Anxious thinking -Vs.- Asperger's thinking

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I am attending a course on anxiety management, which is going well. The course uses the hot-cross-bun model (physical symptoms, emotion, behaviour and thoughts around a circle) which is great until we get to the "thoughts" part of the model.

I wonder how many of you recognize the following as simply Asperger's syndrome thinking, or as your own character:

All-or-nothing thinking: You think in absolutes, as either black or white, good or bad, with no middle ground. You tend to judge people or events using general labels, for example ‘he's an idiot', ‘I'm hopeless. I'll never learn to drive. I'm a complete failure.' You may condemn yourself completely as a person on the basis of a single event.

Awfulising — catastrophising: You tend to magnify and exaggerate the important of events and how awful or unpleasant they will be, over-estimating the chances of disaster; whatever can go wrong will go wrong. If you have a setback you will view it as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

Personalising: You take responsibility and blame for anything unpleasant even if it has little or nothing to do with you. If something bad happens you immediately think ‘it’s my fault'.

Negative focus: You focus on the negative, ignoring or misinterpreting positive aspects of a situation. You focus on your weaknesses and forget your strengths, looking on the dark side. If you’ve done a good job, you filter out and reject the positive comments and focus on the negative.

Jumping to conclusions: You make negative interpretations even though there are no definite facts. You start predicting the future, and take on the mantle of ‘mind reader'. You are likely to predict that negative things will happen.

Living by fixed rules: You tend to have fixed rules and unrealistic expectations, regularly using the words ‘shouId', ‘ought', ‘must’ and ‘can’t’. This leads to unnecessary guilt and disappointment. The more rigid these statements are, the more disappointed, angry, depressed or guilty you are likely to feel.

If these thinking patterns are a part of your nature, rather than a psychiatric condition (and a recent change in thinking), then what differences in approach are required to change them or to cope with them?

I feel I fit a few of those thinking labels while I'm not sure which scenario it fits I feel I tend to dwell on things but I spin it into something good. Example: I was kicked out of college most even some WP members etc. have said it wasn't my fault the teacher overreacted etc. That IMO doesn't change the fact that it happen. I also worry what if I make the same mistake now that I'm back in college and upset another teacher? HELL I'm scared to go down to the campus for even tutoring from the teacher afraid of slipping saying/doing something wrong. Things would have been a lot better if I got actual help instead of take a pill or be yourself it'd be OMG you upset a Psychology teacher and got kicked out of college you need help. That's how I apply it. The way I view is my life going to be an endless cycle of upsetting people? That is my main concern and way of thinking. Not a bad way of thinking but not that good either but I've messed up so much in life (yes I'm only 24) but I don't want to mess up anymore.

[i]All-or-nothing thinking Not really. I tend to over analyze both sides of things wanting more and more data

Awfulising — catastrophising: No.

Personalising: Not so much anymore. The world is utterly indifferent to me. It I actually had an outsized influence on events then the world would take an interest in me because the would want to influence my influence


Negative focus: Maybe? This goes back to acquiring data. I can get locked into examining all contingencies, which means at least anticipating negative events.

Jumping to conclusions: Definitely not. I often can't seem to come to ANY conclusion

Living by fixed rules: I have a very strict personal ethos. Don't lie. Consider the implications of your actions. Some others.

All of them seemed to fit. Of course when I think someone is stupid, that doesn't mean I will think that of them forever. Or when I think things will never happen for me, that is just me feeling that way. I think lot of people are stupid but isn't everyone? I'm stupid too at times but at least I admit it. I don't see that as being black and white because I have to think that forever for it to be.

I have gotten better over the years. When I get criticism for my work, I feel I did a bad job but you know what, I can fix those things by working at it and I will be even better. After all that is what bosses and supervisors do, they tell you about your errors so you can fix them and they expect you to be better at it after telling you. It's not like you got your final warning or fired.

Sometimes I will start worrying about the what ifs but I just shake it off and not worry about it like what if I mess up again and get written up and then it happens again I get fired. I get over it eventually when it happens. One time I learned about sexual harassment at work when I worked my last job and I started to feel worried like oh no what if I am talking and it gets seen as sexual harassment. I decided I just won't talk to anyone about what they have on and their bodies.

I tend to take things to extreme which is one of the horrible habits I have.

I never used to do this but I started as soon as I became a parent. I mean literally as soon as I became a parent. My very first thought was "is she crying loudly enough? Are her lungs weak? Is she getting enough oxygen?" and it hasn't really improved from there. Every cough would probably become pneumonia. And later, every bullying incident would inevitably drive her to suicide (as it has driven many young people to suicide recently). My husband isn't like this so he freqently has to be the voice of reason and talk me down.

I have ALL of those patterns of thinking! My wife also looked at the sheet and said "that is you". The other group participants are attending because they have developed anxiety through depression or trauma, and none have had a lifelong anxious state.

The other problem is more difficult to describe. As an example, I went alone to my daughter's school for a charity event, and very rarely go to social events alone. All the time that I was there, I felt like everyone was slapping me, pointing at me, laughing at me and saying bad things about me - of course they were not, although I experienced real episodes like that when I was a school child. The kind of anxiety that I was feeling doesn't even fit into one of those boxes, because it has no words other than sheer terror and pain. This anxiety persists for ages after social events, through the night and into the next day, with me feeling like a very bad person.

I had that fear when I was a kid and then it stopped when I quit caring what people thought of me. Even when I found out people talked behind my back when I was in high school and I still didn't care.

