WEBVTT

00:00:03.786 --> 00:00:06.065
Newton's first law of motion.

00:00:06.756 --> 00:00:09.695
An object at rest stays at rest.

00:00:10.146 --> 00:00:24.185
An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force elementary physics, the kind I used to teach to first year law students when explaining causation and tort law.

00:00:24.902 --> 00:00:44.642
So why on a Tuesday morning in my 15th year as a tenured law professor did I sit frozen at my own desk for six hours staring at a blanking cursor, unable to type a single word about constitutional doctrine I could recite in my sleep.

00:00:45.606 --> 00:00:57.996
The legal analysis was right there in my head, fully formed, ready to write, but the highway between my intention and my fingers had collapsed.

00:00:58.625 --> 00:01:05.975
My brain knew exactly what needed to happen, but my body simply wouldn't comply.

00:01:06.873 --> 00:01:11.552
My psychiatrist cycled through every diagnosis she could think of.

00:01:12.123 --> 00:01:12.903
Depression.

00:01:13.653 --> 00:01:16.203
Well, my motivation was intact.

00:01:16.653 --> 00:01:21.362
I desperately needed to write a DHD.

00:01:21.843 --> 00:01:27.602
Well, I could hyperfocus for 11 hours straight when something engaged me.

00:01:28.022 --> 00:01:30.033
So, no, not really.

00:01:30.783 --> 00:01:31.653
Anxiety.

00:01:32.102 --> 00:01:37.322
Yeah, sure I was anxious, but I was anxious because I couldn't move.

00:01:37.840 --> 00:01:51.040
It took me three more years to find the answer, and when I did buried in a 2021 research paper from the University of Manchester, I discovered something staggering.

00:01:52.370 --> 00:01:58.040
32 autistic adults had described this exact phenomenon to researchers.

00:01:58.611 --> 00:02:00.831
They called it autistic inertia.

00:02:01.370 --> 00:02:08.841
It's like being stranded in the middle of the sea with no way out except from external intervention.

00:02:09.830 --> 00:02:15.290
They identified it as one of their single most disabling experiences.

00:02:16.203 --> 00:02:22.443
And the DSM five, the supposedly authoritative diagnostic manual for autism.

00:02:23.103 --> 00:02:35.895
It doesn't even mention it, not even once the clinical psychology textbooks don't discuss it, and most psychiatrists have never heard of the term.

00:02:36.435 --> 00:02:45.284
The entire field of psychiatry had collectively shrugged at what autistic people were shouting from the rooftops.

00:02:45.799 --> 00:02:52.579
But here's where this story gets complicated, in ways that challenge every deficit based narrative about autism.

00:02:53.961 --> 00:03:06.350
That same neurological architecture that left me frozen on Tuesday, on Thursday, it gave me the capacity to write for 11 hours straight where I forgot to eat.

00:03:06.561 --> 00:03:11.631
Lost all sense of time, and produced the best legal scholarship of my career.

00:03:12.223 --> 00:03:26.424
So today we're examining the law of motion that psychiatry forgot, and why understanding the actual physics of your brain matters more than any productivity hack ever will.

00:03:27.052 --> 00:03:28.147
This is Neuro rebel.

00:03:28.768 --> 00:03:33.652
I'm Anita, and today we're talking about autistic inertia.

00:03:39.336 --> 00:03:48.216
Welcome to Neuro Rebel, where we examine Neurodivergence through the dual lens of rigorous research and unapologetic lived experience.

00:03:49.700 --> 00:04:02.510
I'm Anita retired, tenured law professor, Fulbright scholar, late diagnosed autistic researcher based in Mexico, and your partner in demanding better from clinical psychology.

00:04:03.608 --> 00:04:06.127
If you're new here, understand this.

00:04:06.518 --> 00:04:20.798
We don't do inspiration porn, we don't oversimplify, we examine peer reviewed research and we challenge medical assumptions, and we do this by centering on autistic people and autistic scholarship.

00:04:21.577 --> 00:04:24.517
And if you're returning, thank you for trusting me.

00:04:24.517 --> 00:04:28.605
With 35 minutes of your intellectual life, let's use them.

00:04:28.605 --> 00:04:32.074
Well, autistic inertia.

00:04:32.988 --> 00:04:44.928
For most of my life, I had other words for it, like laziness or lack of discipline or self-sabotage, or you are not wanting it badly enough.

00:04:45.738 --> 00:04:49.098
The world had plenty of moral judgments.

00:04:49.519 --> 00:04:55.204
What it didn't have was accurate neurology or the words to name it.

00:04:55.913 --> 00:05:00.706
The first formal peer reviewed study wasn't published until 2021.

00:05:01.396 --> 00:05:02.447
Think about that.

00:05:03.107 --> 00:05:07.067
We've had FMRI technology since the 1990s.

00:05:07.516 --> 00:05:11.716
The human genome was fully sequenced in 2003.

00:05:12.482 --> 00:05:23.084
We put a rover on Mars in 2012, but it took until 2021 for researchers to systematically document and experience.

00:05:23.274 --> 00:05:27.613
what autistic people have been trying to name for generations.

00:05:27.810 --> 00:05:29.220
Priorities, right?

00:05:30.750 --> 00:05:47.995
when UK researchers led by an autistic scholar herself finally sat down with 32 autistic adults and actually listened to their experiences, they documented four interconnected dimensions of this phenomenon.

