seven signs of undiagnosed autism in adults undiagnosed autism in adults is a lot more common than most people think if you look at diagnosis rates of children these days you'll see that statistically there's one or more autistic children in every classroom and no it's not an epidemic we've been here all along you just need to know what to look for so in this video we'll go through some of the things you can look out for to spot autism in adults who if they were children today would be getting picked up and diagnosed by the system
hi everyone Paul mikf here from autism from the inside I make weekly videos Sharing The Human Side of autism so make sure you hit subscribe to get the latest content one of the things that often prevents us from noticing autism in adults is an overreliance on our own stereotypes so we know that autism comes in all shapes and sizes which means ironically if you're looking for one thing or even a small number of different stereotypes that will likely blind you to some other signs that might be obvious in hindsight so today I'll go through seven
signs or perhaps more accurately seven areas of where to look for common signs of autism we'll go through social interaction a need for structure sensory sensitivities spiky skill sets meltdowns shutdowns and withdrawals unusual associations and finally in some ways the simplest yet most powerful one that I'll save until the end so let's jump straight into it the first area the first sign of undiagnosed autism can be found in social interactions now in general the important one thing with all of these is a difference from mainstream population but there are several differences in this area that
tend to be expressed in a very similar way if I find it difficult to intuitively understand my peers difficult to conform difficult to know what to do socially that often ends up in the whole social interaction process being very draining I'm thinking about it too much I'm trying too hard I'm trying to manually process all of these thousands of tiny little social cues I'm often not doing a fantastic job and it's not always a fun process so that may lead me to avoid social interactions it may lead me to like to spend a lot of
time by myself it may lead me to appear to be awkward in social situations or it may lead me to just ditch the whole trying to be like everyone else all together and come across as quite eccentric all of these are signs pointing to a similar thing namely that it's difficult to fit in and doing what everyone else is doing in the same way that everyone else is doing it is a challenge number two is a need for structure and routine and ironically whether you see someone who is very structured very routine oriented seemingly quite
inflexible or the opposite coming across as chaotic and disorganized they are often two sides of the same coin one of the reasons I need stability and routine and security is because I am so flexible if I don't have a script prepared socially I could say literally anything and it turns out a lot of those options are suboptimal so to help me cut down on that executive function I make a decision in advance this is what I'm going to say this is how I am commonly going to answer the same question if I can predict it
in advance a need for structure will often come across as a person who likes to do things their own way and who really resists conforming to the status quo especially if there doesn't seem to be a good reason as to why I have to do things the way other people are doing them and all of these outward signs are effectively pointing towards internal executive function challenges what you're seeing are my coping mechanisms that allow me to work and get stuff done and if you take them away if you interrupt me or disrupt my routine or
throw in too many unknowns then I won't be able to concentrate I won't be able to prioritize I won't be able to organize my almost infinitely chaotic brain and suddenly I'll flip from being super organized to Super disorganized so that's why both those extremes are essentially two sides of the same coin the third sign of undiagnosed autism in adults is sensory sensitivity and equally importantly sensory insensitivity now when people say this most of the time people are thinking of light and sound and funny tastes and textures and smells and things like that but sensory is
actually a lot more than that it includes things like pain tolerance temperature regulation coordination that one confused me for a while back when I was first researching autism how is being clumsy an autistic trait that a lot of children have and the answer is it's a sensory sensitivity if I can't feel where my limbs are in space I'm more likely to accidentally bump into things and knock things over if I really like deep pressure I'm likely to hug people too hard cuz I don't realize that they don't like it so the question with all of
these is how far do you fall outside the norm some people are a little bit sensitive to smell some people have a relatively High pain tolerance but if you start to notice that actually your experience is significantly different to the other people around you then that's a pretty strong sign of undiagnosed autism actually very quick disclaimer some of these signs especially the last two around structure and sensory sensitivity have a high overlap with ADHD so if you resonate very strongly with those two and not so much with the others then uh maybe something like ADHD
might be a better fit but that's a much more complicated question so I won't go into that too much today okay so number four the fourth sign of undiagnosed autism in adults is having a spiky skill set okay so what do I mean by that well if you think about my personal skill set there are some things that I can do some things that I can't do some things that I've learned some things that I haven't learned but in terms of intrinsic ability my ability to learn certain things and perform certain tasks there are going
to be some things that I find find generally easier for me and some things that I find just particularly difficult that others others are fine with but that I find them really difficult some people are good with numbers for example and other people haven't thought about math since high school well an extremely common characteristic of autism in children and in adults is having a very spiky skill set meaning there are some things I am extremely good at and by extremely I mean compared to the rest of the population and some things that I really really
struggle with again compared to the rest of the population now this does not mean Sant level skills I'll give you an example when I was younger I used to play a lot of competition tennis and it was pretty common for there to be a table tennis table inside in the clubhouse so that you could play while you were waiting to go out on the court I was reasonably good at tennis I could win things in my local area there was no chance I would ever play at a state level or a national level or an
international level reasonably good but nothing spectacular and so you would think that skill of being able to play tennis would somehow translate in being able to learn table tennis right I mean roughly the same hit the ball with the bat kind of skills but for some reason I was way better than anyone else when it came to table tennis in those kind of tennis Clubhouse situations so much so that I ended up playing with my left hand instead of my right hand just to make it a little bit more fun and interesting for me now
