who else has the forbidding and incomputable Pile of Mail 💀

mood: currently opening mail 1 week to 4 months old because I know there's a $7 check in it somewhere that'll pay for gas money for my friend to drag my ass around town and to the pot shop

I'm crossposting this widely because every single person with a noise sensitivity who previously tried noise-canceling headphones and found them not useful should know: it might be time to give the technology another shot.

This is a plug for a product. I'm not getting paid for it. I'm actually broke and couchsurfing and unable to work (until now maybe????) due to noise sensitivity, so if this info changes your life, I will put my tip jar in my profile after I post this :)

The story

I got a pair of Sony WH-CH720N for Christmas this year.

I had noise-canceling headphones on my wish list, but very low down, as previously I'd tried a couple pairs, including the expensive and highly-rated Bose QC III, and found them very lacking.

My experience with older headphones: the noise canceling was pretty good, but they caused a pressure sensation on my ears which I can only describe as like having a piece of meat behind saran wrap pressed against my eardrum. They also used to be a lot heavier than the WH-CH720N is. Both these factors made them very hard to wear for any length of time (for me) and greatly limited their usefulness.

So, I put the Sony model on my wish list more because I need a solution for wireless-from-my-laptop Zoom calls and don't have one, and less for the noise canceling feature.

My experience

I'm really impressed with these headphones, especially at the $99 price point.

The noise canceling feature isn't an absolute miracle, but it's very very good, equal or better to the Bose QC III which retailed for more than 3x the price back when it was new.

The weird ear pressure sensation is drastically better than with older noise canceling headphones. It's not nonexistent, and it does tend to flare up with certain bass sounds (like people stomping on hardwood floors), but it's waaaaaaaay better than older models I've tried, to the point where I can wear the Sony model for hours without fatigue from ear pressure.

The WH-CH720N headphones are not durable. They do seem a bit delicate. This is their weak point. But they are very lightweight!! This makes it much easier to wear them for extended periods. If you need to carry them around, maybe there is some kind of headphone case that can be found? I will be looking, and if I find one, will post in the comments on the orig post at lemmy dot ml slash c slash autistic_adults.

So anyway. Hopefully this helps somebody out.

Personally, my noise sensitivity is destroying my life - keeping me penniless and semi-homeless due to inability to work - and getting these 'phones for Christmas changed my entire idea of how noise canceling tech might help me out of this situation, after previous disappointing experiences.

What is this??? I know some of you have experienced it, because on very rare occasion it's come up in the past on other autism discussion groups I've been a part of. Sometimes somebody will make a post about burnout and say something like "the knowledge just fell out of my head" when talking about trying to work/think about complex topics while burnt out.

In my case, once I get too burnt out from overstimulation or nonstop social exposure, I get cognitive effects that last for days or weeks afterwards. In some sense, I get "dumber." But this isn't that, exactly, though I'm sure it's related.

Background, and an example: I do web & software development for work. I also live in a place which is a poor fit for my sensitivities, so I've been in chronic burnout for years, and I'm pushed further into acute high-intensity (as in, I become "lower functioning") burnout a few times a year.

I find that once I pass a certain point in burnout, I get to the point where I need to do a complex task, such as some web dev work, or for another example, filling out a bunch of government forms to keep some critical benefit or another flowing while I figure this all out. And I get inertia. But the inertia feels different than the usual inertia. The only way I can describe it is that it feels like in order to do the task, it's going to "rope in" knowledge of so many related things, that my brain realizes it's going to become overloaded and just sort of freezes up and deadlocks at the prospect.

These are tasks that require a good deal of focus and thinking, but which are well within my ability when I'm able to meet my sensory needs.

Anyway ... just wanted to make a thread for speculation and chatting about this, I guess. What is it? Demand avoidance? Conditioned response? Creepily accurate emotional representation of some kind of actual brain overload failure condition??

This study is unique in considering difficulty initiating tasks of any type in real life settings, and by gathering qualitative data directly from autistic people. Four face-to-face and 2 online (text) focus groups were conducted with 32 autistic adults (19 female, 8 male, and 5 other), aged 23–64 who were able to express their internal experiences in words.

[...] Participants described difficulty starting, stopping and changing activities that was not within their conscious control. While difficulty with planning was common, a subset of participants described a profound impairment in initiating even simple actions more suggestive of a movement disorder. Prompting and compatible activity in the environment promoted action, while mental health difficulties and stress exacerbated difficulties. Inertia had pervasive effects on participants’ day-to-day activities and wellbeing.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/5546920

As someone facing homelessness myself due to issues beyond my control, I just wanted people to know they're not alone.

These conditions are real, and people's misunderstanding - and willful refusal to understand - wrecks lives.

I hope you can get to a safe place where you can exist in your own skin in peace.

As someone facing homelessness myself due to issues beyond my control, I just wanted people to know they're not alone.

These conditions are real, and people's misunderstanding - and willful refusal to understand - wrecks lives.

I hope you can get to a safe place where you can exist in your own skin in peace.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/5236945

I'm curious if anyone out there reading who lives with ADHD and/or ASD w/executive dysfunction ... when it comes to tasks that aren't just your own but that involve (or are needed by) others, for example household tasks when living with others ... do you find that you actually need consensus and/or discussion on the topic of tasks in order to get them done?

What I'm realizing is that for me, part of executive dysfunction means I don't have the internal watchdog that keeps track of stuff I need to do in relation to others, and just personally speaking I cannot rely on (or be tormented by) guilt as a way to work around the lack of a watchdog.

