Overwhelm

Overwhelm is a common experience for many autistic people. Neurotypical people experience it too from time to time, but not as often.

One common way of explaining it is the “spoon theory of autism”, coined by Christine Miserandino. It’s not what I use to describe my experience to myself, but it’s what a lot of autistic people use to talk about the experience to each other, so it’s helpful to write about.

It’s worth noting that it’s not unique to autism. Autism is a cluster of symptoms, many of which occur in other places too. In this case, the theory was originally devised to explain the effects of Ms Miserandino’s chronic illness.

The spoon theory states that you start each day with a certain number of spoons; for some people it could be a dozen or so, for some it could be three. [It could be any object; she picked spoons, for reasons unknown.]

Certain activities that you might do, or situations that you might encounter during the day, cost spoons. Which activities it is varies from person to person; it’s usually things that don’t fit nicely with autism. Some of the things are nice, and it’s well worth spending spoons on them; some of them are unpleasant and may or may not be avoidable.

For example:

• Coping with distraction or changes of attention
• Listening to what people are saying in a noisy environment
• Navigating conflict
• Not being allowed to stim when you feel the need to
• Answering the phone
• Feeling guilty or blamed for things
• Having a coffee in public with a friend
• Walking nicely through a noisy shopping centre
• Going out to a gig or concert
• Being bullied

Once you’ve spent a spoon, you don’t get it back until the next day.

If you run out of spoons, you can’t cope with any more of those situations and reach a state known as “autistic overwhelm”. The two most common ways that shows itself are meltdowns and shutdowns.

Meltdowns are more common in children; they happen when they’d usually have to spend spoons on keeping self-control, but they’ve run out. Autistic meltdowns look a lot like temper tantrums, but can function very differently. The best ways to stop them are to get rid of anything that might be costing spoons.

Instead of melting down, I tend to shutdown and do whatever it takes to avoid social interaction. In severe cases of shutdown, some people even lose the ability to speak. I remember one example (in my 30s!) where I was at a party, depending on someone else for a lift home, and ended up hiding under a table for much of the evening.

What most autistic people learn as they grow up is that a lot of life needs to be about spoon management. So we try to avoid situations which would cost us spoons without providing any benefit – for example by avoiding really busy places. That doesn’t mean we can’t do those things; it just means that if we do those things, we can’t do other stuff.

But even that can create its own challenges. For example, when I get close to running out of spoons, I take care not to spend my last few. And that leads to its own challenges – I know that when I’m trying to avoid running out of spoons, I come across as grumpy, intolerant of interruptions and not willing to speak much, which can’t be nice for those who have to spend time with me! It looks and feels a lot like depression. Many autistic people find that antidepressants can also help to manage it.

I strongly advise autistic people to spend as many of their spoons as they can on quality social time with others, because that’s a human need that we often end up short of because it costs spoons.

There are a couple of tweaks I’d make to the spoon theory if I could – as I wrote earlier, it’s not how I’d describe the experience to myself. I’d see it more like an energy bar from a computer game, except it’s not really “energy”. Some things use up more of it; other things use up less. Sleeping overnight doesn’t fully recharge it if it’s low-quality sleep, but I’ve found a few other things that can recharge it during the day.

Because overnight sleep doesn’t fully recharge it, if one day has been hard, I won’t have as many spoons the next day. And that means there’s a nasty trap there – I can get stuck in a long term low-spoon mode, where sleep doesn’t refresh me enough to get me out of it.

I’ve found I can recharge as well. For example, we’ve got two lovely lively boys. They are wonderful, but I find that doing breakfast time and the school run can use a lot of spoons. It used to be that by the time I got to my desk to work, I’d be nearly out of spoons for the day.

But a couple of years ago, knowing that time outside in the quiet helps me to recover, my wife bought us a large dog. So my routine is now that I take the dog for a walk on the way back from the school run, and arrive home with a decent number of spoons. Things like earplugs for use in noisy environments can also help to reduce the spoon cost of activities.