The Best Theory of Autism you've probably NEVER heard of...

What even is autism anyway? Have you ever been asked that by somebody in your life? What is autism? How would you even go about explaining that? It just feels like autism is so much. I feel like I would need an hour. Would you get up the DSM-5 criteria and be like, this is me? I don't really think so. I really used to struggle if I was asked that question and then I was on a Facebook group for autistic women and somebody mentioned the word monotropism and so I looked it up. It was like learning about autism all over again from the beginning. It was like crazy aha moment of this is it. Monotropism is a theory of autism that attempts to explain how the autistic mind works and what being autistic really means for how you experience the world around you. There has been some very recent research found an autism diagnosis to be very consistent with fitting this kind of monotropic profile and it also suggests that ADHDers are more monotropic than neurotypical people. Slightly less so than autistic people but they're definitely, you know, on the monotropic spectrum which is really interesting. So if you're an ADHDer these might apply to you as well. In this video I'm going to talk about 12 different ways that monotropism can explain the autistic experience and link, you know, all these weird little random threads that seem completely unconnected like how the hell does sensory differences and feeling like things are a bit stinky sometimes link into the fact that you have really intense interests. If you feel like this theory of autism resonates with you I think it can be a really lovely way to explain autism to other people because I feel like it's really easy to understand when you read about monotropism how this could be disabling, how this is a disability, how it can be debilitating particularly in this society and in the way we expect people to operate and to behave but then it also makes sense as like a natural variation in human minds and both of those things I think can be true at the same time. Before I start I want to emphasize that monotropism is not new even though it's been, you know, being a bit viral on TikTok at the moment it wasn't created last week. The word monotropism was proposed in 1991 and the original paper describing the theory of monotropism was published in 2005. That's a long time. I get comments all the time on particularly my videos related to PDA, the pathological demand avoidance profile of autism, from people who seem to have like slipped on a banana peel and fallen into my content and they're always like everyone's coming up with a new illness every week these days and it's like okay autism isn't an illness and also no psychologists have been talking about PDA since 1980. Actually that's 43 years so no no no no no. This paper in 2005 was called Attention, Monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism and excitingly all three of the authors of this paper were autistic one of whom was an autistic woman called Diana Murray and she saw traits of autism in herself at the time but it was only later in life she finally accepted that she could use the autism label because she originally felt like she wasn't autistic enough. I feel like that's an experience a lot of us can relate to. So what is it? Monotropism can be explained simply as the tendency for our interests or just whatever we happen to be focused on in a given moment to pull us in more strongly than it would for most people. Every person has a limited amount of attention available to them at any given moment. Monotropism suggests that autistic brains tend to prefer to focus on fewer things at any given time and at a higher intensity. We get sucked into attention tunnels and once we get sucked into them it can be hard to pull ourselves out of them and move on to something else. Does that sound familiar at all because it sounds very familiar to me. Depending on how much you like metaphors you could also describe monotropism using a metaphor of light. So if we imagine a metaphorical room and we imagine a neurotypical person walks into that room and they've got a more polytropic mind they may stand in the doorway and see the entire room lit by like a soft overhead light. Every object in the room appears to be lit somewhat evenly and then by comparison and the autistic individual the monotropic individual would be viewing the room through a torch beam and seeing you know fewer objects at a time through a much more intense and concentrated light. But how does this explain everything about autism? Number one social differences. So in order to receive an autism diagnosis you must have what the DSM-5 calls social deficits. If you imagine that autistic people like to process one channel of information at a time it might kind of be easy to see why socializing would be more difficult for us and why we would have social differences. In my video about masking and what masking feels like from the inside which is one of my first videos I ever made I spoke about how I just feel like I'm doing a juggling act. I've got to be looking at a person, I've got to be monitoring whether I'm making enough eye contact with them, assessing how much eye contact they're making with me and then kind of trying to match that. I'm looking at their facial expression which is moving very quickly and obviously involves a lot of different features moving and doing all sorts of different things I'm going to try and decode that meaning. They're speaking I've got to focus on what they're saying, I've got to focus on their tone and what that might mean. Obviously their body language, if there's maybe more than one person speaking then you've got multiple people to focus on and then obviously the background noise and all the other things that's