Too Much Noise!

TOO MUCH NOISE

My life long struggle with Auditory Sensory Overload.

What is Auditory Sensory Overload?

Before I talk about experiences with Auditory Sensory Overload, I think I need to explain exactly what it is. Sensory Overload is any experience of overwhelm caused by an over-intensity of one of the 5 senses.

What are the signs?

Although temporary, the signs of auditory sensory overload become obvious after a few attempts to communicate with the person in question due to a louder than average environment.

• "Shut Down" a period of inability to respond to one's environment or to other people.
• Increased anxiety (sometimes even panic attacks) 
• Short and heavy breathing.

How does it affect my life?

To cut a long story short, I avoid going to places where I know that there is going to be a lot of noise like discos and nightclubs. This had made dating extremely difficult for me as those are the most common places for trying to find a partner. Personally, I would rather meet my date in a dining place like a restaurant and a cafe when there would be only minimal noise.

I often cover my ears when I hear the siren of an emergency service vehicle (i.e. ambulance).

When I hear somebody shout suddenly, it is as if the voice of the person shouting goes into my body and I feel overwhelmed very quickly.

How do I cope?

There are times when I buy ear plugs in order to reduce the intensity of the noise when I am outside. Thankfully, these days, I also have things like an audio book collection and YouTube on my smartphone with earphones so I can listen to music when I am travelling.

How common is it?

Among people on the Autistic spectrum, Auditory Sensory Overload is very common. It is also common for people on the spectrum to experience more than on kind of sensory overload.

What are the other sensory overloads

Sensory overload is an over-intensity of one of the 5 senses. This means that there is a form of sensory overload for all the 5 senses. They are:

Visual sensory overload: This is based on sight which means a person has sensitivity to the brightness of the environment.

Olfactory sensory overload: This is based on smell which means a person has sensitivity to strong smells.

Gustatory sensory overload: This is based on taste which means a person has sensitivity to strong tasting food or drink.

Tactile sensory overload: This is base on touch which means a person has sensitivity to external physical sensations.

Right Swiping: my review

Right Swiping: my review

I recently finished reading a four-page article on spiritual internet dating in the March 2019, 40th Anniversary edition of the American Buddhist magazine “Lion’s Roar”. Since the beginning of 2019, I have been taken about joining an Internet dating website which has been made specially for people on a spiritual path.  For a while I have been looking for some guidance and advice in the world of internet dating says and it was a nice surprise that in this edition of Lions Roar, there was an article about someone’s personal experience of dating. One thing from the article that I learnt is an Internet dating seems to be a very emotional experience.

People’s demands

There is no doubt that there are people out there who have specific desires for their potential date.  Some of them are VERY specific.  For example, I learnt that there are people out there who list their likes and dislikes.  The writer of the article also mentions that she met a person who gave a long list of likes and dislikes.  For example: “I hope you into hiking, love dogs, and want to eat all the chocolate out of the Neapolitan ice cream.” and “no drama, no head games.  No people who wear blue socks on Tuesdays.”

It is clear to me that on that evidence I’m going to feel the pressure of other people’s expectations.  Naturally, my personal question to what’s this is; “How do I deal with such expectations?”.  Thankfully, the article provides an answer.

Emotional Athleticism.

The writer of the article was given some advice from somebody which I found very useful.  “Dating is an athletic event of the heart.  Athletes stretch before they start playing.  Dating requires the same amount of warm-up.  First, assess the situation.” The quote basically means that we must be honest about how we are feeling and be emotionally prepared before interacting with a potential date. 

I think that is important to ask ourselves meaningful questions about the person we are thinking of dating like “Do I feel positive about this person?” and “Is he or she the kind of person I want to spend time with.” Such questions help us confirm how we really feel about the kind of person we are about to date.

Relationship goals

The article also mentions that it is important to know exactly what you are looking for in a relationship. Do you just want a girlfriend or boyfriend?  Do you just want to have fun?  Do you want marriage?  Do you want to children?  Do you want sex?  Do you just want a close friend?

