Autism meltdown adult how to#

In those moments, every additional demand exacerbates and prolongs the pressure. Sketch of a body sitting in bed with its skeleton visible The energy makes me want to move about and fidget and shout to shake it out, but also fills me with a deep and draining exhaustion. On days like these, I wake up feeling like my bones have been vibrating in my body all night. A drawing of a white transmission tower on a black background

The growing buzz also makes me much more sensorily sensitive: noises I’d normally tolerate become increasingly painful, textures freak me out all over the place, my whole body tenses up. I also feel it physically: a gradual buildup background hum, like being under high-voltage pylons. These days, I know that I’m running dangerously low on resources when I start finding everything much harder to do and filled with anxiety, including normally very simple tasks like remembering to eat or choosing what to wear in the morning. It can therefore take a fairly trivial thing to bring them all crashing down. Everything that happens in a day, from needing to eat, dress myself, and walk the dog to projects for work, social demands, other uncertainties or worries, and illness or pain… all of these take up some of my diminishing resources. The gradual buildup kind can bring lots of different factors into play. It’s the things I haven’t had a chance to script for or plan out internally that can throw me. In fact, many of the crises that happen have clear procedures to follow, or they might be things I’ve made contingency plans for. This doesn’t actually mean that I’m necessarily bad in a crisis.

Autism meltdown adult how to#

All my resources are taken up trying to readjust to the new situation - whether it’s making new plans, figuring out how I feel about it, how to react, etc. In the case of a sudden change, the unexpected thing, which might be fairly trivial, hits me like a tsunami. Sometimes meltdowns build up over timeWhatever the type of buildup, I think it is always a reaction to depleting cognitive load, or in other words, too much stuff taking up my brain’s processing capacity, until it’s overwhelmed. Now that I understand my meltdowns and their triggers better, I have observed the buildups to usually take two distinct forms: gradual or sudden. As I got older, these ‘outbursts’ became less and less acceptable and more alarming to others, so I learnt to hide them as much as possible-which was not always. I had always experienced meltdowns and have vivid memories of them happening throughout my childhood, teens and 20s, but I never understood them, and neither did anyone around me. I was diagnosed autistic as an adult, at 28.

Of course, many autistic people have also talked about their meltdown experiences very eloquently, but as with so many aspects of being autistic, our lived experiences are still very underrepresented in dominant narratives. Too much of what society hears about meltdowns, and what gets written, is about autistic kids, their experiences related by parents and professionals. I’ve been thinking about autistic meltdowns lately, and how little they’re understood. If you’re not autistic, I hope this gives you some insight into some aspects of a different way of being, different ways that humans can experience crises, and how your reactions could help or hinder. Other autistic people may have very different experiences, but if you are autistic yourself, I hope you will find something relatable about my descriptions and illustrations, or something helpful or encouraging in the things I’m learning. This post is about what meltdowns feel like to me, what impacts they’ve had, and what I’m learning about them.