Personal experiences during shutdown

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What are your shutdowns like? If it's not too triggering, what kinds of experiences occur during your shutdowns?

As for me, I tend to "freeze up" and my will becomes "scattered" so the decision to move won't be made. Everything gets more distant and I cease to respond. After a while, I will snap out of it.

I become nocturnal and study in bursts Afterwards, I work out as much as possible to "snap out of it". My only real trigger is being ignored, or reaching that conclusion. Occasionally these happen to me around other people, which is why I keep a laptop around to get some work done until someone chides me for ignoring them. In reality, that's self-perpetuating though, because only a few of my close friends know how and why I deal with information overload.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

I become pretty much unaware of everything around me, if someone is talking to me I have what I want to say in my head but I cant get it to come out

I can't move or speak, and often I lose the ability to speak.

Sensory overload usually triggers this.

It is like tunnel vision. I slowly withdraw. I might face-rub a little. It becomes very hard for me to speak, and if I'm forced to speak and to continue to do things, out of necessity, it will have a very bad effect on me for a very long time, probably leading to meltdown later after I've recovered from the shutdown. All I want to do is zone in to something, like the computer, or reading. My comprehension of what other people say drops, and it is as though my mind is in a grey fog. I feel exhausted, soul-weary. As I come out of it (anywhere from hours to days later), the world feels very assaulting, hyper-real, and offensive to the senses, and I'm at risk for meltdown if I'm not handled very gently by the people around me, and by life. It is like spending hours or days in a dark room, only to enter out into bright, glaring sunlight.

I kind of zone out like I am not focusing on anything. I'm just kind of there physically but I'm not really there. It's hard to explain. I think the best way to explain it is the lack of focus. It almost feels like I am not really in my body but almost just kind of hovering. I feel drained usually.

I turn up the dial on the special interest, usually w/o any tangible results except centering my equilibrium.

I usually shut down after a meltdown or after something really sad made me shurt down.

When I was 8 I had a shutdown because my parakeet had died and I was so sad that I just couldn't talk, or move, or eat.

Another time I had a shutdown was in 10th grade, after a meltdown. I just thought of nothing, sitting and not talking or answering to people who called me.

My daughter shuts down, usually from emotional overload, which is often in an environment that is physically overstimulating. The combo is a tough one for her.

Of course I can't know what she is experiencing, but she looks like she is lost in her mind and completely zoned out. She also has the appearance of being in some high density fluid that slows every thing down. For example, if I can call her name enough to cut through it, she turns very slowly. She also tends not to notice (I am assuming) verbal input, though sometimes if you touch her lightly, she will be able to hear you. But she maintains that far off look in her eyes and is only able to slowly and partially comply with whatever you are saying to her. To be honest, she reminds me somewhat of catatonics I have worked with in the past.

If she stays in this state long enough, she will usually fall asleep, no matter where she is. She just finds a place to sit and falls asleep.

The beginning of my shutdowns start with a lightheaded feeling and then develop into an autopilot. While on autopilot I go through my day to day motions, but I'm locked inside my own body and often lose the ability to talk. If the autopilot mode progresses too far I will often curl up under something (bed, table, etc..) or in a corner. Sometimes I cry, other times I just rock. If I experience a very bad sensory overload (usually due to tornado alarms at school) I will become virtually catatonic, completely unresponsive. During and after a shutdown I feel completely drained of energy and after I snap out of my shutdown I often fall asleep very quickly.

Depends on the trigger. Stuff related to sounds usually leads to hands over the ears, eyes shut, groaning and twitching till I feel 'safe' that it's gone. Anything else leads to the shutting down thing other people have described, nodding and 'mming' in response to questions but not volunteering information. That or something similar to a panic attack; hyperventilating, crying, shaking etc. though I feel that is very much linked with my anxiety.

Also noticed that I'll end up with scratch marks down my arms or fingernail half-moons dug into the palms of my hand afterwards? Hm.

Often it surprises me how resistant I am to annoying noises as a trigger of this phenomenon, but perhaps those are the instances I refer to shutdowns as something like 'my screensaver' and find rationale to dig myself out of them. In this case, noise definitely isn't the only trigger; conversations about other spectrum individuals that I overhear are the worst! It's like being gossiped about to my face, and that's probably what brings up the 'stuck in goo' scenario most readily in my mind, because there's no apropos way to react, no matter how rude or slanderous such topics get.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos