The Blindboy Podcast - This is a Mental Health episode about being Autistic. If you are not Autistic, you might not like it and should listen to Diary of a CEO instead

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

An exciting new non pathologising paper has been published into autistic flow states. I discuss this  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shed your helmets, you sweltering Emmits. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. If you're a brand new listener, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. At the beginning of last week's podcast, I read out a poem by Daniel DeLewis called Is This a Priest or a Seagull. And it was ironically prophetic because I've been tortured all week by the screams of gulls. Seagulls are nesting on the roof.

of my office, just above my head on my tin roof. And it hasn't rained in days, but the fucking seagulls are persistently walking around slamming their massive orange feet and screaming. So if at any point throughout this podcast a seagull screams, we're just going to have to sit with the anxiety of that and let it pass. I was allowing the seagulls to intrude on my mental well-being, during the week. I was catastrophizing a little bit. Every time they screamed, I was thinking, fuck, how am I going to record next week's podcast with this noise? It'll be a disaster. It'll be terrible, impossible. I'm going to have to abandon next week's podcast and put out no podcast because the seagulls would get in my way. And then I identified these thoughts as irrational and negative and

unhelpful. And then I reminded myself, I have a choice here. I can choose to view the seagulls behaviour as something terrible and awful, or I can identify it as an opportunity, an opportunity to fail, to embrace the seagulls, just like we do with the rain. Bring the fucking seagulls on as a guest and name it and move past it, and that's what we're going to do. And when I engage that rational thinking part of my brain, then my curiosity opened up. Oh, there we go. Do you hear that?

Do you know what that seagull is saying there, what that seagull is screaming? The seagull is saying, I don't want to interrupt your podcast, blind by. I'm a seagull, I don't give a fuck about podcasts. To be honest with you, I'd rather not be on the roof of your office. You don't want to be on the roof.

of my office, Mr. Seagull, or Mrs. Seagull, or non-binary seagull, I'll just go with Mr. Seagull. There's a reason I can't put a gender to that seagull that just screamed. But why don't you want to be on the roof of my office, Mr. Seagull, with your nest up there? Well, I'd much rather be nesting on one of the many islands on the Shannon Estuary. I'd much rather be there. It's closer to my source of food. They're called herring gulls, you see. They want to be hanging around the mouth of the fucking ocean or on the rivers, but they're not. The natural nesting habitat of those seagulls on my roof are the islands of the shannon estuary are in some of the wetlands. But those habitats have become overrun with rats and mink.

And these are invasive predators that they eat the eggs in the nests of the seagulls. So the safest place for seagulls to nest is high up in urban areas and they don't want to be there. It's not their natural habitat. They're going apeshid on my roof now. I'll see if I can open the window and you can hear them. Conti's gone quiet now. Gone fucking quiet as soon as I open the window. Probably freaked out.

Anyway look they're defending their nests. That's what they're doing. So both the male and female, herring. they're incredibly loud right now because they're defending their nests. I'm looking at one right now, standing on a lot of solar panels. Absolutely stunning white plumage. Just flew off there, very large. And also they're starving.

I think I might have mentioned this last year, but... So those are... Those seagulls of Limerick City, Limerick City Centre, where my offices. Two seemingly unrelated things are impacting. the Siegel's behaviour. One of them is the bottle return scheme and the other thing is the crack cocaine

epidemic that's been in Limerick City for about three years and I'll explain why. So in 2024, Ireland introduced the deposit return scheme for bottles and cans. Just let the Seagulls speak. If you buy a plastic bottle

in Ireland now there's a 15 cent tax on that plastic bottle, but you can bring it back to a type of vending machine where it's recycled and that will give you money, that will give you 15 cents. So that's been happening in Ireland now for two years. What does that have to do with the crack cocaine epidemic? In Limerick City, there are, there's drug addicts and they're addicted to crack cocaine. That's quite an expensive addiction.

But crack cocaine in Limerick City specifically is very cheap. I'm not putting that out of my arse. The Aniliphy Drug Project who help people who are in addiction. Now they do fantastic work. Anna Liffy do amazing work. But they have an unfortunate name because any time I read Annal Ify,

it reads as anal iffy. So that reads as an organisation for people who are iffy about anal sex. It's not. It's a brilliant community-based drug outreach program and you can donate to them at ALDP.I. they've stated that the price of crack in Limerick City is 15 euro. A major gang targeted Limerick City as an emerging market for crack cocaine and base more seagulls

basically flooded the place with cheap crack and people travelled to Limerick for crack cocaine. So 15 euros. I saw this with my own eyes. When the deposit return scheme came about in 2024, the people who were addicted to crack started to collect started to collect. plastic bottles and bring them to the vending machines for money because there was also a shoplifting problem. So this was a way for people who are in crack cocaine addiction to get money without breaking the law. 100 plastic bottles will get you 15 euros. So for about six months in 2024,

the city centre of limerick was full of people with big black sacks full of plastic bottles bringing them to vending machines. But eventually the people who were in crack cocaine addiction, instead of just picking the bottles up off the street, started to open up the bins of restaurants down alleyways, and they were tearing everything out to get at the bottles. So then what happened? The restaurants started padlocking all the bins down the alleyways to keep humans from getting at the bins.

