10 Signs You're not Tired, You're in Burnout.

I dropped out of school when I was 17 and it wasn't because I was getting bad grades or anything and I did everything in my power to keep going but I was exhausted I remember stepping off the bus at the end of the day and not knowing whether or not I would be able to make it the 2-minute walk from the bus stop to my house when I finally did get home I'd listen to the same song on repeat for hours and hours and I just feel completely numb in the last days before I left College I would frequently have meltdowns in the morning and I had this friend who I would get the bus to college with she would come to my house first and kind of pick me up and then we would go to the bus stop one day she came into my house to find me curled up in the middle of the carpet in my pajamas she tried to persuade me to come into college with her that day but I just insisted that there was no way I could it should have been embarrassing but I just couldn't bring myself to care and she said it's okay you look cute in those pajamas so I think you should probably stay home and then she left and she got the bus and went about her day she never really asked me any questions about what was all that about and I was just left kind of feeling like a failure feeling like a failure to be a good friend the good friend I was trying desperately to be feeling like a bit of a failure at everything and I continued after that point to push and push and try and bulldo through another day even though I had absolutely nothing left to give I often wasn't ready in time in the morning and then missed the boss but would still push myself to go in because there was another way I could get in it just involved walking and taking three different trains and I still many days pushed myself to get there crying most of the way there it's difficult to find the words to express how bad it felt to be in that state I now recognize that experience as autistic burnout and it quite commonly affects autistic people around this age group this transition from being a teenager to adulthood and all of the new pressures that come with that and perhaps particularly the social pressures that really ramp up around that age as well it took me 2 to 3 years I'd say of being very gentle with my myself and just spending most of my time reading books in order to recover even now 11 years on I still feel like that burnout experience colors my life and the way I live my life I am so very afraid of my mind and my body becoming the way they were if you spent any time in the autistic Community you've probably heard people talk about autistic burnout quite a lot but interestingly it's basically barely been research but luckily we have actually autistic researcher Dora rain maker who's done quite a lot of work This Is How They Define autistic burnout autistic burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic life stress and a mismatch of expectations and abilities without adequate supports it is pervasive and long-term typically lasting 3 plus months again and again I read that the biggest trigger for autistic burnout is masking your autistic traits it's trying to push yourself to be sociable to not be weird to fit in as this person said being something that I neurologically am not is exhausting so here are 10 signs that you might be experiencing autistic burnout sometimes called autistic fatigue number one if you're burn out you may experience a kind of chronic pervasive exhaustion you may wake up and already feel done for the day like you have nothing left to give according to some of the research it seems like the Sleep issues that are quite common with depression you know like insomnia or oversleeping those are not really typically Associated so much with autistic burnout with autistic burnout I think the point is that you feel exhausted regardless of how much sleep you've had some autistic people in the state may think they have chronic fatigue syndrome of course you could have both this is a quote from an autistic person in Dora rain maker 2020 study I've had people say to me so many times over the years but why are you so tired what have you been doing the brutal truth is that for an autistic person simply existing in the world is knucking never mind trying to hold down a job or have any sort of social life and many of the standard recommendations for improving mental health and quotation marks such as seeing more people in real life spending less time on the internet simply make matters worse we need a lot of downtime in order to recover from what for most folk are the ordinary things of Life number two if you're burnt out you might also experience physical pain and headaches I don't personally experience headaches but I definitely feel burnout in my whole body around my late teens I would always be saying to people in my life I feel like there's lactic acid in my body that was the only way I could think to describe it I felt like there was something in my muscles I felt achy I felt heavy I felt weighed down it felt like my body was no longer a very nice place to live it felt like a hostile environment one autistic person called Natalie on the website embrac autism described feeling a lot of somatic pain while in Burnout so maybe similar to what I was describing with the lactic acid thing like an achy feeling in your muscles in your bones I do think it's important to remember here that autistic people can also have chronic health issues as well so there may be another reason for your pain there are some studies that do seem to link being autistic with having certain chronic health issues so yeah burnout can cause pain or other negative physical Sensations within your body but don't use that as a reason to dismiss your pain or not get help because you never know there could also be other things going on so number three if you're experiencing autistic burnout you may have a reduced tolerance to stimulus this is something that Dora rain maker talks about quite a lot in their research you may find that sensory stuff kind of gets under your skin more than it usually does you might be more affected by sounds you might revert to safe foods that you had as a child you know you might need everything to be more uniform and you go back to eating really plain and simple Foods you might find that things seem brighter than usual I have something that I think quite a lot of autistic people have called visual snow where you kind of have grainy Vision to some extent and