Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi,
I’m new and glad to be here. It appears to be a wonderfully supportive community.
I’m a 48 year old female who realised I was autistic when I attended autism awareness training and undertook research to support a friend with their ADHD and autism assessment in the past year. I also suspect that I have ADHD.
I’ve previously been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, which I believe to be valid diagnoses, but within the wider picture of autism which I have learned through my research is commonly missed in females.
Since my 20’s, I have had several physically and mentally debilitating episodes of anxiety and depression which have taken from several months to 2 years to recover from depending on their intensity. I now believe these episodes to be a cycle of autistic burnout that have never been fully addressed as I didn’t understand that these episodes were due to autistic burnout.
I’ve had a very stressful year as so many people have with numerous stressors including rebuilding my business post lockdown in a difficult financial climate, supporting an autistic / ADHD friend who has frequent angry outbursts / meltdowns (?) each week which takes a toll on my own nervous system and health, health issues, no access to my GP or support due to the current state of the NHS and planning a move which I was due undertake last week. I’ve also recently experienced floods where I live and during this time became ill with covid and have been in bed for almost a week.
I feel that over the past few years I have become depleted, but more so this year as a result of stressors and feel that I am definitely in burnout again.
Changes that I’ve noticed include autistic inertia, increased effort to do simple daily tasks if I can manage them at all, significantly reduced energy, focus, concentration and functioning, no time, energy or motivation to pursue my interests / self care practices, increased anxiety, depression and shutdowns, withdrawal and social isolation, increased sensitivity to sensory overload, significantly reduced tolerance to stress and the inability to push through and complete tasks that I need to do.
I’ve joined another autistic community and in a recent training of theirs that I attended, a woman spoke of the difficulty in recovering from burnout the more that you experience. This really scared me.
I would appreciate any feedback, personal experience and advice to help me to recover from burnout. I’ve been struggling to complete work tasks and keep up with them for almost a year now. I think that I need to seriously consider taking several months off work to allow my nervous system to recover. This would be difficult in the short term financially, but I think that this may be one of the best options to implement for my recovery from burnout and long term health.
All feedback very welcome and appreciated. Thank you very much
Hi Birdie,
Thanks for posting this. I'm a relative newcomer to this space too and I find that posting and reading other posts is very helpful. I often take great comfort in reading how others suffer similarly to me, and I also often find that articles are quite instructive, such as yours.
I'm starting to realise that my own history is probably similar to yours: I've had periods of great difficulty which I am now beginning to realise were probably spells of burnout. I would agree with what others have said in that the more burnouts one suffers, the more difficult it seems to be to recover from the next one. I don't think the degree of burnout matters. I think it's just the repetition: each time a burnout occurs we lose a bit of something somewhere, and it takes longer to recover. I think each of us gets to a point in this cycle where we start to not fully recover - we end up with lasting conditions or ailments that either never go away or won't go away until we do something drastic and completely stop the cycle. As we get older, we eventually run out of "coping ability" and until we stop hurting ourselves, we leave lasting problems.
Luckily for me, I have a plan for early retirement and I'm getting close to the target date. I am already starting to plan for reducing my working days and I hope that this will give me the space to stop the cycle. Retirement will of course stop it. But can I make it? I'm also starting to realise that even though it's only a couple of years away, I might need to act more drastically before that wonderful day when I hang up my keyboard.
Definitely think there's something in that theory about it being a cycle and it changing us each time. Sometimes I learn from what caused it and thats a positive change as I can avoid it happening again for the same reason, other times I've felt like I'm a bit numb or more negative after. Especially the last big one that I had last year which I'm still only really just feeling ok after now.