📽️ The autistic urge to collect + how I combat overwhelm
[04:37] But the urge to collect, for me at least, isn't just physical items. As autistic people, we are, I'd say, almost absurdly curious when it comes to information. And this is something that is commonly talked about in autistic spaces, this need to collect physical items but also information at the same time. I've talked about commonplacing on this channel before, and that is, essentially, collecting information, in one space, in one notebook.
When I say it's an "autistic urge to collect" I really do mean it is an urge, it is like an intrinsic part of autism, at least for a lot of us.
So collecting and personifying items and objects is an autistic trait, but predisposition to overwhelm from cluttered and overstimulating environments is also an autistic trait. So you can start to see the issue here that we run into.
So how do we as autistic people reconcile the urge to collect, which brings us comfort and joy, with the need to control our environments in order to avoid overwhelm? [05:43]
[14:51] Our digital lives, and the amount of information we expose ourselves to on a daily basis, has a big part to play when it comes to autistic overwhelm. It's extremely common to experience mental overstimulation just from absorbing too much information. All too often I've found myself in an overwhelm-induced shutdown because I've spent like five hours on my phone, and the sheer amount of information I've seen in that time is just overwhelming. Especially in our current attention economy and with the rise of short-form content, the amount of information that we engage with on a daily basis is getting ever higher and higher. This in itself can be overwhelming, but I think the autistic urge to collect can easily translate into amassing a huge amount of digital bookmarks, having too many tabs open, saving things to look at later. [15:41]
There's this one meme that I love, I think I've shared on this channel before, but I'll put it up. It's: "Look, she's afraid of losing–" – my pronouns are he/they, but for the sake of the meme – "Look, she's, she's afraid of losing ideas so she screenshots and bookmarks everything but now those archives feel overwhelming so she never looks at them". Yeah I think that summarizes it pretty well. [16:02]
I actually read a book a few years ago called "Digital Minimalism", by Cal Newport, he's got a great series of books on all kinds of things, "Deep Work" is a great one, "Digital Minimalism" is really good, for this particular topic, so I highly recommend looking at his books; but as I was researching into digital minimalism I found a subreddit. And there is a lot of people on there who are experiencing this. In particular this one post where someone says: "my worst anxiety is never ever being able to actually clear everything I've marked down on the internet as "to see it later"." And I think that's a pothole that a lot of autistic people can fall into when it comes to our digital lives. That urge to collect can so easily translate to "there is so much information on the internet, I can consume all of it, I can mark it down to look at later", but then it can easily become overwhelming. [16:58]
Personally I've run into this so many times. I'm still trying to work out how to combat this. I am the kind of person who has at least, currently I think I have three windows open on my internet browser on my computer, and at least one of them has like thirty tabs open. [17:16]
[20:10] So that's my little thing on social media, and digital lives, but when it comes to the information itself, what do you do when you've got to this point where you just have so many bookmarks, so much information swirling around in your brain you don't know what to do with it?
I have such a huge issue with this, I can't stop collecting information. I have my commonplace book which I've talked about, I have my hobonichi journal, I have way too many notes pages on my phone, I have Notion with way too many pages and subpages, I have different notebooks for different things, I have screenshots on my camera roll, I have bookmarks on pretty much every social media app I have, I have my very carefully curated Pinterest which I love, I have PostIt notes that I write myself, and it just feels extremely overwhelming.
Personally, I've spent a lot of time in I'd say the past two years simplifying my systems as much as I can. I did a video a couple of months ago on simplifying my journal system down from three books and a rings [binder] down to one book. And the same goes for digital life, I've been getting rid of things. So I no longer have notes pages on my phone, the only notes page I have is a food shopping list that once a week my partner and I go through, and I untick what we need to get when we buy it, that's it. I no longer keep screenshots on my phone, around once a week I go through them and if I screenshot something to look at it later I then file it away, I do something with that information. And I think that's like the number one thing I can recommend, is if you're like me and you have this urge to collect and you have these big archives of stuff, actually do something with the information, file it away, find a system that works for you. But if you sit on that pile and let it grow it's going to overwhelm you. [22:12]
[25:22] I think the thing is, as an autistic person, is that a lot of the time we feel overwhelmed just by the idea of trying to do something about our overwhelm. Especially if you haven't thought about doing this before, either digital decluttering or physical decluttering, it can feel overwhelming. But I found that as soon as you start, you start to feel better. Even just one thing a day will help. I'm still refining my systems and working out what works for me, I'm definitely in a much better place than I was though, and I'm really happy about it. I wouldn't say I'm entirely there yet, but I can start to see it take shape in a way that I'm comfortable with, so I'm excited to keep going. And if you have any tips, or if you wanna talk about your systems for managing overwhelm, I would really love to hear it. [26:11]