(51f) I really enjoy my job, but some weeks are "intense". non-stop. Full of questions I need to answer/solve. I have no 'spoons' left. In fact I'm in spoon deficit!
I just want to be in a sound proof room. No visitors. Just a window so I can see the sky.
Any moment, someone is going to ask me something and I'm going to lose my s**t.
How do you get your 'spoons' back?
I've been in a full autistic burnout since November. I managed to push through until June because I was working part-time, and with a few vacation days spread throughout the year, I made it to the end. But once my contract ended, I basically crashed—I couldn't even get out of bed. You all know the symptoms well; they’ve been with me all these months, sometimes very severe, other times a bit milder, but always present. Now that I’ve been resting for almost three months, things have improved slightly, but at the smallest trigger—like a hint of social interaction, an increase in noise, the heat, etc.—I feel terrible again. This worries me a lot because I’m supposed to go back to work on September 1st. I’ll definitely ask for a part-time schedule, but I already know I won’t last more than a few days.
Has anyone in my situation ever recovered from burnout? I’m really worried this condition might last for the rest of my life.
Hey people
I’m a 29M autistic here, I’m exhausted and didn’t know where to post.
It’s 12:20ish am here and I’m just laying down in bed just thinking about how exhausted and burnt out I have been over the last few years. I’m that burnt out and drained that I’ve been withdrawing from my family (mum, step dad, younger siblings) and my gf. There’s a few other things that are going on as well like studying the last two and a half years getting certificates in IT for both personal and professional development, doing outside work commitments like volunteering and leadership positions for organisations (already chosen to step back slowly from leadership positions for a while at next financial year which will be a part of my next part). I’m slowly stopping to do extra things I normally do because I’m so dam exhausted but I’m afraid if I do stop about 50-75% of the things that I’m doing then I get sick again for a couple weeks like last time. I know that I should give my body time to recover but I don’t know how to rest anymore as I’ve been going non stop for the last few years.
Over the past couple months I’ve realised that I’m not just burnt out, I’m also depressed, mentally and emotionally exhausted (hence isolating myself from family) also I think I may have high functioning depression but not sure. I’m not suicidal or anything but I’m just too dammed exhausted.
I need help. I really need help. But what is that? what is help? is it a therapist telling me things I already know? I don't think so and I've had many therapists over many years, thats brought me to conclude that simply talking about my problems does not solve the problems.
When I was 19, I peaked extremely high in college. I was the guy that where my classmates would purposefully sit next to me or behind me during an exam so they could peek.
At some point I got a burnout. A normal regular burnout that I quickly recovered from. but not fully 100%.
When I was 22, in january 2022, I transitioned from being the peak student to being the lowest grade student. ALL of my grades were too low to pass. I failed ALL the tests and exams, no exception. I decided to quit uni, I recognized the burnout situation and that it was too much to handle.
Ever since then, almost 4 whole years now, Ive been surviving and existing in the parental home. Dad died unexpectedly in 2023 so that certainly didnt help.
And not only am I unable to do a study or job..... I'm also unable to take care of myself.
Ive had many years of therapy. Ive had multiple social workers. Ive had medication. Ive talked with doctors and hospitals. No one was able to truly help me or to even to truly understand my problem.
Idk. I'm literally just passively existing, unable to work on anything, no goal, no progress, FUCK THIS.
My normal day:
It feels so fucking pointless and hopeless.
Why is my energy so rockbottom that I can't do anything productive at all? I'm ROCK BOTTOM
Because this is chronic and no professional "help" was able to actually help me, I don't know whats the point in trying to continue. Why should I continue passively existing and suffering? I'm unable to properly live anyway.
I fucking can't do anything.
Every day, things on my todolist are expiring past their deadlines, people are getting disappointed by my broken promises, and the shame just grows bigger and bigger every day.
I know many people who are heavily burnt out. But I know no one else who has it worse than me.
And fuckkkkk I get so mad when people with zero expertise start telling me how to solve my burnout. Just do that, just do this, youre doing this to yourself, and so on etc. Or worse "I'm tired sometimes too but I still do the hard work even when I feel tired" (their "tired" is actually my "energized on a good day")
I'm so sick of it, someone give me hope or tell me what kind of help, what type of help even exists for me? I don't consider therapy to be help, its literally just talking and talking has been proven to not solve any of my problems. And the doctor just tests my blood and shrugs when it shows no deficients. The medication is a painfully slow journey of experimentation which may or may not even help me.
