I stumbled upon the word "perseveration" today...I had never heard it before.
Definitions: the tendency for a memory or idea to persist or recur without any apparent stimulus for it
perseverance: the act of persisting or persevering; continuing or repeating behavior; "his perseveration continued to the point where it was no longer appropriate"
perseverate - describing the behavior, generally displayed by those with various developmental disabilities, of extraordinary, exclusive and lasting obsession to a detail or occurrence others consider minor; to repeat or continue a pattern
A term used to describe an autistic person's fixation on something. For example, an autistic Godzilla fan might spend hours on the internet looking at pictures of Godzilla, write Godzilla fan fiction, and launch into a monologue about Godzilla movies at any opportunity.
Perseveration and difficulties with change
Posted by capriwim on September 5, 2010
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say – I’ve thought of all kinds of topics to write about, and planned them in my mind, but somehow the actual act of getting myself to sit down and writing them seemed hard. Not that I find it hard to actually write blog posts – I like to write them – but what is hard is the actual switch from whatever I’m doing to something different.
As this is a common aspect of Aspergers, I decided I might as well write a post about it – as a way of both explaining my absence and illustrating why people on the autistic spectrum have difficulties with organisation, and why the ‘perseveration’ thing happens.
I’d never actually heard the term ‘perseveration’ until I started reading about autism and Asperger Syndrome, and then I immediately knew what was being described. I can illustrate in by talking about the past couple of weeks.
Once I started doing the ’100 things’ strategy described in my last post, I became focused on organisation. I started planning my meals for the week too, which got me thinking about health, and starting to plan exercise. I started keeping a journal to keep track of all I do each day, dividing my life into various categories, such as ‘house’, ‘food’, ‘exercise’, ‘finance’, ‘relaxation’, etc. This became the focus of my life for a few days – I had to be constantly aware of it for it to work, and in order to be constantly aware of it, I had to focus my mind on it to the exclusion of all else.
Then I started going for walks in the woodlands and in the moors. This seemed a logical way of combining the categories of enjoyment, relaxation and exercise, because I really enjoy such walks. Once I started, I would walk for hours and hours, so walking became the focus of my days. I started taking photographs of the trees, because I love trees – their shapes fascinate me. My days became totally focused on woodland walks and capturing them in photographs, and then collecting these photos onto my laptop, cropping them and resizing them. I completely forgot about all other aspects of organisation, and the journal I was keeping. I just remembered it yesterday, and realised I hadn’t written in it for six days.
When I stand back from this, I feel frustrated, because although I love walking in the woodlands and the moors, I don’t want my whole life to consist of that. I also love reading novels, and had actually planned to do some reading. I always took a book along on my walks, thinking I would sit down at some point and read it. But somehow my mind just wouldn’t switch from walking mode to reading mode. I was walking and I would keep on walking. I would sit down sometimes on the walks, to have something to eat, but I wouldn’t read, because reading seemed like a completely different world. The switch from focusing on the walk and the trees to focusing on a book seemed like a vast chasm.
[I understand this completely. When I go for a walk it is hard to stop walking even if to sit on a bench or to take a picture with my camera.]
This isn’t to say that I can’t read when on a walk – but to do that, my whole focus would have to be on reading. I’d be oblivious to the beauty of the woodlands and countryside around me. When I was a kid, my focus was often entirely on reading. Wherever I went, I would bring a book and I would read it – read it while walking along, reading when stopping anywhere, etc. – because reading was what occupied my mind.
I’m trying to think of an analogy so people can understand the difficulty switching from one thing to another. It’s kind of like moving to another country on the spur of the moment. For most people who have lived in the same country all their lives, this would be an enormous and difficult transition – because your mind is accustomed to your own country. You have learnt to take many things for granted which would all change if you moved to another country – it would be a huge transition, and would be very difficult to just switch from your life here to moving there. Not just in practical terms, but in mental adjustment.
Interestingly, I moved to Canada for five years when I was 21, and many people said how brave I was, but to me there was nothing unusual about it, because all changes are huge for me. Moving to Canada was no different. Obviously, in practical terms, the actual act of switching from walking to reading is nothing like the act of moving to Canada. There were all kinds of complicated things involved in moving to Canada, like applying to be a student at the university, getting a student visa, organising accommodation, booking a flight, etc. – whereas switching from walking to reading just involves sitting down and taking a book out of my bag, opening it and reading it. But the difficulty is not in the practicalities of the act itself – it’s in the switching of mindset.
This is why people on the autism spectrum often develop special interests. Once we are focused on one thing, it is so much easier to keep focusing on it than to switch to something else. Something else may arise from it, as a side thing, like woodland walks arising from my focus on organisation, but it arises because of a link. It’s much easier to switch naturally to something that is somehow linked than to switch to something which is unrelated. For instance, when on my walks, I started thinking about how I’d like to read some reference books about trees and flowers and insects and birds. If I were to do that, then I would probably start focusing on reading, and then may well start reading novels again. But if I were to just pick up a novel and read it today, I may enjoy it but it would feel disjointed from the rest of my life, unless there was a central theme of my life to which the book related.
This is why life can feel fragmented for people on the autistic spectrum. We often lack a sense of overall cohesion – ‘central coherence’ – so we find one thing to focus on, and somehow everything else needs to relate to this.
