Do we have less willpower than NTs?

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In general, apies/autistic have a strong need to follow routines and patterns in their lives, if I'm not mistaken. We like to delve into obsessions, and find it much harder to break free from them. It's kind of like we need to live our lives in a certain way to minimize the effort we put into dealing with the world. NTs on the other hand seem to need to put effort into living their lives, or it'd be empty and boring. They find routines boring, and need more variety in their daily activities and pleasures.

Apologies for any offensive generalizations I may have inadvertently made. I'm not saying aspies/autistic people are lazy or anything like that. I'm just wondering if we have more restricted mental energy or willpower, or if it's a matter of us using it up in more subtle ways, or something else.

How much will power does it take to stop stimming in a publIc venue?

People with Tourette's have been shown to have more control of their bodies than people without it. Because they have to exercise that control all the time.

It might be similar about autistic people and willpower.

I would say I have strong will power. I can also be incredibly stubborn.

I see people give in to their desires all the time. I can successfully restrain myself and get myself to study for hours at a time.

I usually do not notice what other people are doing or how they manage themselves.

I was told lot of people don't have will power. My mom gets tons of patients like that and they all say it's too hard to change their diets and it's too hard to lay off of junk foods and all. My mom's reaction is "Oh god" but of course she doesn't actually say it to them.

People have always told me in my teens I have good self control. I bet the reason why I have such good willpower is because I like to be on control. When I fail, I just say I have to try harder and not give in.

I also have good willpower... when I want to. If I'm expected to have willpower to do something I have no interest in, that's another story. But when it's something I have a desire to achieve, I don't struggle with it much.

Willpower can't be measured like that though. You can't just say that someone who can't stop doing something has less willpower than someone who can. There's no objective measure of how much will it takes to avoid a certain thing. How much will it takes has to do with how compelled a person is to do it. Otherwise people with Tourette's wouldn't have superior body control to people without it -- body control would simply be measured by how many tics a person does.

It's easy for me to avoid rearranging my clothing all day. If someone had an OCD compulsion to do it, and managed to only do it half as well as I do, they'd have superior willpower to mine. It's fairly judgmental to assume otherwise.

Isn't willpower all about doing stuff you don't want to do? haha. I can spend hours and hours doing something until I'm exhausted because I'm overfocused, but I wouldn't call that will power. What I would call willpower is being able to force myself to stop in the middle.

What I meant is... if it's something I have a desire to do but isn't easy for me to do. Like work out. I hate working out, but I like the result. I guess I sounded dumb. Sorry.

Yeah, I understand that. It was probably silly of me to put things that way. It's probably because my major depression has completely depleted my willpower, and I'm looking for a way to make myself feel better about it.


In any case, I've been thinking about willpower since I heard that very interesting lecture from Yale University. The idea is that willpower is a limited resource, and whenever you make an effort to do something, you're using up willpower. Willpower is replenished through food and rest, and like a muscle, can be trained to improve with practice, even by doing very simple apparently irrelevant things, like fixing your posture whenever you remember, or refraining from profanity.

I believe people with AS can have very strong willpower, when having to deal with a major change that neurotical people would not be bothered by. It takes more willpower to use self control, and coping strategies. I think your post was oversimplifying it. People on the spectrum can definitily cope so well to routine changes, that when things are thrown off it doesn't bother them as much as before. And EVERYONE needs routine. It's not just people with Aspergers.

That's interesting. I suppose like with a muscle it's true that it is strengthened by use, but beyond a certain point over-training can actually lead to damage.

I think the hard part is, as others have said, is that you can't tell level of effort by the outcome. The outcome is sort of O(outcome) = E(ffort) - D(ifficulties), so you can't determine E if you only know what O is.

To me the routines thing (and similar things) is basically Chaos Management. If the world is generally overloading/too-much, then familiar things are something to "anchor" to, as the chaos blows past. I've been using a cane lately for some dizziness issues, and I find in crowded places the sensation of the handle in my hand and a solid connection to the ground is very... well, "grounding," when I start feeling overloaded. And similarly for computer games -- they seem to be a circumscribed world where there aren't too many surprises. I always feel sort of refreshed after a long gaming session.

So, rather than less mental- or will-power, maybe it's the lack of filtering, which means there is just more for the brain to deal with, as opposed to it not dealing as well with the same amount of stuff/input as most others.

My mother always tells me she hates me because I don't have to eat that cookie, and when I do, I don't gain any weight. And I don't burn in the sun (I tan) and...yeah, she hates me

I have very strong will-power, when I choose to employ it

It's more like we experience unpleasant effects with greater severity when we try to do things that we don't want to do.

In the same way that an NT would have no problem sitting in a noisy room, while an autistic person might have to try very hard not to get up and leave the same room. It's not that the NT has more willpower, allowing him to tolerate the noise, it's that the NT is not experiencing the same amount of discomfort which requires an excessive amount of willpower for the autistic person to overcome.

In my experience, autistic people generally do have a lot more self control than NTs, and are less prone to be swept along by sudden surges of thoughtless emotion, aside from unavoidable meltdowns. However, due to their exposure to various forms of extreme discomfort, autistic people are more limited in what they can actually choose to do with that self control.

If NTs were exposed to the same kinds of discomfort which we experience, I doubt that they would be able to tolerate it as much as we can, and they would probably find themselves even more limited in everyday life than we are. Like someone above said about tourettes, practice probably has something to do with it.

I have the willpower to get my errands and my chores done, before giving into my special interests.