Someone passes you in the kitchen at work and says how are you, and before you’ve even checked, your mouth has said good, you? Your nose screws up a little. They’ve gone. You stand there with the kettle wondering what just happened, whether you were lying, and whether you even know how you are.
Small talk is talk where the words matter less than the gesture. “How are you?” is mostly a greeting shaped like a question, and the expected answer is short, positive and quick. When you’re autistic it can feel strange or dishonest because you tend to take questions at face value, and answering a real question with a scripted line feels like a small lie. Add alexithymia, difficulty identifying and naming your own feelings, and the honest answer may not be reachable in the time allowed.
What the research shows
- Around half of autistic participants scored in the alexithymia range, compared with about 5% of non-autistic participants. Kinnaird et al. (2019)1
- Autistic adults described rehearsing conversations and preparing questions in advance as part of camouflaging, and the most consistent cost they reported was exhaustion. Hull et al. (2017)2
- Non-autistic observers formed less favourable first impressions of autistic people within seconds, and the gap disappeared when they judged only a transcript of what was said. Sasson et al. (2017)3
- Information passed between autistic people was kept as accurately as between non-autistic people, and broke down faster in mixed autistic and non-autistic chains, where rapport was also rated lower. Crompton et al. (2020)4
What does “how are you” actually mean?
Mostly, it means hello. It’s a greeting with a question mark attached, and the person asking usually isn’t asking. They want a small signal back, something warm and quick that says we’re fine, we see each other, carry on. Linguists call it phatic talk, words used for the contact rather than the content.
You probably knew that already, at least in theory. Someone explained it once, or you worked it out by watching. But knowing it and feeling it sit in different parts of you. When your brain hears a question, it goes looking for the answer. How am I? Compared to when? Which part of me? And while it’s still checking, the conversation has moved on without you.
The words are a question, the meaning is a wave, and you’re built to answer the words. If you lean toward literal thinking, it lands every time, at the bus stop, at the checkout, on every Monday morning call.
Why small talk feels like lying
So you say good. Or fine. Or not bad. And something in you flinches, because it wasn’t true, or it wasn’t checked, or it was true in a way that left out nearly everything.
I remember someone asking me how I was, and I said good, you? with my nose screwed up. I didn’t decide to do it. My face just did it, like it had read the answer and didn’t agree. I think about that moment more than I probably should. It was such a small thing and the whole problem was sitting inside it. My mouth knew the script. The rest of me wasn’t on board.
If you’ve spent your life caring about saying what you mean, a scripted answer can feel like a tiny betrayal of yourself. Nobody gets hurt by it. It’s small, and daily, and repeated, a dozen little untruths a week that build into a feeling that you’re always slightly performing.
And people pick up on the performance. Sasson and colleagues found non-autistic observers made up their minds within seconds, from voice, face and timing, and the gap vanished when they read only a transcript. So the screwed-up nose, the half-second pause and the flat good get noticed, while the words were fine all along. If that one’s familiar, autistic facial expressions goes into why your face and your words don’t always agree.
When you genuinely don’t know how you are
Some days the honest answer to how are you is I have no idea. You can’t find it. There’s something going on in there, a hum, a heaviness, a kind of static, and it doesn’t come with a label.
That’s alexithymia, and Kinnaird’s meta-analysis found it in about half of autistic participants. For someone who reads their own feelings quickly, how are you is a glance inward. For you it can be a search with no map and a time limit of about two seconds.
Your body often tells you late too. Interoception, the sense of what’s happening inside you, can be muted or delayed, so you might not register that you’re tired, hungry, anxious or overwhelmed until it’s well underway. You find out you were having a bad day at nine o’clock at night, after it’s over.
So you’re being asked to report on something you haven’t received yet, and good is the only answer that arrives on time.
The script you built, and what it costs
You probably built a script early. Good, you? Not bad, yourself? Yeah, busy. You tested them, kept the ones that worked and dropped the ones that got funny looks. Maybe you watched how other people did it and copied the rhythm. Maybe you rehearsed in the shower or the car.
That’s camouflaging, and it makes sense. In Hull and colleagues’ study, autistic adults described exactly this, rehearsing conversations and preparing questions so they’d have something to say. It worked, often. The cost they reported most consistently was exhaustion, the kind you go home and lie in a dark room to recover from.
Small talk is where that cost hides, because it’s brief and so it doesn’t feel like it should count. Each time you read the situation, pick the line, set your face, time the reply and get out cleanly. None of it is hard on its own. A dozen times a day, it’s a large part of why you’re running on empty by mid-afternoon, and why you might need the social hangover recovery time that nobody else seems to need.
The script can also start to feel like it’s talking for you. You hear yourself say yeah, good, busy, and it sounds like a recording. Your voice, someone else’s words, about a self you didn’t check on.
Small talk after a late diagnosis
If you were diagnosed later in life, small talk can get stranger before it gets easier. Once you know about masking, you start noticing it everywhere, and the smallest exchanges are where you catch yourself first. The pleasantries were always a performance. Now you can see the stage, and the lights, and yourself standing on it saying good, you?
That can be uncomfortable. You might feel a flash of grief for all the years you did this without knowing why it wore you out. You might feel annoyed at yourself for still doing it. You might try dropping the script and find the silence where it used to be is worse.
None of that means you’re doing it wrong. Noticing comes first, and for a while noticing is all there is. Working out which rooms still get the script and which ones don’t can come later, slowly, one corridor at a time.
The Unmasking Years If you’ve started catching yourself mid-script and wondering who’s underneath it, chapter four looks at what masking cost you, why it was never a choice, and how unmasking actually happens, gradually and room by room.
