 Hello Aspies and Aspienerts. Can I just say you're looking lovely today? Welcome back to the Asperger's Growth channel with me, Mr Thomas Henley, as usual, as usual. In this video today we're going to be talking about the lesser known little cousin of the autistic meltdown, autistic shutdowns. There's a lot of autistic in that sentence, even more now. Autism. In this video I'm going to be covering what they are, what do they look like from the outside, what do they feel like, what do they feel like for the person, and I'm also going to be giving you some ways of coping with meltdowns and shutdowns rather, or already going off track. Coping with autistic shutdowns in the moment and also trying to help in preventing them in the future, or at least making them a little bit more easy to deal with. So if you're interested in any sort of ironic or any sort of actual genuine interest way, please stick around for the rest of the video and enjoy the little explosion that I do every time. So let's get straight into the beat of it. So let's get straight into the meat of it. We've got Mr Autism Shutdown in the right corner and on autism meltdowns on the left they're going to be barring out for the title of which one's worse, which one which one hurts your your soul, both of them, that's the answer. Just as a little bit of a recap, autistic meltdowns are those scenarios where everything becomes very overwhelming, whether it's sensory or you have some social influence or you're just having a bad day, all of those things can congregate in your mind and send your brain into some hyperactive frenzy, which usually leads to aggressive stimming, so any kind of like weird movements that we do, and also large outbursts of emotion usually to do of anxiety or sadness or anything like that, you can have happy meltdowns but those are weird, we don't talk about those, but meltdowns are those things that you see in those like autism memes and stuff about kids having what most people would view as temper tantrums in the middle of supermarkets, which is obviously not right, but they have a lot more of a mainstream sort of, I was gonna say appeal then, but the more known about that's the bulk of it. Autistic shutdowns on the other hand, they do have the same causes and they are usually more of a thing that happen in a specific environment, so some place where there's certain expectations of you, whether it's social or not, and you try your best not to have a meltdown and go crazy about it, but you end up just getting stuck inside your own head in constant thought loops about what to say and overthinking every minute detail in repetition and you know, it just shuts your brain off and that's why it's called a shutdown. In this state it feels very dissociated, so it feels like you've just kind of been sucked out of reality a little bit. It can be both voluntary and involuntary, voluntary meaning that if you know that you're going to have a meltdown and you don't want to have to do that in a public place or in any sort of place, you'll sort of voluntarily put yourself into this instead. On the other side it can be a lot more involuntary, so if you're having a quite an important conversation and you've completely lost your train of thought, you'll likely just get yourself stuck in a little loop, just like if someone was stressed about giving a presentation and they messed up and they forgot their notes, but just more in real life and more in scenarios that aren't like that. Every day things, every day things, and it's usually a sort of accumulation of different stresses and problems that occur during the day piled into one and brought out by some some other stressor. One of the struggles of having a shutdown is that not many people understand quite the reason why it happens. So if you ever have someone that you are in a romantic relationship with or you have a very good friend and you start talking about something semi-serious or serious or important, all of those things can kind of put your brain in overdrive and they only require a certain level of social expectation for you to get into those states. It feels like no matter how hard you try, you just can't use the speech parts of your brain. Feels like there's so much going on in the other parts of your brain, all the analyzing and all the different niggly things that you don't particularly pay much attention to your speech and it can feel like it's very much a large effort to try and get words out. It can take you a long time to process what people are telling you and think about you know even think about what the implications for you are. Although you may be able to do it with a lot of effort it's usually very fragmented. The speech is usually very fragmented and not really much use comes of it. It can be very frustrating for the person who is having a shutdown if they didn't want to and it can be very frustrating for other people as well if they don't really understand what's going on. Shutdowns for anybody on the other side, so people who aren't having it and they're looking in on you just zoning out away in your own little world. There's a few things that you can look for but the main thing is they're quiet. They may even exhibit a lot more intense of an eye contact or they may gaze off into space quite a lot. They may make attempts to talk but these attempts to talk will be very short and very short-lived. They won't really have that high level of social skills that they usually do. I'm not saying that they're high for everybody but it does require a lot of energy and a lot of thought to be able to communicate for an autistic person so in those states it's even more difficult. As I said you can try your very hardest to talk but it will never be satisfying for both people. There may be a lot of signs of distress and some people typically more to do with having a