Tiredness and fatigue are overwhelming for many adults who have dyspraxia due to the effort it takes in planning, prioritising, processing and performing everyday tasks whilst trying not to get distracted.
It can affect your co-ordination skills – such as tasks requiring balance, playing sports or learning to drive a car. Dyspraxia can also affect your fine motor skills, such as writing or using small objects.
Sleeping difficulties, including wakefulness at night and nightmares. Growing awareness of difficulties, affecting confidence and self-esteem. May report physical symptoms such as headaches and feeling sick.
Dyspraxia can cause people to experience stress and frustration when they struggle with day-to-day tasks that require coordination, such as getting dressed, cleaning, cooking and driving. Dyspraxic adults may also walk with a different gait, bump into things frequently and/or have trouble participating in sports.
generally it impacts fine motor skills (e.g. holding a pencil) and/or gross motor skills (e.g. riding a bicycle). It can also impact the ability to organise yourself, remember information and control actions. processing differences. They may be sensory avoidant e.g. leaving a room when noises are too loud for them.
Dyspraxia is most commonly caused by stroke or acquired brain injury. There are 2 types of Dyspraxia: (1) Oral dyspraxia– difficulty with non-verbal tasks - when asked to do so (E.g. please poke out your tongue), however the person can perform non-verbal tasks successfully and automatically (E.g. licking an ice cream).
Common Dyspraxia strengths
Dyspraxics often learn to develop soft skills such as active listening, empathy, and when to delegate tasks to others. Their desire for people to understand what they deal with ensures that they communicate clearly too. All these result in dyspraxics making good leaders.
Dyspraxia (developmental coordination disorder) can cause a wide range of issues with coordination and motor skills. While most people with dyspraxia show signs of the condition by the time they start school, some people have mild forms of the condition that are more difficult to detect.
Daniel Radcliffe (Actor)
Best known for his titular role in the Harry Potter films, Daniel revealed that he had a mild form of dyspraxia in 2008 in an interview for his Broadway debut in Equus. He was unsuccessful at school and 'he sometimes still has trouble tying his shoelaces.
Although Dyspraxia is a lifelong condition, adults and young people present differently to children with the condition as they have developed adaptive (or maladaptive, in some cases) coping strategies to manage their difficulties.
From speaking to others with dyspraxia, one effect that tiredness can have is making our dyspraxia seem 'worse'. We can be more clumsy than usual (yes, that's possible!), forget things more etc. Another difficulty we can have being dyspraxic is getting to sleep.
Many have difficulty maintaining a good sitting posture and lack stamina for gross motor activities.
Apraxia is usually caused by damage to the parietal lobes or to nerve pathways that connect these lobes to other parts of the brain, such as frontal and/or temporal lobes. These areas store memories of learned sequences of movements. Less often, apraxia results from damage to other areas of the brain.
Those who have DCD /dyspraxia are 4 times more likely to become obese4 and are less physically fit and more overweight especially in girls5 It is therefore important that those with DCD/dyspraxia are encouraged to be as physically active as possible.
Dyspraxics often learn to develop soft skills such as active listening, empathy, and when to delegate tasks to others. Their desire for people to understand what they deal with ensures that they communicate clearly too. All these result in dyspraxics making good leaders.
Dyspraxia is a motor and cognitive condition. It affects fine motor skills (handwriting, doing up buttons) and gross motor skills (walking, driving), as well as motor planning and coordination. It also affects cognitive (information processing and memory retention) skills.
The brain does not process the written word as do most brains and so people with this condition must learn in other ways. Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Ford and Richard Branson had/have this condition. Dyspraxia is a brain-based motor disorder.
How many people have dyspraxia? It is thought dyspraxia affects up to 6% of the population, with up to 2% being severely affected. Males are four times more likely to be affected than females. Dyspraxia has also been shown, at times, to run in families.
People with dyspraxia can have difficulty with movement and memory, such as fine and gross motor skills needed for driving and following directions, cooking, and speaking, so patience is the number one trait their partners need to have.
Over sensitive – dyspraxic people are often over sensitive to light, sound and/or touch. Therefore, they may find sounds louder than normal, not like to be touched, squint more often than most or be easily distracted by noise.
The effects of dyspraxia
Anxiety and depression are fairly common in individuals with dyspraxia. The Dyspraxia Foundation reports that “there is increasing evidence of associated anxiety, depression, behavioural disorders and low self-esteem in children, teenagers and young adults with dyspraxia”.
Tend to get stressed, depressed and anxious easily. May have difficulty sleeping. Prone to low self-esteem, emotional outbursts, phobias, fears, obsessions, compulsions and addictive behaviour.
Swimming is particularly good for children with dyspraxia/DCD as it is made up of repetitive sequences of movements and it isn't as unpredictable as team and ball games. Although difficult to learn the early skills it is worth encouraging the child to persevere as they will often become quite proficient.
Many people with Dyspraxia and other neurological deficits find interpreting the meaning of messages from what we see in the world around us a challenge. Of course some people without Dyspraxia sometimes experience these difficulties too, when trying to decode to us what seems like the impossible.
Children with dyspraxia are more than just clumsy. They may have difficulty with tasks requiring involvement of their whole body (such as catching, running, riding a bike), their hands (writing, tying shoelaces) or both. It takes much more effort to learn skills, to retain them, and to transfer them to other contexts.