Modern forms of comfort are failing us and autism has the solution.

Our self-soothing strategies aren't working, but the autistic community has maintained faith in traditional strategies for human self-regulation.

Some of my family posing for the world’s shitest album cover.

It's the 1970s, in an unremarkable end-terrace house, on the outskirts of a suburban town.

I'm playing dice cricket on the dining room table, entering all the data into a proper scorebook with different coloured pencils, commentating to myself when Gordon Greenidge reaches his century, or Allan Knott takes a spectacular catch.

My mother is cooking something from scratch in the kitchen, while listening to 'The Archers' on BBC R4. She will already have been to church twice (once at 8am and again at 11am), and she'll go again this evening, maybe twice if there’s a christening she likes the look of.

My sister is practicing standing 'en pointe' while walking down the stairs, eating a bag of Golden Wonder crisps (Ready Salted), and will soon stumble, spilling the contents of the pack everywhere and incurring the wrath of our mother whose primary concern, having established that my sister is still breathing, is grease on the carpet.

My brother is making something from the collection of 'electrical gubbins' in his room, which will later house a speaker he got from Canterbury cathedral through which he will play reel to reel tapes of steam train noises at unspeakable volumes. Nobody will ask questions about either his securing of audio equipment from the General Synod or the suitability of a cathedral speaker in a small domestic bedroom. Then, he'll go and smash out a tune he's only heard once, on the piano, by ear.

My father is outside, sitting in his car, listening to music on the radio. Later, he will be found in the sitting room with the French doors open onto the garden, still listening to music, and occasionally conducting with his left hand while his right hand holds a pen and hovers above a largely completed cryptic crossword in the Daily Telegraph.

This scene might not represent your idea of comfort, but when there were far fewer options available, finding a route to self-regulation was somehow easier and more effective than it often feels in modern society.

And while these recollections may seem to be no more than nostalgic family quirks, since those days, mental health problems have skyrocketed, with 1 in 6 people now reporting feelings of depression and/or anxiety in any given week in the UK.

My brother later needed to be surgically removed from his radio, but his album of steam train sounds was of some consolation.

Throughout human history, singing, making music, dancing, writing songs or stories and performing them to others in the community have been a central aspect of day to day life. Finding purpose through gardening and cooking to nourish ourselves and those we love both physically and emotionally have also commanded a place of prominence in our lives.

'Hands-on' creative pursuits have been relied on as a stabilising practice for millennia, and similarly, the routine that springs from daily or seasonal rituals, religious practice, community engagement, especially that which is based around and in step with the gentle rhythm of nature and the seasons, has been an important aspect of the way that humans comfort themselves and self-regulate.

Reflecting on the oddness of my family of origin, what's evident is the presence of so many of those traditional methods of keeping ourselves emotionally afloat, something that feels more powerful when I consider how dysfunctional and full of conflict and anxiety my childhood home often was. For me at least.

I recognise now, that what my family were unconsciously practising was something the autistic community has never stopped doing. We were using repetitive, self-generated, sensory-based comfort strategies that have largely gone out of fashion with much of society.

In the past, comfort was something built from within us, and it often required effort and imagination. We embodied it and responded to a need we became conscious of but which emerged out of nothing. It was the absence of balance that necessitated we put activity or gentle stimulation in place to establish it.

In comparison, it's not hard to conclude that modern methods of comfort and self-soothing are failing when we set them against reported levels of deteriorating mental health.

Since the early 2000s, global data show a measurable rise in the incidence and overall burden of anxiety disorders, and a sustained high burden of depressive disorders, particularly among younger and female populations, and the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp rise in loneliness worldwide; while average levels in some populations have largely returned to pre-pandemic baselines, those baselines remain high.

Whatever we're doing to make ourselves feel better, it isn't working, and it isn't simply methods of comfort that have changed, it's the nature of them too, and that's where we've lost so much of value.

Most people these days are unlikely to relax by taking a small sherry and trying to find new jazz chords on the piano. Instead, we increasingly turn to social media, on-demand services, or online shopping.

Where these modern methods of comfort differ so starkly, is in their reliance on external validation. We crave 'likes' and 'shares' or achievements, we depend on constant novelty, and so much of what we turn to is based on passive consumption rather than anything we make or become actively involved with.

Consequently, we become caught in the dopamine trap where, the more reward we receive, the more we crave, altering our brain chemistry and moving us further away from the simpler and more effective traditional routes toward comfort and self-soothing.

The myriad options available to us make matters worse, creating an anxious decision paralysis, something I covered in my recent piece, 'Is convenience making us unhappy?'.

If we accept that feelings of self-worth are positively correlated with a sense of being able to self-regulate and comfort ourselves effectively, it's worth reflecting on the only three places from which self-esteem can be generated.

We can derive it intrinsically, for example through the pride we feel at an especially neat record of our dice cricket games, a veritable mountain of cherry tomatoes that we grew from seed, or walking en pointe down three flights of stairs without dropping our crisps.

