The unspoken truth about autistic burnout

Here’s what nobody wants to tell you about autistic burnout.

It’s also what you think you don’t want to know.

And what you really do need to know.

Many autistic women are not able to return to their full-time corporate jobs post-recovery.

The life you had before (and the one that maybe you’re still pushing yourself to maintain now) is the life that led you to burnout.

It might not sustainable for you in the long term.

Maybe at this point you still think it is.

What often happens before people hit capital-B Burnout is a series of lowercase-b burnouts. 

To clarify: the difference between Burnout and burnout is pretty much nonexistent. 

They both hit when the constant demands on your nervous system eclipse the capacity of your nervous system.

In both cases, you’ve been masking so long, pushing yourself so hard, and battling overwhelming sensory input so much that your nervous system just can’t take it any more.

The difference between Burnout and burnout is this: how early you catch it and how fully you allow yourself to recover from it.

Think about a car battery that’s reached its end. It’s been providing enough energy to keep your car running for a long time, but eventually it runs out of juice.

At first you can use jumper cables to breathe some life back into it and keep driving it for a while.

Eventually, it will run out of juice again.

You can jump-start it again and drive it for a while again. Until you can’t again.

This cycle might repeat a few times. You might be able to head off replacing the battery for some time. 

But you can’t always jump-start a dead battery forever. Eventually you might need to replace it.

So, circling back to my earlier point, maybe the first time you hit burnout, you take a few weeks off from work, thinking that you just need some rest.

Or maybe you get a different job, thinking that you’ve simply outgrown your job or you don’t mesh well with your employer.

That buys you some time with a jumpstart. 

But eventually many autistic women hit Burnout to a degree that they need to let go of the life that drained their battery and replace it with a new battery, a life that is sustainable in the long term.

It looks somewhat different for each of us. 

Here are just a few things that a sustainable life commonly involves:

• A schedule that accounts for your inconsistent energy flow. Some days you can do a week’s worth of work in a few hours. And some days you can do only a few hours of work in the entire week.
  

• Work that aligns with your values. Many autistic people are strongly driven by internal values such as fairness or social justice. Things like money and prestige matter very little to them.
  

• Mitigating sensory input. Things like fluorescent lighting and the constant chatter of an open office put a huge strain on autistic nervous systems.
  

• An environment that doesn’t require masking. Neurotypical settings generally necessitate making small talk every day with clients or coworkers, monitoring your facial expressions, and altering the way you communicate.
  

• Longer recovery time between activities and exertions. Burnout doesn’t mean you can never interact with people in a neurotypical environment. It means your nervous system needs time to reset after you do.