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The Pros And Cons Of Monotropism

DormouseAtRest_25

This video about the strengths, challenges and strategies of monotropism attracted many interesting comments.

I appreciated one person's comments acting as a summary of their notes from watching the video:

"Strengths:
1. Ability to provide 100% of attention, therefore become an expert in your field.
2. superhuman ability to ignore all else/ don't see distractions.

Challenges:
1. Missing a lot of info
2. Lack of tasks where monotropism is best strategy.
3. Energy required to switch tasks
4. Maintaining weak tie relationship is difficult.

Strategies:
1. Lifestyle design- design life around strengths. Pick high reward tasks.
2. Start noticing how much transition time you need.
3. Leverage flow state.
4. Give yourself time to wind down "

Within strategies, number 2; about how much transition time you need between tasks is something I have been practicing recently - and have found to be helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p8BD73xXxI

I don't think we talk about and explore our strengths / positives as often as would be educational and supportive.

If we can learn to assess our personal Autistic strengths - maybe that can help us to better profile ourselves - closer to employment and volunteering opportunity matches - while mitigating the likelihood of burnout.

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  • Hi, I am really struggling with monotropism at moment. It used to be somewhat of a strength but at present it is making it almost impossible to do my job and I am not sure if there are any strategies to deal with it? I am currently doing a life sciences PhD but have for a while been feeling quite demotivated and I am wondering if the reason I have been so unwell and burntout over past years might be as I don’t like the actual lab work (I do like the intellectual part and topic it self). In past I became fully immersed in my project which could be nice but when things are stressful also exhausting as I just cannot switch off. I recently started relearning some maths (over a holiday) and I have been thinking about whether I could potentially do another qualification in maths after this so I can transition to a more dry lab role. But the issue I am facing now is that I got so immersed in maths over the 1 week holiday and it is tugging at me so strongly that I just haven’t managed to do any work for my PhD all week. It can take me days to get into something and also days to task switch and right now my brain doesn’t want to let go of the maths that gave it so much joy. I’ve been feeling extremely conflicted as I am not sure if the fascination will stay and if it is only a distraction or something I might actually want to pursue. But right now I am thinking the only way I may be able to get back to being productive on my PhD is if I ban it completely from my brain but that also makes me feel very sad and miserable as I haven’t been happy for a long time. It is so annoying that I cannot task switch more quickly and that now I feel like I can’t immerse in anything properly. I don’t feel like full immersion in PhD is something I want as it has made me really ill before and I feel deeply unmotivated at present but proper immersion in my new hobby is also not a good idea as it makes it so hard to do any actual work. Can anyone relate to this? 

  • in reply to Ann :)

    You're describing my life in a nutshell (except for the PhD bit, I decided I was never going to be able to focus enough to go beyond a Bachelor's, so why torture myself). There's always something more interesting to do than what I'm supposed to be doing. My inability to focus on what I need to focus on has been soul-destroying. I'm trying not to blame myself for that any more.

  • in reply to Damojo

    I can relate to this so much! I can go down completely random rabbit holes. I think I was extremely lucky that in my bachelor a lot of emphasis was put on independent learning so I could just go with it and get hopelessly distracted by random details without it causing too many issues . But at the moment it is very difficult. And I think it is very hard for people who don’t struggle with this to understand…

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  • in reply to Damojo

    I can relate to this so much! I can go down completely random rabbit holes. I think I was extremely lucky that in my bachelor a lot of emphasis was put on independent learning so I could just go with it and get hopelessly distracted by random details without it causing too many issues . But at the moment it is very difficult. And I think it is very hard for people who don’t struggle with this to understand…

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