I recently learnt on the internet that there are several different types of relationships.

Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of love may help. 

Swipe left or right

If we are on a dating website on our smartphones, you will probably be asked to swipe left for “no” and right for “yes” based on a picture of the person we have seen.  This forces us to make an immediate judgement based solely on physical appearance.  Hence, we must find or create a good picture of ourselves in order to attract other people.  This may be difficult or both you and other people to accept.  If you’re feeling guilty about rejecting somebody solely on an image of their face and you can internally say a small consoling message to that person like “may you find your love” or “I hope you find what you’re looking for”.  This will reduce the amount of guilt that you feel for that person and maintain your positivity when searching for the right date.

Hope and expectation

When we are dating, it is natural to have feelings of hope and expectation.  However, I think one of the biggest problems that modern society has is that they are often attached to hope and expectation.  This often leads to a lot of unnecessary stress and disappointment.  When we are dating, we always had to bear in mind that there is a lot that is out of our hands.  As much effort as we put in our profiles, appearances and mannerisms, there is never any guarantee that your date is going to work out.  We always must be conscious of this fact when trying to find a partner otherwise we’ll always open ourselves to emotional pain from other people.

This is the reason why you should always…

Love yourself first!

There are many people out there who go into relationships feeling empty of love.  This means that they try to find a partner from a point of resentment and desperation.  This is the worst possible emotional state to be trying to find an intimate partner.  Therefore, you should look inside yourself to see what kind of inner emotional pain that you are suffering and find a way to resolve it before attempting to find a relationship.

One thing to remember when you go into relationships is that regardless of your past or present, you are always worthy of love!

If you love yourself first, and loving others will be a lot easier.

Good luck with your search for true love!

My review of 2018

My review of 2018

Usually when I do an annual review of my life, I end up writing a long essay about all of the meaningful moments of the year. However, this time, I am going to do things a little differently. Instead of the essay style description of what has happened to me during the year, I am going to put all of my experiences of the year in 2 categories. "Gifts" and "Lessons". The gifts are things that I have directly benefited from in some way and the lessons are things that I have learnt from the course of the year.

Gifts

• A greater understanding of Yoga and the benefits of Yoga.
• A greater level of self-value.
• A heightened ability to deal with difficult people.
• A better understanding of my own family.
• A greater resistance to physical pain.
• A greater understanding of Shogi.
• Weight loss mainly due to a vegan diet
• Winning the online Shogi title of "10th Purple Dragon".
• A second consecutive whole calendar year without an asthma attack.

Lessons

• People can get emotional about other members of a family.
• There are many people in the world who have a rather "black and white" view on how the world should be.
• Mothers are eternally emotional beings.
• Women are generally more emotional than men.
• There is no point in fearing failure
• Japanese is a complicated language with a lot of "half definitions" and "context"
• I often struggle to deal with cold and flu symptoms.
• I still struggle with anxiety.

How I lost my fear of failure.

How I lost my fear of failure.

Failure is NOT a bad thing.

Many of us believe that in order to succeed in life that we have to avoid failure. By this, I mean that want to push away , abandon or somehow, react adversely to any thought of failing at any time. We always want to believe that we can be successful right from the very beginning and throughout.

This however is a lie that we sub-consciously tell ourselves when we pursue our goals in life. We sometimes act as if we are entitled to have success in life all the time.

However, if we look at our lives carefully, you will find that we are destined to experience failures right from the very beginning of our lives. When we are babies, we are taught to walk and talk. When we first try to walk, we would normally just crawl on all fours with our arms and legs in order to move about as we are not able to keep our balance on our two feet.

When we are growing up and we fail a school exam or we do not do a certain job in the way that our parents or teacher would like us to do it, we are shamed, told off and occasionally even disgraced for our short-comings. This gives us the internal signal that we are "failures" in some way. However, sometimes our failings actually have nothing to do with us. We might have forgotten or mis- understood an instruction or maybe we simply do not have th right "mental toolkit" to succeed in a certain task of job.

