Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello
I'm finding, at 46, that I have significantly less capacity/energy than I used to. I've been self employed for 6 years (which is just a different type of stress but at least I have more control over when & where I work). This is probably a 'how long is a piece of string' question but how can I tell if I'm "trying to do too much", or I'm excessively exhausted trying to do very little. I'm struggling to get a read on it. Chatting with other non-Aspies I trust it doesn't feel like I'm achieving a great deal considering how exhausted I am. I've not been formally diagnosed as Aspergers, but feel it is a dead cert given everything I've read, and I have no other indication or reason to believe I'm not healthy so I'm reluctant to go to the doctors. I have a healthy diet and get decent sleep etc.
Do you find you get more tired than you expect from doing different activities? I know that some things (socialising, noisy environments) wear me out, and seemingly more strenuous activities (hillwalking) energise me so it's hard to get a sense of how to manage my energy levels.
Any thoughts on this are welcome, sorry the question is not very clear.
Daisy
I have a huge spreadsheet of activities & timings in my head. Each activity has a rating of how tiring it will be. There is a bias applied of how tired I am in the first place before starting the activity ansd how much external stress I'm under. I try to avoid the situation where I can go into negative values on my worksheet because that means I go to sleep for long periods.
What I find tiring is different to most - things like complex project planning - low value - almost theraputic
Doing a theme park - low value - theraputic
Driving 10 miles - shattering. Especially early mornings or if the traffic is bad.
1-hour medical meeting where I have to operate on many levels to do the communicating, to look after myself in case they are railroading me, proposing risky meds, being dismissive of symptoms etc, - shattering - I need to have someone with me to do the remembering because I don't have enough CPU capacity to log it all.
I'm in a bad place right now - external needs/pressures mean I'm forced into doing a lot of high-energy activities in quick succession - it's making me spiral down and I can feel myself deteriorating.
Hopefully, I only need to do this for another month so I should be able to tough it out and then collapse for a couple of weeks afterwards.
Hi Plastic,
Sounds like you've been paying attention to your energy levels for some time and got some good data on it. Sorry to hear you're in a bad place, a month sounds like a long stretch - is there any way you can fit in some micro-breaks to rest and restore along the way? Take care, burnout is no fun.
The rest of my week is the micro-break - I'm literally doing nothing apart from giving my time to others who need it more than I do. The rest of the time I'm on the sofa - I sleep here, sit here, eat her, watch tv here. No energy to do anything else. (I'm having to drive my daughter to uni & back early in the morning and at lunchtime 3 times a week). I have a couple of other health problems that mean this is much more difficult than it should be.
Something else is being put in place to take this burden away from me, but for the moment, I've got to do it. (this aligns with my deep seated compulsion to do the right thing.)