 Good evening auties and autionets. Welcome back to another autism related video. My name is Thomas Henley and I make videos and podcasts around autism and mental health. Today I'm going to be covering something that only recently came about in my personal life. I have developed physical ticks, not that not those little insects that latch on to you in fields and suck your blood and give your lungs disease. What are ticks? Are they in any way related to an autism diagnosis? What kind of strategies have I personally developed over these past few months to deal with the symptoms of this very strange and intriguing development? All in the video. Let's get into the show. Ticks are described as very fast and repetitive movements. They are a voluntary or semi voluntary response to an involuntary stimuli. So the actual movement or the tick is actually semi voluntary meaning that you can control it to a certain extent. But the urge and the irritability that comes with it is not. The bodily form is called a motor tick and the vocal form is called a phonic tick. In more relatable terms a tick is a very twitchy and almost uncontrollable movement that occurs due to urges. I'm not those kind of urges you dirty human being, dirty, not on this channel. If you don't personally have a ticking disorder then you may think it's almost impossible to understand what it's like. However it can be quite easily replicable by this simple task. The involuntary sensation of needing to tick can be comparable to your desire to blink. The more that you think about it and the more time goes on the harder it is not to blink and the feeling of relief that you get from blinking is very comparable to the relief that you get when you tick. But the important thing is it's voluntary or at least semi voluntary. If you understand that then you're well on your way to understanding what a ticking disorder is like. If you're wondering what the difference between a ticking disorder and Tourette's syndrome is Tourette's syndrome is usually characterised by upwards of a year or more having both motor and phonic ticks. In terms of prevalence Tourette's syndrome affects around one to ten in every one thousand children and usually occurs in childhood becoming less frequent and less intense over time. Common ticks include blinking, wrinkling your nose, jerking your head, clicking, I can't click, coughing, sniffing, repeating sounds and phrases. Repeating sounds and phrases. Good afternoon Asperger's Legion. Another strange and bizarre piece of information is that ticks can often get worse depending on your emotional state. Tiredness, excitement, anxiety and stress are all possible triggers. They are also more likely to occur when they are talked about so for anybody who does struggle with a ticking disorder I'm sorry. I really am. My experience. When did it happen and what is it like for me? So a few months ago I was in the process of rejigging my medication. I've been on multiple medications for anxiety and depression for a long time and I was sort of in the process of transferring to different ones and trying them out. I was also out of work because of Covid of course so I was more or less going through periods of high and low anxiety that were just constantly switching and causing me a lot of stress and discomfort. It all started out with very aggressive ticks in my arms, my chest, my shoulders. Any sort of my large muscle groups just seemed to be very aggressively jittering and moving. These symptoms would usually occur in the evening. Actually to be honest pretty much every night in the evening from about 6pm or 7pm to 11pm which is horrible and it really messed up my sleep quite a bit. Over the course of these months I started to develop ticks during the day but these ticks were becoming less severe but a little bit more frequent. Over time those aggressive large motor ticks that were associated with very very high states of anxiety seemed to come on at lower states of anxiety but were a little bit different and less noticeable. One of the most iconic things for me and my girlfriend to chuckle about is the tick where I lean my head forwards and raise my hand up. Just like I'm unenthusiastically saying hi to someone that I do not want to talk to on the street, one of those acquaintances that you know but you don't want anything to do with them, comparable to that. Another one that I did when I was getting particularly stressed is I would raise both of my arms up like I'm going to a rave. When I'm in situations that are very highly sensory stimulating or in social situations for a long time I started to develop some facial ticks such as grimacing and because it's such a recent development and because of all the social isolation that we've been doing when I went to see my friends it was obviously a little bit embarrassing and I had to explain it but after that it got a lot easier to handle. What are they like? What does it feel like to have a tick and what does it affect? Why are they bad? Why me? It's difficult to accurately describe but it's almost like a combination of major caffeine shakes you know that heightened energy and irritability with an incredibly annoying immensely itching itch. Very uncomfortable that you want to scratch all the time but the way that you scratch it is by doing some very strange movements. I can control them to a very high degree depending on my emotional state and the situations around me but for the most part the urge is almost irresistible. If I'm around someone else who happens to have a tick then the urge is even more increased because I'm always confronted with someone ticking so I want to tick. It's almost like a yawn you know like if someone yawns then you're more likely to yawn. It's kind of the same thing but just with ticking. I don't know why I've suddenly developed these out of the blue for no I mean I suppose there's a lot of factors in it but it's a very strange development and I'd never thought that anything like this would happen to me. They aren't the devil and they don't really affect my personal life in any way at the most they're a little bit embarrassing at the least they're just a little bit annoying. However I found that they are a good indicator of my stress levels because I'm not always too aware of how stressed I am. When my ticks come out and they start to get a bit more frequent and aggressive I can tell that I really need to chill out. It's just another thing that I can add onto my gargantuan pile of diagnoses and symptoms. Are they linked to autism? Yes well sort of. In a very objective factual and one-dimensional fashion ticking has or