Tuesday: a very localized power outage

This kids are back in school; I got up to do my part in that process and then went back to bed. I set a second alarm, because I’d sort of like to get back to getting up and staying up, but the second alarm did not go off, because the power was out. I _thought_ this was a power outage. We had had flickers that caused the whole house to lose power. When I got up, I had to reset the kitchen stove and microwave clocks. But it was really clear that my room did not have power when the rest of the house did. Apparently, restart on one of the short outages resulted in a flipped breaker. This was all great, because it means I could have my usual breakfast (which involves electricity for the toaster oven and the electric kettle) instead of something involving the stove (which continues to be gas, and thus immune to power outages).

It definitely is moments like this that make me think really hard about how I feel about replacing the stove with an induction range. Also, the stove still works, and replacing functional equipment always requires a lot of extra thinking about tradeoffs.

Different Writing Project Idea! Exercise

I have a bunch of in-progress, longstanding writing projects that I am Not Working On. Today, I went and looked at my decluttering page on my website. I last updated it almost 10 years ago. Which is fine! It ends in the middle of a Thought. That’s less fine, but also, Still Fine! I might go update it. I probably won’t.

I am _also_ Not Working On _I Can’t Stop Thinking About Your Brother_. I’m very okay with not working on that, because I go pretty long stretches of thinking things through, and then it becomes clear what another component of that project is.

I am _also_ Not Working on the JAK monograph project. Also very fine! I’m still in the reading phase of that project and honestly, I’m not even doing the reading. No problem with any of that.

Anyway.

I’ve been thinking a lot about ADHD and autism and related “neurospicy” —a term I learned on TikTok — categories. I’ve posted here already that I no longer believe that anyone in this family has ADHD. I do think there’s some anxiety in this family (understatement), altho I persist in believing that I, personally, do not suffer from it. I _also_ know that Denial is real and can be pervasive in embarrassing ways once some time and enlightenment has occurred, so I’m absolutely interested in the possibility that I’m completely wrong about myself. So, in the interests of, But What If I Really Did Have One Or More Of These Things, I did a little googling about stimming.

I am absolutely a leg bouncer, well, that is, I am when I don’t get enough exercise. Three days of no exercise and I’m not sick? I’m bouncing. I used to leg bounce all the fucking time. I used to be totally unable to sit still in a chair. Or, really, anywhere. When I learned about non-exercise activity and how many calories it can go through, I laughed maniacally and was _insufferable_ about showing the information to everyone (that was a while ago. I only bring it up occasionally now). While the calorie-focused community thinks of non-exercise activity as weird shit that turns out to burn a lot of calories, school teachers and people who have to share space with other people tend to call it stimming.

The question I had was: how do you tell the difference between stimming for autism, stimming for ADHD and a tic disorder?

As near as I can tell from doing a little reading, stimming for autism is for reassurance and calming, while stimming for ADHD is to help with focus. The tic disorder thing is a little confusing, because that looks anxiety related, but often with a whole host of other organic stuff going on in at least some cases.

OK. Next question! Given the amount of co-morbidity, how does this even make sense? Also, does exercise help with stimming reduction in all groups, or just one or what?

Answer: helps with all groups! So you cannot use exercise to differentiate between whether you were stimming for ADHD or for autism.

At this point, I’m thinking, ya know, _I_ went into this knowing that exercise is what you do if you are struggling to keep the restlessness under control. Sorta like, hungry? Cranky, feeling faint? Eat some food! Leg bouncing? Can’t sit still? Go for a walk!

Let’s just reframe the whole thing. We recognize that humans need to eat (and not just humans, either! In general, eating is a need for a lot of critters!). And while people _can_ survive without food for days, and some people in some circumstances for even longer, most people need to eat several times a day, and we have structured society in accordance with that recognition. When schools see a kid who can’t focus, one of the questions asked is, has this kid eaten lately? When a kid’s behavior is deteriorating, we ask, does this kid need to eat something? When a kid is emotionally dysregulating, you get the idea. While we all know people who eat just once a day, we usually think that’s a little odd. If we met someone who only ate on the weekends, we’d be like, WTF anyway.

And yet.

Plenty of people — kids and adults — do not get regular exercise, or at least, not very much. When pedometers were a Thing, one of the startling things I learned was how very many people walk less than a quarter of a mile over the course of their _entire_ day.

What is exercise was _just like food_. What if we needed exercise several times a day, most days. What if 20 or 30 or 40 minutes of brisk walking was roughly the equivalent of a person going on a diet of 1200-1500 calories a day. Can you live on that? For a while, sure. But what if for some (most?) people, it’s just not enough?

What if stimming was just a behavior that tells us there is an unmet basic need, and treating it as a pathology to be addressed via psychology is roughly equivalent to giving someone who is not eating enough food a bunch of drug therapy or talk therapy or whatever to make the food hunger go away, without actually giving them the food they really need.

How much of psychology is attempting to fix problems that are primarily a manifestation of hunger for physical activity?

So, anyway. The hypothetical writing project idea is, rather than think of Exercise as a Tool for managing symptoms of a disease state, to shift to a frame in which we think of all those disease states as what happens as a negative consequence of Physical Activity Hunger.