Beyond Burnout: The Physics of Autistic Inertia - The Most Disabling Condition

Autistic Inertia: The Physics Problem Psychiatry Forgot

Why can't I start? Why can't I stop? If you've ever been frozen at your desk for hours despite desperately wanting to work, or hyperfocused until 3 AM unable to disengage: you're not lazy. You're experiencing autistic inertia.

In this episode, Anita examines the groundbreaking research that finally gave a name to what autistic people have been experiencing for generations: the neurological inability to start or stop actions despite clear intention. We explore the lived reality of operating according to different physics.

But here's the twist: the same neurology that leaves us frozen on Tuesday enables extraordinary flow states on Thursday, deep focus so profound it produces work neurotypical cognition can't access. This isn't about fixing yourself. It's about understanding your actual cognitive architecture.

You'll learn: → The four documented dimensions of autistic inertia → Why the DSM-5 completely ignores this phenomenon → How monotropic attention creates both barriers and brilliance → The difference between rest inertia (can't start) and motion inertia (can't stop) → Evidence-based strategies: body doubling, environmental scaffolding, protecting flow states → How to educate clinicians who've never heard of this → Why inconsistency doesn't mean you're faking

This episode is for: Late-diagnosed autistic adults finally understanding decades of "laziness." Parents seeking language to support their children without shame. Clinicians ready to decolonize their practice. Anyone interested in neurodivergence.

Chapters

• 0:00 Newton's Laws of Motion and Personal Struggle
• 1:38 Discovering Autistic Inertia
• 4:30 Understanding Autistic Inertia
• 6:13 Dimensions of Autistic Inertia
• 10:33 Challenges in Recognizing Autistic Inertia
• 12:33 Why Doesn't the DSM-V Recognize Inertia?
• 14:13 What does Autistic Inertia Feel Like?
• 25:52 Why Does Psychiatry Keep Missing this?
• 32:28 Cultural and Research Gaps
• 34:04 Strategies and Advocacy that help Inertia
• 40:05 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

Neurorebelpodcast: 0:03

Newton's first law of motion. An object at rest stays at rest. An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force elementary physics, the kind I used to teach to first year law students when explaining causation and tort law. So why on a Tuesday morning in my 15th year as a tenured law professor did I sit frozen at my own desk for six hours staring at a blanking cursor, unable to type a single word about constitutional doctrine I could recite in my sleep. The legal analysis was right there in my head, fully formed, ready to write, but the highway between my intention and my fingers had collapsed. My brain knew exactly what needed to happen, but my body simply wouldn't comply. My psychiatrist cycled through every diagnosis she could think of. Depression. Well, my motivation was intact. I desperately needed to write a DHD. Well, I could hyperfocus for 11 hours straight when something engaged me. So, no, not really. Anxiety. Yeah, sure I was anxious, but I was anxious because I couldn't move. It took me three more years to find the answer, and when I did buried in a 2021 research paper from the University of Manchester, I discovered something staggering. 32 autistic adults had described this exact phenomenon to researchers. They called it autistic inertia. It's like being stranded in the middle of the sea with no way out except from external intervention. They identified it as one of their single most disabling experiences. And the DSM five, the supposedly authoritative diagnostic manual for autism. It doesn't even mention it, not even once the clinical psychology textbooks don't discuss it, and most psychiatrists have never heard of the term. The entire field of psychiatry had collectively shrugged at what autistic people were shouting from the rooftops. But here's where this story gets complicated, in ways that challenge every deficit based narrative about autism. That same neurological architecture that left me frozen on Tuesday, on Thursday, it gave me the capacity to write for 11 hours straight where I forgot to eat. Lost all sense of time, and produced the best legal scholarship of my career. So today we're examining the law of motion that psychiatry forgot, and why understanding the actual physics of your brain matters more than any productivity hack ever will. This is Neuro rebel. I'm Anita, and today we're talking about autistic inertia. Welcome to Neuro Rebel, where we examine Neurodivergence through the dual lens of rigorous research and unapologetic lived experience. I'm Anita retired, tenured law professor, Fulbright scholar, late diagnosed autistic researcher based in Mexico, and your partner in demanding better from clinical psychology. If you're new here, understand this. We don't do inspiration porn, we don't oversimplify, we examine peer reviewed research and we challenge medical assumptions, and we do this by centering on autistic people and autistic scholarship. And if you're returning, thank you for trusting me. With 35 minutes of your intellectual life, let's use them. Well, autistic inertia. For most of my life, I had other words for it, like laziness or lack of discipline or self-sabotage, or you are not wanting it badly enough. The world had plenty of moral judgments. What it didn't have was accurate neurology or the words to name it. The first formal peer reviewed study wasn't published until 2021. Think about that. We've had FMRI technology