00:05:48.975 --> 00:05:50.670
I'm going to walk you through each one.

00:05:51.509 --> 00:05:59.189
Not because I love taxonomies, though I confess as a former law professor, I admit I find them soothing.

00:05:59.790 --> 00:06:13.800
But because precision matters when you can name what's happening to you, you stop wondering if you're broken and start asking, what accommodations do you need to thrive?

00:06:13.800 --> 00:06:26.348
So let's go dimension one, a tendency to maintain state, whether that state is rest or motion.

00:06:27.038 --> 00:06:31.928
Here's how one participant, and let's call her, Ruth, described it.

00:06:32.588 --> 00:06:38.439
And I need you to listen carefully because this sentence is doing a lot of work.

00:06:39.038 --> 00:06:51.369
She said, I can't get to the point where I'll go and do the thing, because it's almost like I have to stop whatever I'm doing, whether I'm doing anything or not.

00:06:52.269 --> 00:06:53.439
Even stopping.

00:06:53.764 --> 00:06:58.028
Not doing anything is stopping doing something.

00:06:59.528 --> 00:07:01.209
Listen to that again in your mind.

00:07:02.394 --> 00:07:14.454
Even stopping, not doing anything is stopping doing something that is not a motivational problem, that is a state transition problem.

00:07:15.064 --> 00:07:18.060
Her state of not doing.

00:07:18.829 --> 00:07:29.569
Wasn't a void, it was an active state of rest with its own gravitational pull and moving out of it required a force.

00:07:29.569 --> 00:07:32.329
Her system simply could not generate.

00:07:33.817 --> 00:07:36.877
Another participant said it even more plainly.

00:07:37.326 --> 00:07:47.976
She said, sometimes I end up just sitting and not doing anything when I really want to be reading a book that is right next to me.

00:07:48.595 --> 00:07:50.725
The book is right there.

00:07:51.384 --> 00:07:53.214
The desire is present.

00:07:53.694 --> 00:07:59.785
The knowledge of how to read it is intact, but the action doesn't happen.

00:08:00.372 --> 00:08:03.612
This is where neurotypical people's faces go blank.

00:08:04.242 --> 00:08:11.112
They literally cannot compute how I want to, plus I know how to.

00:08:11.922 --> 00:08:16.302
Doesn't automatically equal to I do or I will.

00:08:19.482 --> 00:08:20.682
Dimension two.

00:08:21.341 --> 00:08:30.502
Lack of voluntary control participants here were emphatic about this point of lack of voluntary control.

00:08:31.341 --> 00:08:35.001
Inertia doesn't feel difficult to control.

00:08:35.371 --> 00:08:38.881
It feels outside of conscious control.

00:08:39.841 --> 00:08:45.692
One woman said, for example, I also can't overcome my inertia.

00:08:46.142 --> 00:08:49.052
I have to wait for it to go away.

00:08:49.922 --> 00:08:56.282
Another one described it as, I just don't feel like I have control over what I'm doing necessarily.

00:08:56.851 --> 00:09:04.052
I feel like I'm coaxing myself through things like I have to push myself or talk to myself through things.

00:09:04.940 --> 00:09:14.960
So coaxing yourself through things sounds like you're trying to negotiate with a separate entity that happens to inhabit your body.

00:09:15.289 --> 00:09:17.210
That's not executive dysfunction.

00:09:17.210 --> 00:09:23.870
As clinicians typically understand it where you struggle, but can eventually override the difficulty.

00:09:24.559 --> 00:09:30.080
This is a fundamentally different relationship between intention and execution.

00:09:31.909 --> 00:09:33.379
Dimension three.

00:09:34.220 --> 00:09:36.919
The first step fractures.

00:09:37.759 --> 00:09:43.279
This one manifested in two opposite, but equally paralyzing ways.

00:09:43.740 --> 00:09:46.980
Some people simply couldn't break tasks down.

00:09:48.120 --> 00:09:53.821
They would look at, make dinner and see an incomprehensible hole.

00:09:53.821 --> 00:09:56.311
They could not parse into steps.

00:09:57.091 --> 00:09:59.760
Others went in the opposite direction.

00:10:00.120 --> 00:10:05.160
They would over segment until paralyzed by granularity.

00:10:05.941 --> 00:10:09.451
One participant described it perfectly, she said.

00:10:09.885 --> 00:10:18.196
I can cook, but a lot of the time I buy the ingredients and I never cook anything because it gets too complicated in my mind.

00:10:19.066 --> 00:10:21.855
So she knows how to cook.

00:10:22.275 --> 00:10:32.235
The procedural knowledge is intact, but the execution pathway fractures under the weight of too many micro decisions.

00:10:34.020 --> 00:10:39.750
It's like having a GPS that gives you directions down to the centimeter.

00:10:40.260 --> 00:10:42.750
Turn, 3.7 degrees left.

00:10:43.081 --> 00:10:45.691
Take 247 steps.

00:10:45.990 --> 00:10:48.630
Adjust posture, two millimeters.

00:10:49.081 --> 00:10:56.191
By the time you've processed step one, you've forgotten why you were going anywhere in the first place.

00:10:57.878 --> 00:10:59.288
Dimension four.

00:10:59.798 --> 00:11:16.351
When mind and body divorce, A subset of participants describes something even more striking, and this is where the research starts sounding like what psychiatry might diagnose as catatonia.

