being very defined. It's a level thing and, you know, I can handle a little bit of it during the day if it's consistent and if it's from one particular person over and over again, tends to be a lot more difficult for me. Like, OK, autism isn't an illness and also no, psychologists have been talking about PDA since 1980. Actually, that's 43 years. So no, no, no, no, no. This paper in 2005 was called Attention, Monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism. And excitingly, all three of the authors of this paper were autistic. Oh, OK, there we go. An autistic woman called Diana Murray, and she saw traits of autism in herself at the time. But it was. I was right, to some degree, maybe not the autistic community, autistic people. Later in life, you finally accepted that she could use the autism label because she originally felt like she wasn't autistic enough. I feel like that's an experience a lot of us can relate to. So what is it? Monotropism can be explained simply as the tendency for our interests or just whatever we happen to be focused on in a given moment to pull us in more strongly than it would for most people. Every person has a limited amount of attention available to them at any given moment. Monotropism suggests that autistic brains tend to prefer to focus on fewer things at any given time and at a higher intensity. So a lot of the downstream impacts of this, if you can imagine, like a lot of the difficulties that autistic people have, things around executive functioning, the ability to kind of manage lots of different small little tasks, sometimes around life, sometimes around work. You know, if you if your brain is wired to focus in on one particular thing or like a very few amount of things, you're obviously going to find that kind of zigzagging transitioning between things quite difficult. As well with transitions as well, the difficulty of transitioning from like work to rest or like rest to to work or like, you know, any transition that you go through during the day can be somewhat harder. It's kind of like we have like a buffer period between switching between tasks, just something that I've noticed in myself and obviously from talking to other people. You get sucked into attention tunnels. And once we get sucked into them, it can be hard to pull ourselves out of them and move on to something else. Does that sound familiar at all? Because it sounds very familiar to me. Depending on how much you like metaphors, you could also describe monotropism using a metaphor of light. So if we imagine a metaphorical room and we imagine a neurotypical person walks into that room and they've got a more polytropic mind, they may stand in the doorway and see the entire room lit by like a soft overhead light. Every object in the room appears to be lit somewhat evenly. And then by comparison, and the autistic individual, the monotropic individual would be viewing the room through a torch beam and seeing, you know, fewer objects at a time through a much more intense and concentrated light. But how does this explain everything about autism? Number one, social differences. So in order to receive an autism diagnosis, you must have what the DSM-5 calls social deficits. If you imagine that autistic people like to process one channel of information at a time, it might kind of be easy to see why socializing would be more difficult for us and why we would have social differences. Especially in group situations. And I can imagine why that would be the case even one to one. Because you have to keep track of it. It's not that you're just keeping track of the conversation. You're keeping track of people's responses and how they act. And, you know, whether what they say is really what they say and they're just changing it with their body language and facial expressions. Makes a lot of sense. In my video about masking and what masking feels like from the inside, which is one of my first videos I ever made, I spoke about how I just feel like I'm doing a juggling act. I've got to be looking at a person. I've got to be monitoring whether I'm making enough eye contact with them, assessing how much eye contact they're making with me and then kind of trying to match that. I'm looking at their facial expression, which is moving very quickly and obviously involves a lot of different features. Moving and doing all sorts of different things that we're trying to code that meaning. They're speaking. I've got to focus on what they're saying. I've got to focus on their tone and what that might mean. Obviously, their body language. If there's maybe more than one person speaking, then you've got multiple people to focus on and then obviously the background noise and all the other things that's going on in the world as well. And then you've also got to think about yourself. So am I reacting correctly? What is my facial expression doing? Do I look sincere? Do I look like I'm interested in what they're saying? They're saying something sad? Do I look sad enough? You know, all that kind of thing. What am I doing with my body language? Does it match what they're doing? Do I want to be doing the same thing as them? Is that weird? Then you have to think about what you're going to say next and be ready. And then when do I speak? And I've got something to say. Should I interrupt? Is it going to be rude? I'm not speaking enough. I need to be speaking more. There is a lot. Giving me anxiety. I mean, there is there is a good fix for this if you are wanting to like sort of approach life in a very monotropic way. Just stop doing all of that. Just like be direct and find people who are happy with that direness. I mean, it's kind of one of those things, you know, it's, I'd say that I'm pretty socially competent. I would say, I wouldn't say that I'm like always, the thing is, I don't mask for the majority of my life, like hardly ever. There are specific circumstances where I will tends to be things which are very like dependent on how people view me, like job interviews, you know, those kind of micro parts of life that are really important and sometimes quite beneficial, but actually like scaling that stuff back and not thinking about your face too much. And perhaps like just focusing on the other person, you know, you can do a lot of that stuff yourself. You know, if you're already kind of thinking about all this stuff in terms of masking, it's obviously going to make the situation a lot more difficult to approach. It's also going to bring up a lot of feelings of social anxiety and paranoia and all of that stuff. You're thinking, oh my God, how did those people interpret that? Did I interpret that wrong? It's not really a thought that I have. I might just have it fleetingly. It's like, is it, did they interpret that the same way that I did? And then it's gone. I think it is one of those things, you know, I'm very happy with not like performing to like the neurotypical standards of communication all the time. I'm pretty, pretty chill, just being myself. It's one of the ways that unmasking is quite important for us, especially if we are kind of struggling in the social settings. Sometimes actually just not focusing too much on that stuff can be beneficial for like getting yourself to socialize more, having more energy for it. A lot to do. And even if you intellectually understand social rules, it's still kind of difficult to perform them on the spot. Everything's happening very rapidly. You've got to react very quickly. And you can see how this would be exhausting for somebody who really prefers having one channel of information or fewer channels of information coming in at a time. It's kind of an onslaught of stuff. And so monotrapism would explain why autistic people often say they can hear what someone's saying more. They can concentrate more if they're not making direct eye contact because then you're reducing the number of channels of information that are coming in. You're not getting all this information from a person's face. You can stare at a fixed object and then your brain is better able to process what's being said to you. I've shared so many times this story because I used to when I first looking into autism I was like, I don't know. Do I have a problem with eye contact? I don't know. And then I remember the story where I was yelled out by a teacher designing technology, very important subject. I'm sure it's important to some people. He wanted us to make eye contact with him. He made it very clear at the start of the lesson you must not look at anywhere other than at me. So I was very conscious of that and I was like, look at him, look at him, look at him. And then at some point he turns around and shouts at me, your eye contact is appalling. You're gonna stand up for the next half an hour. So I had to stand up. I was in shock because I was like, I'm pretty sure I was staring at you the whole time but I kept thinking I need to be looking at