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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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.
My journey feels like it is mostly unidirectional and I haven’t noticed the cycles. For me it was:
Okay, I deleted my post before any comments showed up for me because I decided it was too long for anyone to engage with and I would try again when I had time to make it shorter. Whoops.
I am curious how social you are in your current life, and what portion of your social interaction is in-person vs online?
I’m not very social, but I’m mostly content with that. I go to a weekly online book club about spirituality, but most other online content I just consume without engaging with (like listening to long-form podcasts).
In-person I go to a weekly men’s group and meet with a close friend or family about once a month. I also do my exposure therapy at a bar 2-3 times a month. My hobbies are mostly solitary: bicycling, working out, reading, and video games.
I used to attempt to be more social by going to things like Meetups, but I felt like the best outcome I could get was to be tolerated and it was very exhausting being around people I didn’t know in loud environments when I was sober. If I'm not in the right environment (quiet with a structure that encourages going beyond small talk) it feels very hard for me to succeed.
I get frustrated sometimes that I have so much social drive considering my social difficulty. I think I need to remember to pace myself and keep a good amount of my "social" craving getting met online, via podcasts, etc. even when I'm feeling more up to attempting charm. I definitely have the same experience at meetup type groups where the best case scenario is to be tolerated and maybe find one person who partly likes partly tolerates me. Though I'm sometimes reminded when interacting with people IRL for other reasons that there is a bias to the type of person likely to show up at a Meetup group, so that they're more likely to be people I have a hard time clicking with. Throw me in with a group of gamers and I have a fighting chance, though again, that is online...
I'd be curious to hear more about your exposure therapy if you're inclined (I'm moderately into nootropic/biohacking stuff), but no stress if not.
I was just thinking earlier about how much of an easier time I had in college, where socializing meant going deeper into conversation about the day's class discussion for a couple hours with the other biggest nerd in the class before heading back home into a homework hole.
Sure, but I must add a caveat that my approach is controversial, potentially dangerous, and not medical advice. Also, the medical system has not been open/supportive of my approach.
The cornerstone of my approach is to turn off my anxious thoughts with phenibut (an uncontrolled substance in the United States. Some people call it a nootropic, but it is more accurate to think of it an anti-anxiety drug). Then I do something like improv where I design a role that allows me to be confident, weird, and causes some people to be curious enough about what I'm doing to approach me (something like the wizard/magician archetype). When people approach me I can either respond in character as the role I'm pretending to be, or as my authentic self where I talk about experimenting with exposure therapy to help with my social anxiety.
The exposure therapy teaches me that people will accept me if I do odd/creative things without heavy masking if I'm in the right environment and I take a playful approach instead of a logical one. My exposure therapy role communicates a lot through non-verbal presence that I don't normally practice. It also teaches me that it can be fun/useful to play a different role and that I can play a role I want instead of the one society expects.
The exposure therapy experience runs into an issue with state-dependent memory where it is hard to recall the confident behavior when sober due to the altered mental state. Therefore, I do a lot of sober planning, integration, and journaling to integrate the confident behavior into my sober persona. Tapering helps to transfer the learned skills to the sober state. Also, researching cognitive science and psychology helps me come up with new ideas for my exposure therapy experiment.
I also combine phenibut with real nootropics to reach an optimal state for the exposure therapy role. On the phenibut day I might use things that increase energy/motivation (dopamine precursors)/mood. I do get a bit of rebound anxiety about 48 hours after taking phenibut so I experiment with nootropics to manage this too.
Phenibut is not well understood but my personal experience tends to indicate it has 3 primary effects that have different timeframes. GABA-B receptor agonism peaks around 4-5 hours after taking phenibut. There is a slight impact on dopamine the day you take it that increases the motivation to socialize. Finally, the calcium channel blocking mechanism lasts the longest and creates a next day after glow for me - I feel calm and in a good mood all day but I don't have the same motivation to seek out social connections as the dosing day. Also, I found that I should never use phenibut more than once a week, and that I must take longer breaks occasionally.
That's interesting. I'm very timid about anything GABA-based after issues both taking and getting off of gabapentin (for restless legs syndrome) some years ago. I have been experimenting with intranasal oxytocin recently, which I think is good to experiment with, but the juxtaposition between connecting with people more vs less easily is pretty jarring. Honestly I can't tell if it has a slightly addictive or unhealthy quality for me as result. It does have the affect of making me feel suddenly very aware that the unnaturalness and second-guessing that comes from my anxiety is about half of my off-puttingness on its own and people would probably rather me be relaxed and open even if that means some peculiarness showing. Hard to convince myself of that without the oxytocin in my system though, as you said state-dependent memory can be a bitch.
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