Guys, what do I do from here? The regular "professional help" doesn't cut it for me.
I think if I keep existing like this I will eventually be homeless and starve because I completely lack the energy to care for myself.
I live in the parental home with a disability income, thankfully. Else I would definitely be homeless, possibly starved or dead.
Hello hello!
I (31F) are in an autistic burnout for 3 years now. I am introverted but I also have ADHD. I’m getting help from a counselor and she has knowledge of autistic burnout. I’m also getting help from a community support worker and receive occupational therapy. I am receiving financial support from the Dutch government because I’m unable to work. Of course I’m really happy I’m getting the help I need, I truly am. But I’m so stuck in my life right now. The therapy gave me many insights and I’m glad it did. I realised I’m still doing too much, partly due to my ADHD. I have like 8 friends I still want to see. And on top of that my family and my boyfriend. Some people I see weekly or monthly, others I see once every few months.
I love them and still want to spend time with them,
but I feel so overwhelmed sometimes.. it comes in phases. Lately I have the feeling of wanting to disappear: I just want to have everyone out of my life so I can recover from my burnout.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I even feel like I’m receiving TOO much help from counselors. I just want too stay inside and not worry about anything and not talk about my burnout twice a week. But I know rotting in bed/the couch will not help me as well.
What do I do?
Do I cut down contact? Has anyone been in a similar situation? I need advice
Note: This post was intended as an insight into autistic burn out that might help make sense of how terrible it feels, but it ended up being mostly a rant. But I kinda liked the whole thing so here you go.
Does anyone else feel that each burn out takes away the part of you you were most scared of losing?
I think the cruelest thing about burn out, which might be too subtle to be noticed, is that it takes away the entire predictive system of self.
Autistic people live on predictive systems. That’s how we approach the world. That’s one of the few things we can do well. We precieve more than we need and it gets stored and gives us an illusion of certainty that we need to regulate ourselves.
Such a stupid concept. A brain that needs certainty in a universe can only increase in chaos.
But my point was: you reach a point of such bone deep exhaustion that you can’t predict how many hours it’ll take you to convince yourself to go brush your teeth. Let alone do anything else.
And with it you can’t predict how much you can be what you think you are.
And you can’t act in any way to make it true again.
I mean you try. And it works and then you crash. And you try again harder longer. You crash worse. Until you learn to just stop trying. Or actually, your nervous system realizes what you’re doing and presses non negotiable breaks.
A collapse that can go on, for so long, and long enough for you to have forgotten what it was like. You can no longer generate the felt sense of self you had.
I think for many high functioning autistic people we kinda literally build our identity, it requires a certain kind of proof, we don’t have the capacity to claim to be anything we don’t think we are.
It’s just an oxymoron our brain can’t compute.
Even though the capacity to do that is how people actually move about existing, that’s kinda the definition of confidence: a belief in a capacity to take action towards being/doing… etc
Confidence is a feeling that can only prove itself in retrospect.That’s its origin story. Only after that does it become a fact that doesn’t require proof. That’s the normal construction of a brain.
But our brain keeps asking: why? How? So we exhaust our self building proof of what we think we are. And we burn out in the process.
And one of the first things to go and last to come back, because it’s the most energetically expensive part of consciousness, is our identity. Our felt sense of who we are.
Burn out takes away everything, but most painfully our capacity to do anything, let alone the conscious structuring and majoring of an identity.
That should come naturally. It doesn’t.
I could be wrong… this could be my perspective because I lack form of support system. That was partly by choice because from my experience support in my family was an illusion, ungrounded. You get to think you’re being supported while your actual job is to be as small as possible so that people around you can feel big.
Im sorry but when you require people to stay small around you so can be big…. I mean… your size just defined itself… it’s right there in the sentence… has humanity given up on actual rationale and created a collectively accepted irrationality and sold it as logic?
But I digress. I am vey bitter about my own experience tbh, justifiably so, but I wish I’d stop. It’s not serving me in any way. It just fills me with rage, but not rage I can use as momentum. Just rage with which I can dig myself a deeper hole. And sit in it.
TL;DR: autistic burn out sucks.
TL;DR: I’m questioning the impossibility of solving the equation of an autistic burn out. What you need to get out of it is the exact thing you’ve lost the capacity to do. At some point it feels like a car spinning its wheels in the mud only to push itself deeper in it.