I recognize all these as flaws in my own character. I like to believe that if I do have ASD, it actually helps improve my outlook on life and essentially gives me a little peace of mind. I'd also like to believe that (while it may not have been the root cause) it helped me obssessively hone my drawing and storywriting skills into what they are today.

These things listed here are bad habits I picked up from my past. Slowly though, I'm getting rid of them. All it takes is time, and some good ol' Aspie stubborn obsessiveness!

I dont think these symtpoms are due to aspergers, but more likely a co-morbid condition such as depression or borderline pd.
I dont relate much to these personally. usually I try to be positive about things. Common aspergers thinking would be obsessing over things.

I'm rigidly anti-should

Rules and habits are a safe fallback to me, not having to make stressing choices all the time. I do break them if I feel like it, but I almost always prefer to follow them - not because I should or must do it, but because they're comfortable, easy, habits I like.

For the negativity, no more. I used to go "that social interaction went horrible, I suck", but I've stopped (much easier than I thought it would be). It's due to anxiety, not AS.

I have Tony Attwood's complete guide to autism, and it mentions anxiety as a common trait, as well as the thinking patterns listed above, or close approximations of them. So I guess that some people with ASD do have these anxiety patterns - and like many other thinking patterns, people with ASD are bound to take it to extremes. I did go through the whole depression / anxiety / PTSD thing so it is most likely the interaction of Asperger's and the psychiatric illness, although I feel pretty much fully recovered. It is the difficulty of rediscovering what is normal for me, after a few years of depression.

I went to a big health book section at the weekend and read through the anxiety sections of every autism / Asperger book that they had. Apart from Attwood, the only mentions of anxiety were about parents anxious about their autistic kids!

well i certainly have anxiety. i dont know where i fit in in any of those categories

I have a lot of these thought patterns and I'm working on improving them. I have a lot of anxiety and PTSD with some Borderline PD traits. Maybe some of these thought patterns are more common in autistic people than with the general population, but I seem them more as changeable personal flaws in thinking.

That list leaves out environmental factors that contribute to AS anxiety. Things like irritating noises, distractions, interruptions, people talking over each other, people yelling or talking in harsh tones, people forcing me to hurry, people who insist on talking to me while I'm concentrating on a mental task, people giving vague unclear directions/instructions. That's the kind of stuff that drives me nuts and makes me feel like going postal. I suppose anxious NTs don't have to deal with any of that.

There was some charity out at the weekend offering "free hugs" to spread goodwill to everyone who passed. I have no idea what charity / religion / belief system etc. The anxiety of walking past them and avoiding getting hugged does not fit into any thinking pattern - it is just sheer, blind, wordless and painful borderline panic. I often want to tell these very insistent charity volunteers how upsetting they are to me and presumably other people like me, but I have never had the courage, and I don't want to upset them when they are giving their time freely. I get the same with emergency sirens, car alarms, people handing out leaflets, music in shops, police / men in uniform, busy places, visually distracting places, ...

I find it hard to describe the thoughts / emotions / behaviour / physical reaction to these triggers, but it does seem like simply sensory processing overload, and the brain becomes conscious that it can't cope with the input, but is blind to the content and simply perceives "THREAT!" in big red letters as an emergency fallback position.

I don't make a distinction between "my own character" and aspergers/autism. I don't know if it is desirable or even possible to do so, unless one sees aspergers/autism like a mental illness which one is going to recover from.


Apart from the last one I have found that a completely gluten-free, and mostly dairy/casein-free, zero/low-sugar diet massively reduces precisely these sort of thought-patterns, most particularly the catastrophising and negative focus.

I don't know whether this is because of the food opioid peptides in the gluten, ( 36.7% of people on the spectrum have unusually permeable intestines, compared to 4.8% of the general population, according to a study publ this year ), or the effect that gluten may have on my autoimmune system and the impact that inflammatory cytokines and other autoimmune reactions have on various organs including the brain, or the result of poor absorption of the fructans, ( which wheat is high in ), and fructose which blocks zinc and tryptophan absorption, leading to depression, poor sleep, etc, ... or something else again.

I am what I eat though, just as much as I am my genes, my upbringing, social conditioning, etc, ... and what I eat is determined by what I eat ... :lol ( seriously, both gluten and casein contain chemicals that not only increase intestinal permeability but also suppress our natural appetite suppressants, such that we want to eat more, and fructose has a similar effect, bypassing our regular appetite regulator leptin and stimulating production of an appetite stimulator, ghrelin ), aswell as by my genes, upbringing and social conditioning, ... so who do these thought-patterns belong to when they occur? Are they "mine"? Who or what is responsible for them?

I have tended to think in this way most of my life, but I didn't realise it until my life came crashing down, when I could no longer escape/avoid the effect of those sort of thoughts by drinking more alcohol, smoking more dope, eating more sugar, chocolate, crusty fresh bread, cheese or pizza, buying more clothes, travelling even faster and more recklessly, or moving house/changing my job more often, etc. When I came to the end of that escape route I began to really "see" this thinking; it had become visible ... and I suffered a manic-depressive breakdown, followed by periods of intermittent but serious depression.

I still have a tendency to this kind of thought-pattern, even when gf etc , but much much less; the difference is quite remarkable; I don't "believe" the thoughts so much anymore, they don't seem so "convincing", I am far more detached from them. And some of them don't even "happen" anymore. I think that they were quite literally a side-effect/by product of a certain physical state, or states, and although a lot of the neural connections that these chemical states and the resultant mental "events" created are still there, they are like roads less and less frequently travelled, becoming grass-grown, less like "auto"-routes. I'm not saying I'm free of them, just that they seem faded/less powerful.
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