But then that impacted the food supply of the urban seagulls the fucking hell. herring gulls, I then witnessed an uptick in aggressive and loud seagull behaviour because it started to affect how I record my podcast, so that's what we're dealing with right now. Loud, hungry herring gulls on my roof who are not only defending their nests, but are very pissed off because it's difficult to find food. And if you're wondering where I got my information about Irish seagull behaviour there, I read an article written by an expert from Birdwatch Ireland. whose name is

Owen Hatch wonderful nominative determinism there this week's podcast is not about seagulls I'd like to do a mental health podcast

this week last week I spoke to a neuroscientist by the name of Michael Keen he spoke about the mental health impacts of

doom scrolling and he had a lot to say about that podcast I got a huge response from people who were identifying unhelpful

behaviours in themselves around doomscrolling and it just reminded me that I haven't done, I haven't checked in with a mental health podcast in a long time when I speak about emotional well-being in this podcast. I'm not a fucking expert. I'm just a person navigating my own emotions and I have certain tools that I use to do this and I like to share these things and to be vulnerable as a form of personal journaling. I want to make mention a beautiful study that came out this month. A study that it made me feel really fucking good about myself.

It's a study about the experience of flow states in artistic people. If you're a long-term listener of this podcast, like I think my first ever episodes, eight years ago, I spoke about flow. When I was describing, my first collection of short stories,

the Gospel According to Blind Boy from 2017. I spoke about what I loved about that book isn't necessarily completing the work, having the stories. It was the act of doing it, the process, the fact that I got to engage in the feeling of flow while writing the entire book. And flow feels a bit like daydreaming, but very, very intense.

When I enter flow's date, I experience complete and total bliss. My thoughts become like a laser beam of extreme clarity and I'm overwhelmed with a feeling of belonging, love, purpose and above all meaning. When I'm in flow, I feel unbelievably happy to just be alive. I feel that I have worth, purpose. It feels like being a little baby

and my mother is cradling me and all I have is love and safety that's what flow state feels like to me and when I'm in that state my creativity unlocks I write entire books stories arrive to me like I'm in the cinema

watching them and then I exit flow state and I'm back in the real world we'll call it and I have no idea how I just wrote what I wrote and that can be scary because I can I can read

I can read fucking stories that I wrote myself and go, who the fuck wrote this? How did I do this? I could never do this again. Holy fuck. But that's flow state. And I need to enter flow state to do my job,

to do this podcast, to write books. So this new study, which was published in the journal of counseling and psychotherapy research, is called Towards Autistic Flow Theory and non-pathologizing conceptual approach. What makes it so groundbreaking and so validating is it looks at flow specifically in autistic people because flow in autistic people is reported as being particularly intense. When you hear people talking about autism as a superpower,

which most people disagree with, I don't like that term superpower, but when people say that, what they're referring to is autistic flow states. I don't experience it as a superpower, but at times it has felt magical. It's not fucking magical. But because time and space, in space can fade away effectively and I'm in this weird laser beam universe, the best language I can use to describe it is magical. The most accurate visual representation of flow that I've ever seen depicted is there's a film from 2004 called A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crow. It's about a schizophrenic mathematician, but there's moments in it where Russell Crow's character is solving problems

and patterns emerge before his eyes and the whole world shuts out as he's locked in deep concentration. And I used to watch that film when it came out. I don't even like the fucking film. It's not even that good a film but I used to watch those scenes on repeat

because something about it made me feel normal and now I understand why because it was flow state autistic pattern recognition. You know earlier on there with the fucking fucking seagulls. Most people, if there's seagulls on their roof, they just go, oh, there's seagulls on my roof, that's very annoying. Whereas I don't move on it, I focus on it until patterns emerge. And that's how I connected the seagull behaviour with the crack cocaine epidemic and the

deposit return scheme, which I think is highly plausible. It might be true, it might not be true, I think it's possible. What we can all agree on is that it's fucking mental. It's a highly eccentric theory that I keep to myself. I'll say it here on this fucking podcast on the Blind by podcast. But you think I'm walking around my office? Saying to people, you know what's going on with those seagulls upstairs, don't you? You know what has to do with the crack, don't you? You know that, don't you? I'm not fucking doing that. Because that's the type of eccentric behavior that brings social rejection to autistic people. Not here on this podcast. If you're listening to this podcast, you want to hear why the seagulls are connected to

crack cocaine. That's why you're here. This new study, I cried when I read it. I cried when I read it. It reframes autistic people. Not as defective, as wrong, as broken, but as human beings that are uniquely attuned to states of flow. Also what makes the study unique is it's not non-autistic people watching autistic people and writing about them. It's phenomenological research where autistic accounts from autistic people are central to the concept of what autism is. So they've really listened. Instead of studying the autistic people, they ask the autistic people questions about what

it's like to be alive. So the big, big finding of this study, autistic people need flow state in a order to manage our mental health, in order to regulate our emotions, to feel safe, we must have regular access to flow state. Now I've known this for years. I've known this because I'm fucking autistic. That's my lived experience. Three weeks ago, I told you, I got my analog synthesizers and I started making music again. And then I was posting it online and the music was doing really well. I just posted another track last night on