him. I need to be looking at him. Which probably suggests that my eyes were wondering and I was looking out the window and I was looking at the equipment that he was talking about and I wasn't staring him down the entire time. That's a really interesting thing that kind of comes up in terms of like relationships and dating as well or friendships, to be honest. You know, someone's telling you something really emotionally kind of vulnerable. You know, they're opening up to you about something or telling you something very serious. Like my natural reaction when people do that is, right, okay. I'm going to listen and then I look off into the corner and I'm just completely still. I just listen to everything that they're saying. I don't necessarily react to it because I didn't like process what they're saying and I want to like spend their time, you know, really understanding what they're trying to get across. To them, it kind of may look like I'm just not engaged at all. It's like, it's like the way that people assume that I would be if I was listening intently is like the opposite. Tired time, which is weird. Like why did he even want that? I don't know. No matter how I've ever come across socially when I'm, you know, trying really hard and masking sometimes I think I do come across well and people say that I come across well. It never feels like I'm coming across well. It never feels intuitive. As I say, it always feels like juggling, like fragmented. Like I can't really process how well the interaction is going. So I think this is why I've kind of throughout my life despite the fact that I like people, I'm interested in psychology, I've been trusted in people. I often avoided socializing like on hidden toilet cubicles or run to the library. So I don't have to speak to people to be on my own to get a bit of a break because I think it's mentally exhausting. This also links to the language delays that are sometimes seen in autism. Autism is sometimes mistaken for deafness. And if you look on the childhood traits of autism page on the NHS website, very first trait is not responding to their own name. It could be that for some monotropic individuals, language itself is actually quite difficult to pick up. Also when using group terms, one of the issues that I think was brought up by one of my friends called Adam Mohamed. One of the guys that I did the podcast with a while ago, he was in part of my documentary Asperges in Society that I did for my student documentary, my uni degree, found a project. He was telling me a story of like the fact that he just wouldn't identify himself as like class or like guys or any kind of group term that people use. He just didn't respond to that stuff at all, which is, you know, I recognize that as well. It's the same, like even in work sometimes when people say, you know, address the entire group, I'm like, okay, it's not about me, you know? I mean, I think some people will just do that anyway, just to like avoid taking accountability for stuff, especially if it's like bad news. But I do get, you know, obviously autism very much deal with language. I think that the biggest part of it is the processing delay because that just seems to be something that's quite like stable through most situations, whether it's speaking, whether it's doing things, whether it's changing tasks, you know, a whole host of different things. People, autistic people, we tend to have that processing delay. And so if you're in a situation where you are speaking to someone, we don't always pick up on the fact that it's our turn to speak quick enough. We can pick up on it, but, you know, it's a matter of seconds that someone else will start talking or that other person will continue talking because they expect us to start talking. So the processing delay is definitely like a really, really big thing when it comes to socializing. Maybe you're just hearing it as like individual sounds and are not quite able to piece it together as words and sentences as easily as other people are. Although I don't think I had any sort of language to delay and it wasn't something my parents were concerned about, there are lots of clips of me ignoring, seemingly ignoring my mom in a way my son, who is not autistic, he just wouldn't do. He would always respond to the kind of things that she's asking me. And I'm like in the middle of playing, she'll ask me about what I'm doing or she'll ask me to show her something or say something and I'll just ignore it. They, uh-oh, show me your telly-tubby shirt on the filming. Where's your telly-tubby shirt? Oh. The monotropism is strong with this one. Yeah, I feel like I was the same. I did respond, but I was just, like my processing was just very, very long. It took me a while to like get my head into social mode if I'm like really focused on something. That was like my videos too, yeah. I do actually have footage of me as a child. At some point, if you guys wanna see it, I have it on like one of my SSD like storage memory things. I could show it at some point if you guys would be interested seeing me as a child. I reckon it would be quite similar to this. You know, telly-tubby's new name was, new name was the original G, you know what I mean? Toby Costa. Even as old as five, six years old, I'm still doing that to some extent. Either it appears like I haven't heard them or like I'm really being rude. So the son of Dinah Murray, one of the original authors of this monotropic paper from 2005, he was part of the recent research on monotropism. He's still, you know, super vocal about his mother's work. He was also diagnosed himself at the age of 32 and he kind of describes himself as having a more female presentation of autism, which I think is how you describe most members of my family as well, even though I'm the only autistic female. He wrote a piece for the British Psychological Society and in that article he says, if our attention is elsewhere, auditory input might register as an unwelcome interruption we would much rather ignore or it might not register at all. And then- The really interesting part there is that I find it's sometimes quite like easier to focus on things when I have like people's voices around me. So that it's something that sort of shows up a lot in the ADHD community as well. It's this idea of like body doubling, you know, just having someone around you or having someone there, it kind of, even if it's just like watching a video or something, it can sometimes just like help us somewhat with focusing on what we're doing. That's something that I've experienced quite a bit. Kind of goes against that, I guess, in some respects. When talking about learning language and it discusses a child who's just been taught the word capped, the 2005 paper says the following, once the infant has learned the word capped, the adult possesses a tool for manipulating the infant's interest system. Disruption of the attention tunnel is a painful experience. Language may suddenly become unattractive for a deeply monotropic infant. So in this context when it says interest system, it's just kind of essentially talking about what the child is paying attention to in that given moment. So as a child, if you were very locked into what you were doing, you may just kind of not hurt your parents. You may have been kind of under sensitive to that sound in the given moment or you may have been overly sensitive and heard them calling your name and you recognize your name. You're like, oh, this is trying to get my attention. And that feels painful to you to kind of rip yourself away from the thing that you're currently engrossed in. So you ignore them because... That is the transitional part of it. You know, it's a transition. You're transitioning from whatever you're doing into socializing, even if it's just for a little bit. You know, one of the issues that I have, particularly when I'm engrossed with a project is that, well, I guess you could see it as an issue, but I would just spend my entire day just working on something just because it's just pulling me in so much and it's like the longer that I go on focusing on something, the more intense that kind of attachment that I have to it is. The harder it is for me to kind of switch gears or if someone interrupts me while I'm working, it's like I have to do a full reset and ease myself back into the thing that I was doing. It may get very difficult if you're studying at uni and every minute someone interrupts to talk about something. It's why I never used to do group study sessions because it's just pretty much impossible. I would sometimes, but I would put in my music so I just couldn't hear people. The child I used to love falling asleep to people's voices in the background. Do you want to know what I really like to fall asleep to as a child? Fire starter by the prodigy. Tells a lot about my personality, I suppose. Diablo, you play Diablo? Vampire themed, very nice. I