00:11:17.522 --> 00:11:19.711
There are three characteristics.

00:11:20.131 --> 00:11:23.611
First, physically unable to move.

00:11:24.511 --> 00:11:29.130
It's not struggling to move, but actually frozen in place.

00:11:30.735 --> 00:11:45.668
Then there is altered awareness and people describe it as being disconnected from their bodies, stuck in their minds, experiencing time distortion or complete cessation of thought.

00:11:46.808 --> 00:11:49.028
And then there's passivity.

00:11:49.778 --> 00:11:55.394
One woman said, sometimes I'd be like, oh, I want to read.

00:11:56.089 --> 00:12:10.899
And then it's three hours later, and I haven't moved three hours fully conscious, wanting to act, but unable to move across the board.

00:12:10.928 --> 00:12:16.658
These adults identified inertia as one of their most disabling autistic traits.

00:12:17.318 --> 00:12:23.318
Australian researchers replicated these findings two years later, one person told them.

00:12:23.778 --> 00:12:30.948
I think I kind of sum it up as my life probably being a lot smaller and less than I would like it to be.

00:12:31.697 --> 00:12:37.253
And yet the DSM five has zero mentions of autistic inertia.

00:12:38.003 --> 00:12:40.793
Clinical training programs don't teach it.

00:12:41.182 --> 00:12:45.293
Most psychiatrists I've talked to have never even heard of it.

00:12:45.749 --> 00:12:47.369
This isn't an oversight.

00:12:47.879 --> 00:12:56.158
This is what happens when diagnostic criteria are built by observing autistic children in clinical settings.

00:12:56.578 --> 00:13:02.009
Rather than listening to autistic adults describe their internal experiences.

00:13:02.428 --> 00:13:09.688
You cannot observe the internal experience of being stranded at sea from the outside.

00:13:09.719 --> 00:13:13.708
It just looks like someone sitting doing nothing.

00:13:14.453 --> 00:13:29.129
And in a medical system that privileges what clinicians can see over what patients report, entire dimensions of human experience get erased now.

00:13:29.134 --> 00:13:32.928
Now, intellectual honesty, it requires me to say this clearly.

00:13:34.043 --> 00:13:36.894
The formal research base here is thin.

00:13:37.524 --> 00:13:47.903
We have two major qualitative studies with adults, one with youth theoretical frameworks and extensive community generated knowledge.

00:13:48.474 --> 00:13:50.783
We don't have neuroimaging studies.

00:13:50.844 --> 00:13:56.634
We don't have large scale quantitative data, and we don't have longitudinal research.

00:13:57.114 --> 00:14:01.553
We barely have any studies from non-English speaking contexts.

00:14:02.153 --> 00:14:11.543
What we do have is dozens of autistic people across continents, across age ranges saying, Hey, this is real.

00:14:11.964 --> 00:14:15.698
This is disabling, and this is something you should be listening to.

00:14:17.871 --> 00:14:18.851
are you listening yet?

00:14:20.152 --> 00:14:31.042
Sometimes the best science starts not with brain scans, but with people insisting their experience be taking seriously in its full complexity.

00:14:31.942 --> 00:14:36.591
So let's talk about what that full complexity actually looks like.

00:14:36.889 --> 00:14:42.559
Let me show you what inertia actually feels like across its entire spectrum.

00:14:43.159 --> 00:14:45.980
Not abstractions, but lived phenomenology.

00:14:49.649 --> 00:14:55.320
Part one, the invisible force field, or what we call rest inertia.

00:14:56.894 --> 00:14:59.475
Picture this, you're on your couch.

00:14:59.595 --> 00:15:07.394
You desperately want to shower before meeting your closest friend at a cafe you've been looking forward to all week.

00:15:07.875 --> 00:15:09.765
You can visualize every step.

00:15:10.395 --> 00:15:23.822
Stand up, walk 15 feet to the bathroom, turn the dial, feel hot water on your skin, and you can practically smell the soap, but you can't move, not won't.

00:15:23.881 --> 00:15:25.381
You can't.

00:15:26.312 --> 00:15:30.572
Your mind is active, aware, increasingly frantic.

00:15:30.932 --> 00:15:34.591
You're problem solving, you're making contingency plans.

00:15:34.831 --> 00:15:48.121
You're experiencing mounting anxiety about being late, but there's this barrier, invisible and movable be between your intention and your body's compliance.

00:15:52.750 --> 00:15:56.169
A 14-year-old boy described it like this.

00:15:56.889 --> 00:16:03.700
It kind of feels like my blanket weighs 500 pounds and it's weighing me down.

00:16:04.330 --> 00:16:09.889
I can't move another adolescent described it in this way.

00:16:10.519 --> 00:16:15.470
It's like a slow old computer that's trying to run Google Chrome.

00:16:16.009 --> 00:16:20.029
It just uses up all of the Ram and there's nothing left.

00:16:21.095 --> 00:16:22.325
It's not depression.

00:16:23.134 --> 00:16:26.735
In depression, you often don't want to do things.

00:16:27.004 --> 00:16:30.419
The motivation itself is impaired here.

00:16:31.159 --> 00:16:36.049
You desperately want to, the motivation is screaming at you.

00:16:36.769 --> 00:16:40.759
One teenager said, I think I should be able to do this on my own.

