I Made a Playlist for Driving. That Got Me Thinking.

I spent about two hours making a playlist for when I drive. I'm not even done yet.

The entire process was going through my music library, picking the songs that I am familiar with and like singing along to, and adding it to the playlist.

You'd think it would take like five minutes. I certainly thought so. Turns out, not by a long shot. Between waiting for the processing speed of the phone and vibe checking all my songs, I got thinking about music's part of my life.

I used to play in my middle school and high school's orchestra as a violinist. I was a pretty bad player, I'll be the first to say it; I didn't practice, and what time I spent not playing along with the rest of class I read on my kindle or kindle app on my phone as sneakily as I could. I kept forgetting the shoulder rest for my violin, and I couldn't tune my instrument for shit. You could say I was not the model student, and you'd be correct.

I didn't care to practice because I found the unity of playing a song fun, but I knew I wasn't going to do this for life. The moment I realized I was dragging the orchestra down and probably felt a few signals telling me my classmates didn't like me - personally - I felt it was time to leave. At least my orchestra teacher had the decency to pretend she was sad I was leaving the class. Or maybe she was genuinely sad. Beneath my bad student behavior, I'd like to think I'm a lovable person.

I love singing songs and doing karaoke. I've always felt insecure about my singing, so I kept it to myself in my room or sang with my trusted friends. It was during college that I actually stepped out of my comfort bubble to sing karaoke by myself. Now I can do that, even if I can't promise anything about my singing quality. It's about the fun of it, along with the practice.

This music - the songs I've accumulated on my phone throughout my life - is like a blanket for my mind, where familiar lyrics and nose covers the new stimuli and keeps me from falling into a hole of anxiety and nerves. When I went to the grocery store with my parents, I put in my earbuds. When I didn't have earbuds to put in, I sang lyrics that had become earworms under my breath. Anything to feel comfort in an unfamiliar area with strangers, a lot of noise, and a fuckton of color.

I thought this was normal. Or at least, normal for someone with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Using a comforting stimuli to regulate oneself in an unfamiliar environment. I know my dad has a similar issue when it comes to stimuli, and I know he has the same mental disorder - I'd inherited it from him - so I thought it was just a thing with that disorder.

For people with ADHD, it is. Listening to music can arouse the minds of kids with ADHD, allowing them to cognitively perform better and be more alert. Enough students at my high school made this clear to the teachers that when we did classwork, they'd put on music for us to listen to.

If it didn't improve attention, it definitely helped improve morale.

When subjects like mathematics felt like they were slipping through my fingers in college, I listened to music to sustain my attention and thinking on homework. Sometimes the music felt weird and wrong, and I had to switch to something new. I found a band that plays instrumental cowboy rock music, and while I have them to thank for getting me through organic chemistry, I never want to listen to them again. At some point I'm deleting their songs from my phone. Considering the ADHD meds in my system, it could actually be done today.

Nowadays, when I get in my car to drive somewhere the first thing I do is connect my phone to the car and play music. I love singing along to familiar songs, and when Apple music decides to add a new song into the mix, I'm up to listening and seeing it if passes my vibe check. I have the music turned up loud enough to drown out my own voice.

I had my comfort songs for new places and roads, and my usual litany of familiar and unfamiliar-but-similar songs to sing to when I to familiar destinations and paths. I was still operating under the assumption that this was for my ADHD.

This assumption changed after I had to pick up my mom from work.

When my mom wants to detach from her business self after a hard day's work, she wants silence. Some everyday chatter is good between us, but otherwise she requests my music to be off.

I don't know about you, but when your parent asks you to accommodate them you reflexively think you need to. It's ingrained.

Suddenly, the noises around me (wind sliding past cars, tires on ground, chimes and bells and rings and beeps) have my eyes swinging in all directions. I'm tenser, almost white-knuckling the driving wheel (which is something you should not do, pro-driving tip) and triple-guessing all my driving decisions. I'm stressed, I'm nervous, and my mom can feel it. In turn, she too becomes stressed and nervous and starts commenting on my driving. Without music, this becomes a cycle of stress and anxiety and can potentially culminate in me making a driving mistake.

This cycle of events had repeated so often that I asked my best friend to drive my mom instead, knowing they were a smoother driver and my mom could feel more relaxed. That plan didn't quite pan out, due to dim lighting at the park-and-ride and the presence of a policeman.

After discussing what I felt with that friend of mine, we agreed that unregulated ADHD wasn't quite the problem here. They suggested another reason that aligns with these effects. One word: Autism.

For people on the autism spectrum, sensory regulation is an ongoing problem. Hypersensitivity or hyposensitivity becomes a thing they need to be aware of. Stimuli like noise, light, textures, etc. can feel too intense for those who are hypersensitive, while hyposensitive people need more input going to their brain to feel regulated or normal. It's not an either-or scenario for the person; this sensitivity balance depends on the situation and its context.

