Category: burnout

This is my brain on drugs.

October 6th, 2022

I’ve been taking a low dose of Adderall for about a month. How’s it going?

We weren’t sure what amphetamines would do to my brain. I have a real, bona fide ADHD diagnosis with real bona fide ADHD deficits, but most of the things I need immediate help with are more autism-related or in the grey area between ADHD and ASD.

Things like:

emotional regulation
tolerating interpersonal ambiguity
maintaining communication skills under stress
managing sensory input
managing inconsistent information processing speed
recovery from deep burnout-related fatigue

In other words, the autistic side of executive function stuff and emotional and sensory overload.

Could Adderall help me in those areas, or would it just help with ADHD stuff like time-blindness, motivation, and poorly managed focus?

Here’s a story that illustrates how things are changing in my life with meds.

My day job is with a medium-sized digital experience company. We make the software behind the websites and apps through which you encounter your favorite really big consumer brands, and my team trains our salespeople.

I manage a shifting team of freelance instructional designers and own a large catalog of tech-heavy courseware. I love my job (especially at this company) and I’m good at it, but…

Over the last 5 or more years I’ve observed that I am just too emotionally and politically vulnerable at work for my comfort, seemingly always perched on the flimsy border between rock star and towering failure. My strengths (gentle humor, technological vision, inspiring a team, problem solving) have been consistently undercut by two persistent and often debilitating bugbears: executive function failures and a hefty emotional regulation problem that can remove all access to the communication skills and critical thinking I depend on. I’m really awesome… until my deficits catch up with me and I fail at something.

[editing later: just to feel a little safer about this level of public disclosure about my brain and work, I want to clarify that when I say the phrase emotional regulation problem in this context we’re not talking about tantrums and public ugliness, ever. I’m talking more about needing to slow down as I process strong emotions under stress and a strong sensitivity to toxic work relationships and conflicting priorities]

Basically, my unmedicated brain is a badly-wired tesla coil – beautiful, sure, but also sparky, dangerous, unpredictable, and potentially very damaging to its environment.

My past work disasters have mostly happened at the end of really big, really visible projects (the ones where, if you fail, everyone sees it… oof). Launch dates and major go/no-go inflection points have lately been accompanied by terrible sleep and a lot of ominous foreboding; I’m haunted by memories of past failures and near-failures that destroy my confidence and color everything an ugly, cloudy yellow in my mind.

Typically the disaster pattern looks like this: a last minute change to requirements or scope forces me to make a decision while secretly melting down, I make and execute that decision without asking for help because I can’t think or talk, and I communicate about it in a way that erodes trust with the folks whose trust is critical to my success. The post-action analysis is brutal.

When I first asked my doctor to help me try Adderall, I was beginning a very large project very much like the ones that have beat me up in the past. I knew that even with great planning and perfect execution I’d still be exhausted and at risk for bad decisions and poor communication close to the end. Also, the “last mile” of the project was risky by design: my team’s output would be the first thing to go live in a shiny new piece of digital infrastructure that I knew nothing about and had no control over. I didn’t have enough time or brainspace to experiment with this new environment and still meet our production timeline. So I was going to launch a complex curriculum absolutely blind to how it would look and work when we were done.

I could see a train coming through the tunnel straight at me, even 3 months before our launch date.

While asking for Adderall had been a longterm strategy for my whole life, it was also frankly a hail-Mary pass to save this too-big project that seemed like it was just designed to break me.

I asked for Adderall the same week this project kicked off, but it took over 2 months of doctors hesitating and insurance balking before I could get the Adderall prescription made and filled. My launch date was only 2 weeks after I finally took the first pill, and the work was trending catastrophically behind schedule.

Fast forward to 48 hours before go-live.

90% of the new curriculum was built and tested outside the new system, and I had only two days to make it all work within the new system while my team finished the last 10%. Emails and newsletter articles were already prepared, ready to go out on Friday afternoon. This was Wednesday night.

I’d stayed up the night before finishing a difficult piece of production work that I couldn’t delegate. Sleep deprived, my plan was to host a project status meeting, take a 2 hour nap, then make an offering to the gods of learning management software and load everything into the new system. If we encountered no problems, we’d finish on time and we could sleep all weekend.

Of course, we encountered a problem. Of course it was a big problem. Of course it wasn’t something we could skip or fix or handwave away. It was launch-critical stuff. Shitty user experience stuff. Trust-busting stuff.

UGH.

That late-breaking problem should have triggered a call for help from me to leadership: “Sir, the new whatsit can’t do important things. Send help. Enjoy this perfectly acceptable stopgap in the meantime.”

And that’s where I landed eventually, but first I needed to fail at two kinds of communication, totally fumble the whole nap thing, and melt down spectacularly for about two hours (mercifully in private).

