Possible Reason For Hatred Of Changing of Routines?

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I was playing a duet with someone on piano (the one where it's the c-am-f-g... I can't explain it but it's fairly common) and he changed keys. That messed me up completely and I had to adjust everything to the new key and eventually I just gave up and we restarted.

I think, that maybe that has something to do with the Aspie and change of routine. If we know a change is coming we can mentally prepare to adjust for it, but if it's unknown then life just slowly falls apart and we give up (not consciously though...)

For me life falls apart quickly.

It's not so much that I give up (unconsciously or otherwise) but that I just don't know what to do.

My brain expects one thing and another thing happens -- I guess for normal people, their brain just quickly adjusts all of its settings (like "settings" on a computer or a phone or a radio or whatever) and moves along.

My brain can't switch settings that fast, so all functional brain activity just stops all of a sudden. The mental chaos and emotional-upset I experience are a response to the sudden halt of brain activity -- they happen because I'm trying to process the new information but I can't do it fast enough, and as a result I can't follow/understand/respond-in-an-adaptive-way-to what's happening.

Yep. Because the autistic brain can't deal with all the variables of a situation in real time, AS people tend to "pre-think" things in order to prepare an acceptable response to a likely scenario, such as planning out what to say in a conversation. (It may surprise people here to know that NTs don't do have to do this--they trust in their ability to provide an acceptable response in real time in most scenarios.) Routine establishes a pattern that doesn't require so much careful pre-planning. An unexpected disruption of routine means the autistic is left having to work out a new plan under time pressure, which causes stress.

I can deal with it if I have alone time to prepare my strategy for dealing with the change.

Songs with I - VI - IV - V progressions.

1. D'yer Mak'er - Led Zeppelin - C - Am - F - G
2. Stand By Me - John Lennon - A - F#m - D - E
3. Blue Moon - The Marcels - G - Em - C - D
4. Love Hurts - Nazareth - G - Em - C - D
5. Pink Floyd - The Thin Ice - C - Am - F - G

Wow, when you put it this way I come to realize how little time aspies have to just be. No wonder solitude can be comfortable now and then.

Yes, as others have said, we rely on pre-planning or on a memorised sequence of events to be able to cope with life. For some reason this is rarely explained, resulting in NTs who don't understand why autistic people love routine and try to encourage "more flexibility" (resulting in the autistic person becoming highly stressed, having a shutdown/meltdown etc).

To an autistic person the world is extremely chaotic. I always write "to-do" lists for myself (because if I didn't do this I'd never manage to do anything). Each day I plan the day's tasks in a specific order. However, if something happens in the process of progressing through these tasks that throws off the planned sequence, such as an interruption, equipment failure, sudden appearance of something urgent, etc., I freeze - I'm completely bewildered and no longer have any idea what I'm doing. It takes me a while to untangle myself and figure out a new sequence, and if I'm forced to make decisions in a hurry, I become extremely stressed and upset. This applies to the carrying out of specific tasks also: I have to memorise the steps involved, and if something interrupts the sequence I'm familiar with, I'm lost. For example, it was stressful when they changed the clerks in my local post office, because the new people did things in a different order and it was extremely confusing.

I suspect it's a mix of these factors:

* difficulty shifting attention

* generalized tendency to anxiety-proneness

* poor comprehension of social situations

The kid with the worst need for routine that I've ever met was also the kid with the worst receptive language (as far as I could tell, the only word she understood was 'splash'). For her, the absolute terror she showed whenever we so much as took her through a different change room (family versus women's) was probably in large part because she had no way of knowing what was going to happen except by knowing the routine.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3iUA61r90[/youtube]Its pretty much like this!