Mini meltdown

I am thanks, it’s weird because I haven’t felt this content in a long time. It’s clear to me that that job was the main cause of my anxiety and I feel releaved to be away from it. 

Im also doing well in a dream of mine, I stream games on twitch and as a result I’m now self employed with them. Although I’m not earning money yet as I need subscribers for that. 

The issue I have now is that I know I need a job to pay for stuff, I don’t want to get one as I know this happiness will most likely start to subside. 

Im also in the process of taking the company to tribunal, which also feels good. I feel like I’m finally getting justice against all those people that have made my life difficult, it’s giving me a little sense of power and control. 

Theres also a dark cloud lingering around that concerns me slightly. I’m fully aware that my emotions and feelings can change rapidly, sometimes for no reason at all(or any reason that I can pinpoint) so I’m expecting this happy period to cease, even if I didn’t get another job and managed to get to a point of where my hobby(streaming) could support me financially, I could end up in the bottom of my hole again. 

The other problem as well is I’m so content in my “safety bubble” I’ve adopted to the altitude “I don’t give a f##k” unfortunately this is causing my wife to get upset as the situation is stressing her out and I don’t care. My lack of empathy is very prominent right now. 

I’d like to thank you all again for helping me out of that dark moment, and also for the knowledge that when I’m there again, I know I will be I’ll have someone to confide in, that understand what I’m going through. 

Hope you are feeling a bit better Jason.

Thanks, I really appreciate what you’ve wrote. 

Well it's good that you feel you can talk to us on the forums as it's not good to let all our thoughts and emotions build up.  I find writing stuff down can help to get stuff out of my head or help me rationalise things.  Your partner is also probably coming to terms with the diagnosis as well, so it might be good for you both to read more on the subject and understand things better as well as let it all sink in.  It took me over a year to come to terms with mine and I still have my blips.

If you find having a verbal discussion difficult, then again look at other forms of communication - like writing a letter or email to your partner.  If she questions it, just explain it helps you to get your thoughts and feelings out more clearly.

The main thing is to not to bottle things up and if you have days where you are struggling, then you can always talk to us on the forums.

I think that maybe I’m in a heightened state of stress and I was just managing to mask it all week by escaping(Xbox) but the lack of that escaping yesterday aloud my stress to seep out. 

I really struggle to talk to people especially if they’re close but I understand it’s something I need to get better at. 

I’m also a bit tired with living in my head and find it a bit daunting and lack the energy to “self help” which I’m aware I need to start doing, just not sure how. 

Yea I think I’m finding the post diagnosis a little difficult as I now know there’s no fix to some of my issues. I’ve also seen my gp about my stress a couple of weeks ago and he gave me something to take the edge off(didn’t help yesterday). 

I would say that the melt-down reaction is almost certainly autism related, but not necessarily the feeling of anxiety that made it happen (though this could be the case too.) It's rare to be stressed for "no reason", but identifying the reasons can be very difficult sometimes for several reasons...

• It can often be a build-up of lots of very small stresses, none of which on their own stand out as being the cause. Even if each individual thing can be dismissed as trivial, the cumulative effect can still be very strong.
• Being autistic is often just inherently stressful because we have to work harder to keep up a "normal" appearance to other people. Because we've done this since being very young, we can perceive a relatively high level of stress as being "normal", and so are much more stressed than we think we are. This can very easily allow stress to creep up behind us, and by the time we notice, the causes are far behind us and so harder to identify.
• Once we're in a stressed out state, it's common that other autistic sensitivities become worse, or at least more noticeable. This, in turn, makes us react more to sources of stress. The way you described your day seems like a very accurate portrayal of this kind of vicious circle.
• Autistic sensory differences can include poor sensitivity to what our own body is telling us about itself (interoception). This can make it easy to dismiss the physical sensations of stress or to think that they're something else entirely (e.g. butterflies in the tummy, sweating more, heart palpitations.) Although it might seem strange, the emotional part of our mind often communicates to the thinking part by sending body signals, rather than directly inside the brain, so this kind of insensitivity can make it harder to read how stressed we really are.

So the first step might be to develop a better sense of how stressed we are. An autism-specific counsellor that I saw a while back helped me with this, and her two main techniques were...

• Doing a kind of stress checklist every once in a while; checking my heart rate, how agitated I am, making a conscious effort to analyse how clear or muddled my thoughts are, thinking about how much I feel the urge to stim, etc.
• Complete openness with a few people I trust who can read my stress response better than I can myself, and making it clear to them that it's OK to tell me if they think I'm acting stressed out. They might be wrong sometimes, and that's OK, but it can be a useful early warning system.

Doing these things has helped to to identify a lot of low-level causes of stress, which I'm then able to either tackle directly, or can plan a little bit of recovery time for, to let go of the stress. A few well spaced time-outs has been very effective for reducing the number of more serious melt-downs and shut-downs that I have.

Hi Jason,

It could be that you are a little more anxious than normal and as the day has gone by, things which you could normally grit your teeth and battle on through have hit you harder than you were expecting.

If meltdowns are normal for you, then this could be a sign you are over doing it a bit.  If you rarely or never have meltdowns, then I would suggest it might be worth having a chat with your GP if it continues to see if anxiety or other factors are to blame.

Sometimes, little things build and build and build until we have to break under the weight.  Whatever the cause, I would focus on taking some time out to unwind and hopefully get back to your usual self.

Also it might be worth noting that post-diagnosis can be a little unnerving as it can be a lot to take in and come to terms with.  It can be a bit of a roller-coaster coming to terms with it and understanding who you are - even though a diagnosis doesn't change anything.