Adderall didn’t prevent the meltdown or the bad communication or the chronic lateness of everything we did, and it hadn’t been around long enough to fix the faulty planning I’d started the project with.

So… did Adderall help at all?

Yes. In fact, even though it didn’t do what I expected it to do (make me a golden god of productivity and leadership), it still made all the difference.

Let’s compare and contrast.

typical pattern without Adderall	new results with Adderall
– unforeseen problem emerges	– unforeseen problem emerges
– exhausting 24 hour meltdown – long tail of lingering personal and interpersonal damage	– 2 hour meltdown – refreshed and clear afterwards – only my cats as witnesses – immediately able to devise solid solutions
– lose ability to communicate or collaborate	– some communication impairment, not catastrophic, and collaboration OK
– can’t ask for help – can’t see the big picture – just hoping to god no one notices me fucking it up	– post-meltdown problem analysis – burst of creativity – clear vision of solution then… I. Asked. My. Boss. For. Help.
– zero resilience or sense of humor	– sharing a laugh with boss while discussing my proposed solution – high quality sleep for the rest of the week
– technically meet the deadline – spend weeks fixing problems we caused and calming angry stakeholders	– move the goalpost and claim the win – new plan to fix the infrastructure problem (immediately greenlit by management) then… – collected kudos from VPs for identifying a fix for an infrastructure problem that would have impacted our team for years

How did Adderall help? Did it reduce the spicier features of my autism? Did it make me less offputting to my managers? Did it make me more “normal”? Did it prevent me from melting down?

Nope. I’m definitely not less autistic on Adderall. I’m still a functional weirdo. I’m still pretty damn fucked when measured by neurotypical yardsticks. My project was absolutely headed for disaster.

But.

To me, it felt like the drug cleared some extra space in my brain, so that even as I endured a series of trauma responses and melted down, I could see what was happening and change my path. I could see that I was entering the old shitty pattern. I could identify my emotions and understand what they were trying to tell me, even if I couldn’t stop them from happening. And I could actually consciously decide to step off the path of the oncoming train and do something new.*

*If you’ve seen Hannah Gadsby’s Douglas on Netflix, take her bit about the “funny zip” that expands a suitcase without opening it and apply that metaphor to my brain. I found my executive function funny zip and my brain went spsss whoomp and I had all the extra room I needed.)

Holy shit. I could freak out and find solutions simultaneously.

I must not forget what a shock it was to realize I could have access to the capabilities I needed most during a time when I was profoundly distressed and exhausted and under tremendous pressure.

Honestly, this is so new to me. 30 years of talk and group therapy have made me pretty good at analyzing emotional malfunctions after the fact, but this Adderall-fueled sorcery may have been the first time in my whole I’ve prevented a disaster I created as it was unfolding, while keeping an overwhelm meltdown contained.

*Dialectical Behavior Therapy – emotional regulation techniques for people who suck at emotional regulation due to trauma or mental health conditions

I hadn’t even realized I could dare to hope for that.

It’s kind of amazing, actually.

I can’t wait to find out what all else I can do with my new and improved brain.

Like, maybe I’ll try planning my next project well from the beginning.

Maybe I recognize earlier in the next project that some risks shouldn’t be resolved with creative workarounds (a lateral thinking flex but not the best skill to lean into). Raise a flag. Ask for help. Listen to my gut, not my self-doubt.

Ooh – maybe I’ll invent a time machine and slip early-90s young adult me some amphetamine salts and a whitepaper on neurodivergence.

If I can’t manage to bend physics with a low dose of speed, maybe I’ll just enjoy the remaining 30 or so years of my life as a more sane, more functional, more connected human.

It’s tempting to just end this post and let you think that a stimulant solved every brain problem I have. If you need that hope, hey, you do you, ya cock-eyed optimist.

But the truth is, I mean, I’m just months into this journey and medication is just one tool I was lucky enough to have access to. I still have a lot more work to do to understand my brain and give it the things it needs to thrive. And even more work to be the human I want to be in the world.

Still, with medication I have that little bit of extra room I’ve always needed, so that I can do that work and have some hope of lasting cumulative progress.

Right now, that’s everything.

NOTE: Adderall is not crystal meth or street speed or gack. ADHD brains on Adderall are not “high.” Addiction is a vanishingly small problem among neurodivergent people who take stimulants under medical supervision at the correct dosage for their brains. Don’t @ me and don’t shame people for choosing medication. Also The Salton Sea is the shocking and beautiful crown jewel in Val Kilmer’s impressive (and very weird) body of work. See it. Thank me later.

The Darkness

August 16th, 2022

Content Warning: suicidal ideation, childhood neglect, complex trauma. Please nope out if you’re in a place where reading about these things will trigger you. Come back later if you are curious and feeling stronger. Skip it altogether if you need to. You are the expert on the care and feeding of you.

