 Hey, Thai wife, if you want to get your life in check, just take a load of caffeine every day and get yourself wired and cause a lot of stress in your life and take some, I don't know, some strange drug that induces anxiety for a prolonged period of time. Hello everybody! I am very, very much buzzing with energy because I've had a very strong coffee. I'm very hyper. I'm very, very hyper right now, although I do not sound like I am being hyper because I'm talking with such a strange voice and a very calm and mellow tone that would suggest otherwise. But I am really, really buzzing right now and I was thinking of ways to improve the energy of my videos and make them more fun to watch. So I've turned to everybody's favourite legal drug, caffeine. So I'm very buzzing right now and I'm feeling good, so let's get this video done. Today we are talking about something kind of related to caffeine, sorry about my legs sort of appearing in the video here. I haven't slept as well, which is great, so mental health doing good here from your favourite mental health professional. I'm not, I'm not a mental health professional. Okay, so today, sorry, I'm really dragging this intro out, I'm sorry, yeah, I am. Today's video we're going to be talking about anxiety. Is it different for autistics? Is it, is it, is it stranger? Is it more intense? Is it, is it more physical? Is it more mental? Who knows? Today I'm going to give you my personal experience with anxiety. I'm no stranger to anxiety. I've had it for pretty much all of my life that I can remember of. And even as a kid, maybe I wouldn't be maybe classed as having anxiety disorder when I was a kid, but I definitely got anxious, which is a whole mark of autism. Tend to get more and more anxious in situations. And but when I came to my teenage years, I became more and more anxious and it kind of hasn't left me since that, since then, to be honest. Apart from when I got drinking and stuff, which obviously helps dampen down the anxiety. And a little side note, you, my CBD that I've been taking, I've decided to start vaping my CBD, which you may have seen in previous videos. And I've got a new one for Christmas. My lovely brother has gifted me this because he's very into it. And he doesn't, he doesn't vapes CBD, he just vapes the zero nick e-liquids. But yeah, this, this, this is, it's really good. And it really helps. I'm quite like insensitive to it. So I need quite a lot because most people, they take like a few puffs of this and they feel sleepy and they go to sleep. Whereas with me, because my anxiety is so high. And it just doesn't really do the trick unless I have a lot of it. So it's not really cost effective. But anyways, shut up, Tom. Get on with the video. So yeah, anxiety. No strangers to anxiety. I've suffered with anxiety that ranges from mild to moderate to severe. And depending on my mental state at a certain time and depending on what's going on in my life and obviously exams and stuff attempt to make it worse. And, you know, not having a girlfriend near me and around me makes it worse and not being around my friends makes it worse. So it kind of sounds like I'm very dependent on my friends, which is I think it's okay. It's okay. Okay. So, yeah, anxiety has suffered with generalized anxiety disorder, which is just free-flowing anxiety, which is described of, which sounds very nice, doesn't it? But it's not. It just means that you're constantly stressed about nothing. It's generally what generalized anxiety is and it affects every single part of your life. Getting up in the morning. Doing anything. That's generalized anxiety disorder. And I also suffer with panic disorder, which I have not had a panic attack in a very, very long time, actually. And that might be down to the CBD, which is kind of strange because I sort of sometimes like to have a panic attack when I'm feeling really stressed because after I feel good, which I never really feel good until I have a panic attack and then it's after. And then I feel good. So, yeah, I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not. It sort of helps with dealing with stressful situations and not looking like complete mental freak in public, which has happened in the past. But, yeah, I also suffer with agrophobia, which is getting better now that my girlfriend's come over. She is talking a lot more with, you know, getting an excuse to get out of bed and just feeling like comfortable. So, I start having a girlfriend around. So, that's helping a lot. So, I'm kind of pushing myself out of this agrophobic phase. And it's not very common disorder. It just means that you associate certain situations with panic. So, for me, it's getting out of the house. I don't want to get out of the house because it needs to be panic. Don't want to get out of bed because it needs to be panic. It sounds really strange, but it's combined with my very sleepy state in the morning. It's really bad. Especially when you start getting