going on in the world as well and then you've also got to think about yourself so am I reacting correctly? What is my facial expression doing? Do I look sincere? Do I look like I'm interested in what they're saying? They're saying something sad, do I look sad enough? You know all that kind of thing. What am I doing with my body language? Does it match what they're doing? Do I want to be doing the same thing as them? Is that weird? Then you have to think about what you're going to say next and be ready and then when do I speak and I've got something to say should I interrupt? Is it going to be rude? I'm not speaking enough? I need to be speaking more? There is a lot to do and even if you intellectually understand social rules it's still kind of difficult to perform them on the spot. Everything's happening very rapidly you've got to react very quickly and you can see how this would be exhausting for somebody who really prefers having one channel of information or fewer channels of information coming in at a time. It's kind of an onslaught of stuff and so monotopism would explain why autistic people often say they can hear what someone's saying more they can concentrate more if they're not making direct eye contact because then you're reducing the number of you know channels of information that are coming in you're not getting all this information from a person's face you can stare at a fixed object and then your brain is better able to process what's being said to you. I've shared so many times this story because I used to when I first was looking into autism I was like I don't know I don't know and then I remember the story where I was yelled at by a teacher designing technology very important subject no I'm sure it's important to some people he wanted us to make eye contact with him and he made it very clear at the start of the lesson you must not look at anywhere other than at me so I was very conscious of that and I was like look at him look at him look at him and then at some point he turns around and shouts at me your eye contact is appalling you're going to stand up for the next half an hour so I had to stand up. I was in shock because I was like I'm pretty sure I was staring at you the whole time but I kept thinking I need to be looking at him I need to be looking at him which probably suggests that my eyes were wandering and I was looking out the window and I was looking at the equipment that he was talking about and I wasn't staring him down the entire time which is weird like why did he even want that I don't know no matter how I ever come across socially when I'm you know trying really hard and masking sometimes I think I do come across well people say that I come across well it never feels like I'm coming across well it never feels intuitive as I say it always feels like juggling like fragmented like I can't really process how well the interaction is going so I think this is why I've kind of throughout my life despite the fact that I like people I'm interested in psychology I'm interested in people I've often avoided socializing like on hidden toilet cubicles or ran to the library so I don't have to speak to people to be on my own to get a bit of a break because I think it's mentally exhausting this also links to the language delays that are sometimes seen in autism. Autism is sometimes mistaken for deafness and if you look on the childhood traits of autism page on the NHS website very first trait is not responding to their own name it could be that for some monotropic individuals language itself is actually quite difficult to pick up maybe you're just hearing it as like individual sounds and are not quite able to piece it together as words and sentences as easily as other people are although I don't think I had any sort of language delay and it wasn't something my parents were concerned about there are lots of clips of me ignoring seemingly ignoring my mum in a way my son who is not autistic he just wouldn't do he would always respond to the kind of things that she's asking me and I'm like in the middle of playing she'll ask me about what I'm doing or she'll ask me to show her something or say something and I'll just ignore it say uh-oh show me your Teletubby shirt on the film mic where's your Teletubby shirt even as old as five six years old I'm still doing that to some extent either appears like I haven't heard them or like I'm really being rude so the son of Diana Murray one of the original authors of this monotropic paper from 2005 he was part of the recent research on monotropism he's still you know super vocal about his mother's work he was also diagnosed himself at the age of 32 and he kind of describes himself as having a more female presentation of autism which I think is how you describe most members of my family as well even though I'm the only autistic female he wrote a piece for the British Psychological Society and in that article he says if our attention is elsewhere auditory input might register as an unwelcome interruption we would much rather ignore or it might not register at all and then when talking about learning language and it discusses a child who's just been taught the word cat the 2005 paper says the following once the infant has learnt the word cat the adult possesses a tool for manipulating the infant's interest system disruption of the attention tunnel is a painful experience language may suddenly become unattractive for a deeply monotropic infant so in this context when it says interest system it's just kind of essentially talking about what the child is paying attention to in that given moment so as a child if you were very locked into what you were doing you may just kind of not heard your parents you may have been kind of under sensitive to that sound in the given moment or you may have been overly