00:16:40.909 --> 00:16:44.120
I don't really wanna ask for help, but I'm stuck.

00:16:44.991 --> 00:16:50.182
So it's not paralysis in any conventional neurological sense.

00:16:50.631 --> 00:16:55.251
You can move, you are breathing, your heart is beating.

00:16:55.552 --> 00:16:58.192
You could move if the building caught on fire.

00:16:58.672 --> 00:17:03.081
So the system isn't broken, it's just not accepting your password.

00:17:04.740 --> 00:17:12.300
One participant described it as being stranded in the middle of the sea and nothing exists anymore.

00:17:12.661 --> 00:17:26.659
There is no past, no present, nothing to do, and no way out except from external intervention, which is a hell of a thing to experience when you're just trying to take a shower.

00:17:29.301 --> 00:17:35.092
Part two, the river current or what's also known as motion.

00:17:35.152 --> 00:17:35.811
Inertia.

00:17:36.174 --> 00:17:41.125
Now, on the other side, same physics, opposite manifestation.

00:17:41.678 --> 00:17:42.817
Think about this.

00:17:42.998 --> 00:17:48.788
It's 10:00 PM You sat down after dinner to quickly organize last month's photos.

00:17:48.938 --> 00:17:52.807
Just a 15 minute task before bed you told yourself.

00:17:53.364 --> 00:17:56.544
And it's now three o'clock in the morning.

00:17:57.368 --> 00:18:02.674
You have reorganized your entire digital archive going back seven years.

00:18:03.035 --> 00:18:05.944
You've created three new taxonomic systems.

00:18:05.944 --> 00:18:11.795
You've color coded, tagged cross reference your backaches, your eyes burn.

00:18:12.065 --> 00:18:16.295
You haven't eaten, and you desperately need to sleep.

00:18:16.625 --> 00:18:21.244
You have to go to work in four hours, but you can't stop.

00:18:22.204 --> 00:18:24.664
It's not that you're having trouble stopping.

00:18:25.355 --> 00:18:28.865
You're actually unable to disengage.

00:18:29.345 --> 00:18:31.055
Your brain has momentum.

00:18:31.595 --> 00:18:37.384
The task has captured you, and finding the off ramp requires force.

00:18:37.414 --> 00:18:40.115
You don't currently possess.

00:18:41.086 --> 00:18:43.757
one participant said it perfectly.

00:18:44.386 --> 00:18:45.707
I have two modes.

00:18:45.916 --> 00:18:51.707
I have can't stop and can't start, and there's nothing in between.

00:18:52.162 --> 00:18:55.906
I either go, go, go, or I can't move.

00:18:56.563 --> 00:19:01.813
Two sides of the same coin, same neurology, different contexts.

00:19:04.228 --> 00:19:08.607
This is where something called tropic attention theory becomes useful.

00:19:09.208 --> 00:19:23.097
Autistic scholars proposed that autistic cognition tends to have fewer but more intensely focused attention tunnels, like a spotlight rather than diffuse multitasking attention.

00:19:23.637 --> 00:19:25.647
It's more like a floodlight.

00:19:26.089 --> 00:19:33.740
And the superpower version we can achieve extraordinary depth of focus and expertise.

00:19:34.709 --> 00:19:37.409
But here's the collision with reality version.

00:19:38.398 --> 00:19:45.538
Once we're in that focused state, switching requires enormous cognitive force.

00:19:46.048 --> 00:19:51.076
It's not stubbornness, it's not special interest obsession.

00:19:51.556 --> 00:19:57.405
It's that our attentional architecture operates according to different physics.

00:19:58.470 --> 00:20:07.470
Newton's first law again, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force.

00:20:08.220 --> 00:20:14.759
When your attentional system has gained momentum, stopping requires intervention.

00:20:14.819 --> 00:20:18.390
Your own neurology might not be able to generate.

00:20:18.846 --> 00:20:35.259
Which is inconvenient when the world expects you to switch tasks every eight minutes, like some kind of cognitive hummingbird, and there's part three or what's called escape velocity.

00:20:35.829 --> 00:20:38.859
This is when inertia becomes a state of flow.

00:20:43.057 --> 00:21:01.747
Now, here's where we have to resist every urge to frame inertia purely as a deficit, because when Australian researchers specifically ask autistic adults about the positive sides of motion inertia, the entire disability narrative.

00:21:02.346 --> 00:21:03.156
Fractured.

00:21:03.906 --> 00:21:09.426
Listen to how people describe Temo inertia when it aligned with meaningful work.

00:21:10.537 --> 00:21:14.527
They said it's the most amazing feeling in the world.

00:21:14.946 --> 00:21:17.467
My mind is in a state of flow.

00:21:18.186 --> 00:21:25.926
The exclusive focus on that end goal to the exclusion of all else, it feels wonderful.

00:21:26.406 --> 00:21:29.467
A lot of joy, incredibly productive.

00:21:29.497 --> 00:21:31.446
I am so engrossed.

00:21:31.874 --> 00:21:40.064
One person said, there's something very satisfying about it, about being so deeply immersed.

00:21:40.124 --> 00:21:42.703
You lose all sense of time.

00:21:43.064 --> 00:21:45.433
You forget to eat or drink.

00:21:45.804 --> 00:21:52.223
You become physically energized and emerge hours later on a bit of a high.