Instagram a piece of jungle music that I made over the weekend and it's gone Seagles it's gone massively viral and I got offered three gigs today three gigs

at drum and bass nights two in Ireland one in Berlin I'm not doing it to get gigs I don't want the gigs I don't want to be a professional musician I don't even want to release music if I just get to

enjoy the process of making music and entering flow state. My mental health improves. The next day, I'm less irritable. I'm much more literate in my emotional experience. What I mean by that is I can name and feel and notice my emotions as opposed to react to them. And I knew this to be true, but I would still say to myself, that's fucking ridiculous. How can playing with synthesizers for two hours, improve your mental health. The fuck is that. Don't be silly. Because I've been conditioned to believe that it is silly. Adults don't play with fucking synthesizers. And if you are to play with synthesizers, then you better capitalize on it. You better turn it into gigs. You better turn it

into revenue. Then it has real value. But the real value is, it allows me to be, it allows me to feel safe, to feel safe and to feel happy. This study confirms it. Autistic people need flow. Also this study challenges certain language which autistic people don't like, special interests. I fucking hate the term special interests. It's another way of saying, it's not that deep or you think too much. Autistic people are focused on these silly things, these silly interests. Instead of being serious about life like the rest of us. Well this study gets rid of special interests altogether and goes, fuck that. Artistic people enter flow states.

And what you see as special interests, that's flow state. And that might look silly to you as a neurotypical person. But to autistic people, this is actually an essential part of how they regulate and manage their emotions. The way that neurotypical people social, I mean, that's the huge, huge difference between me and neurotypical people is, I don't really have friends. I have a small circle of people, my family, who I'm very close with and who I can be myself around.

But outside of that, I don't really have friends. And it's not a dislike of people. I love being around people. I like to be, I like to be in, I like to be alone in the presence of humans. I love that. That's why I like going to the gym. I find the gym to be a very artistic friendly space because I can wear headphones

and can be around loads of people and there's no expectation for me to have small talk. I can be by myself in a crowd and that's normal. But I suppose the reason I don't have friends is I don't really experience loneliness. I don't miss people. Like something that used to make me feel like an alien in when I was younger.

In my 20s, when your 20s is a more social time. But someone might say, oh, I called over to this person's house last night to hang out. And I'd go, you did what? Just called over just to hang out. I'd be like, why? Were you doing something?

Were you making something together? Did you have something to talk about? No, no, but you just hung out. Just hung out and watched TV together. And I could never relate to it. could never relate to someone needing to be in the presence. Company. I don't understand that.

Needing a person's company just because during the pandemic, a lot of people's mental health went this shit because they couldn't experience company, the company of other humans. And that's very neurotypical. So neurotypical people require company. they just like to be around other people and to spend time with other people

and this nourishes and heals and regenerates I'm just going to meet this I'm going to go and meet this person for a coffee and when I meet this person I'm going to feel better about myself I'm going to feel good I have no context for that whatsoever

so because of this I don't really have close friends I'm in no WhatsApp group None. I don't know what it is to text a person and say, Hey man, what's up? If I'm texting someone it's because of a specific piece of information, because of a fact, or to send them a piece of music. Do I socialise? Yes, but it's always work. My co-writer James, who I write all my TV shows with, who's probably Nora Divergent, otherwise I wouldn't get on with him so well.

But we socialise, but it's to write television. We go to pubs, we have crack, but always the conversation is about the act of creativity. But autistic people need flow for their mental health, the way that neurotypical people need company. That's one of the positions in this new research, in this paper. Long before I knew I was autistic, I always said, I don't have friends, I have ideas. which sounds fucking harsh but it's the truth most the happiest moments of my life

are by myself on my own writing or going for runs and listening to music with the exception of the core group who are my family and my family are

the people who I get to be autistic around the people who I can stim around the people who I can wear big stupid baggy clothes around the people who I can speak about my pigeon theories around in real life, not on a podcast. Because another thing I experienced, and I'd love to know if other autistic people have experienced this, but I didn't predict this, but

when I announced that I was autistic four years ago, a lot of people who would have been friends just stopped contacting me. And I think, so when you're autistic, especially if you're in a friend, especially if you're in a friends group. Now this is you're autistic your whole life whether you're diagnosed or not you're autistic your entire life. So I've always been autistic but I was in my fucking mid-30s before I was autistic but I was still autistic before that. So if you're the autistic person in a group, you are the eccentric person. This is always represented very well in sitcoms. Sitcoms, they don't say it's the autistic person but the autistic person is

always present in sitcoms. The weird character, the crazy character. In Friends, it's Phoebe. In Seinfeld, it's Kramer. In Father Ted, it's Dougal. In Faulty Towers, it's Manuel. Even though the thing with Manuel, it's more of a racism thing with Man, or a xenophobia thing with Manuel because he's foreign, he doesn't speak English. But he's the eccentric outcast. But when you're the autistic person in a group, you're the eccentric one. You're not fully taken seriously. You're seen as a bit of a lunatic. People like you.