I wrote here, recently, about the things I’m doing to overcome burnout, and here about some of the things that are still failing for me. Both of these posts are very practical: here are the things I’m trying, here are the problems I still have to solve. It’s almost transactional; work through the to-do list, solve the problems one by one, and we’re golden.

But brains don’t work that way. Emotions don’t work that way. Beneath the surface work, the practical steps, is a darkness borne of decades of pain and confusion that at this point I cannot manage with a transactional approach. I can only try to describe it, as a first step to stopping the damage that darkness does.

First some background. I’m 56 years old. I grew up in a town of about 1500 people in rural south Alabama – a small, poor farming community. It was my mother’s home town. My parents were academic-adjacent professionals. Mom had an MS in Education and taught in public schools, doing research and graduate work on the side. Papa was former military (Air Force intelligence) with an MS in Criminology who worked as a homicide investigator for the state of Alabama. (He was CSI before CSI was cool.) My parents had traveled the world (all over the US, the Philippines, Turkey, etc.) before settling in Mom’s home town after Papa transitioned out of the military.

I’ll note that this is the town where most of my bullying occurred, and where my mother had been bullied a generation before.

More background. My brother, 3 years older than me, is autistic. We didn’t have a definition for that when we were younger. It would never have occurred to my parents to have an evaluation performed for him. He was academically very capable and an extremely talented musician, so for them his struggles were “mostly social” and were just the sort of thing that my family thought one should just “live with” and “work harder on”. It wasn’t until he and I were in our 20s that I began to realize what I saw in him (the awkwardness, the toe-walking and “strange” gestures and frequent misunderstanding of social cues, the deep longterm special interests in philately, numismatics, and music) as indicators of autism. It wasn’t until his late 40s that he came to that realization, too. (He’s doing well now – a successful gig and session musician with a fantastic partner and many very floppy dogs.)

I tell you all this because now that I’ve also been diagnosed with autism and my own history is becoming clearer, I realize how profoundly our family was impacted by neurodivergence. Though my parents are dead now, I am nearly certain that my father had ADHD (that he managed fairly well with a kind of military discipline) and my mother was probably autistic (judging from how many of her struggles and how much of her life history matches mine). Additionally, judging from the amount of un-addressed conflict and addiction that I observed in my mother’s family, every single member of her immediate family were neurodivergent in some way, fully unsupported and undiagnosed.

No one in my family has ever been supported in our neurodivergence or in mental health. I am the first of us to go to therapy, to be hospitalized for mental illness, to get a formal diagnosis (ADHD/Autism), or to seek ADHD medication support (which I hope to have in a few weeks).

The problem for us, I think, is that none of us were so obviously symptomatic that we were forced to seek help – especially in the 70s and 80s when neurodivergence was only understood as a crippling developmental disability that deeply disrupted families and mostly happened in boys. We were all wildly unhappy and serially fucked up in a number of ways, but in our collective self-concept, we were “normal”. All of what I now see as expressions of neurodivergence felt to us like things we could just manage with more discipline or better scheduling – as if we should just be able to will our way to mental health and social wellbeing.

So it never would have occurred to any of us to seek help or look for explanations for our unhappiness. We were just like previous generations in our family: fine enough, functional, and we did our best not to whine.

(I know. The ableism in my family just wafts off this history in nearly visible waves like stink off a skunk. I struggle with my own internalized ableism every fucking day.)

I tell you all this history to explain this: I had a very specific role in my family: make things better. Of my mother’s two children, I was the one who was highly intuitive about the emotional state and social needs of people around me (something that, interestingly, until recently was understood by the neuropsychological establishment as disqualifying for a diagnosis of autism). I was “the good one” and “the capable” one and “the loving one”, and I was given the role of making sure our home was peaceful and my mother was calm and hopeful.

(Spoiler: I failed miserably at this every single fucking day.)

My mother saw in my brother a kind of intractable weirdness that she eventually gave up trying to change, replacing that initiative with mostly shame, the occasional admonishment, and money spent on things to keep him occupied. But because she kind of gave up on my brother, she had plenty of focus for me, making sure that I didn’t turn out “weird” like him.

In my more mature moments now, by the way, I don’t really blame my mother for this anymore, though I did for much of the time she was alive. I thought that she tortured me into being what my brother couldn’t be. What I recognize now was that she was also autistic, with all the same kinds of blind spots and spiky skillsets that I’ve struggled with, and she was utterly unsupported. By the time she was a mother in her 30s (with Papa traveling constantly for work – he attended to every suspected homicide crime scene in the whole state), she was already damaged by her own life in a small conservative town and dysfunctional family, unsupported in what must have felt to her like mysterious emotional storms. Just surviving day to day was a herculean struggle.