it can be quite difficult to read like black text on a white background and certain patterns black black and white patterns can make your eyes go a bit funny and it can be a bit horrible to read I really hated maths books in schools with all the little squares they made me feel a bit sick and things like that I feel like are worse when I am feeling burnt out it might be extra sensitive to Smells everything might be really smelly to you number four if you're burnt out it may seem like you've had an increase in autistic traits now obviously whether you're burnt out or not whether you're distressed or not you're always still autistic there's sometimes a bit of a narrative that you know only visibly distressed best autistic people are actually autistic and if you look fine then you must be fine and maybe you've actually recovered from autism there are some researchers who still think people can recover from autism and for some reason just seem to completely ignore the concept of masking I don't really know why that is however if you are burn out maybe there are more observable autistic traits people around you might notice a change in your behavior they might notice you stemming more for example when I'm stressed I always pinch the skin on my neck which is why it's disc call hey I've got a high neck so you can't really see it but when I'm really really stressed and burnt out I will pinch the skin extra and my mom would always be like oh you're pinching your neck a lot at the moment people might point out that you're being very fidgety and Restless remember stimming self stimulatory behavior Can involve any of your senses so you might do what I did you might listen to the same song over and over again you might just find yourself doing more of these little repetitive sensory things to soothe yourself because you are in a distressed exhausted state so number five connected to that point an autistic person in Burnout might lose their ability to mask somewhat you might not have the energy to mask you might not have the energy to cover up your autistic traits and monitor your behavior constantly to make sure you come across as normal it's exhausting and it's what triggers burnout for a lot of people and once you're in that state yeah it might not be possible or you might not be able to mask as well in quotation marks as you usually can I made a video a while back where I talked about my big bir out that happened when I was 17 in detail and I spoke about how when i' started at that college I'd plann this big reinvention of myself I'd studied extroverted people and I had this plan about how I was going to go and be you know a social butterfly now why is it social butterfly is it butterflies very sociable are they sociable creatures let me know I know there'll be somebody with a special interest in butterflies here is it just because we feel like butterflies are appealing we just trying to be appealing socially maybe we should all get a pair of butterfly wings then everyone will want to be our friends that sounds cute anyway wow we've been sidetracked here back to Serious topic of burnout I'd watched people who were extroverted I decided I was going to be extroverted as well I was going to play this extroverted character but I ended up dropping out after only a few months because I exhausted myself through doing this and towards the end I couldn't be sociable anymore I couldn't maintain the friendships that I'd built up towards the end I barely spoke to anybody I knew my husband around that time we met at college we didn't get together but we met at college and I barely spoke to him towards the end and he just assumed I didn't want to be his friend anymore and I don't know yeah I just thought I didn't like him very much and I remember many times where I felt so drained and just in my own head and people would speak to me and I would just be so shocked and like jolted by the fact that someone had spoken to me and I just wouldn't know how to get my words out and I think I must have come across pretty terribly I remember this happened with this one girl who I'd met on a trip I'd been on a college trip and I I didn't have any classes with her but we got on really really well but then I never really saw her around because we weren't in any classes and then I'd just been kind of standing somewhere and she suddenly came up and spoke to me and I just had nothing to give and I'd really really like this person we'd really go on she was into Taylor Swift and she'd let me have her phone for the journey back after the trip to listen to All of the Taylor Swift songs and some other country artists that she had that she was recommending to me she was lovely and I just stood there with a blank face and I was like I I don't know how to speak to you and then it's made me feel sad for years afterwards I'm like oh that was a really nice person who I really connected with at the time and I just probably made her feel like I didn't want to speak to her but I just didn't have the capacity in that moment I also had another burnout experience after my son was born obviously at that point my hormones were also all over the place and I do wonder how much hormonal shifts contribute to autistic burnout and I do feel like with my cycle each month I experience a kind of mini burnout so maybe there is something to that but after having my son I traveled to South Africa to see some of my family members and introduce them to my son and I remember being really distressed while I was there I didn't know I was autistic at the time and I was saying I can't look at anybody in the eye I don't know what's happened to me I can't look at anybody and these were my family members who I love and it made me feel awful and then I just couldn't communicate very well people were noticing and were saying I seem so with drawn I'm speaking so quietly people would like leave the room and I'd be left with someone who I'd usually have been really chatty with and it would just be silent cuz I had nothing that I could think of to say sadly that was I think with three family members that was the last time I ever saw them and they have since passed away and it does still make me really sad that I had to see them when I was like that but at the same time I'm very glad that they met my baby but yeah I mean masking and just being sociable in general even with the people you love it takes a lot of energy and a burnt-out autistic person might not have that energy to give my capacity for sensory and social