00:21:53.060 --> 00:22:01.431
This is not, and I cannot stress this enough, this is not a izing disability.

00:22:02.028 --> 00:22:19.951
This is recognizing that the same neurological architecture that leaves us frozen when we need to shower also enables deep sustained creative focus that neurotypical cognition literally struggles to access.

00:22:20.761 --> 00:22:24.902
The disability isn't in the neurology itself.

00:22:25.112 --> 00:22:50.946
The disability emerges when we are forced into tasks that don't engage our monotronic attention, or we lack environmental support that bridges attention and action, or we're interrupted mid flow by neurotypical productivity demands, or when we are pathologized for operating according to different temporal physics.

00:22:54.031 --> 00:22:59.912
A world designed around our actual neurology wouldn't call this inertia.

00:23:00.392 --> 00:23:02.251
It would call it depth.

00:23:02.682 --> 00:23:11.862
It would structure work around sustained focus cycles rather than artificial eight hour days with constant task switching.

00:23:12.582 --> 00:23:22.031
It would value the quality of what emerges from deep engagement rather than punishing us for inconsistent, unpredictable output.

00:23:24.352 --> 00:23:26.811
But we don't live in that world.

00:23:27.541 --> 00:23:48.152
We live in a world that measures disability by deviation from neurotypical productivity standards, and calls you high functioning on Thursday when you produce genius level work and then quote, low functioning on Tuesday when you can't shower.

00:23:50.537 --> 00:23:54.849
Same brain, same physics, different contexts.

00:23:57.452 --> 00:24:01.547
And here's the inconsistency problem and this.

00:24:01.696 --> 00:24:12.017
This is what makes inertia nearly impossible to explain to neurotypical people, to employers or to clinicians who have never experienced it.

00:24:13.083 --> 00:24:15.032
Monday I shower.

00:24:15.032 --> 00:24:15.782
I dress.

00:24:15.782 --> 00:24:16.742
I eat breakfast.

00:24:16.742 --> 00:24:18.303
I write for four hours.

00:24:18.303 --> 00:24:21.153
Attend meetings, cook dinner, respond to emails.

00:24:21.512 --> 00:24:24.452
Highly functional by anyone's measure.

00:24:25.323 --> 00:24:31.353
On Tuesday, I sit frozen for six hours, staring at a blank document.

00:24:32.208 --> 00:24:42.617
On Wednesday, I shower effortlessly, but then hyper-focus on reorganizing my bookshelf until 2:00 AM despite having a 9:00 AM class.

00:24:43.045 --> 00:24:49.484
Same brain, same responsibilities, same intentions, completely different.

00:24:49.484 --> 00:24:50.474
Physics.

00:24:52.413 --> 00:24:57.034
The research shows this inconsistency is context dependent.

00:24:58.098 --> 00:25:14.213
Inertia is easier to manage in public settings with external structure, scheduled activities and other people present, but it's much harder around the home and behind closed doors where structure disappears.

00:25:15.593 --> 00:25:20.932
One participant said it was a source of argument between he and his wife.

00:25:21.472 --> 00:25:25.103
Another one simply said, because I'm doing my best.

00:25:25.972 --> 00:25:27.173
And clinicians.

00:25:27.593 --> 00:25:52.222
Clinicians are trained to identify consistent patterns for diagnosis, often dismiss variable presentation as proof that the disability isn't real, which tells you everything about who gets to define what a disability is and whose lived experience gets discredited when it doesn't match clinical expectations.

00:25:55.305 --> 00:25:58.664
So why does psychiatry keep missing this?

00:25:59.454 --> 00:26:20.029
So let's talk about why the DSM five, supposedly the authoritative text on autism doesn't mention the experience that autistic people across continents, across age ranges consistently identify as their most significant and their most disabling.

00:26:20.480 --> 00:26:51.357
This is an accidental, this is structural and it reveals everything about how psychiatry was built and who it was built to serve first, there is the observational bias, the DSMs autism criteria were developed primarily through behavioral observation of autistic children in clinical settings and white children at that researchers watched.

00:26:51.657 --> 00:26:57.546
They coded behaviors, they identified patterns visible from the outside.

00:26:57.893 --> 00:27:01.042
Social communication differences, observable.

00:27:01.393 --> 00:27:10.874
Repetitive behaviors, observable, restricted interests, observable sensory responses also observable.

00:27:11.281 --> 00:27:20.156
The internal experience of being unable to initiate action despite clear intention, not observable.

00:27:20.439 --> 00:27:28.209
The cognitive experience of being unable to stop despite desperately needing to.

00:27:28.913 --> 00:27:37.078
Also not observable and the phenomenology of inconsistency you guessed it not observable.

00:27:39.513 --> 00:27:44.078
Inertia is fundamentally an internal experience.

00:27:44.588 --> 00:27:51.608
It requires listening to autistic people describe what is happening in their minds and bodies.

00:27:51.737 --> 00:28:02.981
It requires taking phenomenological reports seriously as data but the DSM framework privileges behavioral observation over self self-report.

00:28:03.797 --> 00:28:09.497
It trusts what clinicians see more than what autistic people say.

00:28:11.576 --> 00:28:15.856
And when autistic adults say, Hey, I'm not lazy.

00:28:16.336 --> 00:28:27.128
I am experiencing inertia and clinicians who have never heard of the term respond with, well, have you tried making a schedule?

