When I received a question from a man in his sixties wondering if he ought to take his pension or keep on working he added, “Is this something you can help me with?”
I do some freelancing for a workplace mental health company that involves answering questions sent in by users who don’t feel ready or have decided against doing traditional therapy.
For the most part, I feel qualified to have a go at answering almost everything I receive, but when this question pops up I can’t help wondering how this person would feel if they knew how hard it is for me to make my own decisions.
But perhaps it works like football management in that those best at playing the game don’t necessarily make the best coaches, and those who enjoy less than illustrious careers can turn out to be gifted at offering advice to others that reflects their failings.
There’s plenty of research in support of the idea that people with ASD have more difficulty in making decisions than their neurotypical peers, but I have been thinking this week about how it shows up in practice, what the impact of it tends to be, and examining some of the recommended advice for dealing with it.
I think it’s been on my mind because I have been building IKEA furniture.
Whereas most people’s frustration with Swedish flat-pack furniture centres around the actual definition of “simple to build” and making sure you get the pieces the right way around so that you don’t end up with ugly bits of chipboard facing outwards, I don’t mind that part. My problem is choosing it in the first place.
My son moved out nearly a year ago and it’s taken me that long to decide which type of shelving I want in his old room to store all my books, records and CDs.
I asked my neurodivergent daughter which was as helpful as you’d imagine. She simply pointed out additional potential problems that required extra decisions that I hadn’t even considered.
So by the time I’d selected the bookcases, the hard part appeared to be over.
Research has found that the impact of making decisions on people with ASD is multi-faceted.
To begin with, anything requiring a fast decision, involving a change in routine, or discussion with others was found to be especially challenging.
The problem with this is that when you find decisions hard to make you eventually reach the point where they all need to be made fast because you’ve spent so long procrastinating over them.
A change in routine is, for me, especially difficult.
When I couldn’t take the dogs to the place of our usual Saturday afternoon walk last weekend because the road there was closed, I drove around the roundabout several times wondering what on earth to do. The myriad other options we take on every other day of the week were seemingly unthinkable to my one-track mind.
The emotional impacts of making decisions for people with ASD tend to centre around anxiety, overwhelm and exhaustion, and if my attempts to decide which vegetables to grow in my garden each year are anything to go by, it’s an assessment that appears to be spot on.
In scenes that to an onlooker might appear as genuinely frustrating as the Sisyphus-like Oscar-winning Laurel & Hardy film “The Music Box”, I spent days mulling over different websites trying to work out which combination of seeds and plants I could source from one company rather than going to the trouble of having to order from multiple places.
I stopped short of adding everything to a spreadsheet with pivot tables, but only just.
Having finally decided on some seed potatoes (selecting which variety took the best part of last weekend) and some leeks I concluded that I’m not that fond of leeks after all and that the £6 delivery charge for seed potatoes that only cost £7 is ridiculous, so I may as well go and buy them at the garden centre.
We have four garden centres nearby so you can scratch that plan for this year.
I often feel overwhelmed by the plethora of choices, and anxious at my apparent inability to decide between “Belle de Fontenay” and “Charlotte”. I haven’t ruled out “Pink Fir Apple” but I’m concerned about its lack of adaptability.
Some of the suggestions for addressing these difficulties in the study I was reading included,
Leaving more time for decisions.
In my experience, rumination tends to flex to fill the available space. If it isn’t urgent and never becomes urgent I may never do it which is, in and of itself, a decision-making strategy.
Minimize irrelevant information.
This is a tricky one because “irrelevant information” is in the eye of the beholder. I recently wanted to buy a new notebook. I like blank pages without any lines because lines are, to my mind, unnecessarily restrictive, but I also like a soft cover rather than a hard one. Having found a brand of notebooks I like they had no offers with blank pages and soft covers. They had lined pages and soft covers, blank pages with hard covers, and both types of covers with checkered pages (presumably for psychopaths). If this qualifies as “irrelevant” you don’t understand stationary.
Offer encouragement and reassurance.
I imagine this is advice aimed at the poor souls who have to live with those of us driven to distraction by which type of lemon to buy, but it is also the piece of advice I’ve found most useful in coming to terms with my own indecision.
Like most of the things that cause us emotional distress, pressing harder at them and demanding change tends only to strengthen their position.
Learning to accept what to others might seem like infuriating dilly-dallying has, ironically, enabled me to better separate that which really needs dealing with from the less important stuff.
When it comes to the man who isn’t sure whether or not he ought to retire, it’s a decision I would never try and make for him in any case.
He might enjoy his work and be reluctant to leave it behind, or he may want to open up space for new experiences like growing potatoes.
Whatever he decides, there will always be another decision to make around the corner, like whether to attach the new bookcases to the wall next to the door, or over there, facing the window.
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