meltdown. There would be a very very intense lack of facial expression, body language, tone of voice, they'll become very monotone. They may start to get a bit stressed out about it because it's not always pleasant when you can't think like you can't produce speech and you can't understand speech to the level that you could usually do so there's always a bit of frustration sort of whimming in there but it's in general a lack of ability to speak and process and if you can see that in someone you can see sort of glazed over eye look then it's likely that they may be having a shutdown. So we've gone over a few of the little basics around shutdowns now we're going to talk about the reasons, the reasons why people have shutdown. I know I've covered over a little bit of the possible reasons and sort of gelled it all together I want to dissect if you will some of the main points that I've you know wrote down and the main points that I've seen in my life. Number one for me, for me, Mr. Thomas Henley from the Asperge Grove channel, I'm just kidding. Number one thing for causing shutdowns is excessive social interaction. As I've said social interaction requires a lot of brain energy, a lot of old ATP to get those neurons firing and there's a lot of them that need to be connected together in order to make you function well in a social environment. So that's a big stressor already on the brain already pleating the brain of energy and wearing out its social sensors. If that's the most pseudoscience thing you've ever heard in your life, yes probably. It's just a vehicle of explanation. Thank you. Number two, anxiety and overwhelmed senses. Yes, you may see a little bit of a pattern in these sort of autism related videos but the truth is that anxiety and sensory overload is a large part of being autistic and it is a large part of the problems caused by being autistic. Having an anxious mind already puts you in a state where you're hyperanalyzing and overthinking the same way that if you were in a room where there was lots of flashing lights and lots of noises and lots of people and all of those kind of things, all those sensory stimulations coming into your brain, it's equally going to give you a lot of stress and it's going to have to make your brain work overtime in order to function properly. Number four. Is that four? Yes it is. Mental health. Of course, depression. Depression for me seems to be one of the biggest causes of shutdowns. Of course, good old anxiety is definitely a causing factor in that but depression for me seems to come along with dissociation. Dissociation being you feel very disconnected from life, from yourself, from what's going on around you, even to the extent that if you're going for a very bad spot of depression and you're feeling extraordinary bad, extraordinary extraordinary bad, I'm going to run with that. You will try to escape from your brain to cope with it and sometimes you can get so dissociated that you don't feel like anything's real and you could be having a conversation with somebody and you could be so disconnected from that conversation that you don't realize that you have to reply. It's very difficult to explain. But obviously that can contribute to having a shutdown if you're already quite dissociated and you've got all that other stuff going on. Damn, how is your brain supposed to cope? Well, it's going to go into a comatose state and it's not going to be able to do anything. Not comatose of course, it's a bit overactive but you get my gist. The next one is confrontation with an unexpected emotional or an unexpected level of emotion. If you are thinking that you're going to, you know, go out with a group of mates and you're going to go to a coffee shop or something or you're supposed to go to it like a bar and have a couple of drinks and then you realize that everybody else in the group wants to go on some wild, spicy night out, then you might feel very overwhelmed by the amount of energy, the amount of emotion that's going on around you. Maybe you've had a hard day at work and you've been stressed all day and the last thing that you want to be confronted with is a lot of people getting excited. It doesn't have to be just these high levels of exciting sort of over-stimulating emotions. It could be some form of social expectation. So if you are very involved with somebody or you know something very well and they're telling you something about them that's important and requires a lot of attention and you haven't thought about it prior to this, then it can be very difficult to structure and formulate speech and opinions and display your emotions on a certain topic when you're in that state of stress and of being overworked. It's going to be very difficult not for your brain to just shut off and try and escape from the situation rather than try to keep going and over-stimulate itself and have them melt down. So shut downs, yeah, if you're not expecting a certain conversation or a certain seriousness, it can be a bit overwhelming. One of the other things that probably won't leap to your mind as soon as I start talking about brains frying up and getting stressed and overworked, but routines, damn, if you have a lot of unexpected transitions during the day, a lot of things that you didn't expect, that can shake your brain under the surface and whether you know it or not, depending on how severe the transition is and how much you stress about it, that can have a large impact on your brain because you've already got a set plan out for a day, you think you know what you're doing, that's scratched, you've got to make a new one up and then if that's scratched, like what are you supposed to do? There is a lot of difficulty navigating transitions just in any situation for autistic people, whether it's navigating from the sofa to upstairs to brush teeth and then back again, that