OCD, Anxiety and ASD's

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I know that OCD and anxiety is quite common amongst aspies/auties. But why is that? Is it due to neurological, physiological factors or perhaps psychological, by which a person almost intuitively brings about a barrier/shield/bubble created by fear/anxiety in order to somehow protect itself due to it's neurological differences?

I'm just interested to know what you think, and if you have OCD, how do you think this has influenced the possibilty of being some sort of defence (if at all)?

This is just a thought, nothing I state is fact, or fact base to my knowledge.

No OCD and no significant anxiety disorder; but I do have an idea about this one.

Autism involves a lot of problems with both sensory input and the unpredictability of life. Sensory input can crash in on you and completely overwhelm you, and send you into meltdown if you're not careful; and this is obviously unpleasant. Not knowing what's going to happen is much more obvious to an autistic person than a non-autistic person because we are much more bothered by unpredictability and surprises. There's something about us that loves knowing what's coming up, and gets more frightened than most people when we can't control it. (Not universal, but true of more people than not.)

Wanting control of your world, and never being able to get that much control, causes anxiety.

That's why routines, patterns, and organization of one's physical space are comforting. It makes life more predictable.

OCD, as an anxiety disorder, has a lot to do with never really knowing things for sure. You can't be sure you won't fail that test today, and you can't be sure that having your pencils arranged slightly different from the exactly perfect way won't somehow cause you to fail the test; so you obsess over your pencils, even though you know it's silly and that your pencils have little connection to your test performance, because your anxiety won't listen to reason (it never does, does it?).

There's a difference between functional routine and functional organization and OCD, of course. OCD is anxiety-based and it interferes with your life. Functional routines and organization, though they may be much stricter than an NT's, enable you to be more effective than you would be without them. (Sometimes there are better ways than what you're doing, though, and switching routines is difficult--but it can be done, and these inefficient routines don't qualify as OCD unless your primary purpose is alleviating anxiety.)

Anyway, that's my take on it. I've had some mild anxiety disorders--a couple of phobias, both gone now, and PTSD, in remission (it's still on the books but I seriously think I don't qualify anymore)... never OCD or GAD, though. I think that most mental illnesses can be relatively easily understood by the average person, because the average person already has the tendencies and habits that, exaggerated and turned into impediments, are what we call mental illness. It isn't all that foreign or frightening to me and I don't think it would be to most people, if they had it related to their own experiences.

I have anxiety.

I think they just kinda sometimes go hand in hand.