out of bed, you feel uncomfortable. And then you start getting a panic attack, which is great. So, all good in the hood. So, in terms of anxiety, you know, you get physical effects. You get mental effects, physical effects of anxiety, muscle tension, all those kind of things, racing heartbeat, difficulty breathing properly and breathing normally at a low pace and a slow pace and a normal pace. And you kind of have a pace, apart from the sprinter's pace, I guess, or the very caffeinated Tom pace, which I can say is very pleasurable. So, put some thumbs up for me on that. And I'll be investing in it and you'll see me in court. I've got no idea what the hell I'm talking about. Yeah, it has a mental stuff. It can lead you to get into fault loops. It can make you over-analyze things very heavily, it sounds like a relationship, friendships. It can impact your work because you can't concentrate. It impacts your motivation. And it's very highly comorbid with depression, meaning that if you have anxiety, you're a lot more likely to have depression because they're sort of in the same sort of biological root and mechanism as each other. So, if you have anxiety for a long time, you might be predisposed to getting depression, which is always great. A nice little combination of two, motivation and functioning destroying mental illnesses. Linking to each other. So, that's not a good thing, definitely not a good thing. I don't know who out there is saying it's a good thing. Is there anyone that's making this person up in my head? It's like this YouTuber saying, hey, tell your wife you want to get your life in check. Just take a load of caffeine every day and get yourself wired and cause a lot of stress in your life and take some, I don't know, some strange drug that induces anxiety for a prolonged period of time. The anxiety really, for me, when we're talking about autism and anxiety, I'm comparing my experiences to the general effects of anxiety. I've actually written a literature review where I went over the links between different functional differences and anatomical differences in the brains of autistics and compared to neurotypicals and how that can link into anxiety. And I found a lot of very cool, not cool, but very interesting links between that. So, there's definitely a thing there. But it can also mean that we experience it a lot differently. When I'm comparing myself to general publics and general psychiatrists and mental health manuals and people who also have anxiety, this is what I'm comparing it to. So I've done a lot of thinking about this. And the main thing that I get from anxiety, which is the most crippling, is sort of a full body discomfort. It's very hard to explain. You would probably say it was muscular tension. But the thing is, is that I've been to a massage person because I was like a massage person, a masseuse or a masseur. And I'm a subject to this at this end, my muscles are fine. I'm not tense at all, I'm quite relaxed. So it's definitely not muscular tension. I think it's due to the sensitivity of the feedback in the brain because autistics tend to have a lot more prefrontal cortex influence. So we have a lot more prefrontal cortex influence. So it's connected to a lot more areas in the brain more strongly. And so we can, we're generally aware of a lot more things in our body and our environment. And it can cause some differences. And I think that is one of the main differences for me. Because I get this full body discomfort that I can't describe. The only thing that I could probably describe it with is sort of like restless leg syndrome where it's not, it's sort of a mild restless legs all the time, but it's mostly in my legs. But it's all around my body as well. Sort of like ants just like crawling across your bones, like just inside your muscles, just something just like vibrating very unpleasantly in your muscles everywhere and all the time. And never goes away. It's pretty horrible. And I think that's because of my anxiety, it obviously increases the unpleasant feelings in your body. Having autism, I feel like that predisposes you to having more awareness of your muscles and your body. So when there's a very tiny amount of discomfort, it can sort of feel quite amplified. And I feel like that's one of the main causes of my experiences with anxiety being so different to other peoples. Whereby, I just constantly feel, I don't know, I'm seeing pain because that sounds like, oh, victimize me, oh, oh, pity me, oh, please, please, help me, please. But it is generally just like pain, but not in the sense that, you know, like sharp pain or dull pain. It's just a really weird tension that kind of hurts, but in a weird way. And that's one of the main things that differs from my experience with anxiety compared to the general public and neurotypicals. I haven't had the opportunity to talk to any autistic who could experience this, but if you experience something like this, drop it in the comments. Maybe