Given that her sister suffered with lifelong addiction, I should at least congratulate my mother for having avoided that. And I have enormous compassion for the effects of her being unsupported emotionally and neuropsychologically her entire life. I know what that feels like.

So it’s true that she did try her hardest to make me what my brother wasn’t – social, accomplished, happy – she didn’t do it to torture me. She did it because it was the only option she had.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t break me. Hence the darkness.

Don’t. Be. Weird.

My mother’s consistent message to me was simple: Don’t be weird.

Don’t be awkward like your brother. Don’t miss social cues. Pay attention. Make the comfort of other people a priority. Don’t embarrass me. Don’t make people ask questions.

DON’T. BE. WEIRD.

It’s an understandable message. She didn’t know why my brother was weird. She just knew she was embarrassed and she struggled to change his behavior. She could change mine, so she focused there.

The problem is, of course, that her belief that my “not being weird” was a matter of simple will blinded her to the fact that I struggled every single day to … you know … not be weird. I struggled because I didn’t know what to do – only what not to do – and I struggled because despite my 100% willingness to conform to social norms, I was bullied because, I guess, I was weird. No amount of will or willingness was going to change the fact that I was autistic, too, and on some level, the people around me could see that even if they didn’t have a name for it.

And my mother wasn’t the only one who told me to stop being so weird. My teachers stepped up to that plate, too, and Sunday School teachers, dance teachers, coaches, band directors, therapists, and friends.

I don’t think anyone in my life, including the behavioral scientists I saw in grade school (that’s a whole other story I’ll tell eventually), really saw how hard it was for me every day to balance my naturally expressive personality against the admonition not to be so goddamn weird. They didn’t see me crying. They didn’t see most of the fights (verbal and otherwise) that I got into at least weekly. They didn’t see me failing to understand. They didn’t see my confidence flag and then crumble. When they did see me breaking, mostly they treated these as isolated incidents. Nobody saw a pattern.

And they told me I could fix it all myself if I just tried harder. Nobody thought to go deeper, to look at it from the struggling child’s perspective, to see the patterns and the frequency of distressing incidents I endured.

They didn’t see the struggle because they were focused on changing me, not the circumstances around me. And they didn’t see me struggle because – surprise surprise – I masked it. Masking was the only strategy I had that made any part of my life tolerable.

How Could You?

So here’s the thing. I get it. I hid my struggle so no one saw it. They weren’t incented to and didn’t have the more evolved frames to understand that this wasn’t a matter of will. I understand that this was inevitable given that nobody in my life had any idea in the 70s what neurodivergence is. I get that.

Still, no matter how unfair it is of me, there’s a little girl in here who has trouble forgiving the world for the times we lived in. Trouble forgiving the flawed humans who didn’t do anything, some of whom still don’t do anything.

Hence the darkness.

It burns in in around the edges of my consciousness when I’m in that fucked up place where I am not certain I want to keep living: the thoughts I don’t like to think because they are unkind and unfair and very, very dangerous to my ability to stay alive.

When I melt down, when I am burned out, when I can’t find my calm and it’s late at night and the tears take over.

I will never find a place where I fit.

I don’t deserve help.

But most importantly, most clearly, ringing like a crystal bell past the actual sobs and the silent screams:

How could you watch a human child struggle and not do everything you could think of to help?

Fair or not, understandable or not, in the loneliest corners of the early morning, it’s difficult for me to understand a world full of people who can watch someone vulnerable struggle and cry for help, and not find a way to answer.

I’ll be fighting that darkness for the rest of my life. If I end my own life ever, it will be this particular darkness that made that happen.

I’m masking RIGHT NOW.

August 5th, 2022
Here’s a thing to know: this blog is a mask.

It’s possibly the most authentic mask I have. In writing I can give myself the freedom to be weird or to say the things I censor in conversation. I worry less about making mistakes (e.g., showing my still-persistent internalized ableism, which I’m hoping to talk about in a future post).

But still this is a mask. I find it difficult not to add a breezy veneer of competence and optimism, a women’s-magazine-style reassurance that all this is doable and even possibly easy. That breeziness is sometimes true but mostly it’s a lie that allows me to write at all when in fact I’m not OK, this is not easy overall, and the things that are easy are so easy they’re almost facile.

(It’s like those articles in Seventeen or Cosmo that give you “Six Ways to Lose the Weight Fast!” or whatever, and that just have really easy and obvious advice that certainly everyone reading has already tried, or which fall apart with the most basic scrutiny or effort.)

Breeziness is my fake confidence. As if the consequence of revealing my very real and persistent doubts is that you won’t read this at all… which is a perfectly dumb construct created by the part of me who believed my bullies when they said I’d never be good enough or accomplish anything.

It’s like I’m saying, “See? Breezy! No big deal. I’m fine. You can depend on me.”

When, in fact, you can’t really depend on me if I’m pretending to have my shit together.

