You have an appointment at 3:00.
It’s 11:17.
You know about the appointment. You agreed to the appointment. You might even want to go to the appointment. But somehow, the entire day has become the time before the appointment.
You can’t quite settle into anything. Starting a project feels pointless because you’ll have to stop. Going somewhere feels risky because you might lose track of time. Even relaxing can feel strangely unavailable because, technically, you have somewhere to be.
Nothing is happening and yet something is happening. The future appointment has somehow entered the present and taken up residence there.
Now imagine someone (or an inner voice) adds: “You need to start getting ready.”
Something in you recoils. Not because you don’t want to go. Not because you don’t understand that you have to leave. Not even necessarily because you object to the appointment itself. Because suddenly, someone has decided that now is the moment when your next action begins.
For a person with a PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) profile, that distinction can be enormous.
PDA is generally described as a profile associated with autism in which everyday demands can trigger an unusually strong need to avoid, escape, negotiate, delay, distract, or regain control. Its diagnostic status is contested, and it is not recognized as a standalone diagnosis in the DSM-5 or ICD-11. But the experience itself is extensively described by autistic people and families, and has been studied and discussed clinically, particularly in the UK.
The standard account says: this is about autonomy. This is about control. The nervous system perceives a demand as a threat to agency, and it responds with avoidance, negotiation, distraction, or collapse. This is true, as far as it goes. Anxiety and threat sensitivity appear to be important parts of the picture. But I want to push on the seam of that explanation, because I think it’s hiding something more interesting, and possibly more accurate, underneath.
What if the demand is not the primary problem?** What if the preciousness of now for the neurocomplex is?**
I’m not suggesting that “now” replaces autonomy, anxiety, or threat sensitivity as a PDA framework. I’m interested in something narrower and stranger: whether the experience of time itself, and the innate drive to be in the NOW, might help explain why a demand can be tolerable in one moment and unbearable in another.
The Demand Is Just the Data Point Within ‘Time’
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