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Coping with sudden change and intteruptions

NAS79108

Any tips for coping with sudden changes or interruptions? I've read eating mints helps, looking for any suggestions of how to cope. 

  • I find it's best to eliminate them as much as possible. I might be able to cope with one unexpected thing is everything else that day is progressing according to a well-designed routine. If everything is in disarray and I don't know what I'm having for dinner or whether I'm going out later or whether it should be laundry day etc, then adding one more unexpected change on top of that is not going to go well.

  • Autistic brains are not designed to cope with sudden changes or interruptions. There is a thing called autistic inertia, whereby thought and / or actions get stuck and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to try and suddenly switch attention from one thing to another.

    I'm not sure how mints are supposed to help Confused That sounds like one of those vague coping strategies for anxiety, strategies that an overwhelmed autistic person has no access to in the moment.

    There is a reason why this is one of the questions in the AQ50 for autism assessment. This is something which autistic people find very difficult to do. No amount of coping strategies is going to change that fundamental difference.

    "If there is an interruption, I can switch back to what I was doing very quickly."

    The best way of coping is to completely avoid them. Make yourself uncontactable and make it clear to everyone that you must not be disturbed unless it is a life or death emergency. If in the workplace you need to ask for reasonable adjustments to make sure that interruptions do not negatively impact your performance and productivity.

  • I had a situation yesterday, It sounds really stupid, I had said in the morning that I would cook fajitas for dinner and it had been left like that. Late afternoon my son offered to buy a takeaway, I went into a tailspin, he must have thought me very ungrateful. I processed it in the end, I then explained to him why I had acted that way. I had an expectation of what dinner would be, to have it suddenly altered was hard to cope with, he was understanding and said we didn’t have to alter dinner. We did have a takeaway once I had accepted the information. I always keep mints in my pocket, they do help me.