People keep you around. But you know they do impressions of you when your back is turned, when you're not there. And you find this out. You find it out when you're not invited to things. When people all gather together and you see it on Facebook and it's like, no one told about that or I've been uninvited to things before long before I knew I was artistic, maybe late 20s but I remember someone just going, do you know what I had this thing here turns out there's going to be a lot of aunts and uncles at this thing so they're just not going to

get you, they're not going to get you, it might be best if you sit this one out but it's like but all my other friends are gone they're the same age as me all my other friends are going and then you realize Oh, fuck. They're actually embarrassed to me because I'm going to do some crazy monologue. And that's the experience of being autistic. Every autistic person has that story.

It's not a very inclusive world. Social rejection is a huge part of being autistic and we learn to be by ourselves. It's safer to be by ourselves. Or when weddings, I always give weddings as the example. when you get invited to a wedding and you think you're going to be sitting with all your friends at the reception

and you're not and all of a sudden you're on this other table the lunatic table where you're sitting with it's like who the fuck are these people around me I thought I was supposed to be up there at the front with all my friends but I'm back here at this other table

and I'm sitting beside people I don't know and then you look around and you notice that the people at your table are all strange or eccentric in their own ways and this happens when the bride and groom they're picking guests and they're going where does this person sit where does that person sit

and then it comes around to the autistic person and it's like we can't have them sitting beside that aunt we can't have them sitting beside that uncle because what might they say they're eccentric they're a lunatic they could say anything they might start talking about the seagull and crack cocaine theory, we can't have, not around my aunt. My aunt won't understand that person.

And every wedding has about five or six of these misfits. And we all end up at the same fucking table at the back, near the emergency exit. And this happened to me three or four times and I just stopped going to weddings. The last time, probably 15 years ago, I found

myself sitting beside, to my left was a dissident Republican and to my right was a man who had brought a ferret to the wedding. No judgment on either of those people. But like, and before I knew I was autistic, this would turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would bring me straight back to, you got to remember too, in fucking school. Up until I was 16, I wasn't in the normal class. I was in a class called 3B3.

There was about 15 of us, and it was the class full of people who couldn't be put in any other class. It was lads with behavioural issues, nora divergent, and lads, who grew up with the trauma of poverty and domestic abuse. So when I'd get thrown at the lunatic table at weddings, I'd go self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd notice that little pain of rejection. I'd try and keep it down because I want to enjoy myself. And then I'm drinking too much

because that's the other fucking thing. If you're autistic, especially in your 20s, alcohol is the leveller. You're severely overstimulated by social, interaction so you're the first person to get drunk because when everybody's drunk there's no autistic people there's no neurotypical people there's just drunk people but I'd like to know if other autistic people have experienced when you announced when you found out got diagnosed and said that you were autistic did it cause some people to

just disappear and I think what it is once you have a diagnosis the way that they previously treated you now becomes bullying. It's now oh shit, you mean we can't do impressions of them? We can't do impressions of them anymore? Ah fuck!

If I make fun of that crazy thing they said, now I think I'm being ableist. Now I'm bullying that person. Am I? Because they're autistic now. So this completely changes how I treat them. Shit, I thought they were just like Phoebe or Kramer. You know,

just a bit kooky and a bit crazy, but now if they're autistic, this changes everything. I'm going to have to change the way that I treat them now, is it? Now what I'm doing is taking the piss out of someone who's legally considered disabled. Or maybe they have a guilt for having done it in the past. I've heard gay people speak about that. I've heard people, I don't like to use the word coming out when it comes to being autistic. Tom Hardy announced that he was autistic there a couple of weeks ago and a lot of headlines were saying

Tom Hardy comes out as autistic I don't think gay people should have to come out either there's no fucking coming out you are gay you are autistic you are trends but I know that gay people when they've announced I'm actually gay certain people who they thought were fucking friends just become distant

it's too difficult to deal with So this new research, this new paper, the flow theory approach to autism. It's a non-pathologising approach. Instead of... So to... The pathologise autism is to view it as a deficit or an impairment. Whereas this approach is... No, hold on a minute.

This is a different way of functioning and it makes sense in its context. And that's non-pathologising. And remember, like all the things were pathologised, Being gay was pathologised. Being gay was in the DSM manual as a mental fucking illness. Up until the 1970s, being left-handed was pathologised. There's people listening to this podcast who were left-handed in school, and the teachers fucking forced it out of you. Instead of going, actually, no, this is just different. It's not a deficit,

and I might have to use some empathy to contextualize this. Okay, let's have an ocarina pause because there's other really juicy stuff in the same. this new study about autistic people and our supposed lack of empathy that gets challenged beautifully and I want to talk about that uninterrupted so let's Ocarina pause now I have a lovely big stone ocarina that I found in my office that had forgotten that I had let's have a crack of this and you're going to hear some adverts for bullshit bit disappointing no that's that's my fault I can't play it this is the most complicated Ocarina I believe this came from New Zealand it has

about 24 halls. I'm going to need to get better at playing that. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, distraction,

joy, whatever, please consider contributing directly to this podcast. This is a listener-funded podcast. It's only possible because you, the listener, funds it directly. this is my full-time job.

