 Hello everybody, welcome back to another video with me, Thomas Henley from Asperger's Growth. You're watching this on YouTube and today we're gonna be talking about eye contact. Why do autistic people hate it so much? Well, today I'm going to be demystifying the unknown. I'm going to be decoding the encoded. And I'm going to explain just why. Eye contact is so horrific for people with Asperger's syndrome or autism. So, eye contact. Yes, you've heard it here. I don't like it. I feel it's very unnecessary and it really distracts me from the rest of the conversation if I'm having to make eye contact with people. But over the years I have been practicing my contact. I've been researching what the best amount of eye contact is, how often you should look away, how often you should make eye contact. And I'm going to firstly tell you about why it's bad for us and why we hate it. But also tell you about how you can improve it. And the ways that I have worked on my eye contact in order to help my social life and my dating life. Lots of lives. The only way that I can really describe how having eye contact feels for an autistic person is just... It's just very uncomfortable. Yeah, I know. It's very basic, isn't it? I understand. When you look at someone's eyes, you sort of get this tense feeling. All down your body and your legs, back of your head and your body. Your gut instinct is just to look away the second that someone makes eye contact with you. Now I realise that a lot of non-autistics do get this feeling. It's not just for autistic people, it's just a little bit more intense for us. Or quite a bit more intense for us to be honest. And it's not dictated by how close we are to somebody. In fact, when we are very close to somebody, someone that we're really... Our parents or our girlfriend or boyfriend or our friends. We don't make as much eye contact with them because we don't like it. If we're really comfortable with someone and they understand us and the fact that we don't like it. We feel more at ease and we naturally don't make as much eye contact. Whereas if you were to be in a situation with a stranger, it'd probably be a little bit more intense. Personally, I make a lot more eye contact with people that I don't know. Because if you don't, then people get a lot of social cues that aren't really there. Sort of bleeding into their opinions of ourselves. The ways that not having eye contact can affect us are very subtle. People who don't make eye contact with people or people that look away a lot and don't look people in the eyes can be seen to be a bit suspicious or dangerous or they have something to hide. If people don't make eye contact but they look up and they look around, they can be seen to be quite aloof and have a very high opinion of themselves. These things can be very important when it comes to giving good first impressions and making friends with people. When it comes to dating, if you're a man, you're generally required to make a lot more eye contact than a lady would. In terms of attraction, guys are supposed to make more eye contact because it's something to do with dominance or some rubbish biology stuff. But it is very applicable. If you don't make eye contact with a person that you're going out for a date with, they're going to think that you're either not interested in them or that you're just very shy and generally that's not considered to be very attractive because people like confident people in general. Even if you are confident, if you could be extremely confident, if you don't make eye contact, they're not going to pick up on those social cues. When it comes to work life, if you're going for an interview, it's the same sort of thing with the dating scenario. You need to be confident in an interview. You need to show that you're attentive. If you don't make eye contact with people, people don't really feel like you're listening to them. They don't feel like you're really taking on board what they're saying because you're not making eye contact with people, especially in an interview scenario. Very important thing to do, very important, and it can dictate whether you get the interview or not because you're displaying these social cues. Those, all the things that come into not making eye contact like shyness, lack of confidence, having something to hide, maybe being a bit of a loof, you know, sort of have a very high opinion of yourself, can dictate how interactions go for you in a very, very strong way. And I wish it wasn't like that, but it is. I'm going to give you a few techniques now for any autistics out there who are struggling to make eye contact with people. And honestly, as soon as I started doing this, it has improved my life a lot. It's improved my interactions a lot. People have a very different idea of who I am in the first instance, and people have a lot better of an idea of who I am and how confident I am because of the eye contact that I make with people. So we've already talked about why we don't like autistic people don't like eye contact and why it's a bad thing for us, why it can affect people's views of us. Now I'm going to give you a few exercises that you can do to help get over that eye contact anxiety. The first thing to remember is that this feeling is never going to go away. It might be alleviated a tiny bit, but in general, a