Tiredness

I dare say that thinking makes everyone tired.

The trouble with Asperger’s is that a lot of what makes a typical day for everyone – meeting people, having conversations, driving places etc, doesn’t work quite so automatically for me. If you don’t have Aspergers, then instinct and intuition govern many of the conversations you’ll have during the day, and the daily drive to and from work is done on automatic pilot.

I find that with Asperger’s it’s not quite like that. I don’t have as much natural ability to guide my conversations, and I need to concentrate and observe to drive well. These sorts of tasks require brain power on my part – more so than for someone without AS. Come the end of the day, this becomes very apparent. A typical day at work, with a 25 mile commute either way will leave me feeling very tired, and I’ll often be uncommunicative for a while after arriving home.

This has always happened to me, but I didn’t really notice it until my wife and I had kids. In the immediate aftermath of our Son’s birth, we were both very tired, and understandably so. However, I never really shook the tiredness off. I kept saying that in a few months time I’d have more energy, but I never did. Eventually this started to seem odd, and I wondered why I was so tired all the time. It wasn’t until I started to look at my Asperger’s that it made sense.

My parents live at the other end of the country, and since we’ve had kids we drive to see them maybe once or twice a year. I find that when I arrive after 5 hours or so of driving I’m not just tired, but exhausted. I can barely string a sentence together for several hours. My daily commute takes it out of me too. For the first 30 minutes or so after getting home in the evening, I just want to sit down and not talk to anyone – I feel like I need to recover. In the days before kids this went largely unnoticed, as there wasn’t anything like the early evening routine of baths, stories and bed that we have now.

It’s clear to me, that the interactions of the day at work – meeting people, talking on the phone, social chatting etc – all take it out of me. I have to think about the flow of the conversation, and frequently find myself trying to think ahead about how the conversation will go. What do I say next? What are they going to tell me next? How do I respond? Would it be right for me to say something at this juncture?

The tiredness that the driving causes is a little different, but has a similar source, I think. I have to concentrate and be observant to drive. I find that my eyes are forever focusing on different things. I look at the mirrors a fair bit, and the road ahead, of course, but I also find myself following the patterns produced by other cars – the routes they take when changing lane, the differential in speed between the lanes on the Motorway, and even silly little details like what spec the cars I pass are, and what their obscure personalised registration plate might be trying to convey. So I am using a lot of brain power again – this time to process a constant stream of important inputs such as the speed of cars ahead of me on the road and whether they might intend to change lanes, and also large amounts of irrelevant information that I naturally gather and don’t seem to be able to filter out.

I have been wondering how this fits with an often talked about aspect of AS – sensory overload.

It’s definitely the case that the more interactions I have during a working day, the more tired I’ll be at the end of it, and if I drive a long way I feel far more exhausted than after a commute. I do think these are sensory overload issues, because I have to process all the data that my senses are gathering, regardless of whether it is useful.

Perhaps the key here is that I won’t know whether it’s useful until I’ve processed it, so everything has to be gathered and processed, on the off-chance. I get tired because of the brain power required to do this, and that leads to me shutting down to a degree afterwards, to try to recover.

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