Emotional Resistance to Responsibilities

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I feel sad, stressed, anxious, and/or frustrated when faced with almost any kind of task or obligation.

Obviously, everyone is reluctant to do things they don't want to do; that's the whole idea behind reluctance. So at first I thought I was just being wimpy when faced with unpleasantness. But a while back, I realized that my emotions in these situations are completely inappropriate for the actual level of unpleasantness.

Here's the example that finally clued me in: giving my pets medicine. I had rats, and they are really prone to respiratory infections, so I had to give them antibiotics and probiotics quite often. Both of these medicines were INCREDIBLY DELICIOUS according to the rats. They really liked taking the medicine, and it was really cute watching drink it from the syringe. The whole process of measuring, administering, and cleaning up probably usually took less than two minutes, twice per day, and was super-easy. But I HATED having to do it. I was able to force myself to do it because my rats' lives depended on it, but why did I even have to force myself? Why wasn't it easy to get myself to do it?!

To clarify the medicine example.... There was no physical pain or sensory problems during this task. It was not complex or mentally tiring. I didn't have to worry about my rats trying to escape their cage or anything inconvenient like that. They didn't have the kind of symptoms that made me sad to be around them. The medicine made them happy.

So it shouldn't have been so hard!

That was a trivial example, but it made me realize I'm like that with pretty much everything. It's pretty hard to make myself do anything unless I'm faced with short-term dire consequences. Taking out the trash, doing my taxes, changing the oil in my car, putting gas in my car, working toward my hopes and dreams in any way, calling my mom periodically, charging my cell phone. I do have some issues that make many tasks more difficult for me than they are for most people, but even if you disregard "most people" and look at how unpleasant a particular task is specifically for me, my emotional state still doesn't make sense. But just because I know my emotion isn't justified doesn't keep me from feeling it. Oddly enough, I hate going to work each morning, but most individual tasks are okay once I get to work.

What can I do to get rid of this problem or otherwise deal with it? Any ideas?

Background info: I'm 27, female, living with a roommate, living mostly independently but Mom provides financial support. I'm receiving helpful but inadequate treatment for ADHD and depression. I have sensory issues and executive function issues, but I have not been evaluated for or diagnosed with autism.

I get that way sometimes, but a day to myself will get me sorted. As the work week progresses, the reluctance to do other activities outside of work does too.

It's not just responsibilities, either. Last Friday my husband complained that I was unresponsive and unaffectionate that night, and was literally cringing. I just had nothing left, so now I try to compensate more on my days off.

I guess my advice would be to have some quiet time with no obligations when you can. When you do need to take care of things, don't procrastinate either. The combination of procrastinating, and dwelling on it is also a huge anchor. Most of my chores are done in a set routine, and I try to get them done early as possible.

Good luck to you.

Cynthia Kim in her book Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate (http://www.amazon.com/Cynthia-Kim-Nerdy-Socially-Inappropriate/dp/B00RWSSVLS) talked about this being a key part of her autism.

I'd agree. It's annoying and it's really, really present in my life.

Things that help: good diet, exercise, and routines. Basically having the energy to do the stuff and having a routine where it "lives" in your day. Kim talks about having household routines, for example.

Personally, I have trouble with weekly household stuff. But I can have a scheduled "day" routine instead. So, after breakfast is my 5-minute kitchen clean. Before bed, I straighten up the bedroom.

Anything beyond this has to be a special interest for me and it sucks up all my mental energy. I have gotten very good at productivity for my household chores...and had no energy left for work.

I can't manage it now, but I think I'll have to hire a weekly house cleaner. My husband does some now. But honestly -- I just have to accept that I'm going to do less.

As for calling my mom, yes, this is a hard one, too. It helps to have that on your calendar and to give yourself a treat when you do it. Like, have a glass of wine, then call my mom while I draw and nibble on chocolate.

I can only manage one or two things a week like that, though. Calling my mom is worth it, but I often still skip it. :/ This post has motivated me to get back on the wagon, though.

I have heard some people with ADHD describe something similar, that often they just don't want to do things, even easy things. I don't know what to do about it, it seems like it would be hard to change these emotions. Have you had it all your life?

Thanks, guys. Maybe I need to try harder to form a routine.

I'm not sure if I've always had it, but I think it's quite likely.

Anyone know what this is sometimes called? I want to be able to google it if possible.