sensitive and heard them you know calling your name and you recognize your name you're like oh this is trying to get my attention and that feels painful to you to kind of rip yourself away from the thing that you're currently engrossed in so you ignore them because you kind of you know want that to go away and it's not something you want to engage with it has negative associations for you in this way you can kind of see how being hyper and hypo sensitive to sensory stimuli can cause social differences it's already starting to all link together but number two let's talk about sensory differences a bit more deeply so why does some autistic people feel like they're over sensitive to brightness smell taste textures whether that's textures of food or textures of clothing and then the opposite side you have some people who feel like they're under sensitive and say that they have a very high tolerance for pain and things like that and why does some of us feel like we're both depending on the day depending on the context sometimes you do hear it kind of spoken about as if autistic people will either be overly or they'll be under sensitive to sensory things but i don't think it's always that simple in black and white if i was trying to concentrate on something deeply at my computer and someone started blasting really loud music at me all of a sudden out of nowhere that would be horrible but if i myself put on my headphones and play some loud music or i go to a concert of music i like and have chosen to hear then i'm quite happy to hear that loud music i suppose in the context of the concert i have chosen for that to be my focus that is where i am and that is where i want to be if someone's blasting music while i'm trying to focus on something else then they're trying to yank my brain in a different direction and that's not very monotropism friendly so monotropism explains our sensory experience being more intense because when monotropic people are focused on something we use more of our mental resources on that thing so our experience of that thing might just be more and that might explain why the world is brighter louder smellier just a bit of an onslaught sometimes for autistic people and adhd as well but also when you're inside the attention tunnel as with the language example you may miss things outside of it they may just go over your head i ignore hunger all the time i do eat enough food but i often do need reminding and sometimes autistic people are explained as having poor interoception so they're not necessarily able to sense sensations like hunger within their own body i'm hungry right now i can tell if i try and zone into it that i am hungry right now i can feel that sensation but i can block it out because i'm really excited about talking to you about monotropism because this has certainly become my interest for the last few weeks and my family are sick of hearing about it stimming how does monotropism explain stimming if you don't know stimming is one of the things that the dsm-5 the diagnostic criteria calls restrictive and repetitive behaviors in autism we can flap our hands i did a lot as a child rock back and forth that's a good time we might use fidget toys we might pinch bits of our skin or bits of clothing or tags on clothing or mess with our hair or twiddle our fingers or do like finger flicking you know just like little repetitive movements that we do why do we do this why do we do this because it's nice but why is it nice for me stimming has always pretty much been about concentration and about heightening my concentration it's always been a super immersive i've described it as being like a meditative experience for me i can get completely sucked into my own world it like enhances this ability that i have to hyper focus on things so i would usually stim while playing as a child i would flap my dolls and like rock back and forth and then like play out a story of like what my dolls were doing in my head rather than actually moving the dolls because that allowed me to be more in the play it seems like it was the same experience for temple grandin when she was a child and she was quoted in the original monotropism paper as a child she would be intensely preoccupied with the movement of the spinning coin i saw nothing or heard nothing people around me were transparent that's like such a beautiful way of describing it yeah it's like the world disappears and the world in my head or whatever i'm focusing on at the time comes alive and stimming can also be a comforting thing maybe because it enhances your concentration helps you to go into a kind of like natural state i pinch my neck all the time speak about it a lot so i must get on my necks a bit just call it i think and for me that's that's about comfort and i think monotropism can kind of explain why the movements are so repetitive within stimming like why do we do the same thing again and again in a world where there's so much chaos and you don't know what's going to happen next i'm like oh there's an ice cream van over there it's you know it's nice to kind of know what you're going to feel next and then maybe because we get stuck on one channel we get stuck on a loop of doing that same thing and it's just soothing and peaceful and nice the sensations flow and we know exactly what sensation to expect next these are people who live in a world in which sudden experiences repeatedly occur so in that world anything that's predictable is comforting number four we're going to talk about special interests and hyper focus which should probably be quite obvious how this fits under the umbrella of monotropism according to a 2011 study 75 to 95 percent of autistic people report having a special interest as i've said so many times in my videos related to special interests an autistic special interest