I’ve been thinking about inertia and perseveration lately. I thought I’d been thinking about depression and my own early signs of a life-long sprint from black clouds, but apparently the part of my brain that ruminates without my knowledge was busy at work on something altogether separate.

I’ve talked about inertia before–I should probably start using a tag for it and the other things I mention regularly. And I’ve talked about perseveration, and how I think it’s a useful, adaptive process in working through executive function difficulties (see the link to rumination).

A quick recap: inertia is the tendency to keep doing what you’re doing rather than change paths (with a nod to Newtonian physics for the basic concept), and perseveration is going over something endlessly, either because it provides comfort, stimulation, or a solution to a problem or otherwise fills some need.

I think they are the same thing, or facets of a larger single thing. And I think that thing is at the heart of difficulties in choice making in autism spectrum disorders and at least partially to do with why concrete plans are necessary. I’m not sure if it is part of the larger executive function or a related but separate thing.

Inertia has negative connotations, at least for me. Inertia is continuing to do something that isn’t really great for me (like not eat or not sleep) because it is easier than the alternative (procuring food or getting ready for bed–which usually entails saying goodbye to Kitty, something I loathe). Inertia means staying in bad jobs because it is easier than finding new ones. Inertia means multiple degrees in a field which doesn’t hold a career or major interest to me, because considering a change took too much thought and spoons to be done at a pace that would have allowed me to change.

Perseveration has a mixed connotation. Perseveration is going over and over songs until I know them by heart and can sing them pitch, tone, and word perfectly. Perseveration is almost always thinking about one of the few topics I am especially interested in, like autism or MBT. Perseveration is the way my brain works to process complex information by letting it tumble around and then finding notable, interesting things in what that information sticks to inside my head. Perseveration is eating the same food for three, four, five days in a row all. the. time.

Both are the inability to change topics or actions without a strong desire to do so. That desire can be internally or externally motivated, emotionally or physically motivated.

This inability to move off a single track can make it difficult to impossible to make decisions and choices. I know that the DSM is too strictly categorized for this to ever happen, but perhaps autism should be considered partially an anxiety disorder.

I wanted to buy a computer–a laptop. I researched laptops for months, learning about screen types and the inner workings of a machine, learning about various OSes and interfaces. I learned what my price range would need to be to get something like what I wanted (a tablet with the ability to write directly on the screen). And then I didn’t do anything. I knew what I wanted, but I was absolutely paralyzed by the idea that as soon as I made a choice a better, cheaper, more awesome choice would appear and thus be unavailable to me. I finally bought my laptop only because it was on woot that day and the price was about half what I’d been prepared to pay previously. I needed that external limitation to make a decision: woot is only one item per day and there is no guarentee the item will ever turn up again, the price is drastically lower than anywhere else online, and there is a limited number of units available–but you can’t tell how many until it’s sold out. I’ve had this laptop for about two years now and I suspect I would still be dithering about getting the BEST LAPTOP EVAR had I not been constrained by this.

Having choices makes choosing extremely difficult when you tend towards this style of thinking. The more choices I have, the more likely I am to fall back into the holding pattern of inertia and just not choose. When I am hungry, I need to have explicit options rather than an open ended “what do you want?” because the latter will only lead to frustration and upset. (Kitty, in her wisdom, knew this years and years ago and tolerated my saying over and over that I hated planning meals and that it made food unappealing, and to her I apologize again for being a shit. She was completely right and knew me better than I knew myself at the time.) Having a schedule means I actually get things done. Without, I am likely to spend all day online, playing games or looking at tumblr.

Unfortunately, none of these things allows me to write coherent blog posts sometimes!