Why highly capable autistic women burn out

The autistic women I work with are intelligent, educated, talented, accomplished people.

They are writers, teachers, lawyers, therapists, artists, executives, entrepreneurs, and so much more.

They raise families and plant gardens and lead community groups and show up without fail for the people in their lives.

They are women who seem to not only have their lives under control, but often seem to pull off the impossible without missing a beat. 

And they also tend to be the women who burn out the hardest.

As time goes on, the gap between the outward appearance of ease and the internal strain on their nervous system becomes unsustainable.

One woman I worked with had consistently climbed the corporate ladder, taking on more and more responsibilities and earning a bigger and bigger salary.

But there was a truth that she didn’t allow anyone else to see.

“It felt like I was just battling through every day, like not being able to get above water,” she said.

Her story is actually quite common among the autistic women I work with.

Here are some of the patterns I’ve seen.

Competence itself becomes part of their mask

Autistic women tend to be hyper-aware of what they perceive as their deficits, and they learn early on to try to draw attention away from them.

One way to do that is to be incredibly competent.

If you’re doing great work, solving problems, and helping everyone else, people are less likely to notice the areas where you might be struggling.

One woman was putting in 10- or even 12-hour workdays, often getting up two hours before her children did so that she could get extra work done. 

Like so many autistic women, she was chasing “enough” – if she could perform well enough at work, nobody would notice what she saw as her weaknesses.

“Look at all my strengths here so you don’t see my deficits over there,” she said.

That strategy comes at a cost.

When competence becomes an integral part of your mask, you’re constantly on the hamster wheel, trying to stay one step ahead.

Social interactions require huge amounts of energy

Many highly capable autistic women develop sophisticated ways of navigating social situations.

They observe people carefully. They analyze tone, microexpressions, and conversational patterns.

They try to anticipate how other people are likely to respond so that they can prepare accordingly.

To other people, these women can appear to be very socially adept.

While they’re able to project that image, the truth is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy for them to make it work.

They’re constantly surveilling, deconstructing, analyzing, and strategizing. 

Sometimes women try to anticipate which version of themselves other people expect to see.

“I’ll try to think what you’ll want me to be… bubbly, serious, intense… and then I’ll try to be that person,” one woman told me.

Although other people don’t see it, that kind of effort navigating social situations consumes enormous energy over time.

Many learned to be independent out of necessity

From an early age, autistic women are told that the things they struggle with shouldn’t be hard for them.

As children, when they express a need, rather than an adult validating the need and helping meet that need, too often an adult does quite the opposite.

The texture of the scrambled eggs are making you gag? Instead of having that acknowledged and being offered food you’re able to eat, you’re told that the eggs are fine and you need to eat them.

Similar scenarios play out thousands of times in an autistic girl’s childhood.

Before long, when they do encounter challenges, they learn not to reach out for help because the inherent message they keep hearing is: That’s not actually a problem. I’m not going to offer you any help because there is no problem.

So rather than set themselves up for being criticized or invalidated, they decide it’s better to just figure things out on their own.

Autistic girls and women are smart and resourceful, so that often works. They tend to become quite resilient. 

The price they pay, though, is reaching out to other people less and less and relying on themselves more and more. 

Over time, that takes a toll; humans are not meant to live in isolation.

They get used to pushing past their limits

On a related note, highly capable autistic women often become incredibly good at pushing through discomfort.

They’re taught to ignore their needs and just push through, from the time they’re very young.

Stay at the party long after their social battery has worn out. Work at the office even though the fluorescent lights drain their energy. Go to the grocery store even though it’s complete sensory overload. 

Exhausted or overwhelmed? Doesn’t matter. Try harder. Just. Do. The. Thing.

Over time, autistic women often ignore their body’s signals to such an extent that they almost lose touch entirely with their own needs.

One woman described how hard it was for her to even notice stress in the moment.

“I don’t really notice how stressed I am until it’s kind of over the top,” she said.

What’s actually happening is that autistic women inadvertently train themselves to override their own nervous system.

Eventually the nervous system pushes back.

By the time burnout reaches the point where it can no longer be ignored, it has often been building for years.

They often become the person everyone else relies on

Highly capable autistic women are empathetic, thoughtful, and reliable.

They are the people friends go to for advice. They’re the problem-solvers at work. They’re the peacemakers in their families.

They care deeply about other people’s wellbeing, and they’re quick to set aside their own needs to take care of everyone else’s.

What many of them eventually realize, though, is that many of their relationships are one-sided.

They spend hours listening to other people’s problems, but don’t get much support themselves.

They always show up for other people, but when they’re in a pinch, nobody’s offering to step in to help.

One woman had been very close to a friend for decades. But after she hit burnout and began reevaluating how she spent her energy, she realized that the conversations the two of them had almost always focused on her friend’s problems.

In fact, she found it difficult to even interject when her friend launched into a monologue. 

“What am I actually getting from this relationship?” she wondered.

When capable women take on too much of the emotional labor in a relationship for too long, eventually it contributes to burnout.

Burnout isn’t a failure of ability

It’s important to understand that autistic burnout is not the result of lack of effort or lack of ability.

If anything, the opposite is often true.

Many autistic women who burn out are incredibly capable.

They burn out because for years, they were surviving by employing skills and strategies that quietly demanded more from their nervous systems than was sustainable.

Your nervous system doesn’t lie. When it reaches its limit, you come face to face with the reality that you need to make some changes.

That can be very painful, but it can also lead the way to something better. 

The key is this: 

Instead of asking, “How can I keep pushing through?” – ask a different question. 

“What would my life look like if it actually fit my nervous system?”

And that is where the road to true burnout Recovery begins.

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If this resonates, here are two places you might want to go next:

• What autistic burnout feels like (so you can recognize it more clearly)
  

• How long autistic burnout lasts (and what actually influences recovery)