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[Music] Hey everyone, it's Ian. Welcome to Happy, Healthy, Autistic, where I share my dual perspective as an autistic psychologist. Today I'll be talking about balancing work, burnout, and my vague attempts to be an adult. I think it's important to show a sort of like a behind the scenes look at how these kinds of things can go for me. I think that a lot of people, many people, most people who are autistic, probably at times can struggle with sustainability and burnout. In this episode I am going to talk a lot about my own personal experiences with

it, but my hope is that in some way they may resonate with you and the way that I try to help myself recover from burnout and catch it earlier and these kinds of things. Hopefully that's of some use to you. I talk a lot about this in the context of the work that I do, but you could apply this at any time in my life and hopefully your life. Just thinking about the primary things that you pursue, whether that's school or work or volunteering, hobbies, engaging with the people you care about, whatever it is that

burnout gets in the way of for you. Generally I'm aiming to do about one episode of the podcast a month for now because I'm quite busy and I know that I'm already off track with that. The main problem is the book that I'm writing and that's due in August 2025, unless that gets delayed, which hopefully it won't. It would get delayed if I wasn't done. So I'm certainly working very hard on that and also running my normal business of doing assessments. So this is why this episode was delayed and also why I'm talking about burnout

because I'm sort of wrestling with that and I in a way, as best as I can, refuse to be burned out. But that's hard to do because I have a lot of work to get done and I've committed to writing this book and those kinds of things. So it's asking myself hard questions about priorities and making sure I'm spending my time how I want to while also still getting enough rest while also getting everything done. So it's kind of a circular mix that ends up being exhausting a bit more often than I would like over

the last eight or 10 months. So if you haven't seen anything about my book or haven't heard me talk about it before, briefly it's based on an article that I wrote about a year ago. I'm trying to explain high masking autistic presentations to healthcare professionals. It came to the attention of a publisher Rutledge and Taylor and Francis. And of course, there are quite a few autistic psychologists out there, but not everyone who's autistic knows that they're autistic. And then even those who know that they're autistic, it's fairly rare, I think right now, unfortunately, that they're

public about it in their professional world. And even people who are publicly autistic and a psychologist, they don't necessarily specialize in working with neurodivergent people. And then even those people who do all of those things, which I know a small number of those people, even amongst those people, lots of them don't write professionally or have a podcast or these kinds of things. So at least in the eyes of this publisher, I think that they found my work somewhat rare. And because of that dual perspective, I think compelling. So I'm trying to turn this article into

a book. The intro and the outro of the book sort of chronicle my personal journey of finding out that I was autistic when I'm 29, trying to parallel that to the typical kinds of challenges that many high masking autistic adults experience and trying to explain it in a way again, that would be helpful for healthcare professionals, especially those working in mental health to better understand the autistic experience. And then in the bulk of the book, there's sort of three sections. The first section looking at pretty foundational knowledge. Very briefly, what is autism? What is a

high masking presentation? Talk about sort of intersectionality in quote, female presentations of autism, you know, how could autism be missed in childhood? How could it be missed in adulthood? And then in section two, I talk about basically how to do good therapy with autistic people, which of course is a infinitely complicated subject, but trying to offer some thoughts there. And then the third section of the book is, in my opinion, the most important, hopefully, and also the longest section. And that's the clinical application. So there will be a chapter each on things like emotional health

for autistic adults, autistic burnout, autism and trauma, anxiety, co-occurring conditions, substance abuse, and these kinds of things. I've gathered quotes and stories from many, many, many autistic people who've very generously agreed to have parts of their story and included in the book in their own words. So those are included throughout the chapters. So I want to believe it's going to be a pretty useful book. I've sent some early chapters to some of my autistic colleagues to see what they think to get that early feedback. They've been very generous with their time and given me very

useful feedback, which is amazing. They've also been very positive about the state of it thus far. So that's been encouraging for me as I push through this work. So I don't intend this episode to be, you know, a comprehensive look at autistic burnout. I may do a future episode on that, but it's a current look at it based in the context that I'm experiencing. So I will talk about a fair amount and then you can see the show notes for more thorough resources on this subject. One thing to keep in mind is that autistic burnout

