What is autistic burnout?
Feeling drained, overwhelmed, or depleted?
Ever find yourself navigating a world that seems to operate on frequencies you can't quite tune into? Have you ever felt like you're running on empty, both physically and emotionally? If you identify as autistic – whether officially diagnosed, self-diagnosed, or questioning – you're not alone in facing these challenges.
Picture this: You're in the midst of your day, the demands piling up, the sensory stimuli buzzing around like an orchestra of dissonance. It's in these moments that you might be wondering, "Is anyone else feeling this too?" The answer is a resounding yes. Autistic burnout is a term that describes the challenges that many autistic people face in a world that is often non-affirming.
Autistic burnot externally manifests as withdrawal, fatalistic thinking, exhaustion, frustration, and disorganization. Internally, it's a complex mix of depression, anxiety, numbness, difficulty to keep up. Executive functioning is highly affected too.
Recognizing autistic burnout
Here are some of the main sypmtoms that may indicate that you are experiencing autistic burnout:
Emotional Symptoms: You feel overwhelmed, you experience an increase in meltdowns and shutdowns or they are more prolonged or intense. You feel very emotional or you feel numb.
Cognitive Symptoms: You struggle to concentrate, you find problem-solving more difficult, experience slower thinking, slower processing information and feel mentally exhausted.
Physical Symptoms: You feel really drained, depleted and extremely exhausted. It is difficult to get out of bed and feel like you need to sleep all the time. The physical exhaustion is not due to a physical illness, excessive exercise or other physical causes.
Executive Functioning Symptoms: Planning, organization and problem-solving abilities are more challenging than usual. You struggle to start an activity, you feel stuck and find it difficult to transition from one thing to the next, you have difficulties creating or following a routine.
Social Symptoms: Socialising feels really challenging, even communicating via text feels overwhelming and responding takes longer than usual. Masking feels more draining than usual or is impossible to do.
Sensory Symptoms: You are hypersensitive to sensory stimuli, things that did not use to bother you are affecting you at the moment. You need to stim more, your dietary patterns are more rigid now.
These are only some of the symptoms that autistic people that are experiencing burnout usually report. You don’t have to experience all of them in the same way they are described in this article, and you might experience things that are not on the list. While autistic burnout is not a medical term or formal diagnosis that can be found on the DSM, but an experience widely discussed by autistic individuals, it does not mean that individuals experiencing it don’t need support or should not be taken seriously. Autistic burnout can have a huge negative impact on your mental health and serious consequences if left untreated.
So, are you burnout?:
First, let’s try to gauge how you are feeling right now, on a scale from 1 to 10, 0 being the worst you have ever felt and 10 is the best you have ever felt. This can be used as a measure to see how bad things are for you and to compare it in the future.
Now, let’s look at things in your life that are feeding the autistic burnout that you are experiencing at the moment. In order to do that, let’s look at the following questions:
What are things that are making you feel stressed on a normal day?
Are you struggling with sensory sensitivities? Is this happening more than usual?
Do you feel annoyed or angry for having to remember every daily task, plan things in advance or organise things?
Are there any life changing events going on for you at the moment?
If you can’t think of everything that is adding to the stress and feeding the autistic burnout, you can use a notebook to write down every time you notice something makes you feel worse. If you find it hard to notice things in the moment, it might be useful to ask yourself about a time in your life when you didn’t feel burnout. What was different?
Strategies for recovery
Some strategies to recover from autistic burnout:
1. Lower the demands. You might be used to pushing yourself but if you are burnout you need to stop and take a break to recharge. Lower the demands, take breaks and stop doing things that require a lot of energy from you.
If you are able to identify the things that are causing you stress and feeding into burnout, you can remove or reduce this stressor in the short, medium and/or long term. This can look like reducing some sensory stressors by wearing ear plugs, cutting labels out of clothing or wearing sunglasses. Or getting out of some of the social events you don’t have the energy to commit to, put on hold some of the things that are on your ‘to-do’ list, and so on. If you find yourself struggling to do this, it might be due to perfectionism. I am sure that there are some things that are essential, but others can actually wait.
2. Take a break. This might be difficult in some cases, and very often when you realise you are burnout you find yourself stuck in a situation difficult to change anything. You can’t take time off work or education, you have a lot of responsibilities and situations where you feel that you have to mask.
It is important to take a break within your possibilities. This can look like a few weeks off work on sick leave, taking a couple of days of annual leave, booking in a few hours each day/ week/ month where you have no demands on you at all, asking for support to do housework or even allowing yourself to rest and going somewhere quiet every day for a few minutes where you don’t have to mask and can decompress.
3. Physical Self-Care: While some physical self-care tasks might feel draining, it is important to continue to take care of ourselves and have our basic needs met in order to feel better. Physical self-care can also lok like sensory self-care: do things that relax you and make you feel physically better and stop doing things that feel overwhelming at the moment.
4. Focus on a Special Interest: Backing away from these interests usually indicates that you are starting to burnout. In order to recover, it is essential to find a way to engage with these special interests or to find new ones. Spending time doing things that you are passionate about is great in order to recharge. Individuals experiencing burnout frequently prioritise staying at work and reducing engagement in activities that bring them happiness. Although this may appear reasonable, it can be counterproductive, leading to decreased mood and energy due to the absence of positive experiences. If you find yourself with limited energy, make a conscious effort to prioritise activities that bring you joy and a sense of accomplishment. Doing so can contribute to an improvement in your mood.
Reconnecting with your passions during burnout might initially seem overwhelming, but you can ease into it by incorporating small changes. Not all activities, people, and environments have the same impact on your energy and stress levels. Some may deplete your energy and increase stress, while others can replenish your energy and alleviate stress. Take some time to compile a list of activities, individuals, and settings where you feel rejuvenated or less stressed. It could be a supportive friend, a comforting pet, a nature walk, a swim in the sea, or simply spending time in a favourite room playing video games, watching TV, or reading.
5. Design a lifestyle that protects you from autistic burnout.
Recovering from burnout is the first necessary step, but it will eventually happen again if you don’t make long-term changes in your life, as far as possible. Is there social, emotional, mental or physical energy that you can save so you don’t burnout again? Can you save any spoons? It is a process to work on, but you might realise that you have to lower your expectations and that you are comparing yourself to neurotypical people and are setting really high and unrealistic standards because of that. As an autistic individual growing up and living in a neurotypical world it is very normal that you will have compared yourself to your neurotypical peers. But remember that you don’t have to do all the things that you think other neurotypical people are doing!