It's how I earn a living. I mention each week about the joy and the meaning that this podcast brings me. The fact that it gives me the time and space to just to research and to come up with hot takes and to then deliver them as a monologue podcast

and to focus on my curiosity as much as I do when I deliver these episodes. I'm at it so long now that some people think that I'm insane. I've done it every single week for eight years. The only time I kind of have to take a break is when I put out a live podcast.

And I usually do that when I need a fucking break because touring and meeting people causes me to have autistic burnout. And autistic burnout is when I'm having to mask socially interact and be away from states of flow everything about making this podcast

is flow state for me and that's why it brings me such purpose and meaning and happiness and that new study it's causing me to see everything in a new light of course I'm delivering a monologue podcast

each week that takes days of research of course I'm doing that that's very important to how I feel safe and exist in the world. The only non-creative, we'll say, nor a typical job I've ever had is I worked in a call centre for six weeks

in my early 20s and I was fired for printing out 93 pages about CIA crack cocaine smuggling on the office printer. Now I've managed to make that my job. The thing that got me fired is now my job. So if you do enjoy this podcast, please consider supporting it directly. It's how I pay all my bills

so I rent out my office, so I purchased my equipment for making the podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free, all right? Because I want everybody to get the exact same podcast, whether you pay or not. And the people who are paying are paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast.

I get to earn a living. Patreon.com forward slash the Blindby podcast. Follow me on Instagram at Blind by Boat Club You can hear my new jungle track That I made at the weekend Well in an intense state of flow Upcoming gigs There's not many left

This Saturday I have two gigs on the same day At 1 30 Is it fucking 1 30 At 1 30 in the afternoon on Saturday the 9th of May I'm in May note at the Arts and Mines Festival There's a few tickets left for that That's going to be wonderful crack Come along to that

if you're doing fuck all at 1.30 in the day in Maynooth. And that's in the university in Maynooth. Then later on that afternoon, I'm at Wellfest at the Royal Hospital, Kilmenham, in Dublin. Then I'm not gigging again until the middle of June. The 19th. I'm in Berlin at the Babylon Theatre. The 19th is sold out and the 20th may also be sold out. I don't know because I haven't gotten updates.

But fuck it, give it a go. I can't wait to go to Berlin. I'm gonna take a day or two to do fuck all over in Berlin because the last time I was there. I just did the gig and then got onto the fucking plane and I didn't get to enjoy the place really to be honest. I ate in a Turkish restaurant and stared at a fella because I thought it was Rod Stewart. Then in July, I'm in Sheffield at the Crossed Wires Festival. That's on the 5th of July in Sheffield, which is in Sheffield City Hall and that gig is going to be grey crack, wonderful lovely Sheffield

I can't wait to drink some local piss and smoke some hash then have we any festivals I wasn't asked back to Altogether Now Festival this year and I believe it's because I did a podcast last year where I

revealed that there was a generational curse on the land that the festival was on and I don't think that went down very well and I haven't been asked back if that is the reason I haven't been asked back I'm okay with that I mean again

lots and lots of acts booked at the festival I'm the one act where I get booked at the festival and then I end up doing deep research into the land that the festival is on and unearthing

a generational curse that goes back 200 years that was autistic flow no one told me I shouldn't have done that I'll probably be doing an electric picnic we'll see what the fucking crack is and then what have I got October 2026

My big massive tour of England, Scotland and Wales kicking off in Brighton on the 8th of October. Then I'm on to Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham. You get your tickets for that at Fane.com.uk forward slash blindby. And then all other tickets should be at

the blindby podcast.org, assuming my website is working. So this beautiful new piece of research about autism towards autistic flow theory and non-pathologising conceptual approach one of the beautiful things about this paper too is it challenges Simon Baron Cohen's theory of mind

approach to autism right? So Simon Baron Cohen I think he's Sasha Baron Cohen his cousin but a lot of modern autistic literature especially what's in the deal comes from the work of Simon Baron Cohen and a lot of autistic people outright reject it.

Baron Cohen said that autistic people have a theory of mind deficit. Right, so autistic people have difficulty understanding other people's thoughts and emotions or understanding what it's like to be in another person's shoes. This is where you get this. Autistic people don't have empathy bullshit. Like fucking harsh shit. This paper takes a complete. different approach, which is that autistic people's relationship with flow is very different.

That we are consistently seeking flow states are in flow states quite a lot. And when we're in flow states, we're distracted. We have less capacity left for social processing. That aligns with my lived experience right there. Why don't I have friends? I'm too busy thinking about seagulls. I am at all times engulfed in curiosity.

When I'm doing that, I feel safe. I feel happy. Unfortunately, maintaining friendships means engaging in the ritual of hey man, what's up?

Consistent small talk. In 2026, when you're over the age of 30, it means being in what? groups, being in WhatsApp groups with friends, with conversation and banter and small talk and slagging, I'm too absorbed in my interests for that stuff to enter my head. Asking me to just text someone for the crack, what's up? Want to go for a coffee? Going for a coffee just for the sake of talking over a coffee.