in a lot of ways really isn't that different from regular burnout that anybody who could experience, including people who are not autistic burnout is a terrible thing to feel and it's, I would say, tragically common. So I'll talk about regular burnout and then autistic burnout in more detail. I pulled some notes from my book draft on this, so at times I'll be reading those. So if it feels the language feels a little more formal or sounds like I'm reading, that's because I am. Burnout occurs when social and environmental factors or demands exceed a person's capacity

and this can cause chronic exhaustion, which can be emotional, cognitive, and physical. Burnout can feel very unrelenting, but please keep in mind, you know, of course it's possible to recover, especially when we think about it in a more systemic point of view. I'm going to talk a lot about sustainability and the importance of self-understanding as both how to recover and also how to stay away from burnout to be sort of "resilient" to burnout. And through this section, I will include quite a few thoughts just for the next couple of minutes, pulling from some different research

papers. And just for simplicity verbally, I'm not usually going to mention like which exact papers are for exact points, but the papers will be linked in the show notes if you're interested to read more. As far as I know, burnout is not currently in the DSM-5 text revision, but it is in the ICD-11, so that's kind of the DSM equivalent used by most of the rest of the world outside of North America. International classification of diseases, regardless. The World Health Organization, they talk a lot about how burnout is, at least classically, it's considered a workplace

condition about stress that hasn't been managed well, again, relating to that exhaustion, cynicism, lack of accomplishment. The ICD-11 calls it a "occupational phenomenon," but there are increasing calls for burnout to be considered a distinct and diagnosable condition. So even though it's traditionally considered this job-related concern, burnout can definitely emerge in any context where the chronic demands are exceeding a person's capacity. So good examples could be in education, in caregiving, relational obligations, social masking. And masking is a huge one for neurodivergent people and causing burnout. Masking is so exhausting. And of course, I mean, each of

us gets to make our own decision about if and when and how much and why we mask. But in general, I would say that probably most people can "get away with" doing a little bit of masking here and there if they felt they needed or wanted to for some reason. But too much masking will, I think, cause people quite a few issues and exhaustion, and I think pretty inevitably leads to burnout. And so I usually encourage people to mask as little as possible, and ideally none, assuming it's safe for them to do so. Efforts certainly

have been made to try to more carefully define autistic burnout and distinguish it from other similar concerns, such as what I'm calling "regular burnout," as in burnout amongst people who are not autistic, but also differentiating it from things like depression, meltdowns, complex trauma, compassion fatigue, sensory overstimulation, and these kinds of things. The double empathy problem can really play a role here, just at a higher cognitive load trying to navigate interactions between people with different neurotypes and having those differing social expectations and feeling unsupported in that kind of way. Autistic burnout is often characterized by pervasive

exhaustion, loss of functional skills, reduced tolerance to sensory or social stimuli, and withdrawal. It often lasts months or years. I used this term a moment ago, meltdowns. So just very briefly, in this context, you could think of meltdowns as being acute and external expressions, such as fight or flight. Shutdowns are acute internal responses like freezing or withdrawing and burnout, in contrast, you could think of here as being a more long-term state of depletion, which often includes increased meltdowns or shutdowns as a symptom. They certainly can all be happening at the same time. There's a bit

of discussion amongst researchers trying to figure this out. So for example, you'll see in the Raymaker 2020 paper I mentioned in the show notes, they emphasize a mismatch between abilities and demands, whereas the 2023 Arnold paper critiques that framing as potentially being deficit-focused, and instead they argue that the exhaustion comes from unaccommodating environments and a chronic lack of getting a break from those kinds of demands rather than being as a result of inherent limitations. So it's really looking at are we or aren't we emphasizing systemic barriers and acceptance in these kinds of things as precipitating

burnout. Social withdrawal and executive functioning being impacted are also pretty core features of autistic burnout, but exactly who you're reading definitions from, they will or will not include those traits. The exact duration of autistic burnout is a little up in the air. Raymaker talks about at least a minimum threshold of three months, whereas Arnold talks about both acute and chronic presentations, making it a little more complicated to figure out exact timelines. You can feel exhausted for two weeks, and that's terrible. It's a terrible way to feel. I don't think I'd call that burnout. Maybe an

inaccurate way of measuring it would be how long does it take you to recover? So if you're feeling kind of burned out and then you get a weekend off and you fully recover, then I would say you probably weren't burned out. Even a week off is not enough to recover. A substantial amount of time is usually required for recovery if you're in that medium or pretty deep level of burnout. As a side note, the executive functioning impacts from burnout are an example of the kind of thing that can complicate an assessment for any condition that

