Last December I solved a medical mystery that had been bothering me for weeks, and I want you to appreciate the full journey, because that’s the point
For most of that month my neck hurt. Not dramatically, just a low, constant wrongness, the kind of discomfort that sits below the threshold of “do something about this” but comfortably above the threshold of “ignore this and be a pleasant person”. My posture had gone strange. I kept catching myself craning forward at my desk like a heron with a deadline. Naturally, I did what I always do when my body misbehaves: I decided to use my autism to assess the situation and see if I could identify the sensory root of the issue.
I considered my desk setup. I considered my pillow, and read more about pillows than any adult should. I considered stress, which is the “have you tried turning it off and on again” of health theories, always plausible, rarely actionable. I adjusted my monitor, I did the stretches but nothing changed.
Then one evening I took off my turtleneck jumper and my posture returned like a cat that had been out all night pretending to be missing.
It was the turtleneck. The whole time. The fabric at the collar pushed my neck forward just enough that I could not hold proper posture while wearing it, and rather than register “this garment is pressing on me”, my brain had quietly rerouted the signal into “you are broken in some new and interesting way”. Weeks of investigation but it was my jumper the whole time. I messaged my partner with the triumphant energy of a detective closing a cold case, and to her enormous credit she didn’t reply with the sarcasm I probably deserved.
An eighth sense that doesn’t file reports on time
There is a sense beyond the famous five that researchers call interoception: the body’s internal reporting system. It is the sense that tells you that you are hungry, thirsty, too hot, in pain, needing the loo, or wearing a jumper that is slowly folding you in half. Studies have repeatedly found that many autistic and ADHD people have unreliable interoception. The signals are not absent, they are late, quiet, or mislabelled, like a courier who does deliver your parcels but leaves them in a hedge three doors down.
I was diagnosed autistic at 31, so I had three decades of practice at receiving these hedge deliveries without knowing that was what they were. And here is the part that took me until 35 to properly understand: when a body signal arrives without a label, your brain does not throw it away: it makes the best guess it can, usually opting for “mood” or “environment”.
We are all familiar with unlabelled hunger registering as “everyone around me has become annoying”. Unlabelled heat gets filed as “I am overwhelmed and my life is unmanageable”. Unlabelled tiredness gets filed as “I am bad at my job”. It turns out that “unlabelled jumper” gets filed as “mystery ailment, possibly age, possibly doom”. I should have seen this coming too since most of my jumpers are unlabelled since my autistic sensory overload means I always cut the labels out. Ironic.
Running the diagnostics
The turtleneck was a small, silly discovery, but it highlighted a much bigger question I have been quietly working through ever since: how many of my moods are not moods at all? How many are inputs?
Because I (like to think I) think in systems, I started by treating it like debugging. When a bad feeling turns up now, before I accept its story at face value, I run through a short checklist of boring physical suspects:
- When did I last eat? Not “do I feel hungry”, because that witness is unreliable. When, by the clock, did food actually happen?
- Am I too hot or too cold? Check by touch, not by vibe. Back of the neck, hands.
- What am I wearing, and is any of it touching me wrong? Waistbands, collars, seams, that one sock.
- When did I last drink water?
- How did I sleep, actually?
It is astonishing, and frankly a bit insulting, how often the terrible mood dissolves within half an hour of fixing whichever of those five comes back flagged but not always. Sometimes a mood is a real mood with real causes that deserve real attention. But the checklist filters out the impostors first, and the impostors are more numerous than I ever wanted to believe.
This does two things. First, it gets actual problems fixed, which is nice. Secondly, and more importantly, it interrupts the old reflex of taking every bad feeling personally. Before, a rough afternoon was evidence about my character. Now it is a ticket in a queue, and the first stage of triage is checking whether the ticket was raised by my soul or by my jumper. You would be amazed how often it is the jumper (and sometimes the wrong pair of underwear).
Why the clock beats the feeling
The principle underneath all of this is one I keep relearning in different outfits: when an instrument is unreliable, stop interrogating it and go and fit a second one.
You wouldn't sit staring at a broken fuel gauge trying to feel how much petrol is in the tank. You'd note the mileage. I don't wait to feel thirsty, I am mindful to drink throughout the day. I don't wait to feel tired, I have a bedtime. I don't ask "am I hungry", I ask "is it after two and have I eaten", because the second question has a checkable answer and the first is a coin toss administered by a courier in a hedge.
None of that is me overriding my body. It is the opposite. It is me finally taking my body seriously enough to build it some external instrumentation, because the internal readout is late and I have a life to run in the meantime. For years the advice was "just listen to your body", which for someone with my wiring is a bit like being told to listen to a radio station that broadcasts on a four hour delay in a language I half speak. I am listening. The schedule is how I listen.
The audit continues
Since the turtleneck, the list of closed cases has kept growing, each one slightly embarrassing in the way all good discoveries are. The chair that made evenings feel hopeless. A pair of headphones that turned out to be clamping my skull like a nervous relative, solved with some larger earpads (with built in cooling? Bonus!). Every one of them had been sitting in my mood ledger under the wrong name, quietly charging me interest for months.
So this is the nudge, offered as someone who learned it the slow way rather than as any kind of medical advice: if you are neurodivergent and you have a recurring bad feeling you cannot explain, audit your inputs before you audit your personality. Fixing the input is the whole philosophy behind our Focus Frames, but most audits start cheaper than that. Check the boring things first. Eat something, drink something, take the offending garment off, and see what is left of the feeling in half an hour.
Sometimes what is left is real, and it deserves your full attention. But sometimes, and far more often, it was the turtleneck all along.