is not an autistic special interest because of the particular category of interest you know like it doesn't have to be transport it can be anything at all what is important is the intensity of focus that is what makes it an autistic special interest it's like your passion your level of devotion your almost like uncontrollable need to be doing that thing all the time and then while you're doing that thing the intensity of focus the way you get sucked into this tunnel the world around you becomes somewhat transparent and you're just in it most of the time it's kind of an antidote to all the things that are difficult about being an autistic person in the world at least that's kind of how i experience it i need my interests in order to feel okay and that's one of the reasons why school is so painful because you're kind of ripped away from doing that and pushed towards all of the things that you find difficult instead on a daily basis my interests and my hobbies and my projects have always been the best thing about being alive to me i would say aside from obviously all the people that i love as well but in order to be happy on a day-to-day basis i need them and this i think explains time blindness as well because like your sense of time slips away the world around you falls away and it is often easier to create order and predictability within a special interest again it can be deeply upsetting when you're interrupted from working on these interests and people may not understand why you have such a big reaction to this oh my gosh the rage i would feel when i was video editing at age 13 when my mum would tell me that dinner was ready the dinner that she'd very kindly prepared for me i would be like i'm coming and then like 10 minutes later i'd still be there and then they'd be calling again and i would have no idea that 10 minutes had passed my mum would make me little cups of tea all the time and the amount of cups of tea that went cold probably 80% that she made for me i can't there's one of the reasons why i really struggle to stay hydrated because i just can't i can't remember to take a sip of water while i'm in what i'm doing so i think that's one of the major things that really separates an autistic special interest from a neurotypical hobby and the intensity and devotion that we pour into these interests does kind of link to perfectionism i've spoken about this a lot again in my pda content it's one of the theories for why some people fit this pathological demand avoidance profile of autism but even just autistic people in general from as early as the 1940s have been seen in research to be very perfectionist to not really be able to handle anything going wrong within their interests or outside of their interests many children with autism are extremely distressed at any experience of failure and hate to be corrected if they make an error and this makes sense to me if you imagine like if you deeply focus on something and the whole world around you has disappeared that thing is kind of your world at least in that moment and maybe the stakes are higher the experience of you know being in doing that thing is heightened and therefore when something goes wrong the experience of that and the emotions associated with that are also heightened okay so number five i'm going to talk about insistence on sameness and also need to be in control so just as stimming under the monotropic lens kind of makes sense it's like you know predictable controllable input the insistence on sameness that is really hard to say and need for routine and structure are kind of similar you know trying to find some order in a chaotic world it's a world that's always trying to yank your brain out of what it's doing and in a different direction without your permission so you may feel quite strongly about wanting to stay on a fixed safe path that you trust a lot of autistic people prefer structure and routine that's kind of like a stereotype of autism at this stage it's one of the accommodations that people make once someone has an autism diagnosis to make sure they know exactly what's going to happen within their day i have a family member who throughout as long as i have known them my whole life they have to go to the shop at the same time every day without fail whether or not they need anything they will make sure they find something that they need some reason to go to the shop they just absolutely must go and i can definitely relate to this feeling there are sometimes things where i've got it fixed in my mind that i'm doing a certain thing and i cannot move on with my day unless those expectations that i've set up for myself have been met otherwise it's kind of deeply upsetting you can end up like crying and shaking in a corner and being like oh my god why is this such a big deal but for some reason my mind latched on to things being a certain way and they're not that way and i can't handle it there's a really great bbc program with chris packham who was diagnosed as autistic and he kind of spoke to a diverse group of autistic people and the one guy on there he had to absolutely had to every day do things in his routine at exactly the same time it was kind of like painful to watch to the minute everything needed to be perfect and then obviously on the other side of it you have autistic people many people who fit the pda profile as i do also people who have a diagnosis of adhd and autism which i do who can't deal with routines and i feel like strangely it is very similar this need to control like every second of your day and know exactly what's happening on your schedule at every moment and then also this need to not be controlled by a schedule and have complete control over what you do every single given moment it all kind of comes back to this feeling of needing to know that to the