would include executive functioning differences from a neurodevelopmental point of view, as in if they were present. That's usually not that hard to determine if they are or are not present, but then determining is this a result of the executive functioning differences coming from autism or ADHD, or is it coming from something like burnout? I think I'm explaining this because it's a good example of how just one of the many thousands of little tiny points that can make it challenging to do a differential with autism, especially in adults. And while I strongly encourage people to consider

self-identification when they think that they may be autistic, this is a concrete example of why that can be challenging to do by yourself without that really thorough assessment being done. To return to burnout though, for many late diagnosed autistic people, burnout can become such a normalized state that it can almost fade into the background. If you know that saying like the boiling the frog idea, it just keeps getting worse, but it's maybe slow enough that over the months and years, we don't notice it in some sharp way. It just really grabs our attention instead it

just doesn't grab our attention and we just feel worse and worse, but it feels kind of normal because we often feel that way. So a lot of autistic people spend years in a low or medium grade burnout and I certainly have had that experience. It's terrible, I do not recommend it. And often when it finally does become noticed, it's because the consequences have become unavoidable. So serious that we just have to pay attention and do something about them. Factors like alexithymia and hyperfocus can make recognizing burnout more difficult. So there's a variety of tools or

sort of ways we can increase our awareness of these kinds of things. So I'll talk a bit more about those later, but there's burnout self-assessment screening tests you can find online, just Google them. If I remember, I'll include one in the show notes. And then in a bit, I'll talk about other signs of burnout and what to keep an eye on and the kinds of things that I find most useful for me. To return to the idea of diagnosis for a second, when a person doesn't have good awareness of what burnout is and or if

they're burned out, and then they're not getting the appropriate accommodations, it can and I think often does lead to misdiagnosis, definitely hopelessness, job loss, even concerns like addiction or risk of suicide and so on. So it's it's a very serious and also very common concern. So I think it's starting to get more attention in recent years. Certainly in the autistic community, it gets a lot of attention. I think it could benefit from getting more attention in like a clinical point of view. And again, a sort of indication of how it isn't getting that attention clinically

is that it's only in the ICD-11 as a workplace phenomenon. And again, I'm pretty sure it's not in the DSM right now. So how seriously can it really be being taken? It's really important to know that autistic people are more vulnerable to becoming burned out. And this is because we are we often are very sensitive emotionally and socially. And basically, we just we have more inputs that can contribute to us feeling overloaded, exhausted, and so on. So some typical examples would be our sensory sensitivities can really contribute to this experience in cognitive and social overstimulation,

the masking would definitely go in here, not getting enough solitude, not getting enough special interest time, how upsetting or off putting frustrating it can be to experience interruptions and unexpected change and all these kinds of things. So that's definitely one of the things that is unique to the autistic burnout presentation or origins. And these same vulnerabilities also make it harder for us to recover from burnout. Because they're having an ongoing effect, they're continuing to add to that feeling of exhaustion and overwhelm even while we're trying to recover. And so this is all made even more

difficult if a person is autistic, and they don't yet know that about themselves. Something I often have to remind myself of is this idea that you can do anything, but you can't do everything. I have lots of ideas, lots of the time, anyone who knows me personally knows that I am just always sort of coming up with more things to do. And if you give me a long weekend, and I'll probably try to start another business or something, or at least write an article or something like that, you know, I just love that cognitive stimulation,

and I just push and push and push. And I don't really notice I'm just enjoying myself, but then sometimes can become a little overwhelming. So I definitely have to keep an eye on that. And again, I'll talk about this later, but you know, identify values, prioritize them, and then define a pretty narrow scope. I sort of have to parent myself in that way, because otherwise, things don't go very well. A pretty simple measure that I use to keep an eye on my level of how burned out if at all that I am is by considering,

you know, how fully depleted do I feel by the end of my work week. So if you think about, let's just talk about a Monday to Friday. So if it's the end of the day on Friday, do I just do I feel like I'm going to collapse? Am I going to need to spend a lot of the weekend or the entire weekend recovering and in solitude? That would be a pretty poor sign. It would indicate that my workload is barely tolerable right now. It's almost definitely not sustainable, even though I could probably keep doing it

like that for a while, you know, a couple of months, that would be a bad thing. And the timeline, I think about this kind of thing, it's not like any single day usually isn't going to make or break a burnout. These are really medium and long term kinds of experiences the way I think about it. Obviously, you can have some kind of horrific experience like a trauma or something that's, at least in the way I'm talking about, that's a bit of a black swan event. It's real and they happen, but it's just not really what