haven't played Diablo before. It always looks like a game that I'd be interested in, but I find that if I'm interested in something, I want to spend a lot of time in it and if I have multiple interests, I always have to add an extra thing that I have to add on to my routine. And I have to stop myself from playing different games. I only have perhaps one mobile game and one actual game that I can play. Any more than that, it tends to take up too much of my time. In the context of monotropism, autism and gaming addiction, obviously a really massive one, makes sense, doesn't it? If you are focused in on the game, then you can go and go and go. And if it's a fun game and you're enjoying it, and all of that stuff, it's going to be even more difficult than if you're doing a work project or something. You kind of want that to go away and it's not something you want to engage with. It has negative associations for you. In this way, you can kind of see how being hyper and hypo sensitive to sensory stimuli can cause social differences. It's already starting to all link together. But number two, let's talk about sensory differences a bit more deeply. So why does some autistic people feel like they're oversensitive to brightness, smell, taste, textures, whether that's textures of food or textures of clothing. And then the opposite side, you have some people who feel like they're under sensitive and say that they have a very high tolerance for pain and things like that. And why does some of us feel like we're both, depending on the day, depending on the context? Sometimes you do hear it kind of spoken about as if autistic people will either be overly or they'll be under sensitive to sensory things, but I don't think it's always that simple and black and white. If I was trying to concentrate on something deeply at my computer and someone started blasting really loud music at me all of a sudden out of nowhere, that would be horrible. But if I myself put on my headphones and play some loud music or I go to a concert of music I like and have chosen to hear, then I'm quite happy to hear that loud music. I suppose in the- The thing is about this is that we do have hyper and hypersensitivities. Like it's not necessary. I don't think it's necessarily related to monotropism. In that way, obviously it's gonna have an impact when it comes to like focusing on something, but what they were saying about, someone just playing loud music versus you putting on your headphones and listening to music, there's a big difference between the two. One is like you've consented to listening to the music. One is not. It's the whole idea of like sensory defensiveness. So I mean, I'm pretty much always hypersensitive to light. Depends what type of light. If it's bright, colorful light, so you usually find it quite pleasurable, but also can be overwhelming at the same time. Same with noise. Same with like food. I do really enjoy spicy flavorful food, but not all the time because I'm very sensitive to it. It feels good, but I'm very sensitive to it. So there is obviously like, you can be hypersensitive to something and enjoy something that you're hypersensitive to. You know, that's where we get these ideas of light sensory joy and stuff, you know, being able to experience the world in a different way or a more intense way. You know, all of this stuff, like these things, they're like the sensory defensive stuff. I don't think it's solely related to focus. I would say, I'd say it's a factor when it comes to focusing on something else. I used to really boring admin entering names on the database and used to get really annoyed if I was interrupted. The context of the concert, I have chosen for that to be my focus. That is where I am and that is where I want to be. If someone's blasting music while I'm trying to focus on something else, then they're trying to yank my brain in a different direction and that's not very monotropism friendly. So monotropism explains our sensory experience being more intense because when monotropic people are focused on something, we use more of our mental resources on that thing. So our experience of that thing might just be more and that might explain why the world is brighter, louder, smellier, just a bit of an onslaught sometimes for autistic people and ADHD as well. But also when you're inside the attention tunnel, as with the language example, you may miss things outside of it. They may just go over your head. I ignore hunger all the time. I do eat enough food, but I often do need reminding. And sometimes... Here's the thing again, that's also involving an aspect of our sensory system, which is inter-reception. And if you are monotropic and you're interested in one thing and you're just absolutely pulled in by it, it's obviously going to be an additive thing, but I think in general, we do tend to have that difference in struggling to monitor our own bodily needs. I don't know if it's wholly to do with focus. Autistic people are explained as having poor inter-receptions, so they're not necessarily able to sense sensations like hunger within their own body. I'm hungry right now. I can tell if I try and zone into it that I am hungry right now. I can feel that sensation, but I can block it out because I'm really excited about talking to you about monotropism because this has certainly become my interest for the last few weeks and my family are sick of hearing about it. Stimming, how does monotropism explain stimmings? If you don't know, stimming is one of the things that the DSM-5, the diagnostic criteria calls, restrictive and repetitive behaviors in autism. We can flap our hands. I did it a lot as a child. Rock and fall, stoop both at the same time. That's a good time. We might use vegetoids, we might pinch bits of our skin or bits of clothing or tags on clothing or mess with our hair or twiddle our fingers or do finger flicking. Just like little repetitive movements that we do. Why do we do this? Why do we do this? Because it's nice, but why is it nice? For me, stimming has always pretty much been about concentration and about heightening my concentration. It's always been a super immersive. I've described it as being like a meditative experience. For me, I can get completely sucked into my own world. It like enhances this ability that I have to hyper focus on things. So I would usually stim while playing as a child. I would flap my dolls and like rock back and forth and then like play out a story of like what my dolls were doing in my head rather than actually moving the dolls because that allowed me to be more in the play. It seems like it was the same experience for Temple Grandin when she was a child and she was quoted in the original monotropism paper. As a child, she would be intensely preoccupied with the movement of the spinning coin. I saw nothing or heard nothing. People around me were transparent. That's like such a beautiful way of describing it, yeah. I don't know if it's like particularly a focus thing again because stimming is inherently a self-regulating thing that we do. The reason why we have stimming and other people don't is because of our different sensory profiles. I would hazard a strong guess that that'd be the reason why. You know, I'm hyposensitive to my balance to my like proprioception. So a lot of my stims tend to be related to balance like spinning or like rocking side-side or like tilting my head. You know, things like that. I mean, obviously you can have stims which are like considered to be hyposensitive as well. For me, it doesn't tend to be like that. It obviously really depends on what type of sensory input it is. But I don't find that it's necessarily just something that I do always to focus. A lot of the time when I will do these kind of like little stims, like the stims that most people do, not just autistic people, I find that those stims do happen when I'm trying to focus. But usually because I have some level of like background anxiety that I'm trying to like cope with. You know, this sense of this stimming is helping me like calm myself in order for me to focus better. So I get it. Like obviously focusing like it's gonna be better if you're stimming, because you're stimming and you're getting the sensory input that your body craves. But I don't think it's like necessarily like all to do with the focus element of it. This is my personal opinion. I'm really enjoying this. And I mean, no, like I'm not intentionally like throwing shade or anything. It's just my kind of personal opinion, my experience, I guess, of my own sort of autism journey. I realized that most of my stims are associated with being anxious. Like levels of anxiety among autistic people tend to be a lot higher than usual. Your stim is to bite your lip. Unfortunately, it doesn't look sexy. It just looks awfully silly. You know, and I've had this comment before, like I think from one of my videos is like, oh, do you even stim