Can you sit still?
Hylian
Citizen, Mentor
in General ASD
I legitimately cannot sit or stand still for the life of me. I have to constantly fidget/stim to stay comfortable and focus on anything. The only time I am still is if I'm laying down to go to sleep. I have ASD and ADHD, and am wondering if other people with ASD and/or ADHD have this issue.
Comments
Maybe try low dose seroquel it could calm you stay around 100MG
I also found it interesting that after I went into online schooling I did a lot better academically. I was told it'd be harder with my ADHD and that I shouldn't do it, but not being in a regular, overcrowded, distracting school environment actually helped me realize how much I actually enjoyed learning, and after realizing that I found my own motivation to complete my work (and even though I still procrastinated and had issues due to family problems, I think I would have done worse in regular schooling with my ADHD and ASD).
However, if I can convince myself to go into work mode then I can stay there and be still. If it's in front of me right away, then I find it trickier to ignore it and go do something else. Working in silence is difficult. I am quite likely to go detouring around the house and procrastinate if I don't have sound around me. This can be instrumental music (lyrics are too distracting), office ambience (faint talking, reshuffling of files and so on) or opening the window and listening to the birds.
Motivating myself to work can be tricky if my deadline is not for a while. I tend to leave things till the last minute. The remaining seated part can be tricky when visiting relatives who have been talking for a while, I still care about what they have to say but I do have to fight the urge not to get up and mindlessly walk in circles. People can often tell since I have a habit of tensing my shoulders, squeezing my knees and drumming my feet slightly. I don't mean to.
Yet, if I can get in the zone, then I don't always want to leave it. My friends are quite similar. I know people who play films in the background whilst they work as a form of white noise.
Music is stimulating and can help when I'm studying or doing something else monotonous, though in most other contexts it just makes me want to pace around more.
I have seen several different kinds of approaches to this problem. One approach is: who cares if you are sitting down? As long as you are doing the work, I don't care if you walk around the table, gaze at the squirrels, throw spit wads onto the classroom clock.
There is also the approach to start with very small amounts of time for sitting down, and then gradually increasing that time after the person has accommodated to the short period of time. This fails most often because the "adult" tries to push it too quickly.
My personal suggestion would be to learn a deep breathing exercise, and later move on to yoga or meditation. I use an app called Breathe. All it does is breathe, no other fancy gimmicks. I started with a minute, which is about six breaths, with the count four in and six out. If that it too long for you, just do one or two breaths.
For yoga, you only have to hold a pose for 20 seconds. Pick a pose, any pose, and try 20 seconds. Or 10 seconds.
When I started these practices, they seemed like a chore. Now they feel pleasant.
Also self-awareness: when I get restless, I try to understand if it's related to what I'm thinking or feeling - I found some patterns there. Another helpful (to me) exercise was to become more aware of how my emotions manifest or even feel physically: for example, I often tense my neck and jaw when I have intrusive or negative thoughts I don't want to have. Identifying the physical sensation helps me with my horrendous emotional awareness.
I don't have AD(H)D and anxiety seems to play the biggest role in my case.