lot of the training that you'll be doing to help maintain eye contact would be more getting used to that uncomfortable feeling rather than making it go away. So I'm not going to put any unrealistic expectations that it's going to go away and you're never going to feel bad about making eye contact with people, but you will get used to it just like how a boxer will get used to fighting people. It's not fun, it's anxiety, well it might be fun but there's a lot of anxiety, a lot of adrenaline but they still do it and they get used to it and they get confident in doing it. The first step to improving your ability to make eye contact is with people that you know well and that you know aren't going to react badly to it. If you go out on strangers, if you go like on the night out, if you go boozing and stuff and you make a lot of strong eye contact with someone you might scare people off or you might intimidate people and get into a fight or something. I'm not saying that but I'm very exaggerating on that, they probably just think you're a bit weird. But try it out with people that you know. Parents are the best people to do it with, best friends, very good person to try it with. See a change in yourself because obviously you may not be used to making eye contact with them but if you can just keep eye contact for a certain period of time, one second, try one second, net look away, do it a few times, get used to it, try two seconds, do the same, go about it, then try three seconds and then after you've gone away from this interaction you need to look back on how it felt and the fact that you've done it. Now this is a very good way to get used to it and comfortable giving yourself that uncomfortable stimuli from making eye contact with people. Once you sort of justify it to yourself and say, oh nothing's gone bad, nothing's gone bad, stuff could go better, could have a better conversation with people. After that, after you've done doing that, it's important next to try and get used to talking when you're making eye contact because I know it takes a lot of energy but once you are confident in making eye contact and you're used to that you can then start to try and bring your focus away from thinking about making eye contact and try and communicate during the process. It's all well looking at someone and taking in what they're saying but if you want to get across your points and your values and your emotions to people making eye contact with people makes those emotions stronger and people take you more seriously. So if you try those steps, they will help over time and you will get used to it and it will be a very good thing for your life, very good thing for interviews, dating, friendships and I feel like it will be a good tool in your arsenal for interacting with people who may not be autistic or may, maybe. Still good for autistic people as well. Depends on the person. A good rule for making eye contact is the 70-30 rule. 70% of the time, this is the top goal that you want to get. 70% of the time looking into someone's eyes. Looking to the forehead, whatever, just somewhere around their eyes. 30% of the time looking away. So I've liked what I'm doing here, I'm talking to you and I'm elaborating on stuff but when I'm thinking I'm looking away and I'm coming back to you with a point that I've got. So that's a good way of knowing what to do in those scenarios. There are other ways of modulating how much eye contact you have with people if you have someone who's a little bit intimidating or scary and you feel in danger and you want to protect people probably want to make a lot more eye contact. Whereas if you have a kid or you have someone who is very shy you might want to turn it down a little bit. So I hope this video has helped you understand eye contact a little bit better. It's one of the things that I've been working on for a long time and I feel like I've really got the grasp of it. There are some times where I'm feeling particularly anxious when I don't want to make any eye contact with people but I try to at least have the minimum of 30-70 if I'm in a bad state because you can't always be expected to perform it's such a very panic inducing task all the time especially if you're having a bad time in your life. So thank you very much for watching, if you found this helpful make sure to put it down in the comments, let me know what you think tell me some anecdotes about eye contact and you know whether you've been making too much eye contact and people have got a bit weirded out or you didn't make enough and people just seem to not connect with you on the same level as you would hope them to. Just let me know, I'm very interested to hearing your experiences if you've got any techniques please let me know and I can put them into next videos that I'm going to be doing and it will also help other people you'll be able to share your story but you'll be helping other people as well and make sure to like the video if you like watching this if you like me making you some content taking some time out of my day to sit down and talk to a green light with a camera next to it and a microphone in my hand would be very appreciated make sure to subscribe if you want to see some more videos by me and I'll see you guys in the next video life is pain very positive note to end on have a good day