since the 1990s. The human genome was fully sequenced in 2003. We put a rover on Mars in 2012, but it took until 2021 for researchers to systematically document and experience. what autistic people have been trying to name for generations. Priorities, right? when UK researchers led by an autistic scholar herself finally sat down with 32 autistic adults and actually listened to their experiences, they documented four interconnected dimensions of this phenomenon. I'm going to walk you through each one. Not because I love taxonomies, though I confess as a former law professor, I admit I find them soothing. But because precision matters when you can name what's happening to you, you stop wondering if you're broken and start asking, what accommodations do you need to thrive? So let's go dimension one, a tendency to maintain state, whether that state is rest or motion. Here's how one participant, and let's call her, Ruth, described it. And I need you to listen carefully because this sentence is doing a lot of work. She said, I can't get to the point where I'll go and do the thing, because it's almost like I have to stop whatever I'm doing, whether I'm doing anything or not. Even stopping. Not doing anything is stopping doing something. Listen to that again in your mind. Even stopping, not doing anything is stopping doing something that is not a motivational problem, that is a state transition problem. Her state of not doing. Wasn't a void, it was an active state of rest with its own gravitational pull and moving out of it required a force. Her system simply could not generate. Another participant said it even more plainly. She said, sometimes I end up just sitting and not doing anything when I really want to be reading a book that is right next to me. The book is right there. The desire is present. The knowledge of how to read it is intact, but the action doesn't happen. This is where neurotypical people's faces go blank. They literally cannot compute how I want to, plus I know how to. Doesn't automatically equal to I do or I will. Dimension two. Lack of voluntary control participants here were emphatic about this point of lack of voluntary control. Inertia doesn't feel difficult to control. It feels outside of conscious control. One woman said, for example, I also can't overcome my inertia. I have to wait for it to go away. Another one described it as, I just don't feel like I have control over what I'm doing necessarily. I feel like I'm coaxing myself through things like I have to push myself or talk to myself through things. So coaxing yourself through things sounds like you're trying to negotiate with a separate entity that happens to inhabit your body. That's not executive dysfunction. As clinicians typically understand it where you struggle, but can eventually override the difficulty. This is a fundamentally different relationship between intention and execution. Dimension three. The first step fractures. This one manifested in two opposite, but equally paralyzing ways. Some people simply couldn't break tasks down. They would look at, make dinner and see an incomprehensible hole. They could not parse into steps. Others went in the opposite direction. They would over segment until paralyzed by granularity. One participant described it perfectly, she said. I can cook, but a lot of the time I buy the ingredients and I never cook anything because it gets too complicated in my mind. So she knows how to cook. The procedural knowledge is intact, but the execution pathway fractures under the weight of too many micro decisions. It's like having a GPS that gives you directions down to the centimeter. Turn, 3.7 degrees left. Take 247 steps. Adjust posture, two millimeters. By the time you've processed step one, you've forgotten why you were going anywhere in the first place. Dimension four. When mind and body divorce, A subset of participants describes something even more striking, and this is where the research starts sounding like what psychiatry might diagnose as catatonia. There are three characteristics. First, physically unable to move. It's not struggling to move, but actually frozen in place. Then there is altered awareness and people describe it as being disconnected from their bodies, stuck in their minds, experiencing time distortion or complete cessation of thought. And then there's passivity. One woman said, sometimes I'd be like, oh, I want to read. And then it's three hours later, and I haven't moved three hours fully conscious, wanting to act, but unable to move across the board. These adults identified inertia as one of their most disabling autistic traits. Australian researchers replicated these findings two years later, one person told them. I think I kind of sum it up as my life probably being a lot smaller and less than I would like it to be. And yet the DSM five has zero mentions of autistic inertia. Clinical training programs don't teach it. Most psychiatrists I've talked to have never even heard of it. This isn't an oversight. This is what happens when diagnostic criteria are built by observing autistic children in clinical settings. Rather than listening to autistic adults describe their internal experiences. You cannot observe the internal experience of being stranded at sea from the outside. It just looks like someone sitting doing nothing. And in a medical system that privileges what clinicians can see over what patients report, entire dimensions of human experience get erased now. Now, intellectual honesty, it requires me to say this clearly. The formal research base here is thin. We have two major qualitative studies with