overload dwindled to near nothing I avoided speaking and retreated from socializing I was spent I couldn't maintain the facade anymore I had to stop and pay the price number six if you're becoming burnt out and overwhelmed you might notice the frequency of your meltdowns and or shutdowns you might notice that ramping up maybe happening more often maybe becoming longer more intense often when I've been in a burnout State I've had you know almost a daily meltdown at that point whereas when I'm in a calm normal place it's probably more likely to be once every month or once every two month and it's very short quite easy to recover from on the last day that I ever attempted to go into college and I was going to try and do the alternative route that I could do that took three trains and a bunch of walking and I started walking to the train station and I think my mom could tell I was not in a good state so she came after me and I just ended up dissolving into tears in the street and was like I can't do this anymore and I think that was the final straw we were like okay this is going to have to stop we'll have to change things cuz you can't keep going on like this so hard like talking about it now I feel like I'm gasl to myself a bit in my head I'm like oh but it was just College you know why was it why was it so hard you know just get over it and this is something that Dora Ray maker has spoken about in their research how so many autistic people can feel dismissed can feel gastl it can feel like nobody has any empathy for their experience and it's just like oh well everybody finds life hard life is difficult you know everybody's tired from work and stuff like that and it's just burnout it's really difficult to express how horrible an experience burnout is it's really difficult to get that into words in a way that people will understand but yeah I think when you're in a burnout state it just takes less like I say you've got a reduced tolerance to stimulus it takes less to kind of push you over the edge into a meltdown into a shutdown whatever that looks like for you if you're not sure if you experien meltdowns or shutdowns or both I have a video about types of meltdowns I will leave link to maybe go and have a look at that one I spoke about how a lot of different people have described meltdowns for them number seven you might experience a loss of skills if you're burnt out a lot of autistic people talk about how they really struggle cognitively when they're burnt out towards the end of high school when my burnout had already started I remember somebody asking me will you write something in my yearbook and I just remember feeling like I just had no idea what to write and how to form s sentences and it was so difficult to make the decision about what to write that experience resulted in me being unable to work for several months and unable to make basic daily decisions such as what to eat for dinner or how to problem solve when I needed to move you might struggle with your memory if you're burnt out you may lose selfcare skills or not have the capacity to look after yourself anymore in a burnout some artistic people actually go as far as to describe this loss of skills during an autistic burnout as an autistic regression regression in autism usually refers to how some children seem to develop normally in quotation marks and hit all their milestones and then suddenly regress and lose those skills and then are consequently diagnosed as autistic however during burnout older autistic people may also feel like they regress like they lose skills and it can be super distressing because you can feel like well what if I'm never going to be back to my full self again what if I never regain these skills if it helps anybody to feel better I do feel like I regained the skills and the cognitive clarity once I was eventually out of that state number eight you might lose interest in things that you love to do so Dora raymaker within their research talks about how autistic burnout seems to differ from depression in that it doesn't seem to be linked to anhedonia which is when you lose the ability to gain pleasure and enjoyment from Life in the way you usually would however I do feel like personally when I've experienced burnout I can struggle to enjoy anything the way I usually would I'm going to think doesn't make sense you don't have as much energy you don't have as much capacity you don't have as much to give so you may not be as super into your interests as you usually are particularly if you're feeling cognitively a little bit foggy I've heard some people say when they burn out they find it more difficult to get into like a really deep hyperfocus state number nine if you're burn out you might struggle with movement or speech so this difficulty with movement and speech can affect people to varying extents as I say for me I usually feel weigh down I might find it more difficult to socialize with people I find that I speak quietly it's like I don't have the energy to project my voice in the same way you may find that you avoid people or withdraw from others I also struggle more than usual with Transitions and this can extend to things like Crossing thresholds to kind of like entering a new room some people experience this to a very extreme extent and it's called autistic Catatonia or a Catatonia like breakdown which I do think seems to have some similarities to autistic burnout I'm not sure kind of where one ends and where the other begins and whether they're just two things that are quite similar and have crossover but Catatonia does often I think have quite a slow onset and the symptoms do seem a little bit similar to autistic burnout katonia is a complex neurosynth havior so someone who experiences cetonia might freeze in the middle of an action they may stop speaking entirely they may get locked in certain positions it can be pretty serious in 12 to 18% of autistic people might experience some level of Catatonia number 10 trigger warning for not wanting to be alive and for harming yourself but Dora R maker has found an association with suicide and autistic burnout autistic people in general are more likely to take their own lives and an autistic person in Burnout is also more likely to think about taking their own life or attempt to take their own life I think because burnout can just be so long lasting you can feel so trapped in your own body and have no idea how long it is going to take you to feel okay again you may still have the urge to do things but