Autistic Burnout... how do you cope?

Thanks for sharing. I'm glad you have some hobbies to help, even if its in the moment. I'm sorry about you losing your friends, I feel like if they don't want to stick by you on your worst day to talk it out then they aren't true friends at all.

My current job as a bathroom sales designer is an enjoyable one, but I think the long hours of constant masking and unpredictability is really wearing me out.

I enjoy playing video games and watching YouTube, my current obsession is Starfield so that is helping me short term, but not a long term solution.

In my eyes, medication for anxiety or depression does not help solely with burnout.

This is not medical advice. What you need is rest and recouperation from the world. I learned the hard way to listen to my body because I had ignored it for so long thinking everyone "was like that" and it was just me being a wuss. It wasn't. Autistic people need a helping hand in the modern world. I categorically don't know how anyone can work full-time and raise a family whether they are neurodivergent or not. I remember the feeling of not being able to switch off and I don't even have kids. I feel incredibly sad that I used to feel this way and didn't know how to stop it. You have the advantage that you are aware something is happening and you need to heed this. I didn't have a scooby doo what was going on. We mask for so long we end up gas-lighting ourselves. If you don't stop now, your body will do it for you at some point and it'll be a longer road back, if at all, to where you started.

Good luck.

I worked on a TV production. I wanted to do it but I didn't pay attention to the impact it was having on me.

I surf YouTube, watch telly and game occasionally. They help take my mind off other things briefly. Talking to my therapist gives me a safe outlet to just talk about stuff, as I lost all my friends 4 months ago so there's not many outlets for that.

Hi, thank you for sharing your expereince. 60 hours plus other responsibilities sounds terrible.

I hope speaking to your therapist is helping you. What are your hobbies? Do they at least give you some comfort and downtime?

Hi Number, thank you for sharing. Those years must have been really hard on you.

I'm doing my best to determine what is best for me. I've always found having full time work, and everything else to maintain at home is extremely difficult for me to balance. I've had people tell me to "leave your stress at work, you're not at work now you're at home." but its not as simple as that. I'm unable to just switch off when I'm at home due to my responsibilities. So I'm stuck in a loop of "its either cutting down hours at work, switching off completely at home to keep working the same hours, or some other hidden method that I just haven't grasped".

I'm going to be speaking to some people who have autism in a local charity in my area, to ask them what they are doing or what they have done to minimise or eliminate burnout entirely.

Thank you again for sharing. Take care!

Hello Winter, I am Number.

To my mind, you are NOT describing burnout above, as I define it and how I have seen most others here define it also.

It sounds to me like you are on the cusp of a mega burnout...........so you need to make some changes QUICK, in my humble opinion !

Loosing your job (with all resultant chaos and pain) is not the worst thing that can happen.  Loosing 4-6 years of your life due to my definition of mega/extreme burnout is FAR worse and I sincerely believe that some poor souls literally loose their life due to extreme burnout.

Please rest assured that I am not trying to "mine is bigger than yours" you.  I am recovered and back to functionality....but holy carp, I could not have imagined just how 'dead' and 'zombified' I was capable of becoming due to burnout...it literally nearly killed me.  From superman to dead-man-walking.....and not for a few weeks, nor few months......but years.

I am guarded on these public pages, so I do not wish to explain precisely how fast and how far I fell, nor from what height, but I can assure you that it quite literally knocked the stuffing out of me when I hit the bottom, and then kept sinking slowly into the quicksand.  The burnout (as I define it) becomes evident when you try to metaphorically get up again, but cannot, no matter how much you want to or need to.

I was very lucky for all manner of reasons (mainly support from one of two humans who don't subscribe to the accepted "values" of our modern world.  I have recovered and re-emerged wiser and calmer - not as a hippy I hasten to add - still doing what I have always done.

If I had my time over....when I KNEW FULL WELL that my life had become unsustainable (i had at least 5 years warning), I would have walked away - despite the lack of logic that would have displayed to me and everyone else.  I didn't appreciate that my downsides of "powering through, like I always have, through the cycles of booming and busting energy and enthusiasm" COULD conceivably have been so dire.

Please take care of yourself Winter.  Please listen to your own head and ignore all the nonsense of "but I have no choice but to...."  You have choices now - so take a long serious look at them - perhaps within the context of my warning above.

Sorry if this freaks you out - not my intention - I just want to save every autistic soul from the fate that I suffered !

Good luck.

Number.

Two years ago I worked a job that was more 60 hours a week, and I still felt like I had to keep on top of other stuff afterwards. Put it this way, I jumped before I sank (or whatever the saying is).

Finding ways to work through it for myself has been hard, as I've just not stumbled on the right thing. Often what is suggested is spending more time on the things you enjoy but there's not many of those anymore.

I do have an autistic therapist though, and that's probably done more for me than most things.