Autistic shutdown

Iain, I do not disagree with what you quoted from the article that you linked to (“Meltdowns often occur after prolonged burnout has been ignored and after autistic people try to push through.”)

Meltdowns can certainly only first occur after someone has already been experiencing autistic burnout (prolonged or otherwise). And increased frequency of meltdowns can also be a key indicator of potential entry into burnout, if someone is not yet already experiencing it.

My issue is with you having misleadingly claimed that:

Iain said:

If you find you are not reaching the point where the sky falls in completely then it is more likely that you are experiencing burnout which is where the stress placed on you in the near-meltdown zone has become intense and you are starting to behave erratically.

Whether you intended it or not (and I think you did, as I explain below), a reasonable interpretation of what you said is that burnout typically precedes meltdowns or shutdowns ("if you are not reaching [shutdown or meltdown]", "then it is more likely that you are experiencing burnout"). 

This is simply not true. Meltdowns and shutdowns can occur both before and during burnout.

As the NAS explains in the article that I linked to:

"Autistic people have described various ways that autistic fatigue and burnout have affected them. Autistic fatigue has often been described as exhaustion with additional difficulties such as:

increased meltdowns and sensory sensitivity
physical pain and headaches
physically shutting down, including the loss of speech."

NAS - Autistic fatigue and burnout

This is supported by the Embrace Autism article that you yourself have previously linked to (which was last updated in July 2025, to reflect the latest research):

"When meltdowns occur frequently, they can signal early stages of autistic burnout, indicating deeper, chronic distress"

Embrace Autism - Meltdowns and shutdowns

Iain said:

Given your track record of attacking me on details where you decide what I meant (ie note that I did not use the word interim)

I dispute both your emotive use of "attack", and having ever misrepresented your meaning. I am not attacking you, and you are not a victim. I am addressing what reads, to me, as a misleading statement about some of the core elements of our autistic experience. I believe that your statement was based on a fundamentally mistaken belief on your part.

By way of supporting evidence for this, I refer you to your comment in a previous, related thread, where you didn't recognise what, for several of us, was a textbook example of a meltdown:

Iain said:

With some further reading it looks line burnout and meltdowns are on their own spectrum:

https://embrace-autism.com/meltdowns-and-shutdowns/

Defining where burnout ends and meltdowns begin is an imprecise science.

Burnout and meltdowns are not on a spectrum in the sense of, per your statement, burnout ending before meltdowns begin. It is an irrelevant falsehood to believe that one could ever define where one ends and the other begins. They can, and often do, co-occur.

Meltdowns can occur without someone entering into burnout. They can also occur after someone has entered burnout. When they increase in frequency, the person is more likely to be in burnout. 

In that same thread, you also said:

Iain said:

I had thought meltdowns were when there was more of a loss of control but it looks like this is much more murky and it is nearly impossible to tell if you are having burnout and a tantrum related to this or if you are moving into meltdown.

It is far from "murky" or "nearly impossible" to distinguish between tantrums, meltdowns / shutdowns, and burnout.

Meltdowns do, indeed, involve a loss of control. Tantrums do not. Meltdown is not something that you "move into" after having burnout and, potentially also, tantrums.

what you wrote made sense to me Iain  , ironically also what Bunny did too -  hehe who said autistic people have problems with empathy - for what it's worth I don't think the person I was ever have comes out of burnout - it's something more like a phoenix engages with - I think that what burnt out was the self-delusion that I was neurotypical enough to manage things the same way i had been in a neurotypical environment

Bunny said:

Autistic burnout is not an interim stage that we go through before we begin to experience shutdowns or meltdowns.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-forgotten-women/202501/burnout-inertia-meltdown-and-shutdown-can-shape-autistic-lives

Meltdowns often occur after prolonged burnout has been ignored and after autistic people try to push through.

This implies that the two are connected in this way.

Given your track record of attacking me on details where you decide what I meant (ie note that I did not use the word interim) I will not engage further but let the professionals opinion explain it for me.

Iain said:

If you find you are not reaching the point where the sky falls in completely then it is more likely that you are experiencing burnout which is where the stress placed on you in the near-meltdown zone has become intense and you are starting to behave erratically.

To clarify,  Kvothe  , the opposite applies.

Autistic burnout is not an interim stage that we go through before we begin to experience shutdowns or meltdowns.