bro? Like you're right. Like you'd be hard pressed to find me stimming, I guess, within live streams. And that's because you can't see the entirety of my body, like at the moment I am like going like that with my hand. I do, I have a lot of little stims. I don't have a lot of big stims that I do. The big stim that I have is going to the gym. That tends to do so much more for me than any kind of thing can do. Perhaps if I got some kind of like automatic spinning device, I would be on that like 24 seven possibly or like hanging upside down. That's really nice for me, you know, like, you know, just kind of set upside down on the sofa and you just let your head hang. I find that very relaxing. You're a lot more of a vocal stimmer. That's very interesting. I do have a lot of vocal ticks. Like sometimes they can have some like tinges of like echolalia in there. You know, I have some ticks, verbal ticks that I do and it's like repeating what people say to me. But those are ticks, they're not stims for me. I do like noises and sounds. That's why I pretty much always have my headphones on, like listening to music, 100%. I love to see all my stims represented in chat LMAO. That's true. Like the world disappears and the world in my head or whatever I'm focusing on at the time comes alive. A stimming can also be a comforting thing, maybe because it enhances your concentration. Most of the time is. Help you to go into a kind of like natural state. I pinch my neck all the time. I speak about it a lot. So I must get on my next bit, just call it, I think. And for me, that's about comfort. And I think monotropism can kind of explain why the movements are so repetitive within stimming. Like why do we do the same thing again and again? In a world where there's so much chaos and you don't know what's gonna happen next. I'm like, oh, there's an ice cream bar over there. It's, you know, it's nice to kind of know what you're gonna feel next. And then maybe because we get stuck on one channel, we get stuck on a loop of doing that same thing. And it's just soothing and peaceful. Again, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say it again. It's primarily an emotional thing. It's primarily like a self-soothing thing. I'm not gonna bring it up again because like, you know, I'd just be hammering, like hammering at home my point over and over again. But 100% out of focus, you know, making sure that your emotional state is good. The reason why it's a repetitive thing that we do over and over again is because everyone does it, neurotypicals, stem. They just don't, it's just not called stimming because it's not like, it's just like a normal thing that people do to self-soothe. You know, like tapping the leg, biting the end of a pen lid. You know, I know a lot of people who do that who aren't autistic. Biting nails, anything that you do repetitively over and over again is a stim. I mean, it's obviously a little bit more out there for us because our sensory systems are different, but it's just a natural kind of human way that we regulate our emotions. And so when we stim, we're regulating our emotions, which can help with focus. Nice. The sensations flow and we know exactly what sensation to expect next. These are people who live in a world in which sudden experiences repeatedly occur. So in that world, anything that's predictable is comforting. Number four, we're gonna talk about special interests and hyper-focus, which should probably be quite obvious how this fits into the umbrella of monotropism. According to a 2011 study, 75 to 95% of autistic people report having a special interest. As I've said so many times in my videos related to special interests, an autistic special interest is not an autistic special interest because of the particular category of interest. You know, like it doesn't have to be transport. It can be anything at all. What is important is the intensity of focus. That is what makes it an autistic special interest. It's like... Are you thinking about it all the time? Are you like, if you're doing something else, are you thinking, oh, when is gonna be the time that I can do my interest? You know, like with me at the moment, it's like, when can I play Rinscape? When am I gonna allow myself to play it? So I really want to play it. It's also, it's quite nice to have a special interest in like psychology and autism because I'm pretty much, I'm trying at the moment to craft my working life around that stuff. So yeah, it's good for me. Makes me feel happy. It took up yoga this year to help me focus quite a bit. Gives me opportunities to practice a healthy social interactions. 100% having a place to go where you're doing something like a sport place or like a yoga place or arts and crafts where socializing isn't the primary objective of going. Usually, quite honestly, tend to be the places where I get on with people the most. I can just socialize when I want to and people aren't like, oh, why are you being so quiet? It's like, I'm doing the sport. There's no expectations for it. There's a really good environments for socializing my experience. Your passion, your level of devotion, your almost uncontrollable need to be doing that thing all the time. And then while you're doing that thing, the intensity of focus, the way you get sucked into this tunnel, the world around you becomes somewhat transparent and you're just in it. Most of the time it's kind of an antidote to all the things that are difficult about being an autistic person in the world. At least that's kind of how I experience it. I need my interests in order to feel okay. And that's one of the reasons why school is so painful because you're kind of ripped away from doing that and pushed towards all of the things that you find difficult instead on a daily basis. My interests and my hobbies and my projects have always been the best thing about being alive to me, I would say. Aside from, obviously, all the people that I love as well, but in order to be happy on a day-to-day basis, I need them. And this, I think, explains time blindness as well because your sense of time slips away, the world around you falls away. And it is often easier to create order and predictability within a special interest. Again, the whole time blindness thing, especially when you're focusing on it, it's very normal for anyone to get into this kind of brain state called the flow state that you hear about it a lot, like within productivity and work circles, you know, how to increase your productivity, how to get into the flow state more. Feeling like time's going by a lot like you're kind of outside of the realm of time is also an experience in the flow state. It can be deeply upsetting when you're interrupted from working on these interests and people may not understand why you have such a big reaction to this. Oh my gosh, the rage I would feel when I was video editing at age 13. When my mom would tell me that dinner was ready, the dinner that she very kindly prepared for me, I would be like, I'm coming. And then like 10 minutes later, I'd still be there. And then I'd be calling again. Relay, I always need like a good 10 minutes. I don't think it's to the point where like my family have kind of clocked in and like wait around it and so they tell me it's ready, like 10 minutes before it's actually ready. It's true. It takes me a while to transition into that, yeah. And then I would have no idea that 10 minutes had passed. My mom would make me little cups of tea all the time and the amount of cups of tea that went cold, probably 80% that she made for me, I can't, there's one of the reasons why I really struggle to stay hydrated is I just can't, I can't remember to take a sip of water while I'm in what I'm doing. So I think that's one of the major things that really separates an autistic special interest from a neurotypical hobby. And the intensity and devotion that we pour into these interests does kind of link to perfectionism. I've spoken about this a lot. Again, in my PDA content is one of the theories for why some people fit this pathological demand avoidance profile of autism, but even just autistic people in general from as early as the 1940s have been seen in research to be very perfectionist, to not really be able to handle anything going wrong within their interest or outside of their interest. Lots to do with certainty. I would say the need for certainty. You know, obviously if your plan is to make something perfect, if it doesn't go perfect, then, you know. The way that I get around that is, right, okay. Like it was real that I put out like, probably just before I started this stream, I realized that I'd repeated like the same text over and over again. You know, perhaps a while ago, I might have been like, oh, okay. That's not, that's bad. That I need to just be a perfect real. Nowadays, I'm kind of just like, oh, okay. It's, I repeated the text twice. It's fine. It's that expectation that