When an autistic person feels hypersensitive in a certain situation, it's as if they can't meld all their senses into a smooth, fluid picture. Things stand out, like sounds or textures, which can (in a sense) create optical illusions of things standing out in your face, raising alarm bells, demanding your attention. A whole cacophony of these alarm bells, and you can't really think of anything but how to escape the onslaught.

For me, each traffic noise carried an alarm bell, and each action I made against the environment felt like I was doing something wrong or illegal. This anxiety would grow and grow until I inevitably made a mistake and sent both my mother and I into worry overdrive. When music floods my ears, it washes away the alarm bells and allows me to focus on the here and now of driving and to smoothly ride the wave of traffic conversation.

Familiar music provides stability and predictability, allowing me some room to breathe while I navigate around the actions of other drivers who independently either communicate their actions (like using the turn signals) or don't.

This same need for predictability and familiarity leads me to sing quietly to myself songs or lyrics that I remember while I'm in a public setting, like on the bus or in stores.

I'm no stranger to the concept of stimming. I could have gotten a minor in psychology if I chose to fill out the papers, and I liked learning about mental conditions/disorders (who doesn't if you're into psychology?), so the nature and reason to stim was well-versed in my mind. But to know or recognize your own stimming behavior is another thing entirely, especially when you don't know if you're on the spectrum.

I was already suspicious that I could be autistic. Life events and therapist suggestion notwithstanding, this added another reason to suspect the diagnosis.

After getting diagnosed, I have the relief of feeling certainty for why some things are in my mind. Familiarity in a song provides predictability provides comfort.

If I'm in familiar territory, I can take some surprise; a new song popping up on my phone that fits my vibe is added to my collection. But when I'm in unfamiliar territory destination- or path-wise, I can't afford to play roulette with my ears.

Unfortunately, that roulette happens more often than I would like due to the accumulation of albums and music on my phone that I just wouldn't want to listen to while I drive. It takes a few seconds to skip the songs, depending on how careful you are driving and if you know where the skip button is on the driving wheel (I just discovered it this week, not kidding), but really the whole process adds a droplet of stress to the journey. Those drops do accumulate, as they have in the years I've been doing this, and recently I've felt like I'm sitting in a puddle of stress when I put myself in the driver's seat.

This feels like a small thing to think about. A bit of a childish problem; something that shouldn't be on my radar with the state of the world and my own other problems. But a childish problem still nags, still demands attention. And now that I know why it exists, it feels like a kindness to myself to solve it.

With my ADHD medication and the time I have on my hands, I had the ability to curate my own driving playlist, filled only with the predictable, the comfortable, and the delightful. Kindness, comfort, ease.

It seems to have more than a hundred songs from various genres, each one embedded in my heart by the glue of memories.

Driving should be easier for me now. That's what's important.

Citations for the science (not by alphabetical order):

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Söderlund G, Sikström S, Smart A. Listen to the noise: noise is beneficial for cognitive performance in ADHD. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2007 Aug;48(8):840-7. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2007.01749.x. PMID: 17683456.

Kevin, et al. “Modulation in Background Music Influences Sustained Attention.” ArXiv.org, 2019, arxiv.org/abs/1907.06909.

Woods, K.J.P., Sampaio, G., James, T. et al. Rapid modulation in music supports attention in listeners with attentional difficulties. Commun Biol 7, 1376 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-07026-3

Robertson, C., Baron-Cohen, S. Sensory perception in autism. Nat Rev Neurosci 18, 671–684 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.112

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DeBoth, Kelle K., and Stacey Reynolds. “A Systematic Review of Sensory-Based Autism Subtypes.” Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, vol. 36, Elsevier BV, Apr. 2017, pp. 44–56, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2017.01.005.

Ben-Sasson A, Hen L, Fluss R, Cermak SA, Engel-Yeger B, Gal E. A meta-analysis of sensory modulation symptoms in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. J Autism Dev Disord. 2009 Jan;39(1):1-11. doi: 10.1007/s10803-008-0593-3. Epub 2008 May 30. PMID: 18512135.

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‌‌Dunn, Winnie PhD, OTR, FAOTA.. The Impact of Sensory Processing Abilities on the Daily Lives of Young Children and Their Families: A Conceptual Model. Infants & Young Children 9(4):p 23-35, April 1997.

Cascio C, McGlone F, Folger S, Tannan V, Baranek G, Pelphrey KA, Essick G. Tactile perception in adults with autism: a multidimensional psychophysical study. J Autism Dev Disord. 2008 Jan;38(1):127-37. doi: 10.1007/s10803-007-0370-8. Epub 2007 Apr 6. PMID: 17415630; PMCID: PMC2185746.

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Pellicano, Elizabeth, and David Burr. “When the World Becomes ‘Too Real’: A Bayesian Explanation of Autistic Perception.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 16, no. 10, Elsevier BV, Oct. 2012, pp. 504–10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009.

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