One way of another we are constantly told that failure is bad and wrong and that we should avoid failure and be adverse to it all costs; and yet failure as we are about the discover, is actually the most important and valuable part of out road to success in anything that way try to achieve in life.

Talk you way to success

One thing that I have learnt through my journey is that you can actually programme the way you think about life. I first learnt this from a book called "What to say when you talk to yourself" by Shad Helmstetter. This small  book taught me how powerful affirmations and inner mental messages can be. Positive self-talk can be a very powerful tool on you path to success. For example, I convinced myself for a long time that I was bad a blitz (speed) chess because I was not a naturally fast player. When I play chess, I usually like to take my time and double-check certain move before I played them. However, I started to encourage myself by saying "I AM a good blitz player" This helped my lose my fear of failure and before you know it, guess what! I actually won an online blitz tournament. Hence, my life has proven that this method really works. There is a common expression that comes from successful people. "Fake it till you make it!" Sometimes the best way to be successful is to pretend that you already are!

Self Forgiveness

While reading the book "Forgiveness is power" by William Fergus Martin I realised the importance of forgiving oneself when falling short of our goals. Many of us are often harsh on ourselves when we are not able to achieve what we wanted to do. Many of us blame ourselves for our lack of achievement in a certain task but we have to remember that there are usually more factors in achieving a certain goal in life than we realise. These are many external factors like:

• Atmosphere
• Social Settings
• General Environment
• Education
• Location
• Upbringing

These are only a small amount of external factors that may prevent us from succeeding. As we can see, it is not always our fault when we fall short of our goals in life. Many of us have barriers that we may not even be aware of. 

Self Forgiveness is about realising that sometimes  our ability to achieve a certain goal in life is simply our our hands. When you fall short of your goals, remember to tell yourself that you did your best in the given situation and your results cannot always be helped.

Failure LEADS TO success!

As explained above, failure is not a bad thing. In fact in order to succeed, we actually have to accept  that we are initially going to have our failures first. What we have to realise above all things is that failure is not the opposite of success, failure is part of success. We have to look at our short comings as opportunities to learn valuable lessons instead of seeing problems and losses. If we look at all challenges this way, then we can attempt any task or challenge and embrace the journey that it leads to the full. During my chess career, I went through a lot of failures and difficulties. I even wanted to quit at times, but I decided to keep going and finding different ways of doing things and eventually, I got my rewards for my efforts. Any path to glory will have it's bitter moments but sometimes you just have to be patient for success to come. Eventually, you will get there in the end.

Summary

The realisation that I have described above has given me a sense of freedom and joy. It has given me the desire to try new challenges in life and enhanced my motivation to improve on the challenges that I am already taking. I can now pursue dreams and goals without ever worrying about what is commonly called "failure". I look forward to new challenges (and continuation of old ones) that come my way in the future.

Good luck with yours!

Richard Davis

My road to chess glory: Part 4: Scrutiny

My road to chess glory: Part 4 : Scrutiny

The 2011/12 proved to be a difficult season for me not just as a player but also as a team captain. At the time, I was the captain of the Stoneleigh trophy team and the competition recently had some major changes to the format. The Stoneleigh trophy was an inter-club,rapid-play team competition where there are 8 game between the two teams in each match. Each player score 1 game point for winning a game and half a game point for a draw. each match is essentially in 2 halves with 4 games played in the first half and the other 4 being played in the second half (usually, it's the same 4 players playing reversed colours; although they a team can choose to have 4 different players for the second half.) Whichever team scored the most game points for their team wins the match. However, before the start of the new season, I was told that there would be told that there would be a new handicap match format for the competition which meant both teams would have to reach a "target" score in order to draw a match and exceed it to win.

