 Neurodivergent people often find themselves stuck in a state of chronic stress. Here are some thoughts on why this happens and what you can do to get unstuck.
If you are neurodivergent, you may feel like you are always stuck in a heightened state of threat. You may even think this is part of your wiring and that there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m not really crazy about using metaphors comparing humans to machines, but since talking about our ‘wiring’ seems to click for so many people, I’m going to go with it for now. But rather than thinking of it as your wiring, I prefer to think of it as your ‘default settings.’ Settings is the key word here. As anyone with a phone or a laptop can tell you, settings can always be tweaked. But since humans are much more complex than machines, it can be harder to figure out how to adjust your internal settings. Especially if you have alexithymia (which co-occurs frequently with neurodivergence), meaning that interpreting the signals coming from within you is an ongoing challenge. Having a clearer understanding of what is really going on inside your body can help demystify some of this, so let’s see if we can sort some of it out. Try visualizing for a moment a sound mixing board, such as those used by musicians when recording (see image above). These boards are filled with sliders, so you can adjust the mix of the overall sound in a variety of ways. Boost the bass a bit, bring down those high frequencies a tad, enhance those background vocals so they pop, etc. Your body’s internal settings have some similarities. You will hear people talking about things like ‘hormonal balance,’ for instance, and may have pictured balanced hormones as nice, neat, steady lines. But your hormones actually rely on a constant state of fluctuation to work properly! A snapshot of what your hormones are doing at any given moment would look more like a sound mixing board with the sliders all in different places. Consider the hormone insulin, for example. Every time you eat something, insulin levels are going to rise. Ok, simple enough. But did you know that when insulin is being released, growth hormone cannot be released? Insulin and growth hormone take turns (or they are supposed to, anyhow). Growth hormone is what is responsible for a lot of repair work that happens in the body. It goes to places where there is inflammation and starts fixing the problem. This is why constant grazing throughout the day can lead to excess inflammation—if your insulin is always being released, repair work is being suppressed in the body. Good to know! Now let’s look for a moment at stress hormones. Like insulin, stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are considered especially critical for our survival. They get released when the body thinks we are under threat. If we have the adrenaline to run at top speed and escape from a predator, it can save our life. Unfortunately in the modern world, our threat response often gets triggered by things that are not actually life threatening, and this creates some problems. Because our bodies are always going to prioritize survival, it will release high amounts of those hormones at the expense of other hormones that are seen as less critical. Reproductive hormones, for example, are not ‘critical.’ If reproduction can’t happen this month, it can always happen next month. We have decades to procreate, and maybe only minutes to escape from this tiger… So when our stress hormones are constantly getting released, it uses up the raw materials that make the other hormones that we need for the day-to-day maintenance of our bodies. Rest and repair? That can wait. So can digestion. And so on… You don’t really need a super complex understanding of all the hormones in your body to get the idea here. To me, just the concept of the slider adjusting levels has been helpful. When I notice that my stress response has been activated, I ask myself “Am I really in danger right now?” And fortunately, the answer is usually no. I then visualize my internal sound board of hormones and imagine the stress slider being cranked up all the way to the top. I then visualize gently bringing the level down. As I imagine that slider going down, I then imagine my rest-and-repair slider going up. I think part of why this visualization has helped me so much is that I used to feel like things were completely on or completely off. More like a light switch than a slider. If you have alexithymia, it can feel like all or nothing, because things don't register until they are REALLY cranked up or bottomed out. For anyone who feels fine one minute, and really angry or overwhelmed the next, the same principle is often at work here. The steps in between are just not registering. It can be really hard to calm down the stress response if we think it is all or nothing. But if we train ourselves to start thinking of small steps it becomes a little easier. What would help me get one notch calmer right now? That’s going to be something simpler to solve than trying to go from being completely activated to completely calm in one fell swoop. Starting to notice those little notches can also help you recognize when things are starting to escalate. And wow…it is so much easier to de-escalate before you are fully activated than to try to calm down once you’re in full-on meltdown mode. You can also think of those little incremental notches on a metronome (yes, I am full of music metaphors today as I do have a background in music). When you just slow down or speed up one notch, you almost don’t even notice it, but over time those little notches add up and make a huge difference! To summarize, there are two things you can do to get started right now in adjusting your ‘default settings.’ The first is to recognize when you are having a stress response and to visualize your stress slider going down and your rest-and-repair slider going up. Just take a minute to imagine it, and remind yourself that if your stress levels are cranked up, other important things that need to happen in your body are going to be put on hold. Do you want to digest your lunch? Ok then, your stress slider needs to come down. The second thing you can try when you feel your stress response being activated is to ask yourself “What would help me get one notch calmer right now?” It might be putting on some relaxing music, getting a few minutes of fresh air outside, taking a walk, or taking some deep breaths. If you are successful and time allows, you could go through multiple rounds of this until you really are feeling pretty calm. Bonus points if you are able to identify the moment your stress response gets activated and can intervene before you are completely amped up! It’s ok if at first you are only able to identify that moment in hind site. You think back on what happened and recognize That Moment when things started to escalate. Reflecting on past episodes really will help you get better at intervening earlier on in the future. In my next post I will discuss another technique for shifting gears that is all about cultivating the ability to feel good in your body. Feeling good in the body! Yes! I think we could all use more of that…. Would you like these posts delivered directly to your inbox each week? Subscribe for free on Substack: arikarapson.substack.com
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