adults, one with youth theoretical frameworks and extensive community generated knowledge. We don't have neuroimaging studies. We don't have large scale quantitative data, and we don't have longitudinal research. We barely have any studies from non-English speaking contexts. What we do have is dozens of autistic people across continents, across age ranges saying, Hey, this is real. This is disabling, and this is something you should be listening to. are you listening yet? Sometimes the best science starts not with brain scans, but with people insisting their experience be taking seriously in its full complexity. So let's talk about what that full complexity actually looks like. Let me show you what inertia actually feels like across its entire spectrum. Not abstractions, but lived phenomenology. Part one, the invisible force field, or what we call rest inertia. Picture this, you're on your couch. You desperately want to shower before meeting your closest friend at a cafe you've been looking forward to all week. You can visualize every step. Stand up, walk 15 feet to the bathroom, turn the dial, feel hot water on your skin, and you can practically smell the soap, but you can't move, not won't. You can't. Your mind is active, aware, increasingly frantic. You're problem solving, you're making contingency plans. You're experiencing mounting anxiety about being late, but there's this barrier, invisible and movable be between your intention and your body's compliance. A 14-year-old boy described it like this. It kind of feels like my blanket weighs 500 pounds and it's weighing me down. I can't move another adolescent described it in this way. It's like a slow old computer that's trying to run Google Chrome. It just uses up all of the Ram and there's nothing left. It's not depression. In depression, you often don't want to do things. The motivation itself is impaired here. You desperately want to, the motivation is screaming at you. One teenager said, I think I should be able to do this on my own. I don't really wanna ask for help, but I'm stuck. So it's not paralysis in any conventional neurological sense. You can move, you are breathing, your heart is beating. You could move if the building caught on fire. So the system isn't broken, it's just not accepting your password. One participant described it as being stranded in the middle of the sea and nothing exists anymore. There is no past, no present, nothing to do, and no way out except from external intervention, which is a hell of a thing to experience when you're just trying to take a shower. Part two, the river current or what's also known as motion. Inertia. Now, on the other side, same physics, opposite manifestation. Think about this. It's 10:00 PM You sat down after dinner to quickly organize last month's photos. Just a 15 minute task before bed you told yourself. And it's now three o'clock in the morning. You have reorganized your entire digital archive going back seven years. You've created three new taxonomic systems. You've color coded, tagged cross reference your backaches, your eyes burn. You haven't eaten, and you desperately need to sleep. You have to go to work in four hours, but you can't stop. It's not that you're having trouble stopping. You're actually unable to disengage. Your brain has momentum. The task has captured you, and finding the off ramp requires force. You don't currently possess. one participant said it perfectly. I have two modes. I have can't stop and can't start, and there's nothing in between. I either go, go, go, or I can't move. Two sides of the same coin, same neurology, different contexts. This is where something called tropic attention theory becomes useful. Autistic scholars proposed that autistic cognition tends to have fewer but more intensely focused attention tunnels, like a spotlight rather than diffuse multitasking attention. It's more like a floodlight. And the superpower version we can achieve extraordinary depth of focus and expertise. But here's the collision with reality version. Once we're in that focused state, switching requires enormous cognitive force. It's not stubbornness, it's not special interest obsession. It's that our attentional architecture operates according to different physics. Newton's first law again, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. When your attentional system has gained momentum, stopping requires intervention. Your own neurology might not be able to generate. Which is inconvenient when the world expects you to switch tasks every eight minutes, like some kind of cognitive hummingbird, and there's part three or what's called escape velocity. This is when inertia becomes a state of flow. Now, here's where we have to resist every urge to frame inertia purely as a deficit, because when Australian researchers specifically ask autistic adults about the positive sides of motion inertia, the entire disability narrative. Fractured. Listen to how people describe Temo inertia when it aligned with meaningful work. They said it's the most amazing feeling in the world. My mind is in a state of flow. The exclusive focus on that end goal to the exclusion of all else, it feels wonderful. A lot of joy, incredibly productive. I am so engrossed. One person said, there's something very satisfying about it, about being so deeply immersed. You lose all sense of time. You forget to eat or drink. You become physically energized and emerge hours later on a bit of a high. This is not, and I cannot stress this enough, this is not a izing disability. This is recognizing that the same neurological architecture that leaves us frozen when we need to shower also enables deep sustained creative focus that neurotypical cognition literally struggles to access. The disability isn't in the neurology itself. The disability emerges when we are forced into tasks that don't engage our monotronic attention, or we lack environmental support that bridges attention and action, or we're interrupted mid flow by neurotypical productivity demands, or when we are pathologized for operating according to different temporal physics. A world designed around our actual neurology wouldn't call this inertia. It would call it depth. It would structure work around sustained focus cycles rather than artificial eight hour days with constant task switching. It would value the quality of what emerges from deep engagement rather than punishing us for inconsistent, unpredictable output. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world that measures disability by deviation from neurotypical productivity standards, and calls you high functioning on Thursday when you produce genius level work and then quote, low functioning on Tuesday when you can't shower. Same brain, same physics, different contexts. And here's the inconsistency problem and this. This is what makes inertia nearly impossible to explain to neurotypical people, to employers or to clinicians who have never experienced it. Monday I shower. I dress. I eat breakfast. I write for four hours. Attend meetings, cook dinner, respond to emails. Highly functional by anyone's measure. On Tuesday, I sit frozen for six hours, staring at a blank document. On Wednesday, I shower effortlessly, but then hyper-focus on reorganizing my bookshelf until 2:00 AM despite having a 9:00 AM class. Same brain, same responsibilities, same intentions, completely different. Physics. The research shows this inconsistency is context dependent. Inertia is easier to manage in public settings with external structure, scheduled activities and other people present, but it's much harder around the home and behind closed doors where structure disappears. One participant said it was a source of argument between he and his wife. Another one simply said, because I'm doing my best. And clinicians. Clinicians are trained to identify consistent patterns for diagnosis, often dismiss variable presentation as proof that the disability isn't real, which tells you everything about who gets to define what a disability is and whose lived experience gets discredited when it doesn't match clinical expectations. So why does psychiatry keep missing this? So let's talk about why the DSM five, supposedly the authoritative text on autism doesn't mention the experience that autistic people across continents, across age ranges consistently identify as their most significant and their most disabling. This is an accidental, this is structural and it reveals everything about how psychiatry was built and who it was built to serve first, there is the observational bias, the DSMs autism criteria were developed primarily through behavioral observation of autistic children in clinical settings and white children at that researchers watched. They coded behaviors, they identified patterns visible from the outside. Social communication differences, observable. Repetitive behaviors, observable, restricted interests, observable sensory responses also observable. The internal experience of being unable to initiate action despite clear intention, not observable. The cognitive experience of being unable to stop despite desperately needing to. Also not observable and the phenomenology of inconsistency you guessed it not observable. Inertia is fundamentally an internal experience. It requires listening to autistic people describe what is happening in their minds and bodies. It requires taking phenomenological reports seriously as data but the DSM framework privileges behavioral observation over self self-report. It trusts what clinicians see more than what autistic people say. And when autistic adults say, Hey, I'm not lazy. I am experiencing inertia and clinicians who have never heard of the term respond with, well, have you tried making a schedule? We see exactly how this observational bias fails. When autistic youth describe feeling like a blanket weighs 500 pounds, and clinicians translate this into, he is refusing to get out of bed, phenomenology gets erased and replaced with moral judgment, and then there's the productivity pathology. Because it's not just diagnostic categories, it's the entire framework of how we understand functionality in a system that measures human worth by economic output. If you can't produce consistently, if your output is variable, if you need three days of hyperfocus followed by two days of rest, you are categorized as dysfunctional regardless of the quality or innovation of what you do produce during those three days. Autistic inertia is disabling, partly because it's neurological, and partly because we live in a world that requires consistent, predictable, sustained productivity on a scheduled, determined by neurotypical cognitive rhythms. Imagine a work culture that said this person produces brilliantly, but operates according to different laws of motion. They need external scaffolding to bridge intention and action on low engagement days. They need flexible schedules that accommodate hyper-focus cycles. They need protection from interruption during flow states. And we value the depth of their work more than the consistency of their availability. But we don't have that culture. I. We have a culture that calls you lazy when you can't move and undisciplined when you can't