We can also generate self-esteem reflectively or comparatively, through the approval and validation of others, or by comparing ourselves with them. This might be achieved by receiving 'likes' for an essay about your tendency to anthropomorphise everything on Substack, or by staring at photos on Instagram of someone who used to bully you at school who now appears to own a yacht.

It's not difficult to see which method of these three are likely to be more satisfying and sustainable, and it's also worth noting that, while intrinsic self-esteem keeps comfort within your control, neither reflective or comparative sources do.

So, is it wise to place our comfort in the hands of others? Is it reasonable to imagine that anyone else will be more invested in our feelings of happiness than we are?

Take coffee, as an example.

I'm big on coffee. I enjoy selecting the beans, grinding them myself or 'dialing them in' as coffee nerds say. I've got all the paraphernalia for making good espresso, a weighted tamper, a decent machine, a needle distributor to make sure my ground coffee has no lumps in it, and even my latte art looks less like an accidental spillage than it used to.

What I enjoy as much as anything though, is the ritual. The specific order of the process, the precise weights involved, the repetitive motor skills. To be honest, I'm not even bothered if you drink it, as long as I can make it.

This is in contrast to someone who may, say, enjoy watching videos on TikTok of other people making coffee or, 'Coffeetok' as it's known, where there is none of the personal investment, none of the ritual, and none of the creation.

An early attempt from my short-lived ‘bent phallus’ stage of latte art.

A few years ago I was alerted to the existence of 'Twitch', a US live-streaming service where you can watch other people gaming rather than playing them yourself. Where will this end? Will we move onto watching other people eating our dinner, or having sex with our partners? (I realise the latter exists in the form of 'dogging', which is another pastime that surely can't be having a positive impact on either comfort or self-esteem).

The passive relaxation and comfort that results from watching TV is one thing, but if that's all we rely on, it's hard to see how we can maintain a sense of purpose and, without purpose, comfort and self-worth become more elusive.

But there are people who have never lost touch with these ancient skills that have been used for millennia to soothe and comfort. The autistic community have continued to employ strategies for self-regulation to good effect that are firmly rooted in the ancient human tradition.

'Stimming', short for 'self-stimulating behaviour', describes typically repetative actions that help people to better regulate their emotions when they feel overwhelmed or in need of comfort. It's most often associated with people who have autism, although it can be used by anyone.

Common examples of stimming might include hand flapping, rocking, swinging, jumping, spinning, hair twirling or scratching, all examples of physical movements used in harmony with the emotional brain to provide comfort in dealing with the overstimulation of a noisy world.

As a child, long before my own diagnosis, I used to enjoy sitting with my father to watch TV whilst sucking my thumb and rubbing a rough patch of skin he had on the edge of his forefinger. It would immediately bring me to a place of serenity, regardless of how worked up I'd been moments before.

As I grew older, I started to feel self conscious of my habit and worked hard to keep it from others, even my own family.

When one day, aged around 12 or 13, I went round to Stuart Mellor's house, his elder brother, who must have been 17, was lying on the sofa watching the TV and sucking his thumb. I was impressed by his chutzpah, but remained shameful of my own odd habit.

When I grew up, my thumb was still available when necessary, but I no longer had access to my father's hand, so I unconsciously scratched away a patch of skin on the side of my own forefinger to provide the same comfort. I also discovered that rubbing my patch of rough skin against certain materials or seams was especially delightful.

Social norms suggest I ought not reveal so much about my peculiarities, especially when I tell you that I still maintain that rough patch of skin, and that the seam on the collar of the t-shirt I'm wearing is disappointing because nylon threads are much better than cotton, but that the bottom of my socks is much more satisfying.

The neurotypical world might consider all of these physical manifestations of comfort seeking to be odd and freakish, but what if the autistic community realise something the rest of the world doesn't, that comfort and self-regulation come most easily and powerfully from repetition, physical movement, rhythm, focus and sensory pleasure, all routines humans have relied on for thousands of years?

Working the garden, walking in nature, cooking from scratch, knitting, weaving, repetitive games, seasonal rituals, are all connected by the central involvement of the physical body. If we divorce our means of self-comfort from the body in which the disturbance arises, is it any wonder that, at best, they have no impact and, at worse, make things, well, worse?

Yes, I make panettone. Not even proper Italians make their own panettone.

In their paper, 'People should be allowed to do what they like':Autistic adults' views and experience of stimming' Kapp et al. found that stimming provides 'familiar and reliable self-generated feedback in response to difficulties with unpredictable, overwhelming and novel circumstances'.

The key in this statement for me is, 'self-generated'. When we are in control of the means of comfort, we have a much better chance of it succeeding. The difficulty with modern tech-based forms of comfort that we rely so heavily upon, like social media and endless on-demand streaming is that we are passive and at the mercy of the algorithm, challenges that humans have only faced in the most recent generations.

If you hang around on Reddit for any length of time you'll find reference to a variety of excellent forms of stimming, all of which provide comfort and self-regulation to the individual concerned. But the shame of revelation that so many feel at what they fear will be judged as inappropriate behaviour by the rest of the world feels very much at odds with the ineffectiveness of the methods for comfort used by those who might do the judging.