The one thing that does work for me is talking about it with the people involved, especially if they are people I respect or care about. Either coming to consensus, or at least maintaining shared understanding of the shared space / task list / etc. For some reason, the process of coming to a shared-state perspective on shared effort, and understanding how my responsibilities impact others and at what time others need me to have completed them, is like sprinkling magic pixie dust on the task-item in my brain that allows me to remember it exists at all once it's 5 days later in the week or whatever. I still suck at scheduling and prioritizing and whatnot, but at least I remember the damn task exists and am trying to get it done!

The reason I've figured all this out is kinda grim, long story short I ended up on my ass about 10 years ago, and lost my home about 7 years ago, and then people took me in... and those people don't do the above. They don't discuss things and they don't build consensus or shared state, they just do stuff. And it's utterly and completely paralyzing because I spent the first 3 decades of my life living with people who did discuss things that affect others around them, and now my entire repertoire of human behavior is based on the premise that people attempt to keep each other informed like this, and that's just not the case for a great number of people.

And that process of communication or shared-state rehashing, which I thought all humans engaged in because both my parents did and almost everybody I lived with early in life did, is absolutely critical to wallpapering over my lack of ability to keep track of / remember that tasks exist, especially as my level of overwhelm gets high or my energy gets low.

What really made this sink in was remembering that my dad had endless conflicts with a kid of his from another marriage when he would go to visit, because she also doesn't communicate like this, and just like me, my dad was also absolutely critically dependent on it in order to be able to do anything at all really. In fact that's how I realized that he had a very similar neurological profile to me. In some ways our behavior is starkly alike and now I understand why.

BTW, that dad who almost certainly would be diagnosed with the same dreamy 'primarily inattentive' adult ADHD that I have today, got a Ph.D., retired as a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force, and went on to lead a small college language department and then have a long retirement doing occasional work in advanced linguistics. He later decided to learn Italian, and succeeded, in his 70s. Every time in his life when he had either autonomy and resources to do his own thing, or external structure + social glue that agreed with him, he was able to excel. Without those conditions, he would drift badly and become depressed. Understanding this has helped me understanding myself. My dad was a poor parent in a lot of other ways, but his ability to succeed when he had enough pieces of the puzzle does give me hope.

I suspect this probably varies across the entire population to some degree, but for me it feels like my senses and my mind aren't fully "bound together" properly when I wake up, and it takes a while of being conscious, QUIETLY, for them to come together and be functioning right. This process takes far longer if I'm in a state of serious/chronic burnout, up to several hours.

If I skip it and jump directly into activity, things usually stabilize quicker, but in a crappy muddled way, and much of my day can be off, I feel dumber, forget things, lower threshold for confusion/distress from random events, etc.

I've been lurking/participating in forums for people on the spectrum long enough that I see "issues with being perceived" type posts pop up every so often. This is relieving to me because I have issues like that, and they are difficult for anyone who doesn't experience them to understand. So it's nice not to feel alone in that way.

I have noticed a definite pattern after months of reading every one of these posts I came across. I think there are two forms of "my desire not to be perceived is causing me distress / avoidance / ineffective behavior" and would like people's thoughts on this.

1. Some people fear being perceived, or have a great deal of what they very clearly understand as anxiety around being perceived. I have a little of this going on but it's by far the lesser portion of my issues being perceived.*

2. Other people seem to have much more trouble with the cognitive load of being perceived. This is the much bigger problem for me. Once another human being is in the same space, some part of me becomes continuously aware of their presence, and devotes a non-negligible amount of energy & mental bandwidth processing ... things ... related to that. It's often enough to make me less effective at what I'm trying to do. This can eventually lead to anxiety, but I'm fairly sure the primary emotion here is not anxiety but... avoidance? exhaustion? at the processing demand required to exist in the same space with others. It is also a much larger issue when I am already burnt out or tired. But the end result is the same as if the culprit were simply "anxiety:" I'll avoid doing things I need to do if the cost seems too much.

I think part of the "cognitive load" issue I just described is in fact directly related to my executive dysfunction. Human beings doing things nearby are one of the most distracting stimuli to me (I'm diagnosed ADHD as well). So if I'm trying to do a task, and somebody shows up nearby, even if they aren't interacting with me, it's quite possible for my ability to perform at the task to get noticeably worse once they are there.

As you can imagine, experiencing this enough times leads to emotions, which leads to a "complex" as they liked to call it in the 70s. In my case, I'm fully convinced there are both biological reasons for my bullshit - after all, I get mesmerized by televisions too, something is clearly going on - and conditioned responses that aren't helpful. Would be nice if I could keep a shrink long enough to get some CBT for the latter, but that's not how it works in the USA if you're poor.

Anyway I would love to hear any other thoughts or experiences having to do with Being Perceived as it applies to us!

...

* If you're the type of person who occasionally hurries to get around a corner before someone walking a ways behind you can round their corner and continue having you in sight, or if you're the type of person who will occasionally beat a hasty retreat when someone is arriving who has nothing to do with you, you probably understand this type of perception anxiety to some degree.

I encourage anyone who wants to see more traffic, and has the resources to do so, to create a throwaway account and confess some personal shit on here!! chances are if you do, somebody else out there will end up feeling less alone. that's exactly what I'm doing 😃

before realizing I'm on the spectrum I've been to some support groups for other conditions as well as going thru DBT, and one thing I realized is that sometimes it's cool to have a space to just put your stuff on the table, and everybody else has done so to some extent as well, and you can approach each other as human beings with less pretense because they already know your stuff unlike everyone in "real life" who you're trying to impress.

anyway. try it out! and then ghost the account in a few days/weeks/months, or don't.

but we all know adults on the spectrum have basically no resources. getting some traffic going here could turn this into one.