best of your ability you're going to be safe from this feeling of being pulled out of what you're doing and have something unexpected happen to you as fergus murray states much of autistic behavior can be seen as attempts to restore some kind of equilibrium okay so number six this is kind of another social one it's literal thinking how can monotrophism explain the fact that some autistic people at least as children they may grow up to understand it but they may not be able to understand sarcasm or they may interpret phrases like break a leg literally and not know what on earth someone's going on about but as we get older even if we do understand these phrases and we don't interpret them literally anymore often we interpret them literally first and like maybe picture what someone said literally and then we kind of have to like process it even if it's quite quick we still have like a little extra step i feel of processing before we can be like oh that's what they mean okay for me if somebody says i always imagine someone with a broom hitting a bush i remember sometimes there were music videos i can think of i don't know does riptide do it the music video for riptide and also a six foot seven foot by law wayne the music video takes all the lines literally and i was just like this is this is hilarious this is a masterpiece and i think there was something about that that was really appealing to my brain it's always been a joke thing between me and my husband he knows i don't like idioms and when he says them to me it's like unnerving i get kind of like an irritated response i'm like oh why do people say that it's so silly it's so stupid like almost a bit snobbish about them and so he'll often try and slot them into conversation it's become like a joke thing maybe just because my brain doesn't like them it takes an extra processing step maybe and monotropism kind of explains that the autistic mind likes one thing to follow another in a more direct way so we kind of prefer things to be more literal and to the point again like needing one thing to follow another and be neat it's all kind of linking back to the perfectionism stuff number seven autistic inertia and interruptions so when we talk about having difficulties with executive dysfunction which is kind of like our ability to plan what we're going to do and then actually follow through and execute that task when we're talking about that with autism we're often talking about autistic inertia we could really struggle with getting started on tasks and kind of just sit and stare blankly into space and be like i cannot move my body i really struggle with getting out of bed i always have done my whole life and then also getting stuck once you do get started and then also struggling to then stop and pull yourself out of that and how that can feel very i don't know rude just in general in a day there's a lot of expectations to like pivot and change and be and that is kind of mentally exhausting for us i think it's as if we've loaded a cart to the brim with thoughts and feelings and then we suddenly have to steer it round a sharp corner in my most recent signs of pda video like how pda feels from the inside video i spoke about how things like getting out of bed to me can feel like facing fears it can feel like ripping a plaster off is what i compared it to and then i also compared it to like skydiving and having to push yourself to jump out of an aeroplane even though it's terrifying like it's so not intuitive i love this quote from the 2005 paper to a person in an attention tunnel every unanticipated change is abrupt and is truly if briefly catastrophic a complete disconnect from the previous safe state a plunge into a meaningless blizzard of sensations it's kind of like our ability to hyper focus to get into these tunnels these deep flow states is our greatest strength and our greatest weakness okay so number eight in general i feel like monotropism can explain pathological demand avoidance that profile of autism and just demand avoidance in general the original paper on monotropism quotes another paper from 1943 one child they were observing was highly satisfied unless someone made a persistent attempt to interfere with his self-chosen actions any demand like even a self-imposed demand which do tend to affect pdas as well me thinking to myself i need to go and make the bed that is an interruption to wherever you know your attention is focused in that given moment that is a requirement that you pull yourself out of doing that which is a painful experience and go and do this other thing over here which might be why a lot of us have either internalized or externalized negative reactions to other people asking us to do things even if those things seem relatively small so it feels like demand avoidance is a protection mechanism pda is often described as an anxiety-driven need to remain in control and there are studies to suggest it is linked to a dislike of uncertainty so again it comes back to that need to have autonomy over what you're doing in any given moment that need to feel a sense of like safety like i am not going to be ripped away from doing this someone asking you to do something is almost always them asking you to either in the moment or in the future stop what you're doing and go and do something else so it's always asking you to pivot and that can feel intrusive and it might be similarly as jarring as hearing a sudden sound i described in my pda video how to me the feeling of a small demand like somebody saying oh could i please squeeze past you in the supermarket gives me a very similar feeling to hearing somebody whistling right behind me while i'm walking down the street it's a similar feeling of like prickling under my skin and kind of like an irritation sensation i probably would both of those