you put on yourself. If you put on yourself, if you give yourself the expectation to do everything perfectly the first time that you do it, it's not gonna go well. It's like, you think of like YouTubers starting off if you watch like some of their first videos, even if you go and watch some of my first videos, it's not the most perfect, well-edited, like well-shot, well-narrated video in the world. That's cool. That's just like part of the learning journey. As many children with autism are extremely distressed at any experience of failure and hate to be corrected if they make an error. And this makes sense to me if you imagine, like if you deeply focus on something and the whole world around you has disappeared, that thing is kind of your world, at least in that moment. And maybe the stakes are higher. The experience of being in doing that thing is heightened and never when something goes wrong, the experience of that and the emotions associated with that are also heightened. Okay, so number five, we're gonna talk about insistence on sameness and also need to be in control. So just a stimming under the monotropic lens kind of makes sense. It's like predictable, controllable input, insistence on sameness that is really hard to say and need for routine and structure are kind of similar, you know, trying to find some order in a chaotic world. It's a world that's always trying to yank your brain out of what it's doing and in a different direction without your permission. So you may feel quite strongly about wanting to stay on a fixed, safe path that you trust. A lot of autistic people prefer structure and routine. That's kind of like a stereotype of autism at this stage. It's one of the accommodations that people make once someone has an autism diagnosis to make sure they know exactly what's gonna happen within their day. I have a family member who throughout, as long as I have known them my whole life, they have to go to the shop at the same time every day without fail, whether or not they need anything, they will make sure they find something that they need. Some reason to go to the shop, they just absolutely must go and I can definitely relate to this feeling. There are sometimes things where I've got it fixed in my mind that I'm doing a certain thing and I cannot move on with my day unless those expectations that I've set up myself have been met. Yeah, the expectations thing is important. Like I never heard of it sort of characterised in terms of PDA before. So that's quite interesting. It's like, I suppose if you struggle with the expectations of other people, if you put an expectation on yourself, you know, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to be honest. Like if you have your own expectations that you put on yourself are obviously going to light impact. You know how you feel if things don't go completely well. I've had situations in the past where I was trying to get like a video made and I said, right, today I'm gonna get the video made, gonna do this and my computer crashes and it just doesn't load and it just doesn't work and everything's slow and I'll just stick by that computer just staring at it, just waiting for it to like continue because I'm like in my head, I'm doing this and then I'm going to the gym and they're having a shower and then I'm eating and then, you know, for example, that's just kind of like a routine that I might set for myself in my head. If it gets to a point where I just can't do the job, it causes me like extreme anxiety. I'm like, sometimes even if I can't do that thing, the things after it also like won't be done. Like I just won't do any of them because it's not following this kind of like this path of certainty and expectations that I've set for myself. Really tough sometimes. I'm definitely working on like trying to overcome setbacks in that way. It's very, very difficult, I'm not gonna lie because you pretty much have to remodel the entirety of your day in your own brain. It's like for most people that might just say, okay, right, I can't do this today. I'll move on and then do the stuff after. It takes a lot of mental energy and like dedication for me to be like, okay, let's leave this here for now or even though I said I was gonna do it by the end of the day. The reason why I like the theory of monotropism, the reason why I'm, I have done a post on it before. You know, it hasn't got 147, 147,000 views, but I've looked into and sort of researched into monotropism. The great thing about it is that it places the blame on the people around them for not like being aware of this, being aware of the fact that actually, you know, transitioning us out of things in and out and interrupting us does actually cause us a lot of stress and people need to be aware of that because a lot of people, they'll see it as an inherently negative quality. It's obviously like a good thing because you can focus really intensely on something and become really drawn into it and like make it your world. But at the same time, people want you to be able to start what you're doing and have a chat or start what you're doing and do this little over task and start what you're doing and do this and this and this and this and reschedule your entire day and just absolutely blow your brain out of the water. So that's one of the reasons why I like it so much. Otherwise, it's kind of deeply upsetting and you can end up like crying and shaking in a corner and being like, oh my God, why is it such a big deal? But for some reason, my mind latched onto things being a certain way and they're not that way and I can't handle it. There's a really great BBC program with Chris Packham who was diagnosed as autistic and he kind of spoke to a diverse group of autistic people and the one guy on there, he had to absolutely had to every day do things in his routine at exactly the same time. It was kind of like painful to watch to the minute everything needed to be perfect I don't experience it to that extent. Maybe like hourly, you know, if I say that I'm gonna go to this finger in the hour but I'm not to that point where it's like I need to micromanage every minute that I have because it's just not sustainable in the long term for me. I just can't, like, I like routine and it's kind of this whole trade-off where it's like, it makes me feel good, it helps me stay on track, it helps me stop like, living in this highly like default mode network state. You know, if you don't know, default mode network is kind of this characterization of your brain at rest, you know. And for a lot of autistic people, we can have like a very overreactive, like overactive default mode network. So we think about a lot of different things constantly and they kind of shift and they roll over in our brain and it kind of, over time, it can build up anxiety and things like that. So having a routine, knowing what I'm doing and it's consistent makes things a lot easier because it kind of puts me out of that default mode network and into focus, you know, into monitor, I suppose. On the other side of it, you have autistic people, many people who fit the PDA profile as I do, also people who have a diagnosis of ADHD and autism, which I do, who can't deal with routines. And I feel like, strangely, it is very similar. There's a need to control like every second of your day and know exactly what's happening on your schedule at every moment. And then also this need to not be controlled by a schedule and have complete control over what you do. I feel like that's like, yeah, I relate to that. You know, it's not like I'm always really, really happy to be doing my routine, because sometimes it includes stuff that I don't particularly want to do. It's just part of it. And so I don't always stick to it, but I find that my mental health and like my overall productivity and my overall focus tends to be a lot better when I do have that routine. Every single given moment, it all kind of comes back to this feeling of needing to know that to the best of your ability, you're gonna be safe from this feeling of being pulled out of what you're doing and have something unexpected happen to you. As focus Murray states, much of autistic behavior can be seen as attempts to restore some kind of equilibrium. Okay, so number six, this is kind of another social one. It's literal thinking. How can monotrophism explain the fact that some autistic people, at least as children, they may grow up to understand it, but they may not be able to understand sarcasm or they may interpret phrases like break a leg literally and not know what on earth someone's going on about. But as we get older, even if we do understand these phrases and we don't interpret them literally anymore, often we interpret them literally first and like maybe picture. And then we kind of have to like process it. Even if it's quite quick, we still have like a little extra step, I feel of processing before we can be