The Continuous Threat-Assessment Loop
I was deep in a conversation with Claude today and it laid out the architecture of the autistic nervous system in a way that finally made sense to me. Not as a metaphor. Not as a self-help platitude. As an actual system diagram.
I want to capture this one in full because it connects almost everything I have written about in these logs. The masking. The burnout. The people-pleasing. The way authority figures can override my own judgment. All of it traces back to one place: the autonomic nervous system.
So here is the map.
Every human being has an autonomic nervous system running a continuous threat-assessment loop. It takes in sensory data from the environment — sounds, light, temperature, social cues, proprioceptive information from your own body — and makes rapid, unconscious decisions about whether you are safe, whether you need to be alert, or whether you are in danger.
This is the sympathetic (fight/flight), parasympathetic (rest/digest), and what Stephen Porges calls the ventral vagal (safe social engagement) system. If you have encountered polyvagal theory, this is that territory.
In a neurotypical person, this system has reasonably well-calibrated thresholds. A noise happens. The system evaluates it, classifies it as non-threatening, and returns to baseline. Someone gives them a slightly odd look. The system pings for a second. They unconsciously read a few more social cues, determine it was nothing, and move on. The whole process is fast, mostly unconscious, and importantly — it resolves.
In an autistic person, several things are different at a fundamental level.
The Volume Problem
The sensory inputs are arriving at different volumes. This is not a metaphor. It is neurological.
Autistic brains tend to have differences in sensory gating — the brain's ability to filter and prioritize incoming sensory information. Where a neurotypical brain might receive the sound of a generator running outside and immediately background it as irrelevant, my brain may be processing that sound at a much higher priority level than it warrants.
And this is not just about the five obvious senses. It includes interoception — sensing your own internal body states — and neuroception — your unconscious detection of safety and threat in the environment.
So right from the start, the nervous system is working with a louder, less filtered data stream. Imagine trying to run threat assessment when the incoming data feed is turned up to 7 or 8 out of 10 instead of the 3 or 4 that neurotypical systems are receiving. Everything gets more weight than it should. The system is triaging at full volume, all the time.
The Loop That Won't Close
This is the part that stopped me cold.
In a neurotypical system, there is a relatively smooth arc: detect potential threat, evaluate, classify as safe or unsafe, return to baseline. Detect. Evaluate. Resolve. Close the loop.
In an autistic nervous system, that resolution phase is often impaired. The system detects the potential threat — "the generator might be bothering someone" — and then instead of evaluating and resolving, it gets stuck in an open loop. The evaluation keeps running because the system cannot achieve the certainty it needs to close the loop and return to baseline.
This is where it connects to everything I have been writing about.
My cognitive brain can evaluate and close that loop. "I am on 35 acres. Nobody has complained. This is fine." But the nervous system operates below cognition. It is not listening to my rational conclusions. It has its own evaluation process, and that process is essentially saying: "Insufficient data to confirm safety. Maintain vigilance."
And it just keeps saying that. Indefinitely.
That is the open loop. That is what is running in the background all day, every day, on dozens of threads simultaneously. My thinking brain closes the ticket. My nervous system reopens it.
The Shifted Baseline
Because of the louder inputs and the difficulty with resolution, most autistic people are operating at a higher baseline arousal state than neurotypical people. We are not starting from calm and occasionally spiking into alertness. We are starting from a state of moderate activation and occasionally spiking into genuine overwhelm.
Think of it like idle RPM. A neurotypical engine idles at 800 RPM. An autistic engine idles at 2,500. The engine is always running a little hot, even when you are "relaxing."
This is why autistic burnout is such a real and devastating thing. It is not just psychological fatigue. It is literal nervous system exhaustion. The hardware has been running above spec for years. For decades. The system was never designed to sustain that level of activation as a permanent state, and eventually something gives.
For me, it gave every February for twenty years. Seasonal burnout, relationship implosions, health crashes. I documented them all in journals without understanding the common root. The root was not bad luck. It was a nervous system that had been redlining since September and finally ran out of buffer by midwinter.
Social Processing Through the Threat Channel
This is probably the piece that matters most.
