What Constitutes a Ritual or Repetitive Behaviour?

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Filipendula
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14 Nov 2012, 3:28 pm

Just wondering, especially at the milder extreme.

I don't think I'm very ritualised, or at least my rituals are voluntary and more like fun games to me than something compulsive and necessary to reduce stress. In fact, I've recently dropped my favourite sock-based ritual for a while just so we can get the laundry backlog cleared a bit more quickly than would be possible otherwise.

Likewise, I think I could stop repetitive behaviours if I wanted to. The main things I can think of are the incredibly arduous things I get up to in MS Excel e.g. manually entering banal data into hundreds of cells where a simple shortcut would do it much quicker. I just seem to get bogged down in these activities because they're bizarrely satisfying and it's easier to carry on than to think about a quicker way. But I could easily stop (I think) if necessary. Especially if a friendly person could remind me to stay focused every now and again.

Oh, and sofas with laptops. Could that count as ritualised? Namely, flopping onto it every evening and never getting dressed at weekends and just happily filling my usual dent in the sofa instead whilst my partner runs around and holds our life together? I suppose what I'm asking with this one is, would the famous Aspie inertia come under the category of RRB's for diagnostic purposes?


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quux
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14 Nov 2012, 3:44 pm

I don't know about the main question, but I'm pretty sure most NT's often exhibit this kind of complete inertia, at least from the way you're describing it.



JBO
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14 Nov 2012, 4:28 pm

I eat cereal for dinner every day at 9pm... Doesn't matter if I went out to an all-you-can-eat at 8, I'm still eating cereal at 9 :lol:



redrobin62
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14 Nov 2012, 5:03 pm

I drink beer before bed every night, and when I do go to bed, I put on my CD of falling rain. I put it on loop so it plays all night.
Every day, in the morning actually, I write about 1000 words in my upcoming novel.
I had my own routine at work when, it was interrupted, I quit.



whirlingmind
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15 Nov 2012, 5:41 am

I read somewhere (reputable) that females with AS often do not exhibit the same depth of obsessional behaviours as males.

The OP is female, and the 2 thus far respondents who have stated their obsessional behaviours are both male.

AS does translate a little differently in females.

OP: I think the slobbing on the sofa is more executive dysfunction than obsessional behaviour, although could be a little of both.

From what I understand, obsessional behaviour is only classed as that if it dominates your life, if you must do it to the detriment of normal everyday things. Doing things at a particular time could possibly be an OCD behaviour.


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