So, will you think less of me when I tell you that I spend much of my time making up songs about things I notice in the street or thoughts that come into my head and singing them to my dogs?

Is it strange that, as soon as I hear 'The Archers' begin on BBC R4 I feel compelled to sing as many different swear words as I can think of to the theme tune, frequently at the top of my voice if I am lucky enough to be driving alone in the car.

Am I weird to find immediate comfort in scratching my own head like a chimpanzee when I feel stressed or anxious?

It's telling that in the research conducted by Kapp et al. none of the participants disliked their stims and described them mostly as 'calming', comfortable' and 'self-regulating'.

Thinking back to my father, I was especially interested in the perspective of one interviewee who said that she enjoyed going and sitting in her car at lunchtime for 'peace and quiet' because it was an environment that she could control. I suspect this was exactly my dad's motivation, alongside a desire to avoid criticism from my mother about constantly making himself a cup of coffee and then leaving it to get cold while he went to the library.

Strengthening further the argument that ancient wisdom is being preserved by autistic individuals, it's easy to see the 'special interests' typical of autistic behaviour as part of the same continuum. Knitting, crochet, playing musical instruments, collecting things, fandom, or deep research are essentially just elaborate and more socially acceptable forms of stimming.

Traditional methods of comfort came from living symbiotically with seasonal rhythms. Rising with the sun and sleeping when it went down, keeping rituals that arose from faith and community, or pattern based sensory activities like tending the garden, walking to work, and making bread by hand.

In modern society, rhythm is dictated by the clock. Indiscriminate urbanisation and the reduction of 'third places' has limited our opportunity get into nature and hang out with other people who might think like us, while we have trained ourselves to expect constant novelty, everything on-demand and the solitary consumption of it once it's arrived.

In contrast, autistic methods of self-regulation reintroduce the repetition, pattern-based, and sensory strategies that have always been aligned with what our physiology has required.

So while people argue constantly about the perceived over-diagnosis of neurodivergence, it's worth considering that what we've actually experienced is a visibility shift, where modern life has exposed the difference between age old methods of comfort and self-regulation and the new, and increasingly likely, less-effective ways in which we soothe ourselves now.

It isn't that there are more autistic individuals than there were before, it's simply that we're easier to spot as modern methods of self-regulation spin further and further away from what's really helpful.

As a child, my daughter was obsessed with covering herself in cold water and would beg to go into the garden in the pouring rain without a coat or stand under the hose, laughing like a hyena, if I shot the jet of water high up into the air.

When my son was small, he enjoyed digging holes in the garden, in mostly inconvenient places. 'He's just exploring the natural world', my wife would say, which made it feel immediately better, as if we were giving space for something importantly human that ought not be denied simply by the risk of a broken ankle when putting the bins out in the dark.

My brother was given similar latitude, but perhaps should not have been, as he enjoyed taking things apart and then putting them together again without much thought for the consequences.

On one occasion, my mother returned home to find he had dismantled the light fitting, had carefully wired my great aunt up to the mains circuit, and was about to flick the switch.

Electrocution notwithstanding, all are examples of pattern-based or sensory strategies I fear many of our children might have lost in the modern world which, whilst keeping more elderly relatives alive, may not be doing much for their ability to self-regulate later in life.

Ancient and ritualised methods of finding comfort and self-regulation tend to be in harmony with natural bodily rhythms, aligning with heart rate and breath or bringing them back into a settled state when arousal levels begin to spin out of control.

Technology-based methods of comfort, like constant social media use, online shopping, or on-demand services keep arousal levels high through their reliance on irregular, rapid and novelty-seeking pay-off.

Over time, regulating patterns recalibrate our brains to remain in high-alert mode, with less patience for necessary recovery times, and potentially suppressing certain coping strategies.

What we've come to consider as 'normal' methods of comfort and self-soothing are often dysregulating, dysfunctional, and unstable, whereas the stillness, repetition, focus and rhythm we dismiss but which is often so popular with the autistic community, is adaptive to the genuine physiological needs of us all, and always has been.

Autistic ways of self-regulation are not maladaptive, they're fundamentally and irrevocably, human.

I’ve spent time in toilets professionally.

Many years ago, I worked for Kimberly-Clark, the people who make the tissue products advertised by the cute Labrador puppy.

We received a letter one day from a man who complained that our toilet paper was 'linting', which means it was shedding little fibres from its surface.

The customer was upset because he liked to use a piece of toilet roll to dab the end of his penis after he'd finished urinating, and the linting problem meant he then needed to use another sheet to dab away the random fibres, leaving him in a debilitating Sisyphean cycle of personal care.

I don't know if anyone still writes letters like that anymore, but being moved to reach out when something disturbs such a fundamental and cherished aspect of day to day comfort feels like a valuable act that won't ever be satisfied by watching someone on TikTok make a cappuccino or a speedy delivery of chicken wings.

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(With apologies for a slight misalignment between a paragraph of the written words and the voiceover. I changed some of the mental health data to improve accuracy but I couldn’t be arsed to record the 20 minute audio again.)

That’s all for this week.

Thanks for being here, I appreciate you.

See you next time.