Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects various aspects of life. Individuals with ASD face challenges in predicting, sensory overload, self-doubt, burnout, and finding and keeping employment. Because of issues with the brain's predictive processes, individuals with ASD have difficulties integrating social cues, and they might also have motor difficulties. Potential coping strategies are cognitive behavioral therapy, relaxation, and the maintenance of routines. It's valuable to understand and accommodate the unique traits of autistic individuals in workplaces to enhance their work experience.

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism is a spectrum disorder: There is no single way to experience it and each individual's challenges and capabilities are unique. ASD is diagnosed based on social communication difficulties, restricted interests, and atypical sensory processing. People with ASD can have eating challenges such as selective eating, limited acceptable food choices, sensory sensitivities during meals, leading to a restricted diet or mealtime difficulties. There is also a potential for heightened feelings of anxiety and worry among individuals with ASD, often linked to disruptions in routines, struggles with social comprehension, sensory overload, or difficulties in expressing needs effectively. This can culminate in frustration or anxiety in social interactions. These feelings might manifest through repetitive behaviors, withdrawal, or excitement in certain situations.

The brain's predictive processes

As human beings, we predict what happens in the world. Even before the senses pick up stimuli, the brain is already predicting what the input from those senses will be. Then the senses are used to check the predictions for their usefulness and survival value. The brain does not like prediction errors and either (1) updates its model of the world or (2) intervenes in the world to adjust it to fit the expectations.

Anxiety and depression are related to the brain's predictive processes and body budgeting. Anxiety sufferers have weakened connections in key brain hubs, including the amygdala, leading to difficulties in crafting predictions to match immediate circumstances. This results in unnecessary fear and uncertainty, making it challenging to prepare for the future.

Individuals with autism have difficulty using broad, contextual information to anticipate what might happen in a given situation. lnstead, they rely more heavily on details without integrating them into a larger, more predictable pattern. This can contribute to challenges in making predictions or feeling uncertain in unfamiliar or complex environments, which may lead to heightened anxiety or rigid thinking patterns as a way to cope with that uncertainty. 

Challenges in predicting for autism 
Challenges in predicting for autism involve an autistic brain struggling to assess reliance on its own model versus sensory information. This struggle leads to heightened unpredictability and difficulties in forming concepts and social understanding. Research indicates that symptoms such as lack of social interest, repetitive behaviors, oversensitivity to sensory features, and difficulties with anxiety and depression align closely with the "discombobulated" predictive brain - a state of confusion, disorientation, or being upset - a disrupted or confused state due to a lack of coherence or proper functioning in predicting and interpreting the world around oneself. This may explain why individuals with autism experience heightened sensitivity, overstimulation, and difficulties in coping with uncertainty in social interactions.

Difficulties in communication

Autistic individuals lack an automatic response mechanism in social situations. While they can sometimes understand what is needed based on context, this requires significant effort and energy. Because non-autistic people mainly use self-revelation and relationship cues, they also interpret others' messages in the same manner; so they frequently question the motives behind someone's words and behavior. Their social autopilot is always searching for motives; they struggle with the idea that there might be none. To avoid confusion, they often attribute hidden motives to autistic individuals. When an autistic person clarifies their motives by stating, “I’m saying this not because of Motive A, but because of Motive B,” it can trigger an even stronger reaction from the non-autistic social autopilot. It leads them to think, “Why are they saying that? They must actually mean Motive A and are trying to conceal it!” If non-autistic people don't take into account that their conversation partner is autistic and what that entails, autistic individuals are at a disadvantage. Autistics are often expected to behave like non-autistics, which is as unrealistic as asking a person in a wheelchair to walk. 

Motor clumsiness and prediction
Motor clumsiness (DCD) is also related to the reduced ability to predict. The uncertain and stressed autistic brain is so focused on the external world that there is hardly any space left to monitor the physical state. Individuals may experience gross-motor issues like uncoordinated movement and fine-motor difficulties such as manipulating objects. Coordinating movements between different sides of the body, maintaining posture, and hand-eye coordination can also be challenging.

Resistance to change and sensory overload
Because autistic individuals cannot predict changes in their lives, they resist, for example, a job change, moving to another house, or hospitalization. They desperately hang on to the status quo. Unpredictability is at the core of their sensory overload. Their brain is in a constant state of hypersensitivity because it takes the unpredictability of the world too seriously. An autistic brain has more trust in its own model of the body than in bodily signals. It overestimates its ability to pick up bodily signals. When estimating what other people are going to do, an autistic brain navigates mainly based on the principle of 'seeing is believing'. They need more information to predict people's behavior.

