James's Notebook

                In my previous post I briefly mentioned how dogs helped me become more social and being able to control my stress levels in this post I will go into more detail on how they played a significant role in my growth as a person, how they helped me become social and learn the skills that I needed to become a better version of myself. The first thing that I noticed is that when I get overwhelmed my dog would usually walk up to me and lay down on top of me to give me pressure which would make me feel a lot less stressed. The next thing that I have notice is whenever I felt lonely they would usually play with me which would help me realize that I am loved and accepted by them. The last way that dogs have helped me was when I took them for a walk people would come up to me and start conversations with me which would help me become more social.

                                In my previous post titled The Challenges I Had Growing Up With Autism I discussed how I overcame a lifelong migraine and learned impulse control through occupational therapy and martial arts training. In this post I will talk about some of the other challenges that I have dealt with while growing up with autism. The other challenges that I dealt with was becoming social and dealing with stress, and the way that I overcame this issue was to first take my time learning how to recognize when I feel stressed and I learned this by listening to my body's signals towards things that make me feel overwhelmed as I have mentioned in my older post titled how I don't get overwhelmed. Then I took my time learning the social skills that I needed with occupational therapy which taught me how to recognize tone of voice and the facial expressions of other people. But occup...

                           A question that a few people have asked me lately is what was it like growing up with autism? for me growing up was challenging for me because I had to deal with a life long migraine, and I had a hard time learning impulse control. But the way that I had overcame these challenges was to first figure out how can I get rid of my migraine and I did that by taking occupational therapy and I had a neurologist who provided me the necessary treatments for me to recover from it. Following this I started studying martial arts which helped me learn impulse control by giving me new skills for me to develop on and little by little I would overcome new challenges. which would in the process teach me new ways to control myself by exposing myself to new people and by learning newer skills that would allow me to gain a better understanding of myself. in other words martial arts and occupational th...