if I actually played against someone who knows how to play table tennis then they would put me in my place very quickly but it's an example of something where I am significantly better than average naturally in one area now the opposite is also true what about something like remembering dates or birthdays or cooking dinner or reading a map a typical autistic profile will likely have some pretty significant gaps in that skill set things that just about every other adult can do fairly easily that for some reason is difficult almost impossible for us a personal example
came up for me recently a lot of restaurants don't have paper menus anymore they require you to scan a QR code and then figure out what you want online and then order it online through their app and that's a barrier for me I would sooner stay home and not eat than have to do that whereas for other people they're like this is fantastic I just get food whenever I want it I don't even have to talk to anyone okay moving on number five the fifth sign of undiagnosed autism in adults is emotional regulation things such
as meltdowns shutdowns and withdrawal and the reason I'm putting all of them in the same category is because they're kind of all mechanisms to deal with the same thing what do I do when the world is too much and I just can't take it anymore does it hit me unexpectedly and I break down and have a meltdown does my brain switch off and I go into survival mode no information in no information out and I just shut down for a little while or have I learned to withdraw away from the world away from relationships and
block out the world that way until I've got enough energy to come back again autistic shutdown and withdrawal is a huge challenge in many relationships and it's one of the top areas that my clients won't help with in my relationship coaching work so if you notice behavior that looks a little bit binary in terms of I'm engaging and everything seems fine and I'm fine and you're fine and we're doing really well and then something happens and suddenly I have melted down or shut down or I've withdrawn and you can't get through to me for some
reason they are relatively extreme forms of emotional regulation that are quite common in the autistic population a slightly less extreme form of this is a similar Behavior but over a shorter time scale so it might look like don't talk to me at all for the next 2 hours I need to decompress or it might look like a habit that I used to have as a teenager of having a power naap in the middle of parties there's music and dancing and people running around making lots of noise and I would just sit on the floor close
my eyes block out the world for 20 minutes and reset my brain fantastic okay number six the sixth sign of undiagnosed autism in adults is very unusual associations and mental jumps so I say banana and you say space station right clearly it's obvious what went on in your brain just now to the outside Observer these seem pretty random it might be an esoteric quote or picking up on a little side meaning or taking something literally and then running with that instead of picking up on the main meaning of the sentence but if your brain makes
uncommon associations and again uncommon is measured based on comparing that to other people so it's being measured apparently cross-culturally that if you ask people to pick a random color blue is by far the most common there are other examples like think of a vegetable most people might think carrot or potato I remember I asked this of a friend of mine in high school and she said rubab and I thought there's something special here how many people when asked to pick a random vegetable would pick rubab that is the definition of unusual compared to your peers
and the result of these natural unusual associations well there are lots of positive ones in terms of creativity and things like that but it does make communication much more difficult cuz if a link is very clear in my mind but it just does not occur at all in my listener's mind that's a problem and vice versa if I'm listening to someone and they think an implication is obvious and my brain just hasn't gone there it's gone somewhere completely different then that can often make communication a bit more challenging okay finally the last one the seventh
sign of undiagnosed autism this one is probably the simplest and the most powerful and the hardest to really pinpoint exactly what we mean the person is just a bit different what does that mean exactly what does that mean they're just a bit different you can't quite put your finger on it it might be a good different it might be a bad different it might just be a neutral kind of quirky different there is something that makes this person stand out as the odd one out for some reason and our brains are very very good at
picking the odd one out I did a video a little while back asking the question can you spot autism in under a second you can watch the full video here if you want but ultimately the answer is yes you can spot difference our brains can pick out patterns and find the odd one out in a split second does being the odd one out mean you're autistic no not necessarily however if you find yourself commonly being the odd one out in a lot of different circumstances then that is a sign that you might be autistic if
that is you and you resonate strongly with that it's actually an extremely surreal experience to hang around with the autistic Community especially for the first time and be surrounded by so many other people who are also a little bit different in lots of different ways that are different to the ways that you're different how many times can I differently use different in the same different sentence differently maybe I should have an eighth category amuses themselves El in ways that are unlikely to be amusing to other people so this is one of the reasons that I
say to understand autism you should go out and meet autistic people and if you are questioning yourself whether you yourself might be an undiagnosed autistic person then seeing what I've talked about in this video in real life and experiencing what that actually looks like in other people can be a really powerful experience because when everyone is the odd one out I ionically no one is the odd one out I experienced this properly for the first time running a camp for autistic teenagers several years ago there was a lot of weird stuff going on and if
you thought you know what I'm going to stand out for the crowd I'm going to wear like a pink onesie and see what people think well you wouldn't stand out from the crowd you might be the only one in a pink onesie but there are so many other people doing other weird different things in other directions that ironically your particular clothing choice kind of Blends into the background against that so anyway I should probably leave it there for today I have some other videos on this topic as well if you're interested I'd probably recommend checking
out the playlist on masking and unmasking and if you're looking to join an autistic Community you might like to consider joining us on patreon you can join the community and support this channel financially as well for as little as a dollar a week so thanks so much for everyone who's already supporting through that we also have an online social group connected through the Facebook page and we do some in-person meetups here in Melbourne as well so thanks again for watching watching I hope you found the content valuable and I'll see you again next time bye