On productivity sites, I usually see it called "inertia." Here is an example:

http://daringtolivefully.com/overcome-inertia

And if you google "inertia" and "autism" you get a bunch of folks ruminating on it, including this little gem:

"Inertia is a problem associated with anxiety and autism. People who experience inertia often experience feeling "paralyzed" when they are faced with stressful tasks."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertia_%28anxiety%29

I definitely have this too about certain mundane tasks, so thanks for bringing it up. I do have a suggestion, it only works for me with some things though. You could try listening to music that you really like on headphones while you do the stuff you can't tolerate doing. If you can use high quality headphones, it will make it more interesting and be better for your ears. Or if you're alone you don't even need headphones. Music is one of my special interests, so it might work better for me than you. I think the problem is that these things we can't stand to do are so boring and mundane, so maybe a distraction like this would help you. I think we go to special interests because it helps us have a connection to a world we're alienated by. When tasks feel really meaningless it's even harder to do them because we naturally feel more alienated being in the world than NT's. So we've got to distract ourselves into doing stuff somehow. That's my take on it.

I get this and relate to it strongly. It's a problem in my life that I too have wondered "Why are my levels of fear and reluctance so disproportionate to the task?"

I get it the worst about filling out tax returns and other official things, but then again, even NT people get a "fear and loathing" reaction to that kind of thing, and procrastinate on taxes.

But I also get this feeling on far less important matters, as you say, things that are not difficult, not painful and may even be over quite quickly. If something has even the slightest degree of stress involved in it, I sometimes have to really fight my fear of doing it. Things that perhaps an NT person would either feel no negative feelings about at all, or if they do, it's just a mild feeling of "Crap, have to do this, it's a drag." Instead of being just a drag for me, that same thing causes me panic attacks at worst, feelings of dread at best. I can get panic attacks just getting ready in the morning to go out to work, because it involves going out into that world where variables and the unexpected can happen, things I don't have the processing speed to deal with, usually.

For simple things at home that shouldn't involve any stress, I don't know why I have dispropotionately fearful reactions. But I have that about a lot of things. When something in my apartment falls into disrepair and needs to be fixed, I experience a panic and a depression that's out of proportion to the event. It disturbs me to have something not working right, and disturbs me even more to know I'll have to have someone in here fixing it and all the disruption that will be.

I still manage to fulfill all my responsibilities: taking care of bills, taxes, repairs, an animal's care, etc, but I relate strongly to the distorted level of fear and distress these "to do" lists invoke. To have to experience this reaction makes life a damn sight harder.

I also came across this link on the subject -- it's a good one, and links to some good reference material I've looked at in the past: https://unstrangemind.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/autistic-inertia-an-overview/

My thoughts on this are modulated by a lifetime of writing code, so I tend to think of it as entering a loop with no exit condition. If you wait for the usual kind of sense of what to do next to emerge from this cycle of thinking, you will wait forever.

My sense of it is that the emotions associated with doing something truly unpleasant create a kind of noise in the decision making networks, hiding the signals that would normally form decisions. My sense is that you have a number of models of potential actions and your cycle of thinking about them gives them each a higher or lower potential until one reaches a threshold and you decide to do that thing. The negative emotions obscure this process, so it becomes like listening to someone talking to you on the phone in the middle of a noisy crowd.

What can be effective is to break the cycle by doing something else. Take some small step toward a desired future state that isn't part of the problem. Once you have broken out of the loop, you may be able to return to the problem without entering it again. But you have to get "unstuck" first.

If I am stuck with work things, I might put in a load of laundry and then make a list of all current tasks at work, so I get going again without having "solved" the problem or done the thing that is causing the resistance/creating the obstacle. Somehow, making progress in this way makes it easier to come back to the thing I am having trouble doing.

The other thing is to try approaching the problem from a different direction, like rotating the chess board.

The last thing is that I find it helpful to keep diagrams that abstract things at several levels. Usually, thinking about things at a higher level helps to bypass obstacles at a low level--e.g., "what specific action do I take next?"

I hear this analogized as the view from different altitudes: the high level of abstraction is the 30,000 foot view. You see large things below like towns, rivers, mountains, highways. The medium level of abstraction is the 2,000 foot view, you don't see towns, but streets, cars, people, etc. The low level is on the ground: you are in the buildings, interacting with the people. This is the "next action" level.

What I have learned is that the turmoil of being really stuck at the ground level prevents me from thinking about the other levels, so I need to have some written notes about that to look at and sort of re-orient with.

