The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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The first time I googled the phrase "autistic burnout", one of the top results was an article titled "Help, I'm getting more autistic!" I was kind of pleasantly surprised to see that other people experienced it this way--as literally "getting more autistic" when burnt out--because perceiving it as such but not thinking that was possible or typical had me kind of feeling like I was just going crazy. This was in ~2019, shortly after the scales first fell from my eyes and I realized that relating to my (long-diagnosed Asperger's) brother but being able to route around the same inclinations so that I didn't act quite like he does was not the same thing as not being autistic. It's funny to me though, that the common opinion chalks burnout up to psychological factors. As someone with co-occurring chronic fatigue etc. type of issues, it's long been obvious to me that my social function worsens when my physical health worsens, even before the autism possibility had entered my brain. Burnout, in my opinion, is as much an energy or at least medical issue as it is a psychological one.
I live in vicious merry-go-round cycles like this: I overextend myself, live inauthentically to fit in, don't take care of myself because my needs (both in terms of health issues and in terms of autism) are weird, fake, made-up, just be normal bro--and I ruin my health, burn out, withdraw, and struggle to recover until I burn every bridge so I can start over finally listening to my own instincts/intuition again about what my needs are. However, as I get older, I seem to maybe be making strides at leveraging smaller epicycles to lessen the dramatic swings of the mega cycles. The net result, at the moment, is that I have made good strides on my physical health recently* without having indulged in the formerly-prerequisite "complete social withdrawal" step. And I'm feeling pretty rapidly quite a bit more socially functional. And feeling quite a bit of whiplash.
Anyway, the reason I bring this to The Motte: I'm curious if anyone else goes through times in your lives where you are more socio-culturally-politically more "normie" and times when you are more "extreme", outlier, believe things that could get you cancelled, etc? I feel like the one-way-street is the default: you start out normie and something "radicalizes" you (lol). Has anyone else swung back and forth?
We're not in COVID times anymore: I leave my house and interact with a variety of people. I can't maintain the same psychological/social quarantine I used to that made it less stressful to hold would-make-everyone-think-I'm-a-bad-person opinions. As a result, I can feel this go-along-to-get-along opinion-normifying happening to me, and I think most people would tell me that's normal and good for me. I know for myself it is not. I will think it's fine while the dissonance eats at my subconscious until it wrecks me again at some later date. Does anyone else experience this? What do you do to hold onto things? Is this why everyone is going to church now? I would love to talk to anyone who relates at all to being in this boat.
I'm glad you undeleted your post! In exploring my own issues with severe burnout, I stumbled upon some good information about autistic burnout myself, and I believe the criteria for autistic burnout is significant exhaustion and increased social withdrawal along with either reduction in functioning, increased executive challenges, and reduced capacity to mask/camouflage. I had all five of those symptoms in spades, and it sounds like you meet the criteria as well. I'm a lot better than I was when I was at my worst but my executive functioning still isn't what it was before, and my ability to mask/camouflage is still reduced as well. So yeah, you're not alone in experiencing this. In fact, when you talk about swinging back and forth between being more normie and being more radical socio-culturally-politically, that sounds a lot to me like reduced masking.
FWIW, and because you asked, my life is significantly different now than it was before burnout really set its teeth into me, and that's kind of the Thing. The answer to the question of, "what do you do to hold onto things," for me, is as simple as it is difficult: I literally can't hold onto All The Things anymore, and though I think that's more from burnout proper as opposed to autistic burnout specifically, the two were closely intertwined and interrelated in my case. In Showstopper!, the book about Dave Cutler and the development of Windows NT at Microsoft, there was a coder named Walt Moore who was so burned out that he spent the bulk of his time at work developing and playing pai gow poker simulations instead of doing his actual work. I identify a lot with his story, having been barely functional myself for about two and a half years, starting around October of 2021, and the long hard road back from burnout has involved a ton of learning how to really take care of myself, which in turn meant admitting my needs to myself and prioritizing giving myself the time and space to meet those needs instead of just doing without and soldiering on. At the beginning of my digging out, I was not even aware that I qualified for the spectrum, just that I was not normal, and strongly identified with being a geek/nerd and had cultivated an unconscious habit of developing assimilation behaviors, the go-along, get-along normifying stuff, at least to the extent that I didn't get myself duct taped to the flagpole. It turns out that assimilation habits/behaviors take the most out of those of us on the spectrum and are the least adaptive of our coping strategies in the long run. These in particular are things that I've had to re-examine and re-work in my life, as well as the masking/camouflaging behaviors, simply because they take too much out of me and they leave me too drained. Likewise, I've had to adopt a lot of behaviors like walking outside and journaling that help me to process my emotions because not only is that a Thing wrt ASD, but I took the possibly-traditional route of stuffing them into a closet and identifying with my executive brain instead of actually taking the time to deal with them until I hit my absolute limit and crashed and burned. My family connections have changed dramatically, my marriage may well be beyond salvageable, and being given a more focused position at work that allows me to see my progress much more clearly has, along with a growing team of fellow spectrum folk in our IT department, has been a saving grace that has kept me employed, but I could have easily lost or left my job as well. I say all this in the hopes that I've made the gravity of my own situation clear, and to hopefully encourage you to keep listening to what your instincts and intuition are telling you that you need, and to keep doing things for yourself that truly help you and sustain you in life, instead of merely surviving to face another day. That seems to be the only real antidote to burnout in the long run.
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