Understanding this can help with devising strategies. For children on the autistic spectrum, who have various activities organised by adults, it would be helpful to find some way of linking the activities, so there is not the uncomfortable jolt of switching from one to the other. For instance, as a kid, I would never want to go to bed when it was bedtime. This was because my mind was focused on whatever I was doing, and couldn’t make the switch to going to bed, which was, to use my analogy, like moving to another country. What would happen is that my mother would get angry, which didn’t help, because it became a fight, which made me even less inclined to relax and quieten for bed.
It occurs to me in retrospect that if instead there had been some kind of link, and routine, it would have been easier. It’s hard to know exactly what would have worked, but it occurs to me that maybe if lights had been dimmed, and soft relaxing music been played, or maybe a scented candle burnt (out of reach, for safety) at a certain time, then this might have somehow prepared my mind to quieten down, and I would have started to associate these sensory cues with going to bed.
I probably could do something like that for myself as an adult too (as I still have a lot of difficulty going to bed at a regular time) – although then I’d be responsible for the cues myself, so I’d have to somehow find a way of making myself do them at the right time. I’m still trying to work this out in my mind, so I have no definite strategies, but I will experiment with trying to find something that works. Maybe having an alarm clock go off at a certain time in the evening when I want to start preparing my mind for bed time – and putting the alarm clock by my aromatherapy oil burner, as a cue for lighting it, and that could act as a cue for dimming lights. I will try this and if it works, I’ll write another post about it.
So that is something I pilfered from the net...now here is my take...
Going to bed has always been a challenging transition. For the most part, I end up falling asleep in my clothes for a couple of hours, waking up and changing to jammies and crawling back into bed. Falling asleep, in and of itself, is not easy usually due to the increased thinking processes that become sharper and more incessant as the house becomes quite. I find that if the tv is on, it is much easier to fall asleep than if it is silent. If the tv is off, it is so very quiet that my brain works on overtime and my thoughts are clearer and louder. The low volume on the tv helps me to subtly focus on that other than any internal worries or concerns.
Frequently, when I forget to eat enough during the day because I am focused on one thing or another, I will wake up at night absolutely starving and raid the kitchen. Thats one reason that it is nice to have a routine. I know whats for breakfast and when (Breakfast IS my favorite meal and it consists of nothing else but a piece of toast with warmed peanut butter. If, for some odd reason, there is no bread or pb in the house, I have nothing. I have yet to find anything to substitute for my fav)...lunch is often a gamble, hit and miss, sometimes left overs. Dinner, probably my least exciting meal for some reason even though I am the house chef and I cook it. I tolerate it, but thats about it. Food is definitely less exciting at dinnertime for some odd reason...always has been. Even if it is something that actually tastes good. Typically, I will have a half-portion of whatever it is as my appetite is lowest at that time...I would rather skip dinner and just do a couple small snacks.
Food doesn't excite me but I do have a penchant for snickers and certain cookies...yeah, those taste great to me and i often have a hard time stopping after just one or two....hence, I do not appear to be starving anytime in the near future :)
Other times that I have noticed this perseveration...it took me a very long time to be able to stop driving, pull off the road and look at a map, pick a new wildflower from the roadside to take home and study or take a picture of something that interested me. For years I wanted to be able to do that but it has only been in the past five years or so that I have actually been able to stop the car and do something that very much interested me. To be driving, one does not stop until the destination is reached. I could never figure out why stopping, even for a moment or two, was so darn difficult.
In a slightly different vein, today I have had this uncomfortable upper respiratory cold going on, which makes me incredibly crabby. When I take ibuprofen my sense of hearing becomes acute and everything becomes way too loud...where was i going...okay. Anyway, for the past two days I had been focused on a particular...situation..and I kept obsessively repeating 5 very specific sentences over and over and over, probably at least 2 dozen times every hour without fail. Well,then someone said something to me and it negated the sentences and then I was lost again...I couldn't find an anchor...okay, thats when I really became irritable and somewhat agitated. I hate floundering..and have yet to find the next item to grasp onto.
Repetition/ Perseveration is like a pinata...you start with one piece of candy, in the middle and you start walking around and continue placing more pieces of candy in a circle, one at a time, walking in a circle around. The walking part never stops. Then you start layering with paper maiche and newspaper, one layer at a time and there is no stopping point there either, it just goes on and on. Its almost like a pseudo foundation of sorts..the grounding of being overly focused and the more you do it, the harder it is to stop. And then, then someone or something comes along and the project, the pinata gets busted. Now what? You stare at all the candy scattered from here until tuesday. The foundation upon which you walked melts and disappears and can never be gotten back, so you flounder, flip and flop, rampant thoughts race by in an effort to fill the void...somehow...searching for something to grab and start building again.
Its only fair to say that minor ailments like colds and other bugs do tend to create more chaos within this aspie. I don't know if neuro-typicals feel such far-reaching effects but I certainly do.
And it seems that each and every of these minor ailments has a particular emotional or mental effect. Some colds are downright numbing, others really slow down the whole cohesive mental process factor. Mostly I find them to be varying degrees of irritation: mean, angry, crabby, cranky, self-pitying, frustrating, weeping, short-tempered...something along those lines. I can recall a couple that were funny/ stupid and even one that was down rigth silly. I do often name them as such...this one is definitely a crank crab, whereas the last cold was simply weeping/ self-pity. When it is harder to complete a thought or if my speech process get slowed down and I am having a hard time forming the correct words, that does tend to lead to irritation and frustration. And the taking of the motrin and the sudden loudness of everything, well, it stands to reason that I am irritated.
Anyway, back to the bottom end of the ocean to flounder some more
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