For instance, I need a list of the big things I want to at work or with my family in the next few months--that's the high level. At the medium level, I have lists of projects at work, projects for my wife at home, projects with my kids, things I want to learn, etc. At the low level I have lists of tasks coming up for each of those projects.

When I was younger I used to try to keep all of this stuff in my head. Sometimes that worked a bit, often it resulted in catastrophic failure at unexpected moments. Eventually I made figuring out how to mitigate this a priority. The approach I outlined sort of works, but it is still sometimes a real struggle when I am right in the stuck moment.

This is an autism thing?

I experience this heavily most of the time. It is the main reason why I am seeking therapy.

I will bring it up to the psychiatrist tomorrow. I am glad that I found this before my meeting tomorrow.


Why is this not listed as a key trait of autism if it's what some autistics claim as their own biggest autistic trait?

"My sense of it is that the emotions associated with doing something truly unpleasant create a kind of noise in the decision making networks, hiding the signals that would normally form decisions."

Anything I've read about psychology that seemed pertinent to my issue implies emotions are -heavily- involved in decision-making in general for everyone, and therefore the acting/doing things process. I would not describe it as noise but rather, a part that is supposed to be there that isn't working right.



Where this is a big problem for me is that it feels like I should be able to do it so the psychological feelings of shame are pretty strong when I don't.

Also because of this, I personally find that being in social situations when I'm actively involved in them, gets the momentum started. Which is...well, I don't want friends because with people comes social obligations and expectations which are also tasks/actions where the cycle can start. In fact, that I seem to have fallen prey to this thing that my mind does, it happened first when I left home.


Seeing I am pretty blind to my emotional states, I only in the past couple of years even noticed that there was dread associated with this, which is I suppose a subset of anxiety.

Last edited by cavernio on 10 May 2015, 7:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I don't perceive what I experience as a macro vs micro level of thought thing though. Thankfully my thoughts themselves seem largely unaffected by the inertia, although there is a high noise-to-signal ratio of thoughts in my head with lots of distractibility.

Oh, also, read 'Awakenings' by Oliver Sacks if you're interested in this at all. It was also made into a movie but it does not capture the internal emotional state of the individuals. They are people who have experienced a very extreme sort of this thing that was caused by a specific encephalitis strain in like, the 1930's or thereabouts.

The relationship to Parkinson's and ADHD is one I have myself described. I fear that it is gradually becoming worse as I get older.

I have thought this thing to be more of a negative schizophrenia symptom for the most part, but I utterly lack positive symptoms (delusions or hallucinations).

I feel like the official definition of autism is kinda messed up, and not just for this reason.

Although, if this is considered a part of executive function problems... I once heard a stat that 40% of people with autism fit the criteria for executive function disorder, or something like that? And some non-autistic people have problem too, but at 40% autistic people have the highest rate. But I'm not familiar with the study that produced that statistic.

Good luck with your therapist. Having another way to describe the problem might help. I was talking with my counselor about a related issue (more about planning and remembering tasks, less about emotions, but I think there might be some overlap), but I couldn't really get her to understand the actual nature of the problem. She kept trying to advise me on how to make the example tasks I mentioned easier or unnecessary, which misses the whole point, besides being stuff I'd already thought of. She wasn't very knowledgeable about autism though. I'm aiming for an actual autism diagnosis partially because I want to get a therapist of some kind who has at least heard of this problem.



Yeah, now that I think of it.... From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, it seems like making decisions based on emotions has to be normal. A lot of animals don't have have the cognitive capacity to make decisions based on intellect, and even historical humans and intelligent animals rarely had access to enough accurate information to make good decisions from intellect. So natural selection would result in creatures who have emotions that incline them to advantageous behavior and a compulsion to follow those emotions. For example, animals eat because they want to eat, not because they know food is required for them to survive.

Nowadays, we can make decisions based intellect, even if emotion is the motivation, e.g. taking out the trash makes me sad, but having the trash in a not-taken-out state for much longer will make me even sadder, so the right decision is to take out the trash. But I think people underestimate the impact that strong negative emotions will have on being able to act on decisions, especially since lots of people try to rationalize their emotional decisions, e.g. the trash can wait a little longer, it's fine if I don't take it out.

So yeah, we're supposed to make decisions based on emotions, but the problem is that our emotions are steering us away from actions we intellectually know are the best action to take.