In neurotypical people, casual social interaction is mostly processed through the ventral vagal system — the "safe engagement" channel. It feels relatively easy, even energizing, because the nervous system has classified social contact as safe.
In many autistic people, social interaction gets partially or fully routed through the sympathetic threat-assessment channel instead. The nervous system is treating social encounters — even benign ones, even imagined ones like the neighbors potentially hearing the generator — as situations requiring active threat monitoring.
Not because I am consciously afraid. Because the system never fully classified "other humans and their potential judgments" as categorically safe.
Read that again. The system never classified other people as safe.
This is not a trust issue. It is not an anxiety disorder. It is a nervous system architecture difference. My threat-assessment hardware routes social data through the wrong channel, and it has been doing that since birth.
Why Masking Is Hardware-Level Exhaustion
This reframes masking completely.
Masking is not just the cognitive load of performing neurotypicality — remembering to make eye contact, timing your responses, modulating your tone, suppressing stims, monitoring facial expressions. That part is exhausting enough on its own.
But the deeper cost is that the entire interaction is being processed through a system that was designed for short-term emergency response. Fight or flight was meant to last minutes. I am sustaining that activation for hours. Days. Decades.
Every masked social interaction is running on the sympathetic channel. Every smile I perform, every small talk exchange I endure, every meeting I sit through — my nervous system is processing all of it as a low-grade threat scenario requiring continuous monitoring.
No wonder I need to go sit in a dark room afterward. The system is not being dramatic. It is depleted.
The Surface Patterns Explained
Once you see the nervous system as the root layer, the surface-level patterns I have been writing about for weeks suddenly have a clean explanation.
The hypermodeling. When I catch myself running elaborate mental simulations of what my neighbors might think about the sound of my generator — that is not a thinking problem. It is my nervous system refusing to close a threat-evaluation loop. The cognitive modeling is my brain trying to generate enough data to satisfy a system that will never be satisfied, because the system's threshold for "confirmed safe" is set unreachably high for social scenarios.
The people-pleasing. This is not a personality flaw. It is my nervous system trying to preemptively eliminate any possibility of social conflict, because it processes conflict through the threat channel. If I can make everyone happy before they have a reason to be unhappy, I can prevent the activation. The people-pleasing is prophylactic threat management.
The authority-input override. When someone with perceived authority tells me something, it can override my own conclusions in ways that feel involuntary. This is not a listening problem or a weakness. It is that my nervous system has specific criteria for what input sources carry enough weight to close an active threat assessment. My own rational analysis often does not meet that threshold. An external authority figure sometimes does. The system trusts certain external inputs more than its own internal resolution process.
The burnout cycle. This is not a willpower failure. It is not "I need to try harder" or "I need better boundaries." It is a nervous system that has been running its threat-assessment engine at elevated RPM for so long that the hardware is degrading. The February crashes were not psychological. They were mechanical.
The Compensatory Software
Here is the part that hit hardest.
For 45 years, I have been running compensatory software on top of this hardware. Masking scripts. People-pleasing subroutines. Hypervigilance daemons. Social modeling processes that consume enormous cognitive resources trying to do what a neurotypical nervous system does automatically and for free.
The software works. That is the insidious part. It works well enough that most people never see the hardware underneath. They see a functional, articulate, capable person and assume the system is running smoothly.
But the CPU usage is at 90% just to maintain idle. There is almost nothing left for actual living.
This is why the diagnosis mattered. Not as a label. As a system specification. Once you know what hardware you are actually running, you can stop trying to optimize for the wrong architecture. You can stop asking "why can't I just be normal?" and start asking "what does this system actually need?"
It needs lower sensory input. It needs longer recovery windows. It needs social interactions that are honest and direct instead of performative. It needs environments where the threat-assessment system can actually achieve resolution and close some loops.
Oak Haven. Thirty-five acres. A workshop in the woods. A wife who understands the architecture.
I did not build this life because I am antisocial. I built it because my nervous system finally told me what it needed, and for the first time, I listened.
The Protocol: You are not running broken software. You are running correct software on different hardware. Stop optimizing the code and start reading the spec sheet. The nervous system is not the enemy — it is the engineer. It has been telling you what it needs for your entire life. The only question is whether you are finally willing to listen.