we can start a new study. Maybe it can get into research and try and understand this a bit more, maybe, you know. So drop your experience in the comments, drop your knowledge and give me your opinion. I will be very much appreciative of your opinion. Okay, so in terms of mental, I'm mental. It's sort of a joke, but it's sort of not. And, oh, my God, what the hell? Oh, oh, shit. I'm sick. I need to get this. So I just got a call from an unknown caller. Guess we'll find out, won't we? So back to the job. Mental health, anxiety, yes, there we go. Anxiety, autism, back on track now. And so the mental effects. I feel like, well, it's true. Autistic generally have a very hard time understanding your own emotions in terms of how they're, because you can't understand when you're in a certain emotional state. It's very hard to distinguish the changes that occur when you're in an anxiety-driven state and you're very, very highly wired and stressed. And when you're autistic, you can't identify when you're in that state mentally with your brain. You can't consciously visualize the state that's happening. So when you have generalized anxiety disorder, which is like a very sort of a low-level or moderate level of anxiety that doesn't really stand out that much, but does affect you quite a lot, quite marked in some of the effects that it can have on your cognitive ability in your outlooks and views and general just feelings on things. And this is a very hard, a very dangerous thing because you can't notice it. You can't tell yourself that you're anxious and the things that you're thinking and the bad things that you're thinking and the anxiety that you have about things. You won't know that that's down to the anxiety. You just think that that's just how you're thinking. And there's no sort of influence from any sort of pathways in your brain or a cortisol in your bloodstream. You don't really know that. Apart from the physical effects that you can feel, which I feel quite a lot, as I've said. But in this state, it can have a lot of effects on socializing. You can just sort of pin it down and say, I'm not really feeling like socializing tonight rather than, oh, I'm feeling anxiety but I should probably go out and socialize and make me feel better. And you don't really attribute that to feeling in an anxiety-driven state. Because you don't attribute your irrational faults and fears and worries and everyday decisions to anxiety, you can sort of let the effects of anxiety take a hold of you a little more easily. Especially if you have depression and the effects of anxiety, you don't realize that you're under them and you make a lot of decisions that are in your problem. Hello? Yes? Yep. All right, bye. Love you. So yeah, this can influence your ability to stay functioning. So you start not doing stuff that makes you happy because you're unconsciously, subconsciously affected by your anxiety and you're doing less stuff that makes you happy and that can impact your mood and you can generally sort of slide down into a slope of depression without realizing it a lot more easily than maybe if you weren't autistic. So that's one of the other fun things that can happen. One of the fun differences. I'm just trying to think of some other things that might be a bit different for me. So this is maybe a bit more of a positive reason. Autistics generally take a lot more of their functioning and their behaviors and their decision-making on a more of a logical mindset. Now this conflicts a little bit with the not being able to tell when you're anxious. So a little bit of crossover. But in general, we are a lot more logical in what we do. So meaning that the logical parts of our brain have more of an impact in the emotional parts of our brain when compared to a neurotypical person. And because of this, that can help us function or stay afloat a bit more easily with anxiety unless we're having it really badly or severely and we're going for a really bad patch in which it can impact you functioning a lot. But again, it's sort of a double-edged sword here again because you don't realize that your logical brain is getting affected by emotions. It does have some inputs on your perceptions of things and just how you generally take everything. So this can impact your logical brain as well. So as I said, a little bit of crossover. But in general, we are more logically driven, which can help us make more logical and reasonable and healthy decisions if we want to. Yeah, it's a whole different ballpark if you really don't care about yourself or anything to do with your work life or friend life or relationship life. Then it can be pretty bad. But in general, most people I would think that would like to have a healthy life and feel good about themselves and feel good about other people. So you could assume it might help in some ways with anxiety. Perhaps one of the difficult parts of it is the generalized anxiety has this sort of free-flowing