Do you think everyone on the spectrum has anxiety?

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Based on the posts of someone in wrong planet, it appears to me that, a larger proportion of autistics have anxiety, depression, sleep problems, no job, no friends, than the proportion of neurotypicals with the same situation

If you say "everyone" and there is one exception, the whole statement is wrong

The world contains a lot of autistics

Not only does everyone on the spectrum have some level or form of anxiety, but so does everyone off the spectrum, as well.

I can't speak for others on the spectrum (though a few others I know have told me they have it), but I certainly have anxiety. Mostly around being in an unfamiliar place alone, talking on the phone, or going up to people I don't know well or at all and making conversation with them.

'Not feel'?
Try to see if you're also severely alexithymic and may not realize/recognize/express anxiety even if it's present.



For now, I have time to kill and bored enough to spill this from my mind:
Anxiety is an internal reaction that causes certain behaviors -- not simply behavioral itself.
One can act and function reasonably with anxiety -- one cannot function and act reasonably without anxiety, and I have countless examples of that in mind.

Autism is not a 'reaction', it's a wiring. So what if the wiring itself is prone to the reaction of anxiety -- it is only common, not an inherent part of it.
What if an autistic had a lucky (or an unlucky) draw -- as a part of the condition's heterogeneity -- of having less anxiety as a reaction or having it a less likey reaction, having a screwed sense of fear, which in turn screws certain processes of learning and memory?
Does that mean they're not autistic? Let alone in the spectrum? I know plenty who qualifies, almost all of them are classic cases, main comorbidities of intellectual disability and it seems, they're unlikely aggressive and sensitive -- which makes sense.

I think it's about aspies and those allistics with anxiety -- they resonate pretty well with one another. If one can notice, it's quite evident in this forum.
Reading the latters' disappointments of not having to obtain any ASD diagnosis -- and the frustrations of the former being mistaken as a latter.

I'm an aspie who had long doesn't struggle with anxiety -- and when I overcame anxiety over a decade ago, I no longer able to relate well with either.
I can still relate with the confusions, the foreignness of NTs (from the laughable ones to the maddening ones), certain body-mind works, the dysfunctions and the oddities -- but nothing related to fear and worry. Also in terms of pain and trauma if I had to go further than that.

Anyways...
Anxiety, in and itself, is a part of human condition. It is an essential evolutionary tool of survival in many animals in the animal kingdom had acquired. It's a mechanism meant to avoid danger and keep one into 'safety' -- therefore all neurologies, save for a very few exceptions, have this.
It's just that, in this era and mostly in the environment we most humans live right now, these tools are kinda long obsolete in some ways. Causing various (yet very common from childhood) traumas that can and may lead into personality and mental disorders.

The term of GAD exists because of (natural) anxiety went or became unnecessarily or overdoing it's own job by getting in one's way in living, damaging one's emotional and mental state itself -- according to the psychiatrists standards and relative human experiences anyways.
If we're are all living in the wild with natural predators, yeah, there's likely no such thing as GAD. GAD of this era would be 'normal', reasonable even.


It's easy to mistook behaviors of anxiety from certain behaviors from severe boredom, overstimulation, ego depletion out of stress and exhaustion, dispropriate/inappropriate reactions (both good and bad, both deliberate and unintentional), likely forms of impulsivity and hyperactivity, certain habits -- and so on and so forth -- alexithymia involved, stress/fear/discomfort avoidance or not...

It can 'look' like 'anxiety' when underneath the behavior there isn't, some don't even have to involve stress and fear to have behaviors.
It's not the overactive amygdala reacting, it's not reasonable/unreasonable 'warning signs' flaring, but something else entirely.

Doesn't help that autistics overall, don't exactly express things the way one intended the same or typical ways.

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