stop. And then there are the voices we are not hearing. Here's something the adult focused research initially missed. How does inertia show up for autistic children and adolescents who don't yet have the metacognitive language to distinguish it from burnout shut down or exhaustion? When researchers actually asked autistic youth between the ages of eight and 18, they found something fascinating. Younger autistic people often experience inertia as a blend between physical heaviness, cognitive blocking, and emotional frustration all at once, one young person said. I feel lazy, tired, maybe even a little bit of exhaustion in my whole body. I feel weak, like my body is heavy. Another one said it's more like an artist's block or a writer's block when it happens to me. These are children and teenagers learning to name their own neurology and doing so in a world that will pathologize these experiences as behavior problems or lack of motivation unless we give them accurate frameworks. When we don't teach autistic young people about inertia, when we don't give them the language that separates neurology from morality, we set them up for decades of shame. This is urgent. This matters for identity development, self-advocacy, and mental health across the entire lifespan. But then there is the cultural blind spot, and here's where my frustration as a supposedly bilingual researcher based in Latin America gets pointed Virtually all the research on autistic inertia is in English, conducted in English speaking countries with English speaking participants. The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada. That's it. But how does inertia manifest in cultures with different concepts of time or of productivity or of disability? How do Spanish speaking autistic communities describe this phenomenon? Is there existing terminology we are missing because Anglophone research dominates? And how does inertia intersect with cultural expectations about family interdependence versus individual autonomy in Latin American contexts? I don't have the answers because the research does not exist. And neurodiversity research that centers only English speaking predominantly white. Primarily Western populations isn't universal science. It's culturally specific observations that are being universalized. We need better, but we can't wait for perfect research before we work with the neurology. We actually have. So let's talk about working with our physics. You recognize yourself in these descriptions. You understand that what you've been calling laziness is actually a well-documented neurology that research largely ignores, and that also enables extraordinary depth. So now what I'm going to share with you three things, what the limited research, what autistic communities have figured out through lived experience and how to advocate with clinicians who've never heard of this term before. First, what the research actually suggests. Well, as a first step, let's be realistic. We don't have randomized control trials on inertia interventions. What we do have is qualitative research documenting what autistic people report as helpful, and that data matters. External initiation support comes up consistently. That is having another person present even silently, even virtually provides structure that can bridge rest inertia. This is what autistic communities call body doubling. This isn't about accountability or motivation or supervision. It's that your brain needs an external input, another nervous system in the environment, generating momentum to bridge the gap between intention and initiation. An environmental support structure and predictability also help like public settings with scheduled activities, other people, or clear expectations. All of these make inertia more manageable than private settings where structure disappears. This isn't because routine is calming, it's because predictable environments reduce cognitive load, freeing up processing resources for action initiation. But, and this is critical, while external prompts help with rest inertia, they can be deeply disruptive during motion inertia. People described interruption during hyperfocus as like suddenly being woken from the deepest, sleek, and it's really jarring. This means that accommodation isn't a one size fits all. You need external structure to start, but protection from interruption once momentum is established. And what do autistic communities know? Well, what autistic people have figured out through lived experience is the following First, momentum hacking works for some people and it's starting with tiny actions like put one foot on the floor, stand for five seconds. Touch the doorknob can sometimes generate enough momentum to overcome rest inertia, not always. And not reliably, but sometimes the physics of starting anything carries over. Second, task interest alignment matters profoundly. Motion inertia during flow isn't a bug. It's the feature that enables depth. The disability emerges when we are forced to engage with tasks that don't activate monotronic attention. So structure your life around what engages you. When possible, negotiate roles that play to sustained focus strengths, and protect your hyperfocus time as sacred. Third, hyper-focused boundaries are essential external alarms, timers, scheduled check-ins. These provide the force required to stop when you need to. It's not about self-discipline, it's about structural intervention. And fourth naming changes everything. When you can say to a partner, I am experiencing inertia and I need external support to transition, instead of apologizing for