Coping with having made a bad social decision

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I'm not even going to go into details about what happened bc it will be relatable to no one, but today at work, I think I made a pretty dumb choice.. that in hindsight, I'm like yeah... that wasn't the best thing to do. I hate this feeling and realizing later that I shouldn't have said/done that. But logically, I also know that probably no one cares. I hate my black & white thinking, its either all good or all bad. I explained it all to my wife and she was like... seems like not a big deal. But I've been wrought with anxiety for 12 hours now LOL...

With my job, I work entirely with people that have been in the field for maaaaaaany more years than me, and who always seem confident in their decisions, and never make poor choices. Or they never make poor choices that I can see.

So why do I repeatedly make the choice that is not going to be the best, or make a decision that ends up negatively affecting me/others....... I think twice as hard about the things I do, and STILL can't do things right. Today I wasn't really reprimanded, but I had to endure a conversation with a coworker bc of something I did that just made me feel sooo stupid bc I was like... yeah, I don't know why I did that, in the moment it seemed right. This coworker is one that I've made myself look stupid in front of like... NUMEROUS times since I began this job last July. I don't know why it's always her... I try to avoid her. I'm SO bad at reading the room and knowing what to do. My job is so social & I'm having to make hundreds of choices in an instant every minute. It's tiring.

Anyway, I have only been diagnosed with autism in the last 4 years, I feel so much more immature when it comes to making decisions than other people my age. Is this a similar sentiment that yall share? ...

The answer is yes most of us do feel that way to some degree or another. So is obsessing about things that others don't or hardly notice.

If you are getting no obvious negative reaction from your colleagues to a decision don't worry about it. If you do apologize. You are working with experienced people, learn from them. Don't be afraid to ask them if you have a question. Most people are flattered when you ask them for advice as long as you are not a pest about it.

Yes. This is very common. One of the common things in Autism is that parts of our brains, especially the social control and the emotional control parts of the brain are literally MUCH younger than your chronological age. Think of this as a type of social and emotional retardation. It has to do with how the Autistic brain develops in the womb and by the size and number of neurons that are present in those parts of the brain. So yes, you are actually younger in parts of your brain than in other parts and that is why you feel immature in those areas. To give you an example, I am 56 years old but socially I am more like ten or maybe a young twelve. Emotionally I tend to linger around three to six years old, usually around four. But in analytical intelligence, I am beyond what is normal for my age by a long shot. I have even been labelled and analytical Savante. So you will function at different age levels in different areas because parts of your brained capped in development at different stages unlike a neurotypical brain which developed much more evenly across the board.

Your black and white logic centered thinking combined with the fact that your brain is like a much younger person's brain in certain areas, even often like a child's brain in those areas, is a combination that can cause you to make social mistakes in a workplace. The workplace is designed to be worked by adults who have brains that function in an adult way across the board. But your brain doesn't work like that. That would cause me a lot of problems at some of my jobs that I have had in the past because often times I would act or make decisions that would be equivalent to an eight year old's decision making process especially in social situations. That was perfectly normal for how my brain is designed but it did not always work in the workplace. I believe that you might be experiencing something similar.

Having the diagnosis is really helpful because now that you have it, you can explain all this to your boss and maybe create accommodative measures to compensate. It would be exactly the same as if you had a mental retardation which we now call an intellectual disability. No one, except cruel, evil jerks, would ever hold that against you and your job would make allowance for that and create a suitable accommodation. So you don't have to feel guilty about it. It's just how your brain is designed. You are not a flawed neurotypical person, you are a perfectly working Autistic person.

Anxiety is just an opinion, just like this post is. Although difficult to do, mindfulness is a good way to let the opinions in your mind carry less weight. Having said that, the autistic mind is the gold standard for perseverating.

I am very confused by this post. What are you saying? I don't understand

^ Essentially

Anxious thoughts are just your mind's opinions, they are not facts.

Mindfulness is a good way of dealing with these opinions if you can master it.

If you have an autistic mind, you have a tendency to perseverate as usually there is a lack of cognitive flexibility, you lack the EF skill to move on from the topic in your mind which can make it difficult when learning Mindfulness.

I hope this explains my ramblings.

very insightful post, but doesn't your last sentence contradict earlier points? To function as an adult human being in accordance with generally accepted contemporary societal values (mouthful, but accurate), one would usually have adult-aged brain areas everywhere. Thus, autistics do not function as adult human beings in accordance with generally accepted contemporary societal values. There is a case to be made that these values should change, but the way you phrase it it seems like we're 'lesser' through no fault of our own but we just shouldn't worry about that. It's fairly distressing to think that my reality isn't the majority's, with the analytical intelligence and logic-focused thinking of a very smart adult, but the social and emotional intelligence of a prepubescent child, which leads to my logic-focused thinking become Not Very Logical At All due to the decision-making of a child. In my mind, which I admit is biased and flawed, it really does seem like we're lesser, when I look at it from your perspective.

sorry if I've made the original post about me in some way, I just want to understand and connect using my own experiences.

I'd go so far as to say that emotions are basically just information. It is up to us to figure out what they mean and how to use them. (Coincidentally, tiredness hunger are also emotions)

I've also found over the years that my alexithymia, sort of a blindness to emotions or lack of vocabularly for describing them, can lead to things like this, especially when combined with the typical blindness to other people's emotional state and likely opinion about what we're doing. For example, I found out yesterday that one of my coworkers has been saying nice things about me behind my back, and I had no idea he had any opinion of me at all, as I don't think I've been doing anything more than bare minimum civility with him.

Most of the time with anxiety, if you can figure out what it's about and do something to move forward it will start to go away. When that doesn't work, you're probably either wrong about the cause or there's something else going on that really requires a professional to sort out.

As to the feelings of failure in the OP, I felt that way in my last job. Like I was always messing up. There were tons of times I did the wrong thing and screwed up an order or chose the wrong option in the byzantine software the company used and someone would have to go in and correct it. I felt like a total screw up.

Guess what? So far everyone they've tried to get in to do that job has been worse. They've asked me back dozens of times (new job pays better though). So maybe you're not as bad as you think?

Yep, I feel this. I guess it's slower reaction times + only more recently having learned to mask as well as I do. I also have a hard time telling when people are joking or being sarcastic much of the time, so I feel like I come across as very naïve.