can surprisingly, if you've just heard about it, causes a lot of stress and destabilizes for a good 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes and as I've said, taking on in all these other factors, if all of those are true for your day, an added transition change can cause your body to freeze up, your brain to stop working and sometimes you can have a shutdown because of that. Now it's all doom and gloom in the Asperger's Growth channel today, on the Asperger's Growth video in the Asperger's Growth house, but what can we do about it? What can we do in the moment? Well, just as the advice goes for panic attacks, just as the advice goes for mountdowns, the one thing, the one main thing that you always gotta have in your mind is try and see it through, try and accept that you're gonna feel like this for a certain amount of time and do some things that don't require a lot of mental effort but are somewhat enjoyable and somewhat grasp your concentration. For example, if I'm having a shutdown, the best thing that I can do is take myself of any type of social environment, shut myself somewhere small, like a toilet, play some mindless games that require no mental thought at all, maybe other than just like clicking and just listen to some calming music and try and write it out until I feel like I can verbalize a bit better. In terms of things that you can do after once it's your brain has retrieved some energy and has got out of those little thought loops that keep going around in your brain, then you can start putting in place things to help in the future. Number one thing you can do is try and think of all the factors that led you to having a shutdown. Have they been controlled? Is there any way that you can control those factors that happen around you to a better ability? Maybe you can't, maybe it's just one of those off days that you can't control. But there is always an element of I could keep this in check more. I could invest in some noise-canceling headphones to help with the walk from home. I could have a little bit of downtime after work instead of trying to cram in some routine that I've got set up in my brain. There's a lot of things that you can do and it's always individual to the person. So if you see something in yourself that happens a lot before you have a shutdown you need to write that down and you need to think of ways that you can navigate around it or at least make it a little bit easier. One of the important things to think about as well is if you have a shutdown amongst other people. So if you have a shutdown in front of your good friend or you have a shutdown in front of your partner it's always extremely extremely important to let them know what is happening. What a shutdown is, the specifics of it, the way that affects your brain, what it feels like, the ways that they can help, the ways that they can notice that you're going through it and tell them. Because even if they are very open to listening and they do understand your autism to a certain degree no one can ever give another person a full appreciation to what a shutdown is like so you have to explain it to them in your own personal way and cover it and let them know because it is important and for some people autistic people having shutdowns in response to something that they've said can feel bad for them and it can make them feel like it's a very personal thing which it isn't of course. Hopefully you guys have got something from this video I put some time and work into it as usual but you don't need to hear that. YouTubers don't have lives they're just on camera they're videos spoof out of nowhere they're just shimmy on in there onto YouTube with no editing with no prior script writing and no effort on camera. I don't know why I'm going with this honestly I don't know. I just want to take a minute to appreciate this lovely mug that I have been sent very recently by one of my subscribers called David so if you're watching this David shout out to you thank you for this lovely mug I have told you that I struggle very much to drink water so I've got some water in here to drink throughout my video so thank you very much David I'm gonna have a nice little sip of that hmm H2O it is also extremely important that I give one of my new patreons part of the elite subscriber squad Cheryl thank you very much Cheryl for supporting me on my youtubeing media journey you know any sort of support for the channel is is really you know I feel very grateful for it and it's never expected but it's always nice just to have a little bit of income that goes into the channel and it will always be used for the channel and it will always be put back into it for equipment and stuff so if we get more patreon subscribers and we get more more money rolling in maybe we'll be able to get some new equipment and do some more big projects and Cheryl thank you so much for being a part of that and pushing my channel forwards if you haven't already checked out my social medias of course they're down there go check them out you can also find them on the little banner on my profile youtube profile and if you haven't already checked out the 4080 podcast we're getting we're getting through some episodes on this guys it's it's looking good we've got a new set of people from instagram got a lot of instagram influencers coming on to the podcast talking about autism talking about mental health come come join in on the podcast it's free on Spotify and I've not put any advertisements on it yet so make the most of it while they're not there this has been Mr. Thomas only from from the asperger's grove youtube channel this is a shut down example this is what happens god damn it i've actually i've actually done it to myself i was gonna do it as a spoof but it's it's actually happened see you later guys nice to have you on this channel out the move back