Misinterpretation of social cues
We project emotions onto the faces of others, and autistic people do this unconsciously incorrectly. They take every variation seriously, even when it depends on the context. Every social situation seems like a new situation to them because no two social situations are absolutely identical. The detailed models they have built are practically useless.

The same applies to hearing, reading, and seeing. They unconsciously use the context of a sentence less to predict how sentences may end. They stick to the initially provoked meaning and do not adjust it to the new context of the continuation. They are uncertain and want to check again. An autistic brain is less quick and accurate in predicting what someone is going to say, so it mainly relies on what comes next.

The vicious circle of sensory overload 
On a day-to-day basis, exceptions and differences that are not contextually relevant lead to an update of their own models of the world. This, in turn, leads to more specific models that result in a lot of prediction errors and overstimulation. The sensory overload that people with autism experience is the result of a vicious circle in which their brain has ended up, in which uncertainty, the absolute handling of prediction errors, and the accompanying stress play a key role. Considering sensory sensitivity, dampening the input does not help because then the brain gets accustomed to fewer stimuli and becomes even less tolerant of new stimuli.

Coping strategies
Autistic individuals need more time to think: slowing down, written language, drawings, photos, and diagrams help them. Since perception is a construction of the brain, we should focus on the brain rather than the stimuli. What helps is cognitive behavioral therapy, to counter the absolute thinking in a relative world what's characteristic for autism. During CBT, individuals learn that, e.g.:

• they look at things in absolute, black and white categories,
• they dwell on one negative detail, such as a mistake they made, and ignore all the things they did right,
• they draw conclusions that are not justified by the facts,
• they reason from how they feel.

Self-doubt and burn-out

Self-doubt may develop from past experiences of rejection and invalidation, leading to questioning one's worth. Autistic individuals may experience meltdowns and burnout due to self-doubt. Masking unique traits to fit in can worsen this. Burnout causes avoidance of challenges and a belief that therapy won't work. Rebuilding self-esteem involves self-compassion, accepting imperfection, and taking small steps towards progress. 

The roles of routines and relaxation

In a world of unpredictability, routines and stereotyped activities are oases of calm. Next to CBT, the other thing that really helps is relaxation. It's about creating a context in which one is relaxed, confident, and has a sense of control. By working on well-being and feeling good, one can handle unexpected changes much better and have less need for specific and absolute models of the world. When people with autism feel good, they display fewer autistic characteristics.

Autism: a valuable perspective
Individuals with autism often view their condition not as a social handicap but as a unique perspective and a valuable contribution to society. They offer a different way of perceiving and interacting with the world, emphasizing details, justice, and the pursuit of what they consider important. This viewpoint can challenge established norms and bring important issues to the forefront, as exemplified by Greta Thunberg's activism on climate change. Autistic employees tend to voice concerns more often and independently of bystanders, potentially contributing positively to organizational effectiveness.

Further reading:

• Bervoets, J., Milton, D., Van de Cruys, S. (2021), Autism and Intolerance of Uncertaitny: An Ill-fitting Pair, in: Trends in Cognitive Science, LETTER| VOLUME 25, ISSUE 12, P1009-1010.
  
• Burns, D.D. (1999), Feeling Good - the new mood therapy, New York: Avon Books.
• Feldman Barrett, L. (2017), How Emotions Are Made - The Secret Life of the Brain, London: Macmillan.
• Hartman, L.M. and others (2023), Organizational benefits of neurodiversity: Preliminary findings on autism and the bystander effect, in: Autism Research, Vol. 16, Issue 10.
• Khan, Sheraz and others. 2015. "Somatosensory cortex functional connectivity abnormalities in autism show opposite trends, depending on direction and spatial scale." Brain,138; 1394–1409.
• Madlo-Thiess, F. (2024), Autismus explizite vs. implizite Kommunikation, LinkedIn-post July 22nd, 2024.
• Sinha, Pawan and others. 2014. "Autism as a disorder of prediction." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(42): 15220-15225.
  
• Suzuki, N, Hirai, M. (2023), Autistic traits associated with dichotomic thinking mediated by intolerance of uncertainty, Nature Scientific Reports (2023) 13:14049.
• Van de Cruys, Sander, Kris Evers, Ruth Van der Hallen, Lien Van Eylen, Bart Boets, Lee de-Wit, and Johan Wagemans. 2014. “Precise Minds in Uncertain Worlds: Predictive Coding in Autism.” Psychological Review 121 (4): 649–675.
• Vermeulen, P. (2022), Autism and the Predictive Brain, Routledge.