I sent a recent post of mine to an acquaintance who was struggling, hoping that there’d be some ideas there to help him. Then I went back and read the post from the perspective of someone who is dealing with burnout and I was deeply embarrassed. I failed to acknowledge that he has been doing this longer than I have, and that whatever seems easy to me is undoubtedly freshman-level stuff. It’s not inappropriate for me to crow about having mastered the self-management equivalent of Freshman Comp and Intro to Calculus, but I need to work on understanding the vast distances I have yet to travel…

…and my gut says that one early step to understanding those distances is to stop masking in my blog. To stop pretending that I’m OK and everything is working out. Or to at least be self-aware and transparent about the struggle.

Because, as I said above, I’m really not OK. Yet. Shit is dark, and that darkness is real. If I’m going to help myself (or anyone else) with this blogging exercise, I need to be real about all that dark shit, too.
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A kiln or a crucible?

August 4th, 2022
Yesterday I wrote about what’s working for me as I recover from a case of autistic burnout.

Today offered an opportunity to reflect on what’s not working.

A quick list of things that still trip me up:
- Setting boundaries with neurotypical people
- Boundaries where it’s not safe to say I’m autistic (work, doctors)
- Back to back meetings
- Switching from many small fast tasks to one big focused task
- Weighing my needs against the needs of the team I manage (I fear I’ll struggle with this forever)
- When work makes it hard to pay attention to my body’s signals (like having to pee or being hungry or cold)
- Disturbed sleep
- Being able to avert a meltdown early in work situations, sometimes. (That failed today. I tried to bug out of a situation but the person I was working with failed to recognize my urgency.)
The good news here is that I’m getting more confident about being able to reduce the number of meltdown triggers I have. I just have to give myself permission to tackle them one at a time.

And I need to more consistently remind myself that failing in any given moment isn’t a failure everywhere all the time.

So yeah I melted down today. Only one person saw it happen and I trust her to be kind.

Now I’m stimming and trying to cool off my brain so I can try again.

I’ll be okay. Every meltdown erodes progress, sure, but there are also opportunities to analyze and learn and prevent the next one.

Meltdowns are not brushfires. They don’t destroy anything permanently. Not are they kilns that harden and strengthen. They are crucibles. They burn away shit I don’t need, leaving behind the truth about where to focus next on my path to feeling better (and mixing metaphors).
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On Burnout: Fighting Fire with Nothing

August 3rd, 2022
CW: Brief mention of suicidal ideation, job-related stress, aging

About a week ago I wrote about recognizing that I’m burned out*, autism-style. Emotionally drained, physically weak, unable to manage simple things like task initiation or even activities of daily life like showering or eating, without significant risk of being overwhelmed, emotionally dysregulated (meltdowns galore!), or prevented from doing whatever the next thing is. I was a ball of snot and fear and sharp sharp knives and I felt like I was drowning in a sea of vindictive and untrustworthy spiders.

*Burnt out? I dunno – I’m sure there must be a rule about which one is correct. I just don’t know what it is. I tend to use burnt out and burned out interchangeably.

I don’t know what neurotypical burnout is like – I’ve never been neurotypical. But I can tell you that my experience of autistic burnout is on par with the most severe cases of burnout or chronic mental illness that I’ve seen among my neurotypical friends. Not just tired; exhausted. Not just discouraged; distraught. Beyond cynical, I lose hope and can’t stop crying. Not just unable to get out of bed; unable to move my eyes.

One major feature for me as an autistic: the tools I’ve learned from the rest of the world for recovering from burnout are either difficult to access, difficult to use consistently, or just plain ineffective for my neurodivergent brain. I’m required to remember how to take care of myself while I’m emotionally dysregulated, which is a non-starter even on a good day. My autism means that I can get so profoundly burned out and dysregulated that I get emotional tunnel vision. I just can’t see the remedies that are there around me begging to be chosen… even if I know they will help.

Additionally, I’ve learned burnout can happen quite a lot in an autistic person’s life with cumulative ill effects. For me, certainly, I can count five major times in my thirty year career when I’ve been so burned out that I needed a completely new job and months away from work to recover. There are loads of other times when I got burned out badly enough that, although I didn’t have to leave work, my work performance or relationships suffered and I had to do a catastrophic amount of reputation repair and damage control.

As I get older, burnout happens more quickly for me, with less warning, and it is harder and harder to recover from. It’s like the feeling is cumulative: every episode of burnout brings with it the burden of past burnouts. Given that my tools for actively recovering are pretty limited by a lifetime of poor training and poor examples (my autism is only recently diagnosed and as yet poorly explored) and I’m burning out faster and more profoundly than I used to when I was younger, burnout is becoming a significant threat to my life and lifestyle. Again. Still.

In other words, the older I get, the less I can afford to get burned out at all.

