Interoception & Anxiety, How to Persuade, & Talking Back to Dumb Comments

Sarah Garfinkel is a neuroscientist and researcher who recently completed a pilot study showing that teaching people with autism to have greater interoceptive awareness was an effective strategy for reducing anxiety.

We know from previous neuroscience research that physiology tends to precede emotion. Your nervous system responds to scary things in your environment with sweating, an increased heart rate, dissociation, etc., before you can even identify that you are scared or why you are scared.

Dr. Garfinkel found that the ability to accurately count your heartbeat was a good predictor of how you handle anxiety. Not surprisingly, she also found that people with autism were terrible at counting heartbeats and overestimated their ability to count them. They have difficulty interpreting signals from their bodies, and don’t have insight into that difficulty.

Duh, right? This is a huge issue that we see every single day in pediatric practice. She was able to demonstrate this in the context of a research study, which is fascinating.

Even more amazing is that she found that teaching adults with autism to count their heartbeats accurately (teaching them to respond to interoceptive cues) improved their ability to manage anxiety.

This is similar to cognitive behavioral therapy in that it will work best with people who are higher functioning.

You can read the article here.

I recently found the truth of life in an Inc.com article:

“…if you tell someone what to do, they become defensive. However, if they arrive at the same conclusion themselves, they’re much more likely to buy what you’re selling, whether it’s your idea or product.”

This is true of 2 year olds, children with autism, and spouses, among other humans.

The article has several great pieces of advice for convincing people to let you have your way:

• Provide several options (including the one you want them to pick)
• Ask questions instead of telling people what to do. Use the answers to their questions to make the case for what you want to happen.
• Point out the “gap” between what a person seems to want and their current behavior.
• Always start with empathy.

I’m always at a loss about how to handle it when someone makes a racist/sexist/otherwise ugly comment. It’s always awkward and it always takes me by surprise because I just assume most people are more evolved.

I once had a therapy supervisor who occasionally made these bizarre, racist comments about patients which made me want to strangle her every time. It was difficult to deal with those situations, because she was in charge of my job (reason number 9873 to have a private practice).

Worst of all, I don’t think she had a clue that what she was saying was inappropriate. Or maybe she thought that because we live in the South I was on her wavelength (DEFINITELY NOT. Gross.).

Trying to deal with stupid comments as if they offer a “teachable moment” never works. But adding context and calling them out without calling the person out is pretty effective.

This article lays out several ideas for managing those uncomfortable situations without creating a situation. I found it really helpful.