just not be able to get yourself going just not have the energy and that's really frustrating this is a quote from an autistic person called kieren my physical body and mind started shutting down I could feel each system in my body closing off as gravity got heavier than it had ever been I didn't know what to do did not understand what was happening to me I had no way to communicate this it was like a switch had gone off my verbal ability to convey what was going on in my mind and body was gone I did not want to die I've never never wanted to die I needed to step out I needed to remove myself from the environment and take myself elsewhere I needed to escape but the only way I knew how to do this was to die so I tried we can just really feel like we need to hit paes I often had that feeling cuz I played a lot of Sims when I was younger and you know you can pause on the Sims and I'd sometimes play it so much that I'd almost feel like I could do it in real life and then I'd remember oh you not on the Sims anymore but yeah we can really feel like it would be great to just be able to hit poor take a moment take a breather stop the demands of life from coming have a rest and then you know start again when we were ready but what can we do to prevent autistic burnout this is again where autistic burnout differs from depression because depression is usually treated with talking therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy and with taking medications but for autistic burnout the advice tends to be to rest to let yourself recover once you're in that state it can take a while to recover so prevention is always a good idea being aware that autistic burnout is a thing that could happen to you the three major recommendations that I could see for recovering and preventing autistic burnout were stop masking get accommodations and reduce stimuli I think it can be difficult to just completely stop masking because for a lot of us it's very very deeply ingrained and it can be a lot of pressure to like oh you need to completely unmask overnight now that you know that you're autistic but I think just giving yourself alone time time to recover I saw one piece on Embrace or autism which recommended social withdrawal but not social isolation so if you can you know spend time with people who you do feel comfortable to be yourself around that might be preferable to being alone I always feel like with masking you know unmasking can be the goal and of course it's great if you can become more comfortable in your own skin but I think it's okay if you still feel like you need to rely on it it just must be done in moderation you know it should probably be seen as something that is unhealthy that we should do in moderation if we want to avoid autistic burnout or recover from an autistic burnout if we're already in that state I think accepting that you're autistic accepting that you have this monotropic mind if you haven't seen my video on the theory of monotop ism you might find that one helpful you know allow yourself to stem might be a good idea to allow your brain to just deeply focus on one thing reduce the information that you have coming in whether you just you know need to flop in front of the TV for a while and watch comforting things I just read loads of books after I dropped out of educ I think anything that's really immersive but maybe not super cognitively taxing so like playing video games playing The Sims that could be a good one and accommodating yourself like wearing ear Defenders if sounds are bothering you I just recently bought myself a big pair of serious ear Defenders and oh my gosh I want to cry when I think about how much they help me like I've always been a headphone sort of person you know but I've always just had kind of cheap ones and not ones that are really like noise cancelling and it's just amazing I can finally feel like I can actually concentrate when I'm scripting these videos for this channel I just put them on and it's like I'm in like my own little world and it makes me so sad like where have these ear Defenders been my entire life but I've known I'm autistic for quite a while now and I could have I could have gone out and got the a Defenders and I'm so glad I finally did cuz I feel like it's changed my life I've also seen the national autistic Society recommend something called Energy accounting so kind of taking note of what energizes you and what drains you and just you know managing how much of your time you're spending doing draining things versus energizing things that I know that sounds like a bit of a chore if you're already burnt out you're probably like no please don't ask me to do these things you could also do the same thing with people though cuz some people are draining to spend time with and some people it doesn't feel all that different to being alone when I spend time with them the more comfortable I am with them you know the less I feel like I have to mask so the less draining is so if this video hasn't scared you off autistic masking enough I do have another video where I discuss the dangers of autistic masking which I'll linked if you would like to support the creation of these videos you can do so over on patreon the lowest here is $4 a month you get exclusive videos from me and you also get access to the Discord server as well where you can chat with other autistic people you don't need to be diagnosed autistic to join you can just be you know suspect to Autistic or you can just want to talk to people and want a nice friendly space that's fine my husband's in there he's not autistic and yeah I also have a podcast that I do with my husband over there as well super long episodes we have have ones comparing our school experiences cuz he's I was going to say he's autistic and I'm not that's not the way around I am autistic and he is not and yeah I've started doing like little book reviews over on patreon I reviewed Orion Kelly's book I used to have a book Channel when I had my burnout experience and I left College I started reading a load of books as I said and then I made this little book Channel and that was a big part of my recovery as well yeah finding things that you enjoy doing but that are not super super high pressure yeah and that that was lovely so anyway I'm going back back to my my book roots and reviewing some autism books I'm going to also be reading and reviewing Ellie Middleton's book unmasked very soon over there as well thank you so much for watching bye [Music] [Music] d [Music] he