Asperger's is worsening.

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Yes, I am aware that people could get "worse."

Yes....because of "autistic burnout" and "masking."

But "getting worse as one gets older" shouldn't be inserted into the diagnostic manual. That's what I'm saying.

My social functioning is better, but my body is certainly slowing down. I'll take a day off to work in the yard and go back to work the next day so my body has a chance to recover.

And movies seem a lot louder than when I was a kid. Fortunately I now have high fidelity earplugs.

I would like to see recognition in the DSM that one's functional level can fluctuate (and not always in a positive direction).
I would like to see recognition of the needs of people like me, who are sub-clinical in their twenties/thirties, before experiencing burn-out and reduction in functional level in our forties.
Because I find it really really hard to explain and to justify - even to myself, let alone to family or colleagues - why I'm struggling with issues I never had before.

MrsPeel, I think your phrasing expresses things perfectly. I think it can fluctuate downward and maybe stay down for extended periods of time but the opposite can be true too. It can go up for long periods of time. Or maybe short periods of time. We don't know how much time before we improve or before we fall downward again.

I know it's common for a lot of more mild cases like myself to not be diagnosed until life overwhelms us and makes us considerably worse (this is what happened to me, and I'm in my mid-20s).

I could be off the mark but I subscribe to the stress/cumulative exhaustion theory. As people get older all people's bodies stop functioning as well as they used to, energy levels decrease etc. My guess is this makes it even harder on autistic people who are already struggling to keep up with daily life.

I think this is also why people can get better overtime. If they change their life habits (like diet) to give them more energy at a higher age, or if they get more efficient with dealing with their difficulties then the getting older effect is cancelled out.

I certainly don't have any solutions, having great difficulty trying to put my life back together from the utter ruin it disintegrated into.

I've noticed parts of my autism getting a lot worse over the last 5 or 6 years, specifically my overthinking, analyzing things that have happened (events, conversations, things I've done), health anxiety and general worrying. I do have dependents and recently increased (by choice, long story) some financial burden (quite manageable, just bigger) and I wonder if these are the 2 main stressors that are triggering it. Not really much I can do about it other that keep telling myself that everything is ok, stop overthinking, I am not the expert in the things I've trying to analyse.....but it's hard!

So yes, things can certainly "get worse" by whatever means you chose to measure the level of impairment.

On the plus side, over the same period my ability to deal with social situations has certainly got better - mainly because I've been forced into more of them with having kids, so I've had to up my masking levels. I must say though, whilst I've got better about it, I care less about doing it now - maybe it's an age thing, and that's normal with most humans, I don't really have the energy to bother with social situations where I don't need to be in them.

Where I work long time employees have more time off. I have six weeks of paid time off. Taking time off can reduce stress from working too much.

***Op, if you're beginning to enter menopause, this could account for some of what you are experiencing. It is a physical rite of passage. When I went through it I really needed to be alone a lot more, and the body needed to rest.

Also a lot of reactions to sound, light, perfume smells etc. can fluctuate as a person gets older. It does not have to be that a person is autistic. It can happen to anyone.

Plus it is easy to attribute various results to wrong causes, and when we think about it from that angle, such as I am experiencing this because I am autistic (just one example) it can seem and feel very true and even enhance certain physical effects in that I have put this circle around the way we are processing data and am kind of stuck inside of it. The human mind is very suggestible in this way. It is kind of like the placebo effect but played backwards. .Speaking from personal experience about all of this. It is totally fascinating how the way we frame our experience can influence what we are experiencing.

It is always getting better , the same or worse

You can't guarantee just the first two

There are many factors involved

Health. Luck . Stress

Not all factors can be measured or controlled

Getting worse is not always because you did something bad

Getting better is not always because you did something good

Interesting thread. I also wonder if part of the reason some of our traits get worse is that many of us become better at "masking" as we get older? Like we think we're getting better and fitting in better by learning how to appear more "normal" but it's actually causing us increased stress having to put the facade all the time... and that when we're alone and take off the "mask" our repressed Autistic traits come out harder.

Thoughts?

My analogy is that using coping skills is like work and exercise. If anyone were to have to exercise long term, they would get unable to do so at the same extreme they originally could. That is why I feel Asperger's gets worse. Society doesn't change expectations. And whatever we need to do to recuperate from overstimulated, it means we need time to do that. And since society doesn't change expectations we do not have the time to recuperate and still get enough sleep or do anything else necessary. As we try to keep up with society, Asperger's gets worse because it is like having to do continuous exercise. Every coping skill is an exercise and is exhausting.

I don't see anything as really stress related but I see it as being emotionally exhausted. Keep in mind that society might acknowledge 'good stress' but the meaning everyone still associates with stress is negative and mental.

Indeed. There is probably a gradual reduction in resilience in humans quite generally as one gets older. I cope with night shifts and the turnround less well at 55 than I did when I started a job with night shifts involved aged 40. I managed a week where my days off were taken up with two days helping my mum through a bad patch of illness, back home to a fairly simple job, and then on that afternoon having to stop, and in fact droppping into sleep and being partly shut down for the rest of the evening, while a decade or more younger I would have winged it without that crash / partial shut down.

I notice more f the features which come with being on the spectrum, and the last loud party I really struggled to hold it together for the person who is very close to me for whom the party had been thrown.

I think it quite possible that I am just as autistic / aspie as I have always been, but, in the years from about 30 onwards I was developing a lot more ways to adapt to the world and at the same time managing to avoid a lot of the stress causing situations, a process which has become better as I age, and then from about 50 the resilience and energy surplus to do the work rounds and the like has been gradually tailing off, meaning more of the pitfalls of an autistic profile trip me up. Also, having formed the suspicion age 51, and had them confirmed age 53, I am much more aware when I do observe an autistic trait in myself or actions.

Some things don't seem so bad once you get used to them

Not having friends. In the beginning of college, I was too eager to make friends. That I was willing to compromise things that should not have been compromised.

Just accepting not having friends is just more functional.

Less dysfunctional

Habituation

Desensitized



Some deprivation take a cumulative toll , long term


For example, if you eat a bad diet one day, it doesn't impact your health. One year of bad diets hurts your health