Here's an essay I wrote a few months ago and published over on Substack.

I'm reproducing elements of it here because it encapsulates not only my core beliefs about how some aspects of neurodivergence can help society more broadly, but also to try and move away from the medical model of neurodivergence that labels autism as a disorder that needs to be 'fixed'.

In some individuals who experience severe symptoms that inhibit their ability to lead a full and independent life it makes sense to focus on the help and support they need day to day. But for many neurodivergent individuals it does a disservice to those who are genuinely 'disabled' to consider them anything other than people who see the world differently and might employ perfectly reasonable and effective strategies to reach the same goals and neurotypical individuals, albeit utilising different methods.

In the original piece, I use personal experience and memoir to illustrate points about how in certain aspects of life, self-soothing being one, autistic people seem better equipped to manage overwhelm, anxiety and stress, even when, paradoxically, stress and anxiety are increased by being made to feel like a 'weirdo' by a society that overvalues norms that, not so long ago, were not normal at all.

It might be that you find yourself here looking for support. Perhaps you're neurodivergent and you're not sure what you really want from therapy or whether you need it at all.

Maybe you experience a lot of anxiety around aspects of life that others appear to find straightforward and you wonder why that is.

Or perhaps you find yourself increasingly adrift in a world that seems to value disconnection or pseudo-connection over the real thing.

If any of that resonates, perhaps you'll find something in the piece that follows, and you may want to get in touch if it crystallises any thoughts.

It's the 1970s, in an unremarkable end-terrace house, on the outskirts of a suburban town.

I'm playing dice cricket on the dining room table, entering all the data into a proper scorebook with different coloured pencils.

My mother is cooking something from scratch in the kitchen, while listening to 'The Archers' on BBC R4. She will already have been to church twice (once at 8am and again at 11am), and she'll go again this evening, maybe twice if there’s a christening she likes the look of.

My sister is practicing standing 'en pointe' while walking down the stairs, eating a bag of Golden Wonder crisps (Ready Salted), and will soon stumble, spilling the contents of the pack everywhere and incurring the wrath of our mother whose primary concern, having established that my sister is still breathing, is grease on the carpet.

My brother is making something from the collection of 'electrical gubbins' in his room, which will later house a speaker he gets from Canterbury cathedral through which he will play reel to reel tapes of steam train noises at unspeakable volumes. Nobody will ask questions about either his securing of audio equipment from the General Synod or the suitability of a cathedral speaker in a small domestic bedroom. Then, he'll go and smash out on the piano, by ear,  a tune he's only heard once.

My father is outside, sitting in his car, listening to music on the radio. Later, he will be found in the sitting room with the French doors open onto the garden, still listening to music, and occasionally conducting with his left hand while his right hand holds a pen and hovers above a largely completed cryptic crossword in the Daily Telegraph.

This scene might not represent your idea of comfort, but when there were far fewer options available, finding a route to self-regulation was somehow easier and more effective than it often feels in modern society.

And while these recollections may seem to be no more than nostalgic family quirks, since those days, mental health problems have skyrocketed, with 1 in 6 people now reporting feelings of depression and/or anxiety in any given week in the UK.

Throughout human history, singing, making music, dancing, writing songs or stories and performing them to others in the community have been a central aspect of day to day life. Finding purpose through gardening and cooking to nourish ourselves and those we love both physically and emotionally have also commanded a place of prominence in our lives.

'Hands-on' creative pursuits have been relied on as a stabilising practice for millennia, and similarly, the routine that springs from daily or seasonal rituals, religious practice, community engagement, especially that which is based around and in step with the gentle rhythm of nature and the seasons, has been an important aspect of the way that humans comfort themselves and self-regulate.

Reflecting on the oddness of my family of origin, what's evident is the presence of so many of those traditional methods of keeping ourselves emotionally afloat, something that feels more powerful when I consider how dysfunctional and full of conflict and anxiety my childhood home often was. For me at least.

I recognise now, that what my family were unconsciously practising was something the autistic community has never stopped doing. We were using repetitive, self-generated, sensory-based comfort strategies that have largely gone out of fashion with much of society.

In the past, comfort was something built from within us, and it often required effort and imagination. We embodied it and responded to a need we became conscious of but which emerged out of nothing. It was the absence of balance that necessitated we put activity or gentle stimulation in place to establish it.

In comparison, it's not hard to conclude that modern methods of comfort and self-soothing are failing when we set them against reported levels of deteriorating mental health.

Since the early 2000s, global data show a measurable rise in the incidence and overall burden of anxiety disorders, and a sustained high burden of depressive disorders, particularly among younger and female populations, and the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp rise in loneliness worldwide; while average levels in some populations have largely returned to pre-pandemic baselines, those baselines remain high.

Whatever we're doing to make ourselves feel better, it isn't working, and it isn't simply methods of comfort that have changed, it's the nature of them too, and that's where we've lost so much of value.

Where these modern methods of comfort differ so starkly, is in their reliance on external validation. We crave 'likes' and 'shares' or achievements, we depend on constant novelty, and so much of what we turn to is based on passive consumption rather than anything we make or become actively involved with.

Consequently, we become caught in the dopamine trap where, the more reward we receive, the more we crave, altering our brain chemistry and moving us further away from the simpler and more effective traditional routes toward comfort and self-soothing.