00:28:28.088 --> 00:28:32.588
We see exactly how this observational bias fails.

00:28:33.496 --> 00:28:54.160
When autistic youth describe feeling like a blanket weighs 500 pounds, and clinicians translate this into, he is refusing to get out of bed, phenomenology gets erased and replaced with moral judgment, and then there's the productivity pathology.

00:28:55.059 --> 00:29:07.240
Because it's not just diagnostic categories, it's the entire framework of how we understand functionality in a system that measures human worth by economic output.

00:29:08.636 --> 00:29:29.126
If you can't produce consistently, if your output is variable, if you need three days of hyperfocus followed by two days of rest, you are categorized as dysfunctional regardless of the quality or innovation of what you do produce during those three days.

00:29:31.866 --> 00:29:48.096
Autistic inertia is disabling, partly because it's neurological, and partly because we live in a world that requires consistent, predictable, sustained productivity on a scheduled, determined by neurotypical cognitive rhythms.

00:29:48.811 --> 00:29:57.653
Imagine a work culture that said this person produces brilliantly, but operates according to different laws of motion.

00:29:58.282 --> 00:30:04.282
They need external scaffolding to bridge intention and action on low engagement days.

00:30:05.002 --> 00:30:08.752
They need flexible schedules that accommodate hyper-focus cycles.

00:30:09.082 --> 00:30:12.051
They need protection from interruption during flow states.

00:30:13.102 --> 00:30:19.221
And we value the depth of their work more than the consistency of their availability.

00:30:22.538 --> 00:30:26.439
But we don't have that culture.

00:30:26.439 --> 00:30:26.469
I.

00:30:27.229 --> 00:30:33.949
We have a culture that calls you lazy when you can't move and undisciplined when you can't stop.

00:30:36.144 --> 00:30:38.788
And then there are the voices we are not hearing.

00:30:39.284 --> 00:30:43.604
Here's something the adult focused research initially missed.

00:30:44.413 --> 00:30:56.804
How does inertia show up for autistic children and adolescents who don't yet have the metacognitive language to distinguish it from burnout shut down or exhaustion?

00:30:57.929 --> 00:31:06.328
When researchers actually asked autistic youth between the ages of eight and 18, they found something fascinating.

00:31:07.872 --> 00:31:23.705
Younger autistic people often experience inertia as a blend between physical heaviness, cognitive blocking, and emotional frustration all at once, one young person said.

00:31:24.455 --> 00:31:31.236
I feel lazy, tired, maybe even a little bit of exhaustion in my whole body.

00:31:31.596 --> 00:31:35.105
I feel weak, like my body is heavy.

00:31:35.440 --> 00:31:42.700
Another one said it's more like an artist's block or a writer's block when it happens to me.

00:31:43.573 --> 00:32:01.873
These are children and teenagers learning to name their own neurology and doing so in a world that will pathologize these experiences as behavior problems or lack of motivation unless we give them accurate frameworks.

00:32:02.318 --> 00:32:16.868
When we don't teach autistic young people about inertia, when we don't give them the language that separates neurology from morality, we set them up for decades of shame.

00:32:17.767 --> 00:32:19.297
This is urgent.

00:32:19.817 --> 00:32:28.186
This matters for identity development, self-advocacy, and mental health across the entire lifespan.

00:32:32.922 --> 00:32:54.642
But then there is the cultural blind spot, and here's where my frustration as a supposedly bilingual researcher based in Latin America gets pointed Virtually all the research on autistic inertia is in English, conducted in English speaking countries with English speaking participants.

00:32:54.942 --> 00:32:58.122
The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada.

00:32:58.602 --> 00:32:58.961
That's it.

00:32:59.740 --> 00:33:08.984
But how does inertia manifest in cultures with different concepts of time or of productivity or of disability?

00:33:09.345 --> 00:33:14.234
How do Spanish speaking autistic communities describe this phenomenon?

00:33:15.015 --> 00:33:21.345
Is there existing terminology we are missing because Anglophone research dominates?

00:33:21.849 --> 00:33:32.980
And how does inertia intersect with cultural expectations about family interdependence versus individual autonomy in Latin American contexts?

00:33:33.233 --> 00:33:38.304
I don't have the answers because the research does not exist.

00:33:38.598 --> 00:33:44.479
And neurodiversity research that centers only English speaking predominantly white.

00:33:44.509 --> 00:33:49.548
Primarily Western populations isn't universal science.

00:33:49.909 --> 00:33:55.759
It's culturally specific observations that are being universalized.

00:33:56.048 --> 00:34:02.709
We need better, but we can't wait for perfect research before we work with the neurology.

00:34:02.709 --> 00:34:03.818
We actually have.

00:34:05.708 --> 00:34:09.188
So let's talk about working with our physics.

00:34:10.244 --> 00:34:12.914
You recognize yourself in these descriptions.

00:34:13.184 --> 00:34:26.614
You understand that what you've been calling laziness is actually a well-documented neurology that research largely ignores, and that also enables extraordinary depth.

00:34:27.454 --> 00:34:43.047
So now what I'm going to share with you three things, what the limited research, what autistic communities have figured out through lived experience and how to advocate with clinicians who've never heard of this term before.

00:34:44.487 --> 00:34:47.818
First, what the research actually suggests.