like, oh, that's what they mean. Okay, for me, if somebody says beat around the bush, I always imagine someone with a broom hitting a bush. I remember sometimes they were music videos. I can think of, I don't know, does Riptide do it? The music video for Riptide? I'd also a six foot seven foot by Lorwayne. The music video takes all the lines literally. And I was just like, this is hilarious. This is a masterpiece. And I think there was something about that that was really appealing. Interesting game. I've talked about it before, but I find taking things literally on purpose to be really, really like humorous. I don't know if anybody else has that experience. First time I've heard another person talk about it. So that's nice. To my brain. It's always been a joke thing between me and my husband. He knows I don't like idioms. And when he says them to me, it's like unnerving. I get kind of like an irritated response. I'm like, oh, why do people say that? It's so silly. It's so stupid. Like, oh, it's a bit snobbish about them. And so he'll often try and slot them into conversation. It's become like a joke thing. Maybe it's just because my brain doesn't like them. It takes an extra processing step maybe. And monotropism kind of explains that the autistic mind likes one thing to follow another in a more direct way. So we kind of prefer things to be more literal and to the point. Again, like. I somewhat, I somewhat agree with that, I think. The thing is that I do use a lot of those, those like idioms. I do like using them. I find them like quite fun. I do feel a bit silly saying them sometimes, but I do use them. Needing one thing to follow another and be neat. Oh, it's all kind of linking back to the perfectionism stuff. Number seven, autistic inertia and interruptions. So when we talk about having difficulties with executive dysfunction, which is kind of like our of it. This is what I was talking about. This is like, I feel like it's like the main kind of, the most interesting part of it for me in terms of like explaining transitions and inertia. I feel like this is like the golden part of, you know, like how monotropism may sort of impact the way that we kind of, I guess, I guess approach the world. So we have the ability to plan what we're gonna do and then actually follow through and execute that task. When we're talking about that with autism, we're often talking about autistic inertia. We could really struggle with getting started on tasks and kind of just sit and stare blankly into space and be like, I cannot move my body. I really struggle with getting out of bed. I always have done my whole life and then also getting stuck once you do get started and then also struggling to then stop and pull yourself out of that and how that can feel very, I don't know, rude. Just in general, in a day, there's a lot of expectations to like pivot and change and be like, right, I'm doing this and then you have to do this next step here and that is kind of mentally exhausting for us, I think. It's as if we've loaded a cart to the brim with thoughts and feelings and then we suddenly have to steer it round a sharp corner. In my most recent signs of PDA video, how PDA feels from the inside video, I spoke about how things like getting out of bed to me can feel like facing fears. It can feel like ripping a plaster off is what I compared it to and then I also compared it to like skydiving and having to push yourself to jump out of an aeroplane even though it's terrifying, like it's so not intuitive. I love this quote from the 2005 paper. To a person in an attention tunnel, every unanticipated change is abrupt and is truly, if briefly, catastrophic. A complete disconnect from the previous safe state are plunged into a meaningless blizzard of sensations. It's kind of like our ability to hyper-focus to get into these tunnels, these deep flow states. These are our greater strengths and our greatest weakness. Okay, so number eight. In general, I feel like monotropism can explain pathological demand avoidance, that profile of autism and just demand avoidance in general. The original paper on monotropism quotes another paper from 1943. One child they were observing was highly satisfied unless someone made a persistence attempt to interfere with his self-chosen actions. Any demand, like even a self-imposed demand which do tend to affect PDAs as well, me thinking to myself, I need to go and make the bed. That is an interruption to wherever your attention is focused in that given moment. That is a requirement that you pull yourself out of doing that which is a painful experience and go and do this other thing over here, which might be why a lot of us have either internalized or externalized negative reactions to other people asking us to do things, even if those things seem relatively small. So it feels like demand avoidance is a protection mechanism. PDA is often described as an anxiety-driven need to remain in control and there are studies to suggest it is linked to a dislike of uncertainty. So again, it comes back to that need to have autonomy over what you're doing in any given moment that need to feel a sense of like safety, like I am not gonna be ripped away from doing this. Someone asking you to do something is almost always them asking you to either in the moment or in the future stop what you're doing and go and do something else. It's like plunging you into a transition that you don't necessarily want to make or that you haven't planned to make. It kind of breaks that up. It's like, okay, my day is looking like this and someone sort of cuts a chunk out of it, takes it off and then like adds, multiplies it because of the transitional difficulties that we have trying to switch from one thing to another and then plops it back in and just pushes our schedule back. Either leaving us like really sad because we didn't do everything that we wanted to do in the day that we planned to. So like min-maxing everything. Well, can also just like contribute to like going, like start like our routine just continuing for longer than is good for us. Always asking you to pivot and that can feel intrusive and it might be similarly as jarring as hearing a sudden sound. I described in my PDA video how to meet the feeling of a small demand like somebody saying, oh, can I please squeeze past you in the supermarket? It gives me a very similar feeling to hearing somebody whistling right behind me. As a self-reclaims like gym person when someone's like how many sets you've got left and they're like waiting for you to do it. If they're nice to me, sometimes I'll be like, okay, you know, I'll try and just like, you know, make sure that I don't take as many like over my rest time that I would have between sets and trying to like actually get this stuff done. But if they're not and they're kind of a little bit like demanding of it and they're really like annoyed and they kind of like loom over me, I'll take longer. Like I don't care. Like I'll just, I will, they're expecting me to rush things and like get things over with. And I'm like, no, my brain's like, I'm not doing this. Yeah, man, like it's a thing. But in the same vein, like it's a very hypocritical thing for me to do because I really like my routine. And so I need to do all of my exercises that I do in the same order every single time. And when there isn't the equipment that I need to use open, I will just like, wait. You know, I'll ask someone and I'll just wait. So it's very hypocritical with me, but I am quite nice about it. So if there was a me coming up to me and saying how many sets you've got left out, I'd be fine with that because I'm a nice person. I'd like to think so. Looking down the street, it's a similar feeling of like prickling under my skin and kind of like an irritation sensation I probably would have described as. Both of those things are interruptions. And on a topic individuals just may feel safest whenever we feel like we have complete control over what is happening to us. Our minds are doing what every mind likes to do and they're trying to minimize the pain that we experience on a day-to-day basis. And that's why we're avoiding demands. Number nine, I want to talk a bit about intense relationships with other people and the fact that many autistic people, you particularly hear it from autistic women, but I'm sure it has happened for many other people as well. They have a misdiagnosis of borderline personality disorders. Sometimes people have a diagnosis of both and feel like both resonate with them, but for some people it blocks them off from looking further and getting that diagnosis of autism, which would explain more different facets of their experience. So you can maybe see why some autistic people would have very intense relationships. If you think about the torch beam, you could become very deeply focused on, infatuated with a particular person. I think we often find that as well as having