The other day I read this study about something called “autistic inertia.”

Autistic inertia is the difficulty many of us have with transitioning from one state or action to another.

There’s often internal resistance to starting or stopping things, even when we want to. https://twitter.com/milton_damian/status/1415017838520193036

The four main themes of the internal experience of inertia are:

1. Tendency to maintain one state

2. Lack of voluntary control

3. Difficulty finding the first step, and

4. Disconnection between intention and action

Autistic inertia is linked to:

Catatonia (a group of symptoms including lack of movement and speech), motor planning difficulties, executive dysfunction, and stress.

There is no singular explanation for inertia, since the brain regions involved in all of those things overlap.

I sometimes have significant problems with intertia.

The most acute episodes are catatonia-like, and are mostly the result of challenges with movement and motor planning.

During these times my thoughts are hazy, my short term memory is unreliable, and I move very slowly.

In those episodes I often get stuck in one place, sometimes stimming but sometimes being perfectly still.

There’s a lot of halting and jolting, instead of smooth continuous movements.

I may grab onto a glass of water, and then take 5 or more seconds to actually drink from it.

When experiencing inertia, I feel like a computer that’s buffering. My loading icon just spins.

I have to stay in my routines and put things in set places so that I don’t get stuck or sidetracked.

Even starting new sentences when typing can take a long time.

It usually takes me 2-5 hours to write these threads, which all have a maximum of 10 parts.

Even though I have the ideas and sentences in my head already, it takes a long time to organize them and translate them into typing.

It can be frustrating at times.

Here’s another example of me getting physically stuck:

I put my phone on my desk, instead of on my bed (this was an accident, probably caused by motor planning difficulty).

And as soon as I put it down, I couldn’t pick it up, even though I wanted to. Then I sat down on my bed.

Once I sat down, I couldn’t get up. So I dealt with it by reading a book that was already on my bed.

I kept having a physical impulse to get up and take my phone off the desk.

But my body just wouldn’t move. I could feel the pre-movement energy but nothing happened.

I was able to get my phone, but it took almost two hours- even though most of what happened looked “normal” from the outside.

You can’t see the impulse to move or me thinking about doing something else.

All you can see is lack of movement, or what looks like leisure.