Most advice for autistic adults focuses on what to do when things go wrong. This blog takes a different position. The more useful question is not how to cope after the fact — it is how to use what you already know about yourself to build the conditions for regulation before you need them.

The Five Remembrances are simple, timeless reflections on ageing, illness, death, change, and the consequences of our actions. As I sat with them recently, I noticed how facing what we cannot avoid does not make life heavier; it makes the ordinary more vivid, and brings us closer to what truly matters.

Self-help culture says anxiety and intuition feel different and the work is to learn to tell them apart. The current research is more honest about the question. A psychologist on what is actually happening in the body, the conditions that make a gut feeling trustworthy, and a more useful question to ask than which signal you are having.

Not every protective pattern is a problem. Some are still doing their job; some have become the thing in the way. A psychologist on how to tell the difference, with four diagnostic questions you can hold a pattern up against.

Most adults self-medicate in some form. The behaviour is rarely the problem; the function it is serving is. A psychologist on why these patterns persist, three questions that surface what your behaviour is actually doing for you, and the function-replacement framework that makes change possible.

Most of what we do is automatic. The research is clear that judgement is not what changes the pattern — knowing is. A psychologist on the dual-process brain and a four-step way to work with it.

Not all self-reflection helps. The research distinguishes adaptive reflection from rumination, and the difference is largely about how you reflect, not how much.