laziness, the entire interaction shifts when you can tell your brain operates mono topically. You can go incredibly deep, and that's a gift. And it also means that switching is hard, so let's build in support. speaking in those terms. You prevent decades of shame. Next, how to educate your clinician. If your therapist or psychiatrist hasn't heard of autistic inertia, you have options. Option one, direct them to the research. I've linked the foundational studies in our show notes@neurorebelpodcast.com, along with autistic inertia.com, which compiles both peer reviewed research and community knowledge option two translate into language they understand. Try something like this. I'm experiencing severe executive dysfunction with action and initiation and task switching that doesn't follow typical A DHD patterns. There's emerging research from autistic scholars suggesting that this type of situation requires different support strategies focused on external scaffolding rather than internal motivation work. Option three, find a clinician who already knows. Resources like the Neurodivergent Therapist directory increasingly lists professionals who specialize in autistic adult support. You deserve a clinician who doesn't dismiss your lived experience because it's not in the DSM five. You deserve someone who treats you as the expert on your own neurology. And if you're a parent, you deserve a clinician who helps your child understand their inertia as neurology and not a character flaw. Someone who builds executive function support without moral judgment, and someone who recognizes when your child is in flow and protects that space rather than interrupting with arbitrary transitions. So here's where I want to leave you. Not with neat answers, but with questions. This research opens up because the best science generates new questions. Question one. If autistic inertia is as significant as research suggests identified by autistic people as among their most disabling experiences, then why isn't it in the diagnostic criteria, and what does that tell us about who gets to define autism? Who experiences get centered and who gets erased? Question two. How do we hold both truths simultaneously? That inertia creates genuine barriers to functioning in the world as currently structured, and that it enables states of extraordinary depth, neurotypical cognition cannot access. Where's the line between my brain operates differently and needs accommodation, and my brain is broken and needs fixing? Question three, what would genuine accommodation look like? Not accommodations that force autistic people to approximate neurotypical patterns, but structural changes that work with monotronic attention, variable inertia cycles, and the need for external scaffolding. Question four, how does inertia manifest across cultures with different concepts of time, productivity, and disability? What are we missing by centering English language research from Western contexts? And question five, how do we support autistic children in understanding their inertia as neurology rather than moral failure early enough to prevent the internalized shame so many of us carry into adulthood. I don't have definitive answers. I have a framework that explains why I couldn't write that Tuesday. I have research that validates experiences I've been taught to be ashamed of, and I have a way of understanding myself that doesn't begin with what's wrong with me, but with what laws of motion am I operating under and how can I work with them. I also have a way of understanding. Thursday, the day I wrote for 11 hours, forgot to eat and produced my best work. That's the same neurology, same physics, different context. You are not lazy, you are not unmotivated, and you are not broken. You are operating according to different physics and the world's failure to accommodate that says everything about the world and nothing about your worth. The extraordinary death you can access when conditions align. That's not despite your neurology, that is because of it. Demand that your clinicians know the research. Share this with people who've misunderstood. You teach your children the language they deserve, and when inertia strikes, because it will remember. This isn't moral failure. This is neurology. And neurology can be worked with scaffolded, accommodated, even celebrated when we stop measuring it against standards designed for different brains entirely. You've been listening to Neuro Rebel. I am Anita Researcher, retired law professor, and your fellow traveler, and demanding better from neuroscience. You can find full research, citations and transcripts on my website@neurorebelpodcast.com. Follow us on social media and if this helped you understand yourself or someone you love more clearly, share it. Not for algorithmic visibility though, we'll take it, but because someone in your network desperately needs to hear, they're not lazy, they're experiencing documented neurology. And someone else needs to hear that their capacity for deep focus isn't a disorder to be managed. It's a cognitive architecture to be understood. If you'd like to support this work, buy me a cup of coffee on my website. We're listener funded because we refuse to compromise intellectual honesty for sponsorship dollars. Your autistic brain is in malfunctioning machinery requiring repair. It's a complex system operating according to different laws and demanding the world. Recognize those laws is the most radical thing you can do. Until next time, question everything. Trust autistic voices and never apologize for your physics. Thank you so much for listening.