Why High Masking Autistics Experience Burnout

To everyone who joins our usual live Friday premieres - We are currently traveling and completely mixed up the time zones, so this one posted without the premiere (completely accidentally😬 oops) We missed seeing you all - BUT next week we will be back at our usual time. Hope you enjoy the video, and thanks for being here!! ❤

Thank god you said "eat what you want" because I went through 17 cookies while watching!

I used to spend 12 hours or more doing animations, drawing, wrighting stories, learning a new skill, programming, whatever. It's been more than 5 years since I could sit down and study a new skill. I've been trying to pick up a specific new skill for over three years now because, well, after a minute or so I'm spent. I never associated that loss of ability with my lack of social interaction, the constant buzzing in my body and mind, my lack of ability to cope with sudden loud sounds at work and lack of emotional regulation. Even the body pains I've felt over the last half-decade I just associated to age. You've actually described 90% of my daily struggle for that time. I'm only recently diagnosed with autism and I'm still salty that I didn't get the updated life manual with it. This was the single most helpful autism video I've seen in the last 2 years. Thanks.

Misdiagnosed throughout my life with depression and anxiety, then autism diagnosis in my 70's! My life could have been so much better if I had known. I love your videos.

Apparently I've been in autistic burnout for a while and have it known. I started crying because you describe everything I've been going through. Thank you for helping.

Beautifully described! During burnout, I feel desperate, like "when is it gonna get better? When is this pain going to end?" And that's when those "I'll be better off when I'm dead" thoughts creep in. It's frightenening and depressing, considering I am not a depressed person normally.

For me, it is the frustration with my loss of skills and the overwhelm I feel all the time that makes me so angry and sad. I have been in burnout several times over the years and this last episode started last year. I feel like with each episode I lose more and more executive functions and become more and more sensitive to stimuli. I have had to quit my job because I no longer could mask or tolerate my work environment. I don’t know what to do about all this. I’m trying to rest but then I feel guilty and ashamed for taking time to rest.

Ha! Looking at my life through the lens of autism is just wild. Almost every time I watch a video about autism, I have a moment of, “Oh, I don’t think I experience that….” And then my brain drips drops of information to my conscious mind and I’m left looking at myself, mouth open, wide eyed in shock because that’s exactly what I’ve been experiencing. It’s incredibly soothing to finally understand what’s been happening. I’m realizing I’ve been in burnout for quite some time now. In fact, it’s the symptoms of burnout that drove me to, yet again, try and figure out what in the hecknbob is “wrong” with me. I truly feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time. Thank you so much for this video, Chris and Debby.

Also, its so so exhausting and flat out distressing that whole issue of ruminating over past memories. So so SO MANY rabdom, often totally benign memories, but they come back again and again and again causing more and nore distress. And 100% in the isolation thing man. Just yo get away from the stimulus, especially people. People can be the absolute worst. 😂

12:01 THIS IS SO TRUE. It is when I really can feel my autism as a disability rather than as a difference.

I use sudoku puzzles to gage my current cognitive function level.

I’ve been in Autistic burnout at least a couple of times during my 32 years without knowing I was Autistic until getting diagnosed this month. The burnouts have taken a huge toll on me. It doesn’t make it easier that I have demand avoidance.

I've spent the last two years feeling like there's a gun to the head. This is very familiar to me.

I am a mom to a young man with autism. We live in Sweden. I would like to thank you for your videos. They help me to understand my son and his needs.

A couple minutes after watching this I broke down sobbing with relief / realization / desperation that this is what I have been living for 8 years after some serious family trauma. My recent realization of having autism (undiagnosed, because it costs $2000 in Canada to see a specialist and get tested) on top of ADHD which was diagnosed at 4yo, your videos have given me so many “ah-ha” and lightbulb moments, but this one was like reading me my emotional thermometer from the last decade

Thanks so much for making a video that was uncomfortable to make. My eyes just slowly started to water and then I just cried. I feel so alone in feeling exactly like what you describe. I think only the people here can understand these tears of connection, tears of community, the peace of not being the only one.

Yes. This. So many times, I have experienced burnout. Remembering what I used to accomplish and now can’t, is extremely frustrating. I am currently experiencing burnout from a job that I loved, but was in an environment that was a complete miss match to my needs. By the last few months of that job, I couldn’t do anything in my off hours. I just crashed. At the job, I felt like I needed to crawl out of my skin. I felt so overwhelmed by too much noise and too many people. We were also in the midst of a move to a different city, with two of our kids. They are teens, so they were wonderfully helpful. Thank goodness. I was so excited for a new start, in our new city, but now realize that I need the time to recover from years of burnout, before I can get involved in anything. I just want to isolate myself and do nothing. But then that’s at odds with all the things I want to accomplish, but I’m just too tired…

"You can and will get through it." That was my driving principle, my willpower's war cry, a cry sometimes inwardly repeated on a constant loop, during life's "Twilight Zone" episodes when nothing made sense except for (borrowing from some more 60s television) the Prime Directive to: Just. Keep. Going. No. Matter. What.  When nothing else in the phantasmagoric world of kaleidoscopically assailing input provides a hook to hang on for a cognitive reconnoiter, in the midst of genuine catastrophes and chaos going on for months without let-up (like for instance the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which bore immediately on my life), all I could do was maintain the mantra: "Keep going no matter what, one foot in front of the other, don't think it through, just do, do, do."  This was all before I made my autism discovery. That discovery not only made infinite sense of a whole lifetime but astounding sense of why I lost 30 pounds in three months during the crisis of 2022. I was, essentially, the way a singer with a bad cold tries to sing over the cold to get through a concert, I was by sheer willpower propelling myself to keep going over burnout, push through meltdown, scramble by hook or by crook through the sensory overload and the short-circuited masking. Which led to a kind of PTSD that took well over a year to subside. I couldn't even manage a conversation about the previous year's events without breaking down. And then I discovered my autism. And it all made sense. Now "You can and will get through it" is a friendly mantra, not the savage taskmaster of a mantra it used to be. Before it meant "You'll get through this even if it kills you." Now it means, "This doesn't have to kill you. You have choices and methods to regulate this."

I really appreciate other autistic people sharing their experiences of burnout. I forget that burnout is a thing, and to be gentle with myself because of it, even though when I zoom out and look at my life I've mostly been operating it a burnout state for the last 10+ years. Also, in regard to pain I experience the worst of it in and around my stomach, and it started when I was so young that my muscles tightening around it actually deformed my ribcage on the left side! Which equals more pain! Wheeeeee! Shout out to not being diagnosed and having to deal with the schooling system for kicking it off 👌🏼 Thanks for sharing Chris, I hope your day brings you peace and calm 🧡 P.s. I had planned to say other things but my brain broke when I started trying to make words leave it

I swear... this video came out right when we needed it.