New job

Llama said:

How long did it take for you to settle into your new job?

I used to contract and had new jobs every year or two, sometimes every 3 months and I found it took about a week to settle into the new environment and maybe a month to get familiar with the ways of working to get up to speed to do most stuff.

For the anxiety I found a mix of mindfulness (to put things into perspective and shut down the internal "what if" conversations) and meditation (to relax) worked the best .

Towards the end of my career I was a specialist in being brought into IT teams which were either performing badly or were really falling apart (one team lost 5 out of 6 staff before I even joined) so I often had chaotic and conflicted environments to take over and manage, but these skills (mindfulness and meditation) always kept the stress from being more than a nagging annoyance.

My therapist often suggests mindfulness as the answer to many of my issues.

I think it's true that it's probably the strongest tool in our Armoury as autistics, instinctively we react "wrongly" or at least "wrong" when comparing to typical people. So being able to watch over ourselves in the moment and step in to correct the course could be our way to avoid conflict.

The issue I have is, knowing what the "proper" response should be, without being too harsh (risking alienating people when we don't want to)  or too soft (and risking being taken advantage of)

The other issue is that if we keep stopping ourselves mid outburst and holding the emotions back, I think that creates "unspent stress" pressure within and might be dangerous long term.

Also, if the FFF response has kicked in, it's not always even possible to stop as we loose our objective mind to the adrenaline.

My therapist often suggests mindfulness as the answer to many of my issues.

I think it's true that it's probably the strongest tool in our Armoury as autistics, instinctively we react "wrongly" or at least "wrong" when comparing to typical people. So being able to watch over ourselves in the moment and step in to correct the course could be our way to avoid conflict.

The issue I have is, knowing what the "proper" response should be, without being too harsh (risking alienating people when we don't want to)  or too soft (and risking being taken advantage of)

The other issue is that if we keep stopping ourselves mid outburst and holding the emotions back, I think that creates "unspent stress" pressure within and might be dangerous long term.

Also, if the FFF response has kicked in, it's not always even possible to stop as we loose our objective mind to the adrenaline.