I want to socialise more but I don't have much energy

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I have an answer. Better than what you may have read. The answer is not to deal with it by avoiding it. Step 1. Immunize yourself of your social withdrawal symptoms. That means force yourself into a social setting and force yourself to talk. You will develop a Nonchalant attitude to the situation and eventually remove yourself after longer and longer periods. Step 2. Social situations raise in "difficulty" in comparison to the number of participates. If you are coming from a Aspy background, your focus is narrow making it even more difficult. Here is a suggestion in highly populated areas. Condition yourself to focus on one thing in the conversation and only reply to one person at a time. If you are overwhelmed with questions dismiss the questions. Interact from a neutral stand point. If you find a group difficulty level too high for you, try to lower it with lower difficulty groups. Or just stick to nooby level one on one interaction.

Wow. Great link!



I had sort of made the connection, but reading that completed the loop. It made me realize how my weight, diet, exercise level, social functioning, and success in life relate to each other in a complex web. First step, find some set of complex carbohydrate foods that I will reliably eat in the mornings, and also start eating more beans again. At least, if I can maintain good brain glucose levels, I can at a minimum avoid exhausting its basic fuel.

It sounds like exposure therapy, and I think it works if integrated into a more wholistic plan which includes physical well-being. I feel a lot less annoyed with people since moving from living alone to living in a shared house. Or perhaps, I feel just as annoyed, but it takes more interaction for me to reach that level. When I lived alone, and had no real social contact beyond the guy at the corner store, it didn't take much at all to set me off. It surprised me, and made me wonder if aging had made me less tolerant. I think it was more having enough resources to attempt living alone for the first time, and losing a lot of my tolerance.

This suggests that I can only do so much on that front, since my natural baseline level of tolerance at this time seems pretty low. So, I also intend to work on various skills, like always looking for people's positive intent. At best, I don't misconstrue someone's words as hostile. At worst, I overlook someone trying to get on my nerves. But, I'm just starting to work that strategy and always look for the other person's positive intent.

You get annoyed less now that you are around people more often??

Yeah. Weird, right? But, on another level it makes sense. I maintain a level of comfort with social interaction as a result of living with people that more than outweighs the friction which naturally results from living with people. I stay in practice, so I can return more volleys in social games.

My housemates, while very chill in many ways, have a lot of intensity like I do. We probably have a more conceptual type of friction than the practical friction which I see in some shared houses with territorial arguments and so on. We share the physical space very well, and feel more inclined to mark our territory in the realm of ideas.

Yes. What I've been saying.