things are interruptions monotropic individuals just may feel safest whenever we feel like we have complete control over what is happening to us our minds are doing what every mind likes to do and they're trying to minimize the pain that we experience on a day-to-day basis and that's why we're avoiding demands number nine i want to talk a bit about intense relationships with other people and the fact that many autistic people you particularly hear it from autistic women but i'm sure it has happened for many other people as well they have a misdiagnosis of borderline personality disorder sometimes people have a diagnosis of both and feel like both resonate with them but for some people it blocks them off from you know looking further and getting that diagnosis of autism which would explain more different you know facets of their experience so you can maybe see why some autistic people would have very intense relationships if you think about the torch beam you could become very deeply focused on infatuated with a particular person i think we often find that like as well as having special interests we have special people in our lives people who we are very loyal to people who we love unconditionally and very deeply we maybe just grow very strong attachments to particular people and maybe sometimes more quickly than other people would on the other hand you can also see how monotropism might make it very difficult for you to maintain friendships and why your friendships may slip away from you because you're spending so much time in this tunnel focused on your interests and like the world slips away and everyone becomes transparent and you're not maybe always the best at replying to messages for me the best friendships that i've kept hold of are the ones that really don't require that much maintenance often they're friendships with other people who are neurodivergent as well but not always i can't respond to your message every day but that doesn't mean i don't love you unconditionally and i don't think you're like one of the most amazing things on this earth it does feel like the torch beam i can't spread myself very thinly with relationships as a child you know it would be like one or two very special friends it was my cousin for most of my life and then it has also been the same for romantic relationships for me it can be bad like sometimes people might not deserve that level of devotion that we're trying to give to them you know and also it can be really great if you have somebody else who you know really likes you as well it can slot together and work you can like cool you know we're both committed to this let's go you might be able to see how this intensity of devotion might be misdiagnosed among like you know other traits like maybe if you were speaking about autistic meltdowns as well and they were perhaps interpreted as an anger outburst you can see how maybe those two things together could lead to a misdiagnosis of borderline personality disorder on the nhs page for borderline personality disorder one of the traits listed is intense but unstable relationships yeah i mean you can imagine if somebody became very fixated on somebody quite quickly and then maybe they were rejected obviously a lot of autistic people we could feel this rejection sensitivity and i suppose if someone is in your tunnel they're in your torch beam and then they reject you that could be deeply upsetting number 10 how does monotropism explain dyspraxia from looking into the research it seems like adhders do have some sort of difficulties with movements more so than neurotypical people but then autistic people have movement difficulties that are more consistent with a dyspraxia diagnosis if you don't know what dyspraxia is i'll leave my video where i talk about the traits of dyspraxia but basically you struggle with movement stuff you struggle with hand-eye coordination you might have found difficult to ride a bike it also can relate to like moving your mouth and speech delays and things like that as well that makes sense to me through a monotropic lens because movements and particularly learning new movements involves coordinating different parts of your body and making them do different things at the same time and again it's like the socializing thing lots of different threads of information you imagine like hitting a ball with a bat you've got this ball rapidly launching at you so you've got to watch that follow that with your eyes and you've also got to think about your movement and how you're standing and how are you going to hit the ball and how hard are you going to hit the ball and it's all happening very quickly and it's you know a juggling act again obviously this isn't to say that autistic people can never be good at movements i think it can be more difficult for us to learn movements and it will be more so for some people than others for me learning to ride a bike was near impossible it was difficult for me to learn how to drive as well took me a bit longer than it did for most people number 11 how does monotropism explain meltdowns shutdowns burnout just general mental health difficulties but as we kind of explained it's jarring it's painful to be moved out of this attention tunnel and if you think about how a lot of autistic people are expected to live our lives we're expected to live our lives often on other people's schedules being pulled from task to task to task whether it's in school or it's in a job or even just in a home life like okay now we're going here bergus murray calls you know each of these different transitions wrenching dislocations and i think that that is a really good description of it our attention is being knocked off its natural course again and again and it's really exhausting it makes sense that autistic people would be more likely to