The myriad options available to us make matters worse, creating an anxious decision paralysis, something I covered in my recent piece, 'Is convenience making us unhappy?'.

If we accept that feelings of self-worth are positively correlated with a sense of being able to self-regulate and comfort ourselves effectively, it's worth reflecting on the only three places from which self-esteem can be generated.

We can derive it intrinsically, for example through the pride we feel at an especially neat record of our dice cricket games, a veritable mountain of cherry tomatoes that we grew from seed, or walking en pointe down three flights of stairs without dropping our crisps.

We can also generate self-esteem reflectively or comparatively, through the approval and validation of others, or by comparing ourselves with them. This might be achieved by receiving 'likes' for an essay about your tendency to anthropomorphise everything on Substack, or by staring at photos on Instagram of someone who used to bully you at school who now appears to own a yacht.

It's not difficult to see which method of these three are likely to be more satisfying and sustainable, and it's also worth noting that, while intrinsic self-esteem keeps comfort within your control, neither reflective or comparative sources do.

So, is it wise to place our comfort in the hands of others? Is it reasonable to imagine that anyone else will be more invested in our feelings of happiness than we are?

But there are people who have never lost touch with these ancient skills that have been used for millennia to soothe and comfort. The autistic community have continued to employ strategies for self-regulation to good effect that are firmly rooted in the ancient human tradition.

'Stimming', short for 'self-stimulating behaviour', describes typically repetitive actions that help people to better regulate their emotions when they feel overwhelmed or in need of comfort. It's most often associated with people who have autism, although it can be used by anyone.

Common examples of stimming might include hand flapping, rocking, swinging, jumping, spinning, hair twirling or scratching, all examples of physical movements used in harmony with the emotional brain to provide comfort in dealing with the overstimulation of a noisy world.

Working the garden, walking in nature, cooking from scratch, knitting, weaving, repetitive games, seasonal rituals, are all connected by the central involvement of the physical body. If we divorce our means of self-comfort from the body in which the disturbance arises, is it any wonder that, at best, they have no impact and, at worse, make things, well, worse?

In their paper, 'People should be allowed to do what they like':Autistic adults' views and experience of stimming' Kapp et al. found that stimming provides 'familiar and reliable self-generated feedback in response to difficulties with unpredictable, overwhelming and novel circumstances'.

The key in this statement for me is, 'self-generated'. When we are in control of the means of comfort, we have a much better chance of it succeeding. The difficulty with modern tech-based forms of comfort that we rely so heavily upon, like social media and endless on-demand streaming is that we are passive and at the mercy of the algorithm, challenges that humans have only faced in the most recent generations.

If you hang around on Reddit for any length of time you'll find reference to a variety of excellent forms of stimming, all of which provide comfort and self-regulation to the individual concerned. But the shame of revelation that so many feel at what they fear will be judged as inappropriate behaviour by the rest of the world feels very much at odds with the ineffectiveness of the methods for comfort used by those who might do the judging.

It's telling that in the research conducted by Kapp et al. none of the participants disliked their stims and described them mostly as 'calming', comfortable' and 'self-regulating'.

Thinking back to my father, I was especially interested in the perspective of one interviewee who said that she enjoyed going and sitting in her car at lunchtime for 'peace and quiet' because it was an environment that she could control. I suspect this was exactly my dad's motivation, alongside a desire to avoid criticism from my mother about constantly making himself a cup of coffee and then leaving it to get cold while he went to the library.

Strengthening further the argument that ancient wisdom is being preserved by autistic individuals, it's easy to see the 'special interests' typical of autistic behaviour as part of the same continuum. Knitting, crochet, playing musical instruments, collecting things, fandom, or deep research are essentially just elaborate and more socially acceptable forms of stimming.

Traditional methods of comfort came from living symbiotically with seasonal rhythms. Rising with the sun and sleeping when it went down, keeping rituals that arose from faith and community, or pattern based sensory activities like tending the garden, walking to work, and making bread by hand.

In modern society, rhythm is dictated by the clock. Indiscriminate urbanisation and the reduction of 'third places' has limited our opportunity get into nature and hang out with other people who might think like us, while we have trained ourselves to expect constant novelty, everything on-demand and the solitary consumption of it once it's arrived.

In contrast, autistic methods of self-regulation reintroduce the repetition, pattern-based, and sensory strategies that have always been aligned with what our physiology has required.

So while people argue constantly about the perceived over-diagnosis of neurodivergence, it's worth considering that what we've actually experienced is a visibility shift, where modern life has exposed the difference between age old methods of comfort and self-regulation and the new, and increasingly likely, less-effective ways in which we soothe ourselves now.

It isn't that there are more autistic individuals than there were before, it's simply that we're easier to spot as modern methods of self-regulation spin further and further away from what's really helpful.

What we've come to consider as 'normal' methods of comfort and self-soothing are often dysregulating, dysfunctional, and unstable, whereas the stillness, repetition, focus and rhythm we dismiss but which is often so popular with the autistic community, is adaptive to the genuine physiological needs of us all, and always has been.

Autistic ways of self-regulation are not maladaptive, they're fundamentally and irrevocably, human.

You can read the whole article here

https://grahamlandi.substack.com/p/modern-forms-of-comfort-are-failing