00:34:48.079 --> 00:34:51.648
Well, as a first step, let's be realistic.

00:34:52.309 --> 00:34:57.228
We don't have randomized control trials on inertia interventions.

00:34:57.679 --> 00:35:05.989
What we do have is qualitative research documenting what autistic people report as helpful, and that data matters.

00:35:06.342 --> 00:35:10.422
External initiation support comes up consistently.

00:35:11.143 --> 00:35:20.452
That is having another person present even silently, even virtually provides structure that can bridge rest inertia.

00:35:21.092 --> 00:35:24.452
This is what autistic communities call body doubling.

00:35:24.766 --> 00:35:28.846
This isn't about accountability or motivation or supervision.

00:35:29.043 --> 00:35:41.463
It's that your brain needs an external input, another nervous system in the environment, generating momentum to bridge the gap between intention and initiation.

00:35:42.659 --> 00:35:53.387
An environmental support structure and predictability also help like public settings with scheduled activities, other people, or clear expectations.

00:35:53.686 --> 00:36:00.016
All of these make inertia more manageable than private settings where structure disappears.

00:36:00.684 --> 00:36:12.534
This isn't because routine is calming, it's because predictable environments reduce cognitive load, freeing up processing resources for action initiation.

00:36:13.375 --> 00:36:25.025
But, and this is critical, while external prompts help with rest inertia, they can be deeply disruptive during motion inertia.

00:36:25.894 --> 00:36:35.614
People described interruption during hyperfocus as like suddenly being woken from the deepest, sleek, and it's really jarring.

00:36:36.719 --> 00:36:40.920
This means that accommodation isn't a one size fits all.

00:36:41.550 --> 00:36:49.019
You need external structure to start, but protection from interruption once momentum is established.

00:36:50.900 --> 00:36:53.204
And what do autistic communities know?

00:36:53.655 --> 00:37:10.762
Well, what autistic people have figured out through lived experience is the following First, momentum hacking works for some people and it's starting with tiny actions like put one foot on the floor, stand for five seconds.

00:37:11.123 --> 00:37:18.952
Touch the doorknob can sometimes generate enough momentum to overcome rest inertia, not always.

00:37:19.523 --> 00:37:25.913
And not reliably, but sometimes the physics of starting anything carries over.

00:37:26.972 --> 00:37:31.742
Second, task interest alignment matters profoundly.

00:37:32.612 --> 00:37:36.152
Motion inertia during flow isn't a bug.

00:37:36.572 --> 00:37:39.483
It's the feature that enables depth.

00:37:40.112 --> 00:37:47.882
The disability emerges when we are forced to engage with tasks that don't activate monotronic attention.

00:37:48.887 --> 00:37:52.427
So structure your life around what engages you.

00:37:52.487 --> 00:38:02.777
When possible, negotiate roles that play to sustained focus strengths, and protect your hyperfocus time as sacred.

00:38:03.697 --> 00:38:12.876
Third, hyper-focused boundaries are essential external alarms, timers, scheduled check-ins.

00:38:13.327 --> 00:38:17.797
These provide the force required to stop when you need to.

00:38:18.010 --> 00:38:22.869
It's not about self-discipline, it's about structural intervention.

00:38:23.679 --> 00:38:28.030
And fourth naming changes everything.

00:38:28.840 --> 00:38:46.105
When you can say to a partner, I am experiencing inertia and I need external support to transition, instead of apologizing for laziness, the entire interaction shifts when you can tell your brain operates mono topically.

00:38:46.764 --> 00:38:50.364
You can go incredibly deep, and that's a gift.

00:38:50.474 --> 00:38:56.144
And it also means that switching is hard, so let's build in support.

00:38:57.664 --> 00:38:59.284
speaking in those terms.

00:38:59.525 --> 00:39:02.224
You prevent decades of shame.

00:39:04.211 --> 00:39:07.181
Next, how to educate your clinician.

00:39:07.438 --> 00:39:13.318
If your therapist or psychiatrist hasn't heard of autistic inertia, you have options.

00:39:13.768 --> 00:39:17.068
Option one, direct them to the research.

00:39:17.378 --> 00:39:35.708
I've linked the foundational studies in our show notes@neurorebelpodcast.com, along with autistic inertia.com, which compiles both peer reviewed research and community knowledge option two translate into language they understand.

00:39:36.188 --> 00:39:37.958
Try something like this.

00:39:38.527 --> 00:39:49.177
I'm experiencing severe executive dysfunction with action and initiation and task switching that doesn't follow typical A DHD patterns.

00:39:49.538 --> 00:40:04.527
There's emerging research from autistic scholars suggesting that this type of situation requires different support strategies focused on external scaffolding rather than internal motivation work.

00:40:05.728 --> 00:40:10.077
Option three, find a clinician who already knows.

00:40:10.978 --> 00:40:20.237
Resources like the Neurodivergent Therapist directory increasingly lists professionals who specialize in autistic adult support.

00:40:20.525 --> 00:40:27.666
You deserve a clinician who doesn't dismiss your lived experience because it's not in the DSM five.

00:40:28.385 --> 00:40:34.115
You deserve someone who treats you as the expert on your own neurology.

00:40:35.150 --> 00:40:44.721
And if you're a parent, you deserve a clinician who helps your child understand their inertia as neurology and not a character flaw.