suffer things like depression and anxiety having to exist like this in a chaotic world there's a page that i really love on monotropism.org and it's about the monotropic split which was a term that someone called tanya adkin came up with to me this just encapsulates the experience of being at school and then also like socializing in particular so well it feels fragmented it feels patchy the fact that we're often required to do this mental gymnastics the splitting in order to fit into a polytropic world is exhausting eventually after a day of trying to push through can lead to a meltdown tanya adkin kind of describes a shutdown as an internalized version of a meltdown so when you know it's not socially appropriate for me to have a meltdown right now i can't do this in public i've got to like keep it in and in some ways that can be worse like meltdowns can be worse for the people in your environment but then shut down nobody knows nobody knows how bad you're feeling you're internalizing and i think that's how i spent my school life i very much shrunk into myself the whole time i was there until basically the end of high school and then when i went to college i started trying to mask more and trying to push through that which was then even more exhausting and was probably why i then dropped out which i have a whole video talking about you end up in autistic burnout which can take a very long time can take years to recover from is when you've consistently just been pushing yourself past your limits not allowing yourself to do what feels natural and intuitive and making yourself do what is not natural and not intuitive to you constantly trying to make yourself be polytropic when that's just not who you are basically i think in order to be happy we have to be allowed to be monotropic it is who we are we have to be allowed to have this time to deeply focus on our interests whatever those interests may be obviously as long as they're not hurting us and hurting anybody else finally number 12 how does monotropism explain the fact that autistic people are so different from each other there doesn't tend to be like one consistent presentation of what an autistic person looks like we're all so different but why are we all so different why is it that when you've met one autistic person you've met one autistic person i mean obviously in general people are all different and autistic people are people so that comes into it but it makes sense if you look at it through the lens of we've mostly all got different interests we've mostly all been exposed to different things as a child we've been for whatever reason drawn to specific things as a child we've spent a lot of time on those things and maybe less time socializing and less time building other skills we may have more obvious strengths and weaknesses compared to other people i think it's a common autistic experience that people might assume was stupid it may be just yeah because we have very uneven skill sets you know like i was good at writing essays and good with words but not so good at speaking with words and putting my hand up in class and you know maybe it's difficult to reconcile like this person who seems like sometimes there's not a lot going on or they don't always have a lot to offer then goes away and produces this incredible thing in whatever area they happen to be interested in so yeah never underestimate autistic people there we are there's the there's the takeaway we've got different interests we've been spending our time for a whole life doing very different things it's kind of interesting though because thanks to the internet a lot of us have now you know we're discovering more information about autism and we're developing a special interest in autism and then speaking to other autistic people and it's like the autistic community has kind of found a like common special interest in autism that's bringing us all together it's just just it makes me feel a bit emotional you can apply monotrophism to so many different areas you know like decision making and difficulties with working memory with like holding on to different threads of information i think it's an amazing theory it's amazing that it was created by actual autistic people and probably very telling that oh who who would have thought it you know the people who actually live in autistic minds might know a thing or two about autistic minds compared to people who are just looking at a meltdown and watching somebody rocking and then being like restrictive repetitive you can even potentially explain the lack of empathy which we know is not a thing it's not inherent to autism that you will have less empathy but if you're stuck in an attention tunnel people around you might be transparent you might not notice what's going on you might not be able to read when someone's upset because you may struggle to juggle the information and read someone's facial expressions you may miss things you may not notice things you may be distracted it doesn't mean you don't care just this year another paper came out which fergus mori worked on and this was about the development of the monotropism questionnaire the mq which hopefully i'll make another video soon where i go through that questionnaire i haven't done it yet at all because i wanted to save it to do it in a video so i don't know i don't know how monotropic i am i feel like i very much am but we'll see subscribe if you'd like to see that video and in the meantime if you're struggling to get yourself to do things in your life due to demand avoidance or autistic inertia i have this video of 12 tips hopefully some of these might be able to help you if you're finding yourself getting stuck and also if you're kind of dealing with feelings of overwhelm and intense emotions as well thank you so much for watching bye