People talking in work

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Hello everyone

My question here is about working in groups, attending classes with others in the same classroom, working in a lab with other people and the need to communicate. Points and places where there is a discussion between more than two people.

What is your limit when it comes to the time you can stand this? How long can you bare doing it within a day? Why does it tire me out?

Lately I feel I cannot do it for longer than two hours, with breaks included. I hate that I need to commute to get there and then come back. Even driving can exhaust me because of my vertigos Then I suddenly switch to a leave me alone mode and people think I am arrogant or mean. I hate giving explanations. What do you do? In life you got to deal with this because you need to work.

Do I need to choose a complete solitary job such as being an artist?

I am not talking about when people talk a lot about themselves, in a social situation where you have the option to say I got to go.

How do you deal with this?

Have a good day!

that is exhausting! What seems to come naturally to others is such hard work for us sometimes. I ended up finding jobs where I did not have to do "teams" that communicated closely for hours. Yikes!

It might be possible to obtain some accommodations if you are open about your diagnosis... but of course this path is not right for everybody. Hope you can figure out a way to get through it.

It's hard for me to put a number to how long I can stand those situations because it depends on how well I relate to the group, and when I was working I was never expected to be in a group situation for very long. The worst meetings were those that were practically irrelevent to me, and I'd get more frustrated and bored as the thing progressed, dying to escape. There was always a risk that they'd announce I was to be saddled with some undesirable task, and as support was often poor, the meetings would give me some stress because I was half expecting that to happen. Judging by the noise some of the participants made when they got outside the room, those meetings were a strain on everybody. Other kinds of meeting were of more interest to me, though I rarely got very much out of them because they usually talked too fast for me to keep up.

But we mostly worked alone. One of the worst things was young-ish people who would start chattering away near my desk, which would play havoc with my concentration. I didn't know how to get them to shut up or go away and do it somewhere else (perhaps there was no way), so I wore closed-back headphones and played unobtrusive music through them to drown them out. When the headphones got too uncomfortable I'd just stop trying to focus and either go and do some practical work in another room, or just leave the workplace for a while. If it was near the end of the day I'd sometimes even go home. Luckily we weren't very tightly managed so if I downed tools for a while, nobody noticed. By the time those noisy groups were a serious issue, I'd been diagnosed, so I felt that if I were challenged then I was fairly safe.

I don't work in groups, I'd rather have a 10-hour-long proctology exam than work in groups. So yes, I choose solitary work.

Background chitchat is the most infuriatingly distracting and tiring normalized noise.

I have never been good in groups either. I am not sure what the solution is.

I've always just assumed people were generally rude and self-centered. Are NT's genuinely not bothered by background noise/chatter?

Apparently there's a wide range of reactions from the general population, but noise does bother a lot of people and it hampers most people's performance:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20 ... ality-type

Some people are annoyed by certain specific noises. General intolerance of background noise seems to correlate with introversy. Most people perform better at intellectual tasks when there's no background noise. Some people think they perform better when they have background music, but apparently they actually perform worse. It seems odd to me that the article calls open-plan workplaces aesthetic. To me they're just big rooms that aren't pretty at all. I've always hated the idea.

I'm glad I never had to do a working-class job where the workforce are subjected to pop radio. It would have driven me mad, and they would have thought me the unreasonable one.

NTs find it irritating. Autistic people find it overwhelming.