When I realized a couple of weeks ago that I was profoundly burned out – enough to take leave from work if I’d had the option – I knew I had to make my recovery count, quickly.

If I didn’t I risked:
- Blowing the newly-boosted but still-limping confidence I’ve accumulated since recognizing that I’m neurodivergent and not just a weirdo who fails a lot
- Failing (or even just breaking down) at work during a very high traffic, high pressure time
- Losing my performance bonus (I count on that money – it’s not “extra”, it’s a sizeable chunk of my compensation)
- Losing my job and having to find a new one right away
- Losing my health insurance at 56 with a growing stack of major healthcare needs for myself and my partner
- Losing many of the things that form a barrier between me and suicide
- Worrying my already chronically worried cats
As an acquaintance in the online autism community said about their own currently-emerging burnout, “…[M]y life as I know it will end. Not suicidally or anything, just, I can’t rebuild from scratch again.” Yeah. Me, too. The stakes are high, our margins are thin, and taking a break to recover from burnout can be very, very disruptive to the stability many of us on the autism spectrum crave. Not to mention expensive as fuck, and I haven’t recovered financially yet from the last time I burned out 3 years ago.

So. I’m burned out but not free to drop everything for repeated screenings of Heartstopper and the Harry Potter movies. I need to stay mostly sober and responsible, maintain a decent attendance record at work, and keep doing the health work I’m already doing* so doctors don’t yell at me.

* I have Type 2 diabetes and scoliosis, and I’m finally making real progress in keeping those two conditions out of crisis-mode. (My a1c is almost normal!) Losing ground on my health would be expensive and painful and also really fucking humiliating for me.

So. How do I recover from my current state – leaning out over the edge of a potentially bottomless burnout chasm and highly likely to fall in?

It’s clear, now that I know I’m neurodivergent, that for me the best remedy for burnout is to drop as many balls as I can and do as much nothing as I can possibly manage.

Nothing is my friend. Things are my enemies.

Every social event, conversation, decision, outing, phone call, meeting, project, clothing change, document read or written, or even walk around the block deepens that burned out feeling and weakens my ability to recover.

So what am I trying instead of taking time off work? And how is it working? I want to take some time to write down some of this, both for others who may be going through the same thing (YMMV of course) and also for myself, to keep a record of what seems to be working so far.

What am I trying?

Here’s a quick list of what’s been working for me over the last two weeks.

Turn Down Every Invitation

I’ve declined* all social invitations for the next several weeks (possibly months), even with the partner who shares my house, in favor of hanging about in my shorts with my hair uncombed, only vaguely paying attention to anything. (Yes, I’m bored. No, that isn’t a terrible problem to have.)

*Because sometimes I won’t say no if I don’t have a “good” excuse, I’ve pre-written one that I’m using everywhere I can: “I’m so glad you invited me. I miss you! I have to say no because I’m giving myself permission to prioritize quiet alone time this summer. Please keep asking, though, because I am excited to say yes when I’m in a social space again.” It’s not perfect but it’s a good starter that I can customize to the person/occasion.

Pay Attention to As Little As Possible

Since I lead a team at work and have to pay attention to their needs most of the time, I’ve cut way back on things I’m attending to outside of work. I am reading headlines, not articles (my partner will summarize anything I need). I avoid clicking in on social media trending topics. I’m watching things I’ve seen before many times. (Thank you Christopher Nolan for Interstellar and Alice Oseman for Heartstopper.) I’m letting some political stories and Twitter dramas proceed without my knowledge or input. This is a big change for me, as my general nature is to get up in the business of everything around me; it’s a part of my self-concept that I am aware, observant, and informed at all times about as many things as possible. Right now, I’m just not going to be that person and I’m going to let that be OK.

Stop Trying to Optimize Everything

This started before I was burned out, months ago, because I realized I was irritating my partner with increasingly detailed instructions on not only what to do but how to do it. Looking back I recognize that I tend to want to control things so that there are no surprises, no rework, and everything is smooth for everyone, believing it’s my role to prevent things from going wrong everywhere. So if I have learned the “best” method for grilling a zucchini or breading a chicken wing I’ll include that in my instructions. I end up writing and reciting a LOT of instructions – even for someone who does instructional design for a living.

While it’s admirable (if unsustainable) to try to optimize outcomes, when I’m burning out I lose my sense of proportion about that need for control. I want to control everything or nothing. And since trying to control my partner, an actual human who makes his own decisions with his own grownup brain, was stressful for both of us, I temporarily gave myself permission to give that up. If something is so important that it a) MUST BE DONE, and b) MUST BE DONE RIGHT, I do it myself. If I can let it be “good enough”, I let someone else do it. If I can’t tolerate having it done poorly and I can’t do it myself, I skip it. Period.

Perfection can wait.

