This week's support session was on sensory processing and repetitive behaviours and I quite enjoyed the session this week. We started off by having everyone talk a bit about their favourite sensory experiences. I explained that my new favourite thing was my sequin snap band that I got from eBay after discovering them in the sensory box at the sessions. I also explained that I'm quite a heavy chewer - which is why I've always got my button necklace from Chewigem on me - and I contemplated whether that's related to why I have a habit of over eating, or whether it's to do with the taste, or both.
We covered all the difference senses and how they can be either under active (hyposensitive) or over active (hypersensitive) in autistic people, or even both! I always thought there were only 5 senses, but it turns out there are actually 7 or 8 senses depending how you look at the 8th one. The senses are:
1. Sight
2. Taste
3. Smell
4. Sound
5. Touch
6. Vestibular
7. Proprioception
8. Interoception
The first 5 are self-explanatory, so lets just go over the last 3. Vestibular is the sense of balance and spatial awareness, which helps to coordinate movement with balance. Proprioception is the sense of position of the parts of your own body in relation to the rest of your body, as well as the strength and effort that's put into movement. Interoception is the recognition of the body's signals such as hunger, full bladder etc. One of the coping strategies that we were given to deal with sensory issues is to develop a sensory profile. This is basically just knowing what you're under/over sensitive to in relation to each sense, but they gave us a handy table for us to write it down on, which I'll include at the bottom of this post for you.
There was a brief section about stimming where they explained that it's self-stimulatory behaviour which is used as a coping strategy to help suppress pain, help with calmness, or just simply for sensory stimulation. A stim is defined as a repetitive action or movement. For example, as mentioned before I chew a lot, and I now also play with the sequins on my snap band rubbing them back and forth to change them from black to white and back again. These are among several other things I do. Stimming is something that everyone does in one way or another, but it's usually more obvious, frequent or intense in autistics. We were encouraged to try to be aware of our sensory diet in that we all need a certain level of sensory input on a regular basis, just like we all need to eat food on a regular basis. One particular example of how you can take in sensory input is apparently yoga because it includes the vestibular and proprioceptive senses which can be the most soothing. Everybody is different though, so it's best to find what works for you.
After this we took a short break and then moved on to repetitive and restrictive behaviours, but we were running behind at this point so didn't have the time to go through it in as much detail as we probably should have. We first covered the different types of repetitive behaviours which are:
- Repetitive motor movements (hand flapping, rocking bouncing etc)
- Fixed routines and rituals (insistence on following rules, doing things the same way each time, resistance to environmental change)
- Restricted/fixated interests (for example my interest in wrestling where I can spend hours on end watching/researching/listening to wrestling themes and doing nothing else)
- Sensory seeking/aversion (Seeking out certain senses that you enjoy or find soothing or conversely, avoiding those that you don't)
We went though some pros and cons of each of these 4 types and we established some strategies for finding balance between these behaviours and the rest of everyday life. These can be simple things such as setting a timer, exploring alternatives, asking for help/advice from other people, making plans/scheduling etc. It's also important to be open to and accept other commitments as these are just a part of life and need to be given a time and a place just like your interests and other behaviours. A couple of the examples I gave of routines and rituals are that when I make a cup of tea I make sure I let it brew for exactly 5 minutes (Alexa comes in handy for that!) before I take the tea bag out and add the milk. I also insist on using the document feeder on our printer when I'm trying to scan something in because the idea of it is to make things quicker an easier. But because our printer is a bit crap it doesn't always work, so I end up spending ages trying to fix it to scan my things in through the feeder when by the time I've managed to fix it I actually could have scanned it in manually on the scanner bed in about half the time. These 2 things are the main things that annoy my wife but I insist on doing them because it's how they should be done. I can understand her getting annoyed about the printer because in reality I'm wasting more time by trying to do it the quick way, but I just see letting a cup of tea brew for 5 minutes as doing it properly. I think it does taste better and it also gets more caffeine out of it. And I also think that if you put the milk in first you're a monster!
Here's the table we were given as mentioned above to help profile your sensory preferences and needs:
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