effect but it also is exacerbated. So if you have social anxiety and generalized anxiety disorder, the generalized anxiety disorder is probably going to make it a bit more intense when you have social anxiety because if you're autistic, this can be really, really bad because we generally don't have a good experience with talking to people. We're not very good at it in general. And there's mostly in general, like a lot in general, we're usually not very good at socializing and feeling like we're fitting or feeling like we're not trying to play some tests or little game in our heads of, hey, let's play the social situation game, which we do have to do on a very readily basis if we're trying to socialize with people. And it can impact, again, the depression side of it. You know, make us feel bad about ourselves. If you have too much social anxiety, then you can start to just sort of whisk your words about and it can make you come across a bit weird or a bit too hyper. Or maybe if you're confident, it might make you a bit too forward as well because you might just phrase yourself into it and be like, hey, do you want to be my friend? Which I have done before in my past. I thought it was pretty logical proposition. So I'll give you some of my time because I think you're a cool person. I'll give you one hour a week and we can propagate our friendship and see if it goes anyway. And if not, we will cut off the deal. I will get a warrant, a warrant. I'll get a restraining order put in place if I do not like you enough and we'll go our part in ways. Good sir. But if we do like each other, we can maybe go out for a recreational drug binge on everybody's favorite drug alcohol and we can get intoxicated and dissolve our boundaries and connect on a deeper level. Yeah, it's generally like how we think life is gonna go. And if we're anxious and it exacerbates our social anxiety, we may just get a bit of a pluck of courage to say something like that and open up to someone like that. But it's not always very well received in a lot of cases, especially if we don't have that much experience as a kid or an adolescent or even an adult. So it's a bit, yeah. It depends really, I guess, on the person. So this is going to wrap up everybody's ready video. The caffeine's sort of wearing off a little bit now so I can feel a little more level habit. You know, I just, yeah, I've got no idea what is going on with my brain. I don't know. I think you like the video. Make sure to click the like button so that I know you like it. It's pretty, pretty self-explanatory reason why you should hit that like button. Don't hit it. You've got to caress the like button. You've got to essentially play it sure. The tips you're offering go on the like button and press like pressure on that like button because that like button gets a lot of abuse. It gets hit. It gets smashed all over YouTube. You've got to, you've got to be sensitive to that like button. And just how you are sensitive to that like button, make sure to lightly press the palm of your hand. Just hit this bit. This is the magical bit. On the subscribe button. And if you're on a iPad or some kind of mobile device, may probably unlink the video and close the video and stop it. But don't worry about that. Keep persisting. Keep opening that tab and... You know what I'm getting. I'm kind of drawing on this stupid, farce of an analogy. An analogy. I keep using that word, but I keep forgetting what it means. I hope that's the right word. Or else it's going to look like an idiot. Anyway, like the video, like it. If you want to see some more content by me, your favorite little ASPy, very little ASPy Tom from Asperger's Growth, make sure to subscribe. Click the little notification bell. Just give a little ding. And then you'll get notified when my videos come out, which are very infrequent. And for the time being, maybe if we get a bit more views, a bit more subscribers, I'll start to upload a bit more frequently and regularly in certain patterns so that I don't surprise anybody or worry anybody. Yeah, anyway, thank you very much for watching this video. I appreciate it a ton. I'm not just saying that because that's a script. I don't have a script for this video and I do like to say it from my heart. Thank you very much. You have been very kind. You have been very kind with your time and your watch hours and your surfing the internet. So thank you. And do something for yourself. Treat yourself. Scroll down, scroll down on that page. Head to those comments section. Just say, hey Tom, I need a bit of the pick me up. And I'll say to you, how are you partner? How are you doing? Hope you're feeling good. Look, it's a weird video so I'm gonna end it here. Thank you very much for watching. Thank you very much for watching. You've been great. I've been great. It's been a bit of a duo here with the hills and cities you go in here. I can see some romance coming home, you know what I mean? Bye. See you later guys.