Aug 11, 2026 · 28 min · 12 segments
Why can alcohol feel so useful for autistic and neurodivergent people? Chelsey Flood speaks with Associate Professor Dr Felicity Sedgewick about friendship, belonging, and the social challenges that…
Felicity SedgewickGuest
Chelsey FloodHost
Do you have much of a sense of what masking can look like and how it can feel on the inside? And could you talk about that?
I mean, so in terms of what it looks like, I mean, when it works, weirdly enough, it doesn't look like very much at all to outside observers, right?
Um, and, and it does work to a certain extent for people because if it didn't work, people wouldn't keep doing it.
It, it looks like somebody just going about their day the same as everybody else.
[laughs] E- Even the unconscious masking and the instinctive behaviors, which are often particularly around, um, either, like, the sensory sensitivities or things like mimicry, um, is exhausting.
Um, if your body, your nervous system is working to suppress or ignore things like sensory sensitivities so that you don't display that sensitivity and get a negative social response, um, it's having to not only take in that sensory information, recognize it, and then do the inhibition response, it's also trying to do the social stuff at the same time.
For neurotypical people, a lot of the time, they will automatically filter out the background music, the sound of the coffee machine, and the people talking on the table next to them.
It's not an additional process for their brain, for their processing system.
Whereas for a lot of autistic people, all that information is coming in and, like, actively being processed.
Do you have much of a sense of what masking can look like and how it can feel on the inside? And could you talk about that?
I mean, so in terms of what it looks like, I mean, when it works, weirdly enough, it doesn't look like very much at all to outside observers, right?
Um, and, and it does work to a certain extent for people because if it didn't work, people wouldn't keep doing it.
It, it looks like somebody just going about their day the same as everybody else.
[laughs] E- Even the unconscious masking and the instinctive behaviors, which are often particularly around, um, either, like, the sensory sensitivities or things like mimicry, um, is exhausting.
Um, if your body, your nervous system is working to suppress or ignore things like sensory sensitivities so that you don't display that sensitivity and get a negative social response, um, it's having to not only take in that sensory information, recognize it, and then do the inhibition response, it's also trying to do the social stuff at the same time.
For neurotypical people, a lot of the time, they will automatically filter out the background music, the sound of the coffee machine, and the people talking on the table next to them.
It's not an additional process for their brain, for their processing system.
Whereas for a lot of autistic people, all that information is coming in and, like, actively being processed.
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