Why ND people get pissed off when they're interrupted
Last night, while taking my meds, I had a thought.
My meds are a very strict routine for me. They need to be.
I only ever leave one tablet sheet in the container I use for my meds. If I could see all of them, it would be harder to know when I'm about to run out. With one sheet, I can track where my meds are at. When that sheet is empty, I get the next one out, and I know when I need to order again. I know the box is empty, not just the container.
Talking myself through it
And I realised I still talk myself through every step. In my head it goes: Okay, that's the end of the sheet. I need to get a new sheet out and check where I'm at.
It's a routine I do every day, and it still hasn't become muscle memory.
Most people use inner speech, especially when they're learning something new or when they're stressed. For most people, routines eventually drift into automatic muscle memory. But from my own experience, and from the people I work with, that doesn't happen as reliably for many ADHD brains. Everyday steps still need conscious steering. For me, that's especially true of the little routines that keep me on track.
Am I using double the energy?
So here's my question. When I talk myself through a routine, am I using the muscle memory for the bits that stick and my brain capacity to keep reminding myself of the rest? Am I actually using double the energy? Not just in behaviour, but fundamentally, biologically?
From the research, it's not literally double. But consciously steering a task takes far more effort than running it on autopilot, and that causes real fatigue.
Russell Barkley describes ADHD partly as difficulty using inner speech to guide yourself, which might be why so many ADHD people talk themselves through things. And a 2022 study linked long stretches of demanding mental control to chemical build-up in the brain's control regions.
Tired vs exhausted
Thinking about this in my own life, I wonder whether this part of my biology, my fundamental working mechanism, has led to periods of what would be classed as autistic burnout.
Tired? Yes. Exhausted? Yes. Two different things, as far as I'm concerned. Brain fog? Yes. All the things that affect the day-to-day running of our brain and our behaviour.
Autistic burnout research by Raymaker and colleagues (2020) frames burnout as long-term demands outstripping capacity, made worse by the hidden cost of compensating and masking.
Why interruptions hurt
If all this steering wears us out, then maybe the rhythm is what keeps us going. Hyperfocusing and listening to our own voice along the way keeps that stability and control in place.
That would make a lot of sense of why ND people get pissed off when they're interrupted, whether it's a train of thought or the thing we're hyperfocused on.
Monotropism theory (Dinah Murray and others) describes autistic attention as a deep, narrow tunnel. An interruption means rebuilding the whole thing from scratch, not just pausing.
Everybody pays a cost for stopping one thing and starting another. Not just ND people, everybody. But the cost is steeper when the focus is deep, or when the task is being actively steered.
So where do we go from here?
We know we don't like being interrupted. We know we're single-minded when we're doing something that doesn't come naturally, or learning something new.
So how do we manage? How do we see it coming? And how do we make some of it automatic?
Let the environment hold it. My one-sheet system puts the memory into the environment, and I'm finding I do this a lot. If I can see where the gap is, my brain doesn't have to hold on to it all day, or every time I come back to the task. The environment holds the memory for me.
Listen to the voice. I've also been listening to my voice prompts: where I use them and where I don't. That shows me where my gaps are. It can be a really good way to track your symptoms and the gaps in your functioning. Introspection is something we often find quite hard, but we might already be doing it. We just haven't noticed where it's coming through.
Finding my people
Sharing this helps me understand it, because I talk it out loud. It also means I find my people, the people this relates to.
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References
Barkley, R. A. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological Bulletin, 121(1), 65–94.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
Raymaker, D. M., et al. (2020). "Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew": Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143.
Wiehler, A., Branzoli, F., Adanyeguh, I., Mochel, F., & Pessiglione, M. (2022). A neuro-metabolic account of why daylong cognitive work alters the control of economic decisions. Current Biology, 32(16), 3564–3575.