(1.5 minute read)
I’m enjoying the police drama called Astrid, which is on Amazon Prime and sometimes on PBS. The show is about the professional partnership and friendship between Astrid, an archivist with Aspergers Syndrome, and Raphaelle, a homicide detective in the Paris police force. In this post, I want to share a technique Astrid uses to help her self-regulate her emotions.
Astrid is more than capable at her job as an archivist in the judicial library in Paris. However, any unexpected change in her daily routine or encounter with a stranger can make her a nervous wreck. She’s afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing. So it’s no surprise that when Astrid becomes part of a homicide investigation and has to interact with police officers and witnesses, sometimes she gets so overwhelmed that she melts down and collapses.
A neuro-typical (NT) person instinctively knows when and how to slow down so they can keep going from morning to night. A quick break, a cup of coffee, or simply moving on to a different task may be all that is needed to become re-energized. At the end of the day, an NT person might be tired, but not to the point of collapsing from exhaustion.
But people on the autistic spectrum, like Astrid, often don’t know how or when to stop when they get stressed. They just keep pushing themselves until they have no reserves left and completely shut down. It’s common especially for children on the spectrum to use up all their energy to hold themselves together so they look “normal” during the school day, but as soon as they get home where they feel safe, they will explode–throw a temper tantrum, run in circles to burn off energy, or just dive under the bedcovers. The facilitator in Astrid’s social studies group shows her a technique that he uses to get through the day without breaking down. It starts with putting 10 beans in a pocket. The beans represent his reserve of energy for the day. Whenever Astrid gets stressed, she moves one or more beans to a different pocket. An unexpected social interaction, like having to talk to a witness at the crime scene? She loses one bean. A noisy room or loud music? Two beans. A quiet hour at her desk? She gets one bean back. The goal is to keep as many of the 10 beans as she can by the end of the day. If there are just a few or no beans left in the first pocket, then she knows that she is minutes away from a melt-down unless she immediately drops whatever she is doing and finds a quiet place where she can be alone and regroup.
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