special interests, we have special people in our lives, people who we are very loyal to, people who we love unconditionally and very deeply. We maybe just grow very strong attachments to particular people and maybe sometimes more quickly than other people would. On the other hand, you can also see how monotropism might make it very difficult for you to maintain friendships and why your friendships may slip away from you because you're spending so much time in this tunnel focused on your interests and like the world slips away and everyone becomes transparent and you're not maybe always the best of replying to messages from me. Very much something that I am struggling with at the moment, like I'm really, really struggling at the moment to reply to people, do emails, text messages. I'm just really not good at it, good with it at the moment. I'm so focused on what I'm doing online and planning and making stuff and doing things that I'm just really struggling to pull myself away from doing that or pull myself away from thinking about that. Magus is giving us a great video. I'm thoroughly enjoying this. Thank you, Meg. Me, the best friendships that I've kept hold of are the ones that really don't require that much maintenance. Often they're friendships with other people who are neurodivergent as well, but not always. I can't respond to your message every day, but that doesn't mean I don't love you unconditionally and I don't think you're like one of the most amazing things on this earth. It does feel like the torch beam. I can't spread myself very thinly with relationships. As a child, you know, it would be like one or two very special friends. It was my cousin from the rest of my life. And then it has also been the same for romantic relationships for me. It can be bad. Like sometimes people might not deserve that level of devotion that we're trying to give to them, you know, and also it can be really great if you have somebody else who, you know, really likes you as well. It can slot together and work and you can like, cool. You know, we're both committed to this. Let's go. You might be able to see how this intensity of devotion might be misdiagnosed among like, you know, other traits. Like maybe if you were speaking about autistic meltdowns as well, then they were perhaps interpreted as an anger outburst. You can see how maybe those two things together could lead to a misdiagnosis of borderline personality disorder. On the NHS page for borderline personality disorder, one of the traits listed is intense but unstable relationships. Yeah, I mean, you can imagine if somebody became very fixated on somebody quite quickly and then maybe they were rejected. Obviously a lot of autistic people, we could feel this rejection sensitivity. And I suppose if someone is in your tunnel, they're in your torch beam. Rejection sensitive dysphoria is a term. It's often characterized in terms of ADHD. I think it's a lot, it can happen a lot for autistic people as well. Glad to hear that echoed somewhere else as well. Jack, that could be deeply upsetting. Number 10, how does monotropism explain dyspraxia? From looking into the research, it seems like ADHDs do have some sort of difficulties with movements more so than neurotypical people but then autistic people have movement difficulties that are more consistent with a dyspraxia diagnosis. If you don't know what dyspraxia is, I'll leave my video where I talk about the traits of dyspraxia but basically you struggle with movement stuff. You struggle with hand-eye coordination. You might find it difficult to ride a bike. It also can relate to like moving your mouth and speech delays and things like that as well. That makes sense to me through a monotropic lens because movements and particularly learning new movements involves coordinating different parts of your body and making them do different things at the same time. And again, it's like the socializing thing. Lots of different threads of information. If you imagine like hitting a ball with a bat, you've got this ball like rapidly launching at you so you've got to watch that, follow that with your eyes and you've also got to think about your movement and how you're standing and how you're going to hit the ball and how hard you're going to hit the ball and it's all happening very quickly and it's a juggling act again. Obviously this isn't the same that autistic people can never be good at movements. I think it can be more difficult for us to learn movements and it'll be interesting. Interesting point. Again, I would say, I would like to tie in the sensory processing differences as well into this because I do feel like it is a separate thing. I know I've talked about it. Rehashing it again. This vestibular proprioceptive hyposensitivity is what I have. You could necessarily, pretty much just call that dyspraxia, I suppose. I've never been diagnosed dyspraxic but I definitely do have difficulties in both those things. One concept that I've actually come up with myself is I'm very proud of myself for coming up with a somewhat well-adopted term which is like worm walking because if you're hyposensitive to your balance you tend to walk in a worm pattern because you're trying to walk in a straight line but your balance is throwing you off a little bit and then you try to correct that and you over-correct it and you go the opposite way and you sort of do this wormy kind of light pattern when you were walking. There is obviously that sensory component which I feel is not related to focus which is involved in perhaps dyspraxia, perhaps learning gross motor and fine motor patterns. The interesting thing is for anybody who is like myself or who might be dyspraxic or might have those hyposensitivities which I would argue are kind of like the same thing I suppose, you still can do things well and this is probably one of the reasons why I somewhat agree because I feel like I can do the thing, like I can do the physical movement pattern if I'm very focused on it. If I'm very focused on, for example, doing taekwondo or lifting weights, I can really sort of laser in on that and do really, really good technique and do lots of crazy spin kicks and stuff like that. I can do that, but to do that, I need to focus on it. I still knock into things, I still bash into things when I'm walking. You could argue that I'm quite a wide individual, a tall individual, so it's gonna happen a bit more but that stuff usually happens when I'm not focused on doing it. If I'm focused on walking, I tend not to have those experiences but soon as I break my tension away, I'm talking to someone while I'm walking. That's when I tend to trip up and spatch is very annoying, especially when it comes to balance. It is something that you can work on, I would say, if you're really focused on it and you want to improve. I wouldn't let that hold you back if you're wanting to go into certain sports. It hasn't held me back, you know. National gold medal in taekwondo, Commonwealth gold, used to compete for GB in a couple of events, international, internationally competed. You know, I have those issues of, oh, it didn't hold me back. We've more so for some people than others. For me, learning to ride a bike was near impossible. It was difficult for me to learn how to drive as well, took me a bit longer than it did for most people. Number 11, how does monotropism explain meltdowns, shutdowns, burnout, just general mental health difficulties? Well, as we kind of explained, it's jarring, it's painful to be moved out of this attention tunnel and if you think about how a lot of autistic people are expected to live our lives, we're expected to live our lives often on other people's schedules, being pulled from task to task to task, whether it's in school or it's in a job or even just in a home life. Like, okay, now we're going here. Bergus Murray calls each of these different transitions wrenching dislocations and I think that that is a really good description of it. Our attention is being knocked off its natural cause again and again and it's really exhausting. It makes sense that autistic people would be more likely to suffer things like depression and anxiety having to exist like this in a chaotic world. There's a page that I really love on monotropism.org. You might be thinking like, oh, how does that make you feel depressed? Depression, you know, it's something that I looked into quite a bit when I was at university. There is this concept called, well, it's not a concept. There is this thing called the HPE axis which is the hypothalamus, pituitary gland and adrenal glands and it's basically this kind of access that access whereby prolonged experiences of anxiety can sometimes like loop around and cause like depression. You know, whenever you experience any kind of chronic pain and I would say that anxiety is chronic pain to some degree. It's like a chronic emotional pain and you feel it physically