Instead, experiencing more frequent meltdowns and/or shutdowns than we normally do can be an indicator that we are entering the early stages of autistic burnout.

NAS - Autistic fatigue and burnout

Embrace Autism - Meltdowns and shutdowns 

Kvothe said:

What about the lead up to the shutdown? how does one experience it?

This can vary from person to person but what I have heard from others is that the anxiety levels really ramp up, your behaviour can start to be unpredictable but then it reaches a point when it is like someone hit you with high voltage - all systems shut down and you almost become a curled up ball of a person, not responding to normal attempts at communication.

If you find you are not reaching the point where the sky falls in completely then it is more likely that you are experiencing burnout which is where the stress placed on you in the near-meltdown zone has become intense and you are starting to behave erratically.

Some peope can exist indefinitely in this zone, myself included and it can last for months. There can be health consequences from the continual high adrenaline exposure this creates so it should be avoided if possible.

A good therapist can train you on how to step aside from the situation and use techniques to control your high tension state then bring the tension down while working out a way to change how you are engaging with the situation so it becomes more controlled.

This is not a quick of easy skill to learn but it has saved me from a lot of pain in recent years and improved my quality of life massively.

The links that good people have sent about autistic shutdown/meltdown/burnout will give a good insight into those.  Under the circumstances i suspect it might be a bit tricky for you to get your head around the reading   It did me _ I had a read, then came back to it, had a break from it etc.  all seems to come and go in cycles and gradually things get clearer if that makes sense?  Took a long while to sink in and I'm still getting my head around it myself...

 From what I remember of experiences of "shutdown" they were often after outbursts of pent up frustration and all the piled up anxiety and depression I ended  up so I couldn't speak, couldn't rise from a chair, interact in a particularly varied and flexible way with other people and with life etc and and stuff and also being pretty much emotionally numb.  What you write about seems similar to my experience I think.  A bit like switching the fancy windows systems and apps off on a computer and just being left with command prompts on the black screen.

The thing about feeling physically knackered rings a bell with me too at this point - equating with the body being all tense and out of balance and having to force it to do stuff and then paying for it when stopping and tuning into it again.

The only bit that to me doesn't seem familiar to me is the sweats and the change in sensation with feet etc - when I read that I wondered if you maybe had some sort of infection - an infection can mess with how we think and physically feel as well.  Guess if you had a temperature at the same time that would give some indication.  Needless to say seeing a GP or similar would be wise under the circumstances whatever.  I suppose it could even be a combination of both.

Overall, yep, sounds like a bit of a shut down to me.  I have learnt a lot about myself by answering your question as I have never put these experiences into words befor so thanks for asking the question Kvothe .  A lot of us on here seem to be learning about ourself and autism.  I think mostly by experience based learning in what is a different paradigm to the one we have lived most of our lives before.  

There's plenty of strategies for recovery out there for engaging with to find the right way for you at the right time.  I wish you all the best with feeling better! 

Kvothe said:

I snapped at some people in the street for approaching me

Ooh! That's giving me a COVID flashback. I got very snappy if people weren't following the social distancing rules. The snappiness I would consider to be more of a meltdown reaction. It was definitely well beyond my control. I'd be trying to hold it in, and I'd succeed quite often, but sometimes I just couldn't keep a lid on it. I needed people to back the hell away or I was going to explode!

You could well be experiencing some sort of shutdown, too. Shutdowns and meltdowns are sort of two sides of the same coin. For me, shutdowns and meltdowns also often involves situational mutism (I find it too hard to speak, though only after my shouty bit in the case of a meltdown). I feel very overwhelmed. I feel like I'm having a panic attack (probably mild, in the grander scheme of things), and I just withdraw. I need some alone time to recover.

I think it helps to know what's going on in our brains. Have a look at some of these:

• https://embrace-autism.com/meltdowns-and-shutdowns/
• https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/behaviour/meltdowns/all-audiences
• https://reframingautism.org.au/all-about-autistic-meltdowns-a-guide-for-allies/
• https://reframingautism.org.au/all-about-autistic-shutdown-guide-for-allies/

If you understand what's going on, it still a horrible experience, but it's not as scary and not as shaming.

What about the lead up to the shutdown? how does one experience it?

A shutdown is simply just not functioning or doing only the basic functions this can show diffent for each person for me it’s I won’t talk to certain people and the ones I go get very basic responses and my tasks slow to a crawl