 Could you tell us a little bit about like the overlap between autism and PTSD and whether it's different for an autistic person or not? Yeah. So it's interesting, older studies used to think that autistic people experience PTSD at like a similar rate to non-autistic people. But thankfully, there's some emergent research, some newer research that is looking at it. Now it's hard. If you see my infographics, you'll notice that the prevalence rates are like huge gaps. So like I have an infographic on trauma and autism and it's 32 to 60 percent of autistic people report PTSD. That's a huge gap and it's because it's from two different studies and every study is going to have a different sample. So of course it's hard to get a really accurate capturing of it. But what we are seeing is that autistic people are more prone to develop PTSD. So we experience it at much higher rates. For reference, about 4 percent, maybe 4.5 percent of the general population experiences PTSD. So even if it's that more conservative number of 30, that is still like a huge increased risk of PTSD. It's like low population, but a large amount of the PTSD diagnosis are still going to that one. Well, it's not 1 percent, but the minority of autistic people. Or just if you took any one individual autistic person, their risk of developing PTSD would be, I mean, this is an estimate, but like tenfold the risk or potentially higher. There's different theories and I have some of my own theories. You mentioned earlier having a really good memory. I do too. A lot of autistic people have really good autobiographical memory. So if you think about a traumatic event, we might encode it with more intensity, especially if we have hypersensitivities. The sensory experience of the trauma is going to be encoded with more intensity. So that's one of the theories as to why we might be more prone to PTSD. Another one is we have, so I've done, I have a series on this, the neurodivergent nervous system, but we just, we have more reactive nervous systems. What that means is, so we have, everyone has like a window of tolerance and that's how much can I take in, how much stressors can I take in, both from internal and from my environment and stay within a regulated window of tolerance. Still function. Exactly. Autistic people tend to have a more narrow window. So do ADHD, window of tolerance, meaning we more easily flip into a stress state. So that's either hypermobility, so fight or flight stress response, or hypomobility, like that freeze state. So we're more likely to flip into one of those two stress states more easily. So it takes less for us to get into our stress response. And I think that is probably a pretty significant contributor to why we're more prone to develop PTSD after traumas. Our nervous systems are going to have a harder time regulating and recovering afterward. Yeah. And we have higher rates of victimization. So those are kind of the factors and there's more, but those are the big ones. That's, that's interesting about like the more likely to freeze more likely to hypomobility, hypomobility. As you said, mobility, right? Yeah. I might be confusing words there because it mobilizes us for action, hyperreactivity or hypo reactivity. Yeah, sure. So I was thinking joints like. Yeah, I think I was because it mobilizes us for action or we've kind of freeze. I was combining concepts there, which my ADHD brain does all the time. No, no, I do that as well. It's how you think of new things. Yeah, exactly. And create new words. Yeah. But in terms of the hyper reactivity or under reactivity, would you say that that because autistic people, you know, we tend to get into one of two states when we get stressed, we've shut down or we melt down. And what one is very introverted, sort of internal shutting down and functioning, freezing. The other very, very erratic, all over place, lots of emotions, lots of physical movements. And would you say that those, those are kind of like the a good ways of thinking about that sort of hyperactivity? Yeah, yeah. It's the same concept exactly of either shutting down or going into stress states. And there's some research that suggests autistic people may be more, not necessarily more likely to do one or the other, but more likely than non-autistic people to go into the shutdown mode. So there's a study of so there's a study of autistic children who had their blood drawn and they measured cortisol throughout the day before the blood draw, during the blood draw, after they did different measures of cortisol. And they found no surprise autistic children had more cortisol, higher peaks, they excreted cortisol for a longer, and it took them longer to get back to their baseline. But what they also found is that some of those children who were having big cortisol spikes, they weren't showing hyper reactive behavior, they looked calm, meaning they were entering more of that shutdown stress state. So this is what I get this language from Finn Graden, who's a fantastic autistic advocate, full regulation, that this is full regulation, you look regulated to the outside world, but actually your body's in a very stressed state. But it's that shutdown. So you look calm, you look very regulated, but you're not your body's in a stressed state. And that that seems to be more common for autistic people to do that. I love that word. Isn't it a great word? Yeah, it is. I kind of feel in like a constant state of like, I've got restless legs all the time. It's not like the restless like syndrome, but it's like a mild like that. I always feel sort of was that like my like, there's ants crawling on my bones, or there's like, or something related to energy or something like that. I feel like that most of the time. And I like that way, because I think, you know, hiding, especially when you've had like, anxiety for a long time, it's like hiding that anxiety so well, even though, you know, I could be like on the scale of one to 100, I could be like 60, 70 most of the day. But as soon as I flip into that 80 and above, then that's when it becomes like the fight off light, the shut down or melt down. And for the rest of the day, I kind of just, even sometimes I pay to myself that I'm regulated and just normal, because that's what I'm used to. Cortisol. I've done a lot of research. Cortisol and the amygdala, if we could just put it aside, I hate that stuff. Yeah, I always, I always, that's how I explain to people, I say, I'm okay. My cortisol is just very high. Oh, I love that. I'm okay. I'm like, I love that. That's a great way. Because it's a way of saying I'm not okay, but I'm okay. Like, I'm okay not being okay. Like, I'm like, my body's having this experience and I can tolerate it. Yeah, I love that. I find it very useful to use names for things that cause things, because if you say that I feel anxious, some people, they don't really take that on board. They're saying that, oh, you feel anxious, just like, okay. But if you say, my cortisol is raised a lot, and cortisol is like the thing that sort of makes your brain activate the body, you go up and you get too much of it and you get overstimulated and you hyper aware of everything. People find it a lot easier to grasp that there's this molecule in my body causing me to feel like this rather than me just saying I feel like this.