in yourself. Like over time you're going to get those feelings of lent helplessness, your mood's going to drop. You're not going to feel as positive about and like optimistic about things, you know, can lead you sometimes to depression so that it makes sense. And it's about the monotropic split which was a term that someone called Tanya Adkin came up with. To me, this just encapsulates the experience of being at school and then also like socializing in particular so well it feels fragmented, it feels patchy. In fact, that we're often required to do this mental gymnastics, this splitting in order to fit into a polytropic world is exhausting. Eventually after a day of trying to push through can lead to the meltdown. Tanya Adkin kind of describes a shutdown as an internalized version of a meltdown. So when you know it's not socially appropriate for me to have a meltdown right now, I can't do this in public. I've got to like keep it in. And in some ways that can be worse like meltdowns can be worse for the people in your environment but then when it's shut down, nobody knows. Nobody knows how bad you're feeling, you're internalizing. I would characterize shutdowns as being less intense on meltdowns. Just do it personally. I feel like shutdowns are more of a defense mechanism to stop us from having a meltdown. I have shutdowns like not in public as well. That happens. It's not because I'm thinking, okay, I can't have a meltdown now because to me that's not how it works. Like I'm either having a meltdown or I'm not. There's not really much of a consideration of that because it's not something I can necessarily control very easily. I think just in general, like my default is stressful situation, I go into shutdown, stressful situation continues. I have a meltdown. It tends to be that way for me. I think that's how I spent my school life. I very much shrunk into myself the whole time I was there until basically the end of high school. And then when I went to college, I started trying to mask more and trying to push through that which was then even more exhausting and was probably why I then dropped out which I have a whole video talking about. You end up in autistic burnout which can take a very long time, can take years to recover from is when you've consistently just been pushing yourself past your limits, not allowing yourself to do what feels natural and intuitive and making yourself do what is not natural and not intuitive to you constantly, trying to make yourself be polytropic when that's just not who you are. Basically, I think in order to be happy, we have to be allowed to be monotropic and it's who we are. We have to be allowed to have this time to deeply focus on our interests, whatever. That I can agree with 100%. And I'm not saying that I'm like disregarding like the points that Meg's making. That's not what I'm trying to do. I think it's a good theory and I think it explains a lot of our behaviors. I don't think it explains everything. Just a personal, I think it kind of has some like feeding like it can feed into some of the things that we find difficult or some of our behaviors and traits, but I don't think it's everything. And that's just like my opinion of it. But whatever those interests may be, obviously as long as they're not hurting us and hurting anybody else. Finally, number 12, how does monotrapism explain the fact that autistic people are so different from each other? There doesn't tend to be like one consistent presentation of what an autistic person looks like. We're all so different, but why are we all so different? Why is it that when you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person? I mean, obviously in general, people are all different and autistic people are people, so that comes into it. But it makes sense if you look at it through the lens of we've mostly all got different interests, we're mostly all been exposed to different things as a child, we've been for whatever reason drawn to specific things as a child, we've spent a lot of time on those things and maybe less time socializing and less time building other skills. We may have more obvious strengths and weaknesses compared to other people. I think it's a common autistic experience that people might assume was stupid. It may be just, yeah, because we have very uneven skill sets, you know, like I was good at writing essays and good with words, but not so good at speaking with words and putting my hand up in class. Really, really good point that it's very much something that I think confuses a particular lot of like employers. They see us doing really, really well at a certain task and think that we can like transfer the skills that we have in that to something else. 100% that can be a really like difficult characterization that we've got to deal with and it's something that I've experienced quite a bit myself. You know, maybe it's difficult to reconcile like this person who seems like sometimes there's not a lot going on or they don't always have a lot to offer, then goes away and produces this incredible thing in whatever area they happen to be interested in. So yeah, never underestimate autistic people. There we are, there's the takeaway. We've got different interests, we've been spending our time for a whole life doing very different things. It's kind of interesting though because thanks to the internet, a lot of us have now, you know, we're discovering more information about autism and we're developing a special interest in autism and then speaking to other autistic people and it's like the autistic community has kind of found a like common special interest in autism that's bringing us all together which is just, it makes me feel a bit emotional. 100%, I feel that way as well. It's great. Like who better to like delve into and explain autism than autistic people who are like really, really hyper-focused on autism. And it's kind of good. It's been good for me as well, like to kind of try and explain some of the aspects because it helps me understand myself better as well. You can apply monotropism to so many different areas. You know, like decision making and difficulties with working memory with like holding onto different threads of information. I think it's an amazing theory. It's amazing that it was created. Short-term memory, yes. Decision making. I feel like that's better explained by like Sophia and Mia, I would say. By actual autistic people and probably very telling that oh, who would have thought it? You know, the people who actually live in autistic minds might know a thing or two about autistic minds compared to people who were just looking at a meltdown and watching somebody rocking and then being like restrictive, repetitive. You can even potentially explain the lack of empathy which we know is not a thing. It's not inherent to autism that you will have less empathy but if you are stuck in an attention tunnel, people around you might be transparent. You might not notice what's going on. You might not be able to read when someone's upset because you may struggle to juggle the information and read someone's facial expressions. You may miss things. You may not notice things. You may be distracted. It doesn't mean you don't care. Just this year, another paper came out which Fergus Murray worked on and this was about the development of the monotropism questionnaire, the MQ. Which hopefully I'll make another video soon where I go through that questionnaire. I haven't done it yet at all because I wanted to save it to do it in a video. So I don't know. I don't know how monotropic I am. I feel like I very much am but we'll see. Subscribe if you'd like to see that video. And in the meantime, if you're struggling to get yourself to do things in your life due to demand avoidance or autistic inertia, I have this video of 12 tips. I think hopefully some of these might be able to help you if you're finding yourself getting stuck. And also if you're kind of dealing with feelings of overwhelm and intense emotions as well. Thank you so much for watching. Bye. Brilliant. Thank you very much for that Meg. That has been the best fear of autism you've probably never heard of. I have kind of a few, like I have mixed feelings about this video. I see like it's utility in explaining a lot of autistic things, but I don't feel like it wholly is like, like autism is just monotropism. I don't think it's like it explains everything that autistic people experience. And I feel like other concepts do do a better job of explaining those things. But it's definitely like a very compelling component of being autistic, I would say. Really interesting. If you have enjoyed this, make sure go and like the video. Maybe maybe even give it a watch 30 seconds just so that make and get one of the views. Subscribe to the I'm Autistic Now What channel if you are interested in seeing some more stuff by Meg and thank you very much to Meg for creating this.