Before the season started, I had a game-plan about how to win the Stonleigh trophy. I wanted to be
one step ahead of my opposition. Basically, I wanted as bag a grade range as I can possibly get. As high-ranked a player as possible on board 1 and as low-ranked a player as I can get. on board 4 with average players on boards 2 and 3. New thinking for a new format. however , this philosophy cane under heave criticism from a member of the club who also happened to be the inter-club tournaments director of the Surrey board and vice-president of South Norwood chess club which I was a member of at the time. he simply wanted me to select the strongest players that I can get. Infect I almost had my captaincy for the Stoneleigh team stolen from me as he phoned the day after the 2011 A.G.M saying that he should take over the opposition because he thought I was "depressed" in the A.G.M. I had to tell him that I was not depressed but tired and I was still willing to run the team .

In the first match, we narrow lost by 1 point and the vice-president told me on my mobile phone on my way home after the match "you need to get someone who will get you a point". He simply didn't appreciate what I was trying to achieve with my player selections and first thought I chose a weak team. The results were not going our way and we only had one match win in our first four matches which meant we were unable to win the competition.  What made things worse for me was the fact that before our fifth match I had a serious stomach infection where I had to go to hospital one early Saturday morning which left me feeling weak for a few days. During  that time I had a very rude phone call from the vice-president accusing me of "falling asleep", clearly unaware of what happened to me during that week-end. The illness also meant that I had little time or energy to think of what kind on team I wanted to have for the match. I thought that I might as well experiment with one or two players who had not previously been in the team. However, the vice-president decided to take the law into his own hands and demanded that he should be in the team over another player. This lead to me having a strong panic attack as I felt as if he was denying me my rights as a captain to select the team that I wanted. Out of shear panic, I gave in and asked him what team he wanted me to have. He gave me the list of 4 players he wanted me to have for his team which inevitably included himself in replacement of another player. I felt like my power and rights as a team captain were instantly taken away from me. It was a moment where I felt named and shamed. We eventually won the fifth match our only victory that season. The final match ended in a draw.

I will never forget that phone call from the vice-president for as long as I live. The feeling of powerlessness I had during that moment haunted me for a couple of months and changed the way I viewed the vice-president. However the worst was yet to come. 

My road to Chess Glory: Part 3: The road to recovery.

Going into the 2011/12 season, I decided to make major changes to the way I played chess. Before the start of this particular season, I had a style that I eventually called "Tempo Hunting". This style of play was aggressive, but was also tactics dependent and required sharp calculation for it to be successful. I realised that my ailing body was not able to compete in the tactics department. Therefore, I adopted a more positional style. I changed my repertoire and relied more on judgement rather than calculation. After a while, I saw my results improving. However in the summer of 2012 when I was preparing to make my debut in the CCF Cup, I found myself suffering an asthma attack and had to go to hospital about a week before the start of the tournament which ment I was forced to take a bye in the opening round. This left me feeling fatigued for the rest of the summer as I could only manage an equal score of 3 wins and 3 losses. I did however did better in the Wernick Cup that year as I won my section and therefore qualified for the final on my first appearance in the competition since winning it in 2009. It was a 4-way final where I finished runner-up after 2 wins and 1 loss, losing only to the overall winner.

Different (A poem)

DIFFERENT

If they are red then I am blue.

If they are false then I am true.

If they are right then I am wrong.

If they are short then I am long.

If they are hot the I am cold.

If they are fresh the I am mould.

If they are square then I am round.

If they are a penny then I am a pound.

So here I am, something new.

So here I am, out of the blue.

So here I am, fitting in

So here I am, blending in

So here I am, it's all change.

So here I am, let's re-arrange.

So here I am, It's only me!

So here I am, can we just be?

I am different, something new.

I am different, a point of view.

I am different, rain or shine.

I am different, a pure devine.

I am different, so they say.

I am different come what may.

I am different, so it's true.

I am different, ... but then so are you!