Asking me to do that would be as difficult as asking someone else. Can you read about seagulls for eight hours? For eight hours straight, can you just read about seagulls and seagirl related topics?

This study posits that flow states are so important to the autistic person's feeling of safety and mental health that were just, were not cognitively and emotionally

available for the social connections that bring a feeling of safety and joy and happiness to neurotypical people. That's not a deficit there, that's a difference. Another thing of challenges is executive dysfunction, that autistic people struggle with executive control in planning, memory, organization and decision making. Whereas this study says, it's not really a deficit like that. the autistic person's cognitive capacity is consumed by intense focus involved in flow state and therefore has limited resources available for executive skills.

It also speaks about autistic interpersonal flow. This was called double empathy. I've mentioned this before. This paper suggests that when two autistic people are speaking, that that conversation can be a joint flow state. again, something that I agree with because it's my lived experience. You listened to my podcast about a month ago with Sean Ronane, who's the ornithologist, all so autistic.

When me and him had a chat, it was wonderful. We're both interrupting each other. We're both going off on tangents. We're coming back. But it's a conversation full of humour and empathy and compassion. things that autistic people are not supposed to possess during interpersonal interactions I fucking have it with other noradivergent people

Kali Ennis who I had on a few weeks back and two or three other guests on this podcast who have had amazing conversations with who I know are nor divergent they just haven't said it publicly yet this research shows that autistic people not only do we need flow in order to feel safe, to regulate our emotions, to have good mental health.

But we access flow more readily, more intensely and more frequently. And our states of flow, they don't match traditional definitions of flow. Traditional definitions of flow, you think of as just when someone's making art, just when someone is playing music are involved in. in a sport, you know, intense focus and task. For autistic people, the flow is much more of a part of everyday life. 90% of what I do when I'm by myself on my own is flow. When I research this podcast, when I'm on Wikipedia, when I'm reading articles,

that's flow state for me. I know it's also work, but as an accommodation in this world, I've had to make flow my work. When I cook dinner, I'm in flow. And another beautiful thing in this study, it offers a new way to look at stimming. And again, this new way of looking at stimming is, this is what stimming is for me, and I've said it before. So this paper suggests that stimming is a way for autistic people to enter flow state.

That this is unique, a unique autistic thing of how to get into flow state is through stimming. When I'm in my office, when I'm in my studio, and the door is locked. I pace back and forth and rub my hands together. For hours, I've got calluses on my hands, thick calluses that I've had since I'm a kid, because I rub my hands together so much when I'm on my own, and I pace back and forth. For hours, I can measure how productive a day has been by my Fitbit

because I'll clock fucking 20,000 steps without leaving a six foot space. That's stimming. And it's something I only do it in private. I only do that in private. because to do it in public around people who are not my family, it's very intimidating. It's quote-unquote crazy person behavior. Stimming on the outside looks like someone who's very distressed, very nervous, pacing, rubbing

hands together. These do not look like positive things. That looks like the physical behavior of a person who's stressed or worried. But when I'm doing that, I'm in another world. I'm in complete and utter flow. And I write this podcast, pacing back and forth. I've written books, pacing back and forth. Before I knew I was autistic,

I used to say to myself, well, this is just a thing I have to do because if I don't do this, I'll get distracted by something. So if I keep walking back and forth in this rhythm, then I can disappear inside my own mind. What it feels like when I stim is Do you know when you ask your computer to do a particularly difficult task and then the fan gets really loud

and the computer itself starts to get loud and it gets hot but you know that when your computer is doing that it's working on a particularly intensive task that's what stimming does for me it allows me to enter flow state I've always known this in my heart I just haven't had the words for it

This paper now confirms it. They spoke to loads of autistic people and they're reporting the same thing. That stimming is how we induce flow state because flow state is so important to our mental health and feeling a safety. We flow just to live rather than specifically to engage in tasks. Now I also enter flow to engage in creative tasks. I'm trying to think of a good metaphor. for how this the new way that this paper is looking at autism. It's like autistic people are a spotlight

and non-autistic people are a floodlight. A spotlight is very bright, very focused on one point with excellent detail around, like a laser. Whereas a floodlight, again very bright but less intense. and it allows you to see everything. So the autistic person, the spotlight, sees one thing extremely well. But then everything outside of that spotlight fades away.

