Spoons Theory and autism

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Have a look at this: Spoon Theory

It's not written specifically for autism/Asperger syndrome, but so much of it applies to my life. Finding the energy ("spoons") to get through a day can be so hard to do, and different things result in a sudden loss of 'spoons' that means I shut down and can't do any more.

I think it's a useful way to describe things for us too. Any opinions?

Yeah, I like that one. It's not an exact fit, but it's a reasonable approximation of what it's like trying to find the energy for getting through the day.

The analogy I tend to use is a glass of water. Some things (reading, stimming, time alone, etc.) refill the glass, while others (anything that requires mental energy) drain some water out of it. Something like figuring out what to make for dinner drains a tiny bit of water; something like going to a party drains a whole lot. If I run out of water, I have a meltdown, and need to do something to refill the glass a bit before I do anything else taxing (lest I have another meltdown). And some things refill it faster than others.

If you substitute the word 'disabled' for 'sick' yeah, it's got lots of parallels. Just keeping myself fed, clean and out of trouble is a full time job.

Spoons?

Duh, I didn't see the hyperlink.

My adaptation of it (oddly enough just posted on another thread) is written in my post Colored Spoons... and Social Codes. I'll quote from two posts of mine.

So here's my adaptation of spoon theory, copied and pasted.

Someone’s linked to The Spoon Theory again, and I really need to get my act, and spoons, together, to explain my version of the spoon theory. This won’t make much sense until you read the link, but be aware I don’t necessarily attach the emotions to spoonlessness that the author of that link does. (Nor do I think this analogy is perfect even when I extend it the way I have in this post, it’s an analogy, analogies are inherently problematic.)

One thing a friend with an unspecified autoimmune disease (been speculated as rheumatoid arthritis and then as Sjogren’s, but it’s unclear what exactly it is) pointed out, first off, is that you can be going through a day with nine spoons, and then suddenly you’re down to no spoons a few minutes later with no warning or ability to prepare yourself. She said there is an element of total randomness that the spoon theory doesn’t adequately capture.

Something I find that it doesn’t capture, is that not all spoons are the same.

I have (in my interactions with a world set up for non-disabled, non-autistic people) spoons for overall energy (probably most similar to the “spoons” in the original article), spoons for language and symbol, spoons for processing input, spoons for deliberate movement, spoons for abstraction, spoons for deliberate remembering, and so forth. These spoons are all different colors.

Any given activity is going to require several kinds of spoons. There is sometimes a “spoon bank” at which certain colors of spoons can be exchanged for other colors, but the exchange rates vary wildly from moment to moment and can get so extreme as to be effectively non-existent.

For that matter, there are certain kinds of spoons that are just going to be drained even if I do nothing all day. Spoons for processing input are under a constant drain during all of my waking hours. Certain kinds of input make them disappear faster, and certain kinds make them disappear slower. Some kinds of input can make them disappear altogether.

And then doing certain things is going to cause different rates of spoon-drainage. If I want to hear a voice as just background equivalent to the sound of water flowing, it’s going to cost fewer spoons than if I want to hear a voice as words, and it’s going to cost even more spoons to discern what the words actually are, still more to put them in context as meaning something, and so forth. (And it also begins to involve more and more spoons of different colors, in that case.)

As far as the spoon bank goes, a frequent usage of it is to trade off between moving and perceiving. My brain can exchange all my movement spoons to allow me to perceive more about my surroundings. This renders me totally incapable of voluntary movement until and unless other spoons can take their place. Sometimes it gets exchanged back, and suddenly there is little to no abstraction and little to no understanding of my surroundings while my body is walking into walls or something. And around and around all that goes.

And sometimes I’m extremely able to do one thing and not at all able to do another that everyone else seems to think is related. More spoon stuff.

So a good chunk of my time goes to figuring out ways of doing things that minimize the amount of spoons necessary to do something. Lest anyone claim I am incapable of multitasking, dealing with change, and so forth, look at all those spoons I’m juggling all the time and all the flux this is constantly in. That I have to juggle them for much smaller activities than most people do, including probably smaller than the author of the Spoon Theory is dealing with, does not mean that I’m not in a constant state of change and flux and multitasking. And keep in mind the randomness my friend described, and multiply that by all kinds of different spoons.

This is why I frequently say that were it possible to take a non-disabled, non-autistic person and stick them into my body, they’d be totally unable to do or understand anything. I have 25 years in this body, I have evolved a very streamlined and efficient way of doing things over that time, and I make use of everything I can conceivably make use of.

...

I also wrote another post called Storkscontaining an analogy I prefer over spoon theory. I'll finish my post by quoting it:

Storks

Storks do not fly long distances under their own wingpower. What they do, is catch hot air currents called thermals, and use them to assist their flight. This does not mean that they don’t do any work, but that they have to keep track of exactly where to concentrate their work, among a shifting mass of air currents.

Well… that seems to be how my mind works. There are all sorts of things equivalent to thermals: Perception, movement, communication, language, contemplation, etc. They’re always shifting around, and I can’t always be certain that something’s going to be there at any given time, or what form it will take when it’s there. I have to plan my life around this kind of unpredictability.

This does not mean that I am simply carried around without having to do any work, but it does mean that there are some areas where, for that moment, all the work in the world won’t do much of anything but wear me out, and other areas where the work I put in goes further. It also means that what I set out to do isn’t always what’s going to happen, and when it does happen it can be through a roundabout sort of route.

Storks suit me better than spoons, even colored ones, at any rate.

I don't see it exactly the same in the story. I have a lot of energy to get stuff done every day, as long as I have enough structure and planning. But it's hard to do many things at once, like deal with a group conversation which is made up of multiple conversations. I like conversations with just one or two people.

Everybody's different... Why it should work that way for some people and not others is just one more mystery of the amazing human brain. Maybe we'll figure it out one day; who knows, with enough autistics sharing experiences, we might end up with some crucial discoveries.

I have something like a "stress meter"... I begin the day with some default level; on a perfect day, enough sleep, physically healthy, good weather, etc., I could start out at zero; given things like a bad night of sleep or being on my period, I could start quite near the top. As time goes on, the meter rises slowly by default, simply because I'm using up energy; but if nothing else affected it, it wouldn't hit the top until about 24 hours had passed. Each event, situation, and activity has a stress value, which adds to the meter while I'm doing that thing. Some things--like my obsessions--have stress values of zero. I can do them as long as I want, until tiredness or hunger by themselves raise the stress meter to the point that I have to drop into bed and/or eat something. Other things have really high stress values. Just taking a ride on a public bus makes it impossible to do anything else.

If my stress meter goes to the top, I end up with a meltdown. If it was because of a situation or event, changing the situation can stop the meltdown. But if I have a base stress value that's high enough, it can cause a meltdown or make it impossible to use various skills until I lower the meter somehow. Many things raise the base stress value even after they're finished--that bus ride makes the whole day harder. And a very few things--sleep, some stims, and quiet aloneness--can lower the base stress value. Only one thing doesn't fit into that system--self-injury. For some reason, self-injury lowers the meter--base and current--to about half; but only temporarily, for anywhere from ten minutes to six hours, depending on just how stressed out I was to begin with. (This is why it's not a good idea to try to use it to cope. The stress just comes back.)

Anyway, that's how my system works. It's not quite spoons, but it's pretty close.