Knowing When to Ignore My Body Signals

This is a big deal for me because as well as being autistic and ADHD I also have bad interoception, which is how your body recognises things like feeling hungry, full, thirsty, tired or exhausted etc.

I just got back from a big conference last week, it was the Water Industry Operations Group (WIOG) conference in Rotorua. I did all of the photography for this amazing conference and had the privilege of presenting a paper and winning a trophy, with my teammate, for water tapping. For an autistic person like me, being with 300+ people over several days, interacting with them all the time to get the best pictures, is enormously draining. Just for scale when I say enormously draining I don't mean the usual neurotypical being really tired. In my case, if I don't manage it properly, it can shut me down to the point where I lose the ability to read, talk or interact meaningfully with people around me. Definitely not a very good place to be in when you're doing your best for the people you're serving. 

Thankfully the conference went brilliantly and I'm proud of the photography I did and the connections & friends I made.

So when I got back home on Friday night I was tired, understandably. A week before the conference I had already planned that I would need the Saturday and Sunday after the conference to allow my autism to recover, so I deliberately planned to do nothing but allow my system to recover over the weekend after the conference.

The interesting thing is that come Saturday morning I didn’t feel tired or out of spoons as I had expected to, in fact my body was telling me we had plenty of energy and really didn't need that much rest. Thankfully I have learned that I can't always trust what my body tells me, because of my bad interoception. So I ignored what my body was saying and I deliberately spent most of the weekend in my beanbag doing nothing, just letting my system recover.

And it was totally the right thing to do. I know this because while I was in my beanbag it felt so right, my body and brain were where there needed to be, despite the signals I was getting to the contrary. I did do a little bit of work, but only a little bit. It’s now Monday and I think the feeling of tiredness is starting to catch up with me, that’s because my autism can delay the processing of events or feelings for some time so I feel them later on rather than as they happen.

Another important aspect is that I resisted the feeling that I was wasting time and that I really should be using this time more productively, rather than being on my beanbag. This is a powerful feeling but not letting it drive me was so important.

But I’m so glad I ignored my body's over optimistic assessment of my capacity and just let myself recover. Had I not done that, I would be absolutely dead today with zero spoons. Don’t get me wrong I’m still low spoons today but not zero spoons which I would have been had I believed my body on Saturday.

This is just another way in which I’m learning how my brain and body work and using that knowledge to better accommodate my neurodivergence. And I’m so glad I did.