HSP

The October Slide is real

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been noticing the October slide into worse chronic health symptoms phenomenon for years (as reflected by countless posts alluding to it ever since I first started writing here) but, at last, I’m hearing tons of other people talking about, or maybe my ears are just pricked-up looking for more answers as ever, galling as it is to see a summer’s worth of steady health improvements set back like this once again. So what is it, why does it happen and what can be done to get through this heinously challenging time for some of us?

The fact I “seem” to be coping with the big event doesn’t mean that I really am!

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

My hypermobile neurodivergent way of getting through an event might not be typical and will generally involve a lot of extra strategy and accommodations but it is just as valid as the next person's and, the more I own this, the less disappointed I am with myself or my circumstances. The world does not, in any large way, accommodate people with neurodivergent sensory responses to the environment or their not insubstantial neurological or physical differences, especially if hypermobile, therefore big events are seldom pitched to accommodate us, as a minority factor in the room. The very best I can do is have my own list of helpful methods and tools at hand to get me through these big events my way whenever they happen, with a view to minimising the worst kinds of after effects sufficiently enough for me to be able to hold on to the happy highlights instead of all the low points. Here are a few of my tips to myself in case they are of use to anyone else.

Music festivals and the like: The biggest win isn’t pushing through but getting real about what you can and can’t do

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

As someone who is both autistic and who has disabilities, I've learned the hard way that the most important thing is to keep getting ever closer to living within my actual capacity (not some pipe dream based off "what I have done in the past" during all those years when I tended to try and normalise my behaviours), knowing my limitations, tailoring my life more and more to what feels good without all the compromise and stepping away from circumstances that have too high a toll, in terms of physical consequences and overstimulation from crowds and such, to be any good for me.

Reframing PEM and considering how it may be linked to delayed emotional and sensory processing in autism

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

How could having more sensory information to process than the next person and delayed emotional processing have to do with post exertional malaise or delayed onset pain and what could any connection between them tell us about PEM so that we can reframe it in a more positive light?

ME/CFS and neurodivergence: a potential overlap?

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

There are so many overlaps between ME/CFS with common neurodivergent factors such as extreme sensory sensitivity and environmental challenges, increased hypermobility, porosity and laxity, orthostatic challenges such as POTs, increased susceptibility to viruses and adverse medical side-effects, sometimes lifelong energy deficits and frequent burnout events that, surely, the question needs to be asked...is there a credible link between neurodivergence and having an increased propensity to develop the condition? If so, how do you single them out; is it even viable to try and view the one factor in isolation from the other if they now coexist side-by-side, as they clearly do for me, or is the better headway always made once they are viewed as a kind of package of tricky responses to "life" as we know it.

Accommodating both sides of AuDHD is a must!

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

If you are AuDHD and a situation that is meant to be working out for you is actually overwhelming you more than its helping, is too mentally, physically or emotionally stimulating, pressing buttons and resulting in repeated fatigue or symptoms that suggest your triggers are increasing, not backing off then you need to question whether its right for all the various parts of you. It's just so easy to be led off down a path of becoming overstimulated, thinking you can cope because you are ADHD or must push through when you can’t (I believe we AuDHDers really do require more rest and recovery to cope with our complex nervous system), never forgetting, except at our peril, that there is always that other factor to appease…the autistic side!

(Finally) dedicated to pacing

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

I am now forced to humbly admit that most of my prior attempts at pacing, over all the many years of constantly dabbling with it, weren’t really pacing at all because I simply wouldn’t stick at it and would then fall back into old habits as quickly as blink. I always had my excuses at the ready as to why this one thing I “had” to push through was outside the jurisdiction of my need to pace or couldn’t be avoided (a dread of disappointing or letting others down being one of the most consistent excuses) when, really, the whole of life has to become one giant, continuous exercise in pacing to make this whole thing work sufficiently enough to avoid the constant boom-bust cycle of flare-ups and chronic fatigue that potentially get harder to recover from each time.

Being a passenger is not an energy-neutral activity and other hard lessons of pacing

~ Helen White ~ 4 Comments

There are a few activities, and these will vary from person to person, that are not as energy-neutral as they look for someone that is neurodivergent. Coming to realise which activities these are, in your daily life, can be a game-changer when learning how to pace in order to gain a more consistently stable footing in your health.

Stabilising the autonomic nervous system as a first crucial step

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

There is no separating the nervous system from the various different aspects of how the body has started to misfire over the years, cumulating in whatever burnout or crash led you to where you now are, however much other provoking factors (such as a virus or accident) might have taken the brunt of the blame because, after all, what makes one person respond to those things differently, more devastating and lastingly, than the next person if its not the nervous system? Post Exertional Malaise is a classic manifestation of this whilst tracking its triggers can teach us such a lot about our personal state of misfiring health.

Hyper: when your body doesn’t behave in predictable ways

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Curly tubes, slow motility, mystery pain, treatment outcomes that don't "take" for very long, delayed and paradoxical responses and an ongoing tricky relationship with gravity...exploring some of the quirks of living with a hypermobile body.