Decline Decision-Making

My partner and I tend to make decisions about food, entertainment, money, etc., together. At work I have a reputation for wanting to weigh in on decisions that affect me and my team. But for the duration of burnout recovery, I’m walking away from any decision I can delegate. I’m saying “I’ll back your play if you make the call,” far more than I ever have before and I’m finding it’s not uncomfortable. I trust my teammates and partners, and if that trust fails I’m learning again to trust my own ability to adjust to imperfection.

So wherever I can I let them lead. Where I can’t delegate, I choose the simplest option. Not the option optimized to please the most people (my usual mode) but whatever option can be done in a click, handled with an email, brought in from the porch, or consumed with my hands in front of an open fridge.

(As I was writing this my partner, who is arranging a few things before he goes out with friends, came in with a tray of supper and asked me where I wanted it. That moment became an opportunity for me to decline the decision, and for him to make a once-and-forever decision about supper trays: they go on the coffee table next to the couch where Jane works. Done. QED. No more supper tray decisions, probably forever. Enormous relief! Plus yummy cheese and fruit and tuna salad for me to graze on while I watch… well, you’ll see in the next section what I’m watching.)

Samefoods, Sameclothes, and Samecontent

Even before I was autistic, I’ve always had the stereotypically autistic tendency to settle on one way of doing things and do it consistently.

Like “samefoods”, for instance. Though I have a wiiiiiide variety of things I enjoy eating, I really like always having a fried egg and sausage for breakfast, or the same latte order, or the same “cheese and cherries” snack tray next to me all day. I like knowing I’ll have a consistently acceptable experience of these things without much emotional or physical effort.

For burnout recovery I’ve extended that idea to just about everything I can think of: clothing (I’m writing this in the same sports-bra-and-boxer-briefs outfit I exercise and sleep in, and I only throw on a grownup shirt for virtual meetings, pants/shoes only for leaving the house), hairstyles (messy topknot all day and all night), television and books (re–watching and re-reading is soooo soothing), document templates and tasks at work, and anything else I can think to same-ize.

I’m finding that if I don’t put any effort into or add any risk related to these small same-things, I have more margin for dealing with other, bigger things and I can keep myself clear and emotionally organized.

(And at least one restaurant is getting used to making the same sandwich order for me 3 times a week; I’m thrilled to give the tuna melt from Vessel in Seattle my repeated patronage.)

When I’m recovered I’ll go back to adventure foods and new storylines and compelling news and documentaries and daring outfits. I’m still that same curious and driven brain. I just need to rest all of that for a while, and that’s OK. In fact, it feels pretty good.

Set a Very Low Bar

I’m ambitious, as a rule. I will choose overachieving in every situation when I’m allowed, even when I know that it’s destructive for me in the longterm.

But not right now. On purpose, I’m setting the bar for every hour, every day, super super low. Did I sleep at least a small amount in 24 hours? Win. Have I taken my meds? Win. Am I marginally hydrated? Win. Do I smell mostly OK? Win. Have I had a little bit of pleasure or quiet? Have I successfully navigated not hurting myself today? WIN.

That’s it – that’s about as much as I want to promise for any given moment, hour, or day.

When a day ends, am I at yes for basic human functions? Then that’s the whole ballgame. Because when I’m in burnout, basic human functions are hard enough. Period. End of story.

Soothe My Senses First

(Honestly, this one seemed small to me at first, but it’s not. Really really not small.)

Now that I know I’m autistic, I feel freer to acknowledge that there are some sensations that set my teeth on edge; I have sensory sensitivities*, not just shit I’m picky or snobby about. In burnout recovery, I’m finally acknowledging that my sensory needs are foundational to my ability to cope.

*At least one beloved partner would like to have known this earlier, having suffered my shocking and immediate response when, during an intimate encounter, he tried to put his fingers in my mouth.

Way more than I’ve let myself admit in the past, my failure to attend to sensory things has led to meltdowns even when sensory things are not the things I think I’m melting down about. Sure, I’m mad because someone parked in front of my driveway or won’t answer my simple question, but I melt down because that happens on top of hours of ignoring an annoying noise or hip pain or an itch, or because I’ve been a little too hot or cold for a while, or I put off peeing, or (like right now) I have the hiccups and they’re not going away*.

*No, I don’t know why I get the hiccups at least twice a week, and I don’t know how to reliably stop them… though sometimes a particularly perverse way of breathing deeply can interrupt the diaphragm spasm and give me relief.

So right now I’m giving myself permission to aggressively file the edges off my environment. I have the quiet fan running in my office. My partner and his noisy podcasts have been gently nudged towards his upstairs office. My office window is cracked for fresh air all the time. The air conditioning is made to work harder at night so I can sleep without hot flashes. (We’ll find a way to adjust to the added cost later. This is temporary.) My clothing is soft soft soft. The blankets on my sofa and my bed are the super plush deep red ones that please my skin and my eyes (and therefore my brain) more than their grey or brown cousins. I do not answer the phone.

