Pain in my head when trying too hard to stay "in the mo

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The past few days I've been trying way harder to make more normalized eye contact with my professor while she was talking. I've found that it gets easier after the initial adjustment, but there's like a permanent "approach anxiety" and it always occurs all over again the next day.

Anyway I've been trying hard to make eye contact, listen to every word being said, and..after awhile I feel horrible. I get a stiffness in my neck and my brain (around my forehead/frontal lobe area) it almost feels like my brain is hurting because I'm overexerting myself,. Sometimes I can even feel a slight pulsation, like a heart beating but inside of my head.

I have to strain myself in order to pay attention because otherwise I always find myself zoning in and out and not listening well. I end up not following what my professor is saying. Normally speech will feel more like random broken up sentences related to each other, and I just kind of put the scattered pieces together in my head.

I keep telling myself that maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's my brain adjusting to what I'm doing and that with time it will go away. Doesn't seem to be the case, though. So..am I alone here?

Once you've been doing it for awhile, it just becomes a habit. That part of my IEP got revoked because of my assesment last year, when the ASD specialist said I had good eye contact.

I also don't need no stinkin' Special Ed. classes.

I think you get that feeling because you are fighting against sort of anxiety and learning something new.. it's normal to feel strange by doing that.
once it becomes a habit it'll just go away.

Why are you trying so hard to make eye contact? If it's so difficult for you, why not just explain your issues to the professor and focus on paying attention without worrying about eye contact?

The symptoms you describe sound like a classic tension headache, which results from stress. I get the same kind of headaches when I'm exposed to too much sensory stimulation, such as too much loud noise.

That's probably because it is averse, and your brain knows it. If NT's had to endure an electrical shock every time they made eye contact they'd be anxious about it too.



Well, you probably are over-exerting yourself. I'm too tired to write out the whole story right now, but I severely did myself in by going overboard and trying to do that kind of stuff every minute of every day. I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to learn what they can about functioning better in the world, but I think that energy/stress management is critical for people on the spectrum (and is usually overlooked in the common NT-generate advice).

The idea that ASD is simply a lack of knowledge about social rules is wrong. It's like saying that dyslexia is due to a lack of knowledge about the alphabet. The truth is that a person's perceptual systems are different. And that leads to behavioral differences. A person with ASD can learn techniques to make functioning in the world more successful, but that is not the same as those learned things causing a normalization of the person's brain or curing them. It's just a patch to help function in an NT world. And it tends to require significant energy (energy that NT's don't have to spend to function similarly, so it is not the same as being NT).

(The idea that behaving normally is the same as being normal and have a normal brain comes from behaviorism. The behaviorist view is that internal states do not matter at all.)

I agree with the comment that it's probably a tension headache. You mention having to "strain" to concentrate--you're probably unconsciously tensing all your muscles. Try consciously relaxing your shoulders down away from your ears, unclench your jaw, and smooth out your brow when you're listening, and breathe slowly and deeply.

I find attention isn't actually aided by strain, but by physically relaxing and opening the senses to allow the information in. Your ability to listen may be hampered by the stress the eye contact is causing you, and it's more important that you hear and understand than that you meet the lecturer's eyes (it's perfectly fine to look down at your note-taking, and generally expected.)