So we're thinking about seagulls. But then nothing else is allowed in. It's just fucking seagulls. And when I'm thinking about seagulls on my roof and researching, then I'm in flow and then patterns emerge. and then my brain gets so relaxed that I'm able to connect things that don't seem connected at all. But at the expense of experiencing the passage of time, the expense of noticing that I'm hungry,

the expense of maintaining friendships, unfortunately. The non-autistic person, they don't have that spotlight. They have the floodlight. Seagulls are on their roof, they notice it, they're annoyed, but they don't give it that much thought. There's seagulls up in my fucking roof Huh Better text someone and tell him

That'd be an interesting story wouldn't it Gonna text my friend Joseph And say How are you getting on man Oh not too bad I've got fucking seagulls up in my roof Oh really no way What are you doing tomorrow night

I'm looking at man United Fuck it let's go to the pub together All right see you then See you too man Hope there's no seagulls Actually the The non-autistic person would not have signed off With Hope there's no seagulls

because they'd have forgotten about him by then. That's me being autistic. I'd have had to sign off with a Seagull mention. And I wouldn't have gone to the pub because I'd needed to read about Seagulls on Wikipedia. But the non-autistic person

has the floodlight. Okay? And this sensory shit as well. You know, when I was in school and I'd get in so much trouble because I wouldn't wear my fucking school jumpers. Other people are wearing

the same school jumper. Like school jumpers aren't aren't supposed to be comfortable. They're a little bit itchy. But non-autistic people just get on with it. They just get a, it's a small bit itchy, fuck it, who cares, what are we doing maths? Not me. I can only focus on this fucking itchy school drumper until it feels painful and it's driving me crazy and now I'm taking it off even though the teacher has told me to put it back on six times and now I'm out in the hallway. Blind boy, where's your economics homework?

economics homework. I was listening to Cyprus Hill last night. Have you heard of Cyprus Hill? Why didn't you do your economics homework? Because I can't think about anything other than Cyprus Hill. That's all I'm able to think about is Cyprus Hill. Nothing else. And when I listen to the music of Cyprus Hill, and when I think about Cyprus Hill, I feel like I'm in heaven. I feel calm. I feel happy. I feel okay to exist and to be alive. I feel like the exact opposite of standing in a room for the people where they all have competing conversations. Cypress Hill saves me from that, but I'm afraid it's not possible at all for me to be interested in economics when I'm interested in Cyprus Hill right now. I might be interested in something else next month. It might be economics I don't know, but if I'm fucking interested in something and I'm focused on something,

I'll learn everything about it, but I can't learn anything else. And that was my experience of school, which I was heavily punished for, but that's the spotlight. That's the flow state autistic spotlight versus the neurotypical floodlight. The world is designed for floodlights. It's not designed for spotlights. What would it be like trying to walk home in the dark? Two separate torches. You give one person a very intense spotlight

and then you give another person a floodlight. The person walking home in the dark with the spotlight, they can focus that intensely on details. They can shine it on a fucking hedge and identify in two seconds what that hedge is, what colour it is, the structure of the leaves and then they can move it over

and they see a cat and they get a good look at that cat's face because it's a fucking spotlight but then the journey home the journey is going to be a lot more difficult you're going to fall over you'll get disoriented and confused but if you've got a floodlight

your journey will be easier you'd be able to see a little bit of everything at once. You can take it all in. You won't trip over things. The journey will be simplified, but you might miss out on moments of complete and total focus and clarity on one spot. And when you try to do it,

you might just get bored and move on. I mean, are you going to read about the history of door handles for four hours? Or after ten minutes would you get bored and go, why the fuck am I reading about the history of door handles? This isn't that. interesting. Well, I'll read about history of door handles for four hours and love every second of it. This is a bit of a selfish podcast, but I finally found research and a theory of autism that really aligns with my lived experience. Before I was, before I was diagnosed, I used to just say, I'm a mad

artist. I'm one of those mad artists. And when I used to try to explain, because obviously I knew I'm eccentric. I'm, I'm seen it. strange, I was aware of these things. But before I was diagnosed, I thought that this was a choice. I genuinely believed, and I'd based this belief on research that I'd done into flow state, because I always knew flow state was my thing. But the original flow state research, which was by a psychologist called Chixen Meijai, he spoke about in order to engage in flow, in creativity, you have to exit the closed mode of thinking to enter the open mode of thinking.

And he described the closed mode of thinking as the way that we are in our everyday lives. The closed mode of thinking is where you're self-conscious. You're thinking about other people, how you appear to other people. You're thinking about the clothes that you're wearing, how you present yourself. You're thinking about

what you're going to eat for dinner later on, what your grocery list is, an appointment next week. The closed mode of thinking, it's executive fucking functioning skills, that's what it is. It's all of the tools that you need to exist as a human being in society to just get the fuck on with your life. That's the closed mode of thinking. It's rational and sensible and solemn. But if you're to be an artist and you're to create a piece of work, whether it's music, a piece of writing, whatever. If you want to engage in actual creativity and reach your inner voice,

then you have to exit the closed mode of thinking, and you have to leave yourself available to the open mode of thinking. And the open mode of thinking is flow state. The open mode is where you can connect to ideas that are seen miles apart, where you can be silly, where you can have fun, where you can be playful, where there's no judgment whatsoever. Your goal is utter and absolute, silliness, humour, humour and playfulness.