Ways to answer that feel less like lying
You don’t have to choose between a full honest report and a lie. There’s a lot of room in between, and some answers sit better in your body than others.
Answer the greeting. Hey, good to see you. Morning. It’s warm, it closes the loop, and you haven’t claimed anything about how you are.
Pick something true and small. Tired but okay. Bit of a slow one. Glad it’s Friday. A small true answer feels different in your mouth from a big untrue one.
Ask something you actually want to know. Bouncing how are you back just passes the problem along. Did you get that thing sorted? How was the coast? A specific question gives you both somewhere real to go.
Keep a holding answer. Honestly, still working that out. It’s true more often than good is, and people will usually smile and move on.
Let some people have the real answer. Not everyone who asks needs it. A few do, and saying not great, actually, to someone safe can feel like putting something heavy down.
When someone actually wants to know
Small talk can feel easier with other autistic people, and Crompton and colleagues’ chain study fits what you may have noticed: information held up between autistic people and broke down faster in mixed pairs, where rapport was lower too. A lot of what gets called autistic social difficulty is a mismatch between two ways of communicating, and the strain runs both ways.
With the right person, how are you becomes a real question again. You can say I don’t know yet and they’ll wait. You can skip the pleasantries and open with the thing you’ve been thinking about all week. You can be blunt without it landing as rude.
You might not have many of those people yet. If you’re finding them slowly, autistic friendships often start with a shared interest and very little warm-up, which suits you fine.
Small talk will probably always feel a little strange. That’s okay. You don’t have to love it and you don’t have to fix it. You can just know why it feels the way it does, and choose, more often, the answers you can live with.
Key points
- “How are you?” is usually a greeting shaped like a question, and your brain is built to answer the question.
- Scripted answers can feel like small, repeated lies when you care about saying what you mean.
- Alexithymia and delayed interoception can make the honest answer unavailable in the moment, so you find out how you felt later.
- Small talk scripts are a form of camouflaging, and the cost builds across a day even though each exchange is brief.
- Small, true answers, greetings and specific questions can replace the script without forcing a full emotional report.
Why do autistic people hate small talk?
Usually it’s the format that grates. Small talk asks you to treat questions as gestures, read unspoken rules quickly and produce an expected answer on cue, all while managing your face, voice and timing. If you take words at face value, “how are you?” sends you looking for a real answer the other person never wanted. The script that gets you through can feel hollow, like saying lines in someone else’s play. Add the energy each exchange takes and it’s no wonder you’d rather talk about something real or say nothing at all.
What does “how are you” really mean?
Usually it means hello. The person asking expects something short and positive like good, fine or not bad, followed by the same question back. Sometimes it’s a real question, especially from someone close to you, someone who knows you’ve had a hard week, or someone who asks it slowly and waits. Tone, setting and whether they stop walking are the main clues. If you can’t tell which version you’re getting, a small true answer covers both, because it works as a greeting and leaves room for more if they want it.
How should I answer “how are you” if I don’t know how I feel?
Say something true that doesn’t require you to know. “Still working that out” or “one of those days, not sure yet” are honest and short, and most people accept them easily. You can also answer the greeting rather than the question, with “good to see you” or simply “morning”. Or describe a fact rather than a feeling. “Bit tired.” “Busy week.” “Had a good coffee.” Facts are often easier to find than emotions, and none of these will raise eyebrows in a corridor.
Is it lying to say “good” when you’re not?
Socially, it isn’t treated as a lie, because both people understand “good” as part of a greeting and not a report. But if it feels like lying to you, that feeling is worth taking seriously. It usually comes from caring about honesty and from taking language literally, both of which are common when you’re autistic. You don’t have to force yourself to feel fine about it. You can keep “good” for moments when you simply need the exchange to end, and give the fuller answer to the few people who actually want it.
What is alexithymia and how does it affect conversation?
Alexithymia is difficulty identifying, describing and telling apart your own emotions. In conversation it shows up as going blank when asked how you feel, saying “fine” because nothing more specific is available, or realising hours later that you were upset during a talk. It can make small talk feel like a test you didn’t study for, and deeper conversations harder too, because people expect you to name feelings on demand. The feelings are there, often strongly. They just arrive without labels or arrive late.
Why do I make weird faces during small talk?
Your face may be answering honestly while your words follow the script. A screwed-up nose, a flat expression, a delayed smile or a wince can all happen when what you’re saying doesn’t match what you feel, or when you’re concentrating hard on getting the exchange right. Autistic facial expression can also simply differ from what non-autistic people expect. That says more about the observer’s expectations than about you. When the words match your insides, your face has less to disagree with.
Is small talk a form of masking?
It often is. Learning stock phrases, copying other people’s rhythm, rehearsing answers, forcing a smile and asking questions you don’t care about so the conversation keeps moving are all camouflaging techniques autistic adults describe. That doesn’t make you fake. You learned these things because getting small talk wrong had consequences, from odd looks to being left out. Seeing it as masking also gives you a choice you might not have had before, which is to keep the script where it serves you and let it go in places where you’re safe enough not to need it.
How do I get out of small talk without being rude?
Short, friendly exits work better than you might expect. “Good to see you, I’d better get back to it” or “I’ll let you go” signal warmth and close the loop at the same time. Moving your body helps too, picking up your mug, turning slightly toward the door, so the words and the action say the same thing. You don’t need a reason, and you don’t need to apologise. If it’s someone you see every day, a reliable greeting and exit line can become your routine, so you’re not inventing one each time.
If you’ve lived this.
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