And I stim every time I get the urge.

Treat Every Near-Meltdown as if it’s a Meltdown

True to the autistic stereotype, I melt down when I’m overwhelmed – with tasks, emotions, or sensory input. And also true to the stereotype, I’m quite bad at recognizing I’m melting down until it’s too late. Typically about halfway through forming the thought I need to stop or I’m going to melt down, I melt down.

It’s fast.

The speed of meltdown events is the biggest factor in my inability to prevent them. If I’m about to melt down, it’s almost always already too late to stop it.

And to be absolutely clear, stopping meltdowns when I can is critical to recovering from burnout for me. That’s because every meltdown takes me backwards, removing progress I’ve made and forcing me to start from way farther back along the path than I was.

Since I am bad at recognizing meltdowns as meltdowns when they’re about to happen, I’ve turned to identifying potential very early precursors and blasting them with self-care. I’m learning to recognize when I have the urge to be sarcastic, for instance, or when I start to fantasize about saying no to something. Or the urge to cry. Or thinking I need a break after this.

I’ve learned that these are the signals I have to take seriously or do real damage to myself.

I wouldn’t have taken them seriously in the past, even in the recent past. Most of my life I’ve thought of myself as neurotypical, beholden to neurotypical standards. Neurotypical people can get a little pissed off or impatient or itchy and it isn’t a catastrophe. I thought I should be able to do the same… which has led to me consistently underestimating how far I am down the path to a giant cataclysm of emotion and will.

I’m trying not to make that mistake anymore. I’m autistic. I’m alexithymic. An early warning system is critical to my survival in an autism-unfriendly world.

So now I give myself permission to treat even tiny, laughable warning signs as if I were actually melting down. I don’t mean that I scream and throw a shoe at the closet door (my partner’s customary first sign that I’m melting down). I mean that I treat it like I can see a tornado in the sky and I have five minutes or less to get somewhere safe… even if it’s just a funny-shaped cloud.

At the first sign of impatience, irritation, anger, or tears, I clear the room as quickly as possible and I stim. Depending on the situation, that might mean faking a small urgent matter to bug out of a meeting, going to the bathroom to be alone, giving my partner the code word (“goodnight”) that means I need him to gently clear out… whatever buys me a little space and time. Then I grab the nearest, most acceptable stim I can get: anything from a small soft piece of red chenille fabric I keep in my bag if I’m amongst people to a full bodied session of chaotically slamming my body back and forth to my stim playlist if I am alone.

Because I have discovered stimming and it is magic for me.

If it’s not really a nascent meltdown, I know pretty close to immediately: stimming is satisfying and happymaking but not physically necessary.

If I’m averting a real meltdown, stim activity focuses me and centers me in my body, and it gives me just enough relief and room in my head to think. And feel. And release.

Since I’ve been treating near-meltdowns as meltdowns (about two weeks), my meltdown frequency has drastically reduced. I went from a meltdown at least every other day that could last as long as 24 hours to something like one full meltdown a week that I can release and move forward from after only an hour or two.

That’s MASSIVE, and it’s helping me gain confidence that I am not always going to be a slave to my tendency to react poorly to overwhelm. I’m starting to feel in my bones that there is a whole universe of autistic-friendly cope that I can master and use to feel better, consistently and reliably.

I’m beginning to realize that I could possibly, maybe, in the far future, feel okay.

Some Results!

All of that – that whole list of things above that I’m doing to help myself recover from burnout – has one central thread: the more nothing I can fill my days with, the faster I will feel better.

And it’s showing results.

It’s been almost 2 weeks since I came back to work from vacation fully burned out, weeping and melting down near-daily, absolutely terrified that my biggest project of the year is starting now and I really can’t fail at it. In that two weeks I expected to just barely be able to do the minimum at work and in my relationships, hoping that no one notices I’m failing or deferring tasks until I feel better.

But in that two weeks I’ve clocked only two absolutely awful days (where I did end the day in tears without the ability to use language) and three or four days when I was practically happy – confident about my work, adequately connected with my partners and the world, and able to sleep well without drugs or nightmares.

I’m not okay, but given how awful I felt every minute the week before I realized I was burned out, just the simple progression of marginally good days is a bounty beyond my ability to fathom.

There’s a chewy metaphor for burnout that uses a tabletop roleplaying game mechanic, but it’s 7pm and time for me to stim for a bit and let go of the day. I’ll save that metaphor for another post.

Wish me luck for the next however-long, as I craft a real and sustainable burnout recovery.

What do you do to prevent or recover from burnout? Is it working? That’s what the comments section below is for. Go nuts – I want to hear about you!
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