And failure doesn't exist in the open mode. There's no such thing as failure because there's only process and playing. Failure is for the closed mode. In the closed mode you've got right and wrong. In the open mode, there's no such thing as right or wrong. There's only process and doing and playing. And that's the research that the psychologist, Jigs and Mihai did

on creative people who enter flow states and he did this research in the 70s and that research was hugely influential on me in becoming a professional artist sitting down and engage in the part of my brain where flow exists but the thing that chicks and me I stressed was

you need to be able to exit that open the open mode you can't the open mode is great for flow but you can't and bring that into everyday life. You cannot bring the open mode, the lateral thinking, the silliness,

the playfulness into everyday life, because then you start saying silly things to people. And you won't be worried about how you're dressed and you won't be conscious of other people's opinions. You can't bring the open mode into everyday life. It needs to just be for creativity. By about the age of 23, when I first started writing for television,

when I became a professional, creative person. My fucking job now was to write comedy sketches. That's what I was doing when I was 23. I was writing comedy sketches on RTE. I'd basically said to myself, I have surrendered myself completely to being an artist, to being creative. I've surrendered myself entirely

to being open to creativity at all times. And because of this, I'm a lunatic. Because of this, that's why I always say mad. things to people and they look at me strange. That's why I sometimes might walk out of the house with two different shoes on. That's why I'm forgetful. That's why my room is messy. That's why I forget to pay bills. Because I'm so open to creativity all the time that I actually can't operate in the closed mode. But I could turn it off tomorrow if I just got a normal job. If I just went back and

worked in in the call center that I worked in before I became an artist. If I just went back to that, I can turn all this shit off and I go back to being a normal human being. This eccentricity, this madness that I have, this is a choice. It's a choice because I've chosen consistent creativity as a career. And that's what I used to say to myself before I was diagnosed as autistic. That's how I used to square it with myself. This was a fucking choice. And then I get diagnosed and you realize, no, it's not a fucking choice. And if you had tried to switch it off and left your career and creativity and went back to a regular office job, you'd soon find that you would not be able to function at all and would be quite miserable. So this new study, this new paper,

which I'll share the link on Instagram when I put this podcast out and the name of the study is towards autistic flow theory and non-pathologizing conceptual approach. right and it was first published in 2024 but I believe it was released publicly like a month ago it's the first time I've seen a definition of autism that doesn't make me feel wrong or are deficient in any way and that aligns fully with how I experience being alive everything about my autism journey it's it's been mostly about language I've been autistic my whole life but you find words you find new words

that describe how you've been and certain words are better than others special interest does not fucking suit me at all it's really condescending because it implies you know what it's like it's like you know you see a dog sniffing

another dog's arse and we as humans we as humans often look at a dog sniffing another dog's arse and go look at that stupid cunt we project like if you as a human were to walk up to another a stranger on the street and start sniffing their arsehole

it's strange it's odd it's socially unacceptable it would be seen as a dumb stupid thing to do we're always doing that with dogs look at those too stupid look at the dogs sniffing each other's fucking arces for fuck give it a rest you'd even see some owners going stop and they tug at the fucking lead

because one dog sticks his nose and another dog's anus and you know what's going on when a dog sniffs another dog's hole? We as humans only have about 6 million cent receptors in our noses. Dogs have 220 million

scent receptors in their fucking nose. Dogs can smell time. Dogs can smell the passage of time. Dogs use their noses to experience things that You and I can't even fathom. And when a dog sniffs and other dogs ours, it's the social equivalent of spending three hours stalking that dog's Facebook page.

If you go to a person's Facebook page and they don't have any privacy and you spend three hours at it, you can learn everything about them. Their opinions, who they're related to, their fucking, what college they went to, their political beliefs, their social beliefs, their social. social status. You can learn everything about another human being through the data of their Facebook page with just three hours of a good stalk. A dog does that in six seconds with just their nose in another dog's arse. That's what it is. That's what they're doing. But what do we do? Look at those stupid cunts. Get away from his whole fucking stupid idiot dog. I should have

gotten a cat. They're smarter. We use our sniffing as evidence of dog's stupidity. That's what special interest is It's acknowledging that this is clearly very important To the autistic person But this thing that's important to them Is actually fucking stupid You know, they just have a special interest And in the way that that dog has a special interest

And sniffing that other dog's arse It's kind of ridiculous but leave them off There's nothing we can do about it It's a special interest We hate that term special interest This paper redefines it It's not special interest. It's actually fucking flow state.

And it doesn't matter if they're reading about the history of ketchup for six hours. If you think that's ridiculous, that there's no point in it, it doesn't fucking matter because the process there is flow state. And for that autistic person, that is essential to their mental health. What do you mean? Yeah, just like the way that you have to go and hang out with a lot of your friends, so you don't have to be alone with your thoughts. Just the way you have to do that with all your mates on the weekend,

the autistic person needs to do that with the Wikipedia page about ketchup. All right, for six fucking hours. It's not special interest, it's flow state, and it's hugely important for this human being to exist alongside you in the same fucking world. It's just a different way of being. It's like assuming that bees have a special interest in flowers because they think they look nice, as opposed to understanding the process of pollination.

So that's all I have time for this week. I don't know if you enjoyed that or not, but it's something I needed to speak about and to process and to get off my chest and I hope there might be some autistic people out there or relatives or friends of autistic people. I hope that was helpful to you. It was very helpful to me to learn that shit

and to speak about it. I'll catch you next week with a hot take. In the meantime, Rob a dog, wink at a swan, genuine you flick to a butterfly. Dog bless.