Tourette syndrome has few things in common with autism. Repetitive and complex body movements involuntary repetition of words and phrases. However if we take a little bit of a step back and analyze these common crossover traits there isn't too much there. For example one thing that is very common phrase in the autistic community is stimming and stimming is actually a completely voluntary response to stressful situations. Those things like rocking or twisting your hand or doing something or fidgeting is more of a self-soothing thing and it is completely voluntary. However like a tick they are exacerbated by stressful situations, social situations or anything or any place that has a very high energy to it. That's not a right word. Any exciting, happy or stressful environment basically. But what about the statistics? What about the prevalence between non-autistic people in Tourette's and autistic people in Tourette's? Well there are a few studies that I've sort of glazed over and had to look at but for the most part it seems that having an autism diagnosis predisposes you slightly to developing a tick. However a common trend in these studies is that the amount of repetitive and obsessive like symptoms that an autistic person has correlated quite highly with the chances of them having Tourette's. One of my own personal thoughts on all of these statistics and research that I've read is that autistic people generally have a higher amount of ADHD or ADD, higher amount of OCD and anxiety disorder and the thing is all of these are risk factors in developing a tick. So do with that information what you want but in general if you're autistic you're more likely to have a tick. How to deal with it? How do you deal with this very strange thing that has sprung up on you and gives you urges to move your bodies in very specific and repetitive ways? Well I've developed a few ways of coping with this. To be very blunt and to the point the best way of dealing with a tick is just to ignore it. Just let it happen in any even if it's in a social situation just forget that it happens and continue on with your conversation or activities in the day. The funny thing about them is that the more that you don't want them to happen and the more that you think about them the higher the likelihood is that you're going to do them and the higher anxiety is going to be because you're so scared of doing it in public. One of the best ways that I've found for dealing with ticks is to use the things that I've learned from dealing with my anxiety disorder to apply them to my ticks. If I'm getting a little bit too anxious and I'm starting to tick a lot by employing those strategies to alleviate my anxiety it helps a lot with the symptoms of ticking. Ticks usually come in in situations where the person is very overstimulated or in an excitary state. In the short term putting on some noise-canceling headphones listening to some calming music, doing something mindless and repetitive like playing a game on your phone, trying to relax having some herbal teas like chamomile or valerian or CBD if you have some of that and using those very common and over-prescribed breathing techniques to help try and calm you down so that the severity of those ticks and the frequency of them go down as well. For longer term management for the future it is highly recommended that you go to talk to your doctor especially if these ticks are or have been a regular occurrence for a number of months. Possibly they could offer you some strategies but they could also help by rejigging some of the meds that you're on, some of the ones that are more correlated with excitary states so that you don't have them so often. They may also provide you with different avenues to go down, different articles and things that you can read and learn from in order to better manage your ticks. Personally I take to drinking CBD tea during the day and having valerian tea that sort of sleepy herb that people like taking at night because it calms me down a lot. You know some people have these things called calms you know you can get those those tablets that you take basically what they are is just valerian and it does lock for anxiety it does make you a little bit sleepy but because my ticks usually occur in the evening or scale up and become more frequent and intense during the evening having valerian tea at night around 6pm 7pm does a lot for calming me down and reducing the frequency of those ticks. In conclusion I know I'm reiterating a previous point but I can't highlight enough the importance of taking a step back and viewing it objectively I feel like the first couple of months that I was developing these ticks I took it very to heart I felt like it was something that defined me in social settings or as a person so being able to view it very objectively and take that step back and realise that it's just a small movement that occurs infrequently not all the time after all ticking is a symptom of anxiety it shouldn't cause anxiety and if you view it that way and you you try not to and you get upset when you do tick then it's going to cause anxiety and make them worse. Just view them as an annoying byproduct of an excitatory emotion and make your peace with them. So thank you very much for watching this program with Mr Thomas Henley from the Asperger's Growth Channel. A massive thank you to my main source of income on YouTube Mr Patrick Vedy I hope I said that right if not please message me and ask me to give me the correct phonic description of it. Patrick is a gold subscriber and he's a moderator on my youtube channel he's a very awesome guy he supports my work he's sporting the one of the new Asperger's Growth t-shirts if you want to go check them out um god cycled it into another promotional piece I'm sorry I'm sorry but in all honesty you know I don't make a lot on this site and it's very hard to progress to better equipment and better services better editing stuff if I don't have an income I don't put any of the money that I make on YouTube or my podcasts or Patreon into my own savings I use it for the channel in order to grow it so thank you very much to those three people for supporting me and yeah much appreciated thank you very much for watching I hope by now your tics have subsided it's probably wasn't the best thing to say because now I'm again drawing your attention to it but it's difficult to make a ticking video it's difficult to make a video on tics without triggering someone to go into a ticking fit so uh apologies for that and um I hope you have a good day stay up to date stay subscribed all that jazz and I'll see you later you