00:40:45.351 --> 00:41:00.771
Someone who builds executive function support without moral judgment, and someone who recognizes when your child is in flow and protects that space rather than interrupting with arbitrary transitions.

00:41:02.782 --> 00:41:03.987
So here's where I want to leave you.

00:41:04.927 --> 00:41:08.197
Not with neat answers, but with questions.

00:41:08.197 --> 00:41:14.376
This research opens up because the best science generates new questions.

00:41:14.916 --> 00:41:15.876
Question one.

00:41:16.597 --> 00:41:36.586
If autistic inertia is as significant as research suggests identified by autistic people as among their most disabling experiences, then why isn't it in the diagnostic criteria, and what does that tell us about who gets to define autism?

00:41:37.067 --> 00:41:41.777
Who experiences get centered and who gets erased?

00:41:42.646 --> 00:41:43.547
Question two.

00:41:44.297 --> 00:41:47.836
How do we hold both truths simultaneously?

00:41:48.313 --> 00:42:01.623
That inertia creates genuine barriers to functioning in the world as currently structured, and that it enables states of extraordinary depth, neurotypical cognition cannot access.

00:42:01.878 --> 00:42:11.088
Where's the line between my brain operates differently and needs accommodation, and my brain is broken and needs fixing?

00:42:12.797 --> 00:42:17.568
Question three, what would genuine accommodation look like?

00:42:18.003 --> 00:42:33.123
Not accommodations that force autistic people to approximate neurotypical patterns, but structural changes that work with monotronic attention, variable inertia cycles, and the need for external scaffolding.

00:42:34.503 --> 00:42:43.623
Question four, how does inertia manifest across cultures with different concepts of time, productivity, and disability?

00:42:44.762 --> 00:42:50.523
What are we missing by centering English language research from Western contexts?

00:42:51.442 --> 00:43:09.411
And question five, how do we support autistic children in understanding their inertia as neurology rather than moral failure early enough to prevent the internalized shame so many of us carry into adulthood.

00:43:10.409 --> 00:43:12.748
I don't have definitive answers.

00:43:12.891 --> 00:43:17.661
I have a framework that explains why I couldn't write that Tuesday.

00:43:18.170 --> 00:43:36.570
I have research that validates experiences I've been taught to be ashamed of, and I have a way of understanding myself that doesn't begin with what's wrong with me, but with what laws of motion am I operating under and how can I work with them.

00:43:37.896 --> 00:43:39.697
I also have a way of understanding.

00:43:39.697 --> 00:43:45.726
Thursday, the day I wrote for 11 hours, forgot to eat and produced my best work.

00:43:46.447 --> 00:43:51.487
That's the same neurology, same physics, different context.

00:43:52.871 --> 00:43:59.530
You are not lazy, you are not unmotivated, and you are not broken.

00:44:00.161 --> 00:44:10.871
You are operating according to different physics and the world's failure to accommodate that says everything about the world and nothing about your worth.

00:44:11.092 --> 00:44:15.952
The extraordinary death you can access when conditions align.

00:44:16.581 --> 00:44:20.931
That's not despite your neurology, that is because of it.

00:44:22.510 --> 00:44:25.690
Demand that your clinicians know the research.

00:44:26.050 --> 00:44:28.480
Share this with people who've misunderstood.

00:44:28.480 --> 00:44:37.840
You teach your children the language they deserve, and when inertia strikes, because it will remember.

00:44:38.230 --> 00:44:40.329
This isn't moral failure.

00:44:40.869 --> 00:44:42.730
This is neurology.

00:44:43.329 --> 00:44:56.320
And neurology can be worked with scaffolded, accommodated, even celebrated when we stop measuring it against standards designed for different brains entirely.

00:44:59.443 --> 00:45:02.083
You've been listening to Neuro Rebel.

00:45:02.893 --> 00:45:10.543
I am Anita Researcher, retired law professor, and your fellow traveler, and demanding better from neuroscience.

00:45:11.262 --> 00:45:18.072
You can find full research, citations and transcripts on my website@neurorebelpodcast.com.

00:45:18.612 --> 00:45:26.322
Follow us on social media and if this helped you understand yourself or someone you love more clearly, share it.

00:45:26.742 --> 00:45:39.402
Not for algorithmic visibility though, we'll take it, but because someone in your network desperately needs to hear, they're not lazy, they're experiencing documented neurology.

00:45:39.788 --> 00:45:46.838
And someone else needs to hear that their capacity for deep focus isn't a disorder to be managed.

00:45:47.197 --> 00:45:50.347
It's a cognitive architecture to be understood.

00:45:51.367 --> 00:45:55.748
If you'd like to support this work, buy me a cup of coffee on my website.

00:45:56.005 --> 00:46:02.755
We're listener funded because we refuse to compromise intellectual honesty for sponsorship dollars.

00:46:03.675 --> 00:46:08.626
Your autistic brain is in malfunctioning machinery requiring repair.

00:46:09.045 --> 00:46:15.646
It's a complex system operating according to different laws and demanding the world.

00:46:15.646 --> 00:46:20.206
Recognize those laws is the most radical thing you can do.

00:46:21.405 --> 00:46:24.346
Until next time, question everything.

00:46:24.615 --> 00:46:29.806
Trust autistic voices and never apologize for your physics.

00:46:30.226 --> 00:46:31.931
Thank you so much for listening.