How We Endure

Winnie has a lot to say on the matter of endurance as informed by her own experience combined with reading a book on the subject, and I don’t have much to say here but I wanted to think out loud a bit about the idea that “being mentally exhausted impacts our physical performance too”.

Even before my presumptive ME/CFS diagnosis (my primary care physicians continues to do due diligence before we lock this down, although we’ve agreed that my lived experience in recent years certainly seems to reflect that of ME), my experience of being a late-diagnosed autistic was one of needing to engage in careful resource management.

Autism, it seemed came with fatigue, essentially because our brains have to do so much more work to navigate the neurotypical world and situate ourselves within it without breaking, not to mention that as I neared my diagnosis for developmental coordination disorder the occupational therapist noted how methodically I moved because my brain is doing extra processing just to ape “normal” movement.

(It should be noted that that early source for autism including fatigue, as I later discovered, shortly thereafter was diagnosed with ME/CFS.)

Anyway, my point is that I’m fully aware of the idea that mental effort and exertion “counts” because of course mental work is work. What I got stuck on in Winnie’s post was this:

The researchers believe that by working on mentally draining tasks repetitively we can train our brains to be less exhausted, and this will translate to improvements in our physical performances.

The reason I got stuck on this was that there’s some indication when it comes, say, to our sensory environment, that autistics don’t habituate and that this is why attempts at inflicting “exposure therapy” upon autistic people might only be doing them more harm. This idea that we can train our brains to be less exhausted and so be less physically exhausted as well is completely alien to me, much in the way that my shrinking world is evidence that my problem isn’t deconditioning.

None of which is to say that these researchers are wrong when considered more generally. I’m just noting that once again what research indicates might be the normative case does not seem to apply to my autistic brain, my dyspraxic nervous system, or my chronically fatigued bodymind, and I guess I might be exercising a bit of catastrophizing in the sense that I wanted to get this down “on paper” before some doctor tries to tell me to exercise my brain more in order to build up my body.