I'm talking about. So we've got this Monday, Friday measuring stick. And the thing I really think about, I mean, that's a bad sign right away, even if feeling that bad at the end of the day on Friday, but even worse is noticing if it's happening, how early in the week do I notice that feeling is happening that I'm exhausted and feel like I'm going to collapse and need the weekend to myself to do well, just to focus on recovery. So if I'm feeling that Friday morning, or Thursday at lunchtime, or Wednesday, or, or Monday, right?

So that's the thing is, if I'm showing up on Monday, in the first 10 minutes, I'm already feeling that way, then I'm definitely I'm already burned out. Burnout is a continuum, but feeling it midweek or early in the week is like, Hey, I'm burned out, this sucks. And I need to, if I can, hopefully I need to do something about that. Again, I'm talking a lot about my own experiences. And I'm just sharing it, hoping that it could be of some use to other people as they navigate similar things in their own lives. Another measuring

stick is noticing how much compassion and patience I'm able to feel for myself and show myself as well as the people I'm interacting with. And the opposite indicator would be, am I withdrawing or feeling irritable? And I find those to be pretty noticeable indicators for me. And certainly there are things I don't want to be feeling because they are unpleasant. And also their behaviors I don't want to be using in general, I would never want to be treating somebody in an irritated or agitated way. As far as how these things manifest for me now, I

pulled this from the article I wrote on emotional health for autistic adults, which is on my website. It's in the pay what you want store, which can include paying nothing. So it's available for anybody. This is a list of behavioral indications that my emotional health is probably not doing very well. And I have to pay closer attention to behavioral indications rather than just like asking myself how I feel because I have alexithymia. And so my emotional awareness isn't that great, or can be kind of delayed within complicated personal situations. So that's it's just not a

super reliable thing for me to watch. And even if I can notice the feelings, sometimes it can be a little challenging or delayed to notice you know, why am I feeling those things in this situation, which may sound like a strange thing for a psychologist to struggle with, but I assure you, I am merely a human being. So I've come up with this list of behavioral things. This isn't exactly matching one to one with burnout if my emotional health isn't doing really well. And the more sort of severe that problem is that's contributing to the

burnout pretty significantly for me. So I'll read some of these things from my list of behavioral indicators. And generally speaking, the higher something is on the list, the more significant an indication it is for me, but it's not a it's not a perfect ordering. So starting at the top as in the most concerning. So this would be things for me, this is very personalized. But for me, it'd be things like brain fog, being forgetful, trouble staying or falling asleep, I can pretty easily forget that like I have control over my schedule in my to do

list. And that can leave me feeling pretty scattered or being driven being feel I'm being driven by other people's priorities. I can feel too busy or overwhelmed to slow down and empathize with people probably feeling annoyed. Instead, my sensory sensitivities will get worse. I'll feel overstimulated more easily. I'll be putting too many things on my to do list that I can just notice it's just getting longer and longer and longer. I can have too many internet browser tabs open. My sex drive can decrease. I'm not attending as regularly to personal care, house chores, these kinds

of things. Somewhat conversely, I can become like overly active, a lot of excessive task switching quite rapidly, like maybe 30 seconds, and they'll switch again, switch again, switch again. And then I'll often forget what I was doing. It can make me feel quite unfocused lead to more procrastination, my shoulders and necker tight. That can be as a classic indicator. And to wrap up, sorry, there's a long list. Not spending enough time on my hobbies. I track some health metrics with a watch or whatever you want to use. So those can be somewhat helpful if I'm

skipping some of my exercise goals, or if I'm skipping some of my regular meditations, and so on. So again, when I noticed that some of these indicators are present, I mean, at one, it's good information for awareness, but I'd really try to act on that information. And it's telling me like, Hey, this act now, or you're gonna suffer more later. So I try to engage in like extra regulation, extra self care before it becomes some kind of crisis. So the list isn't, you know, complete or perfect. But I think it's, I mean, I certainly find

it very useful. When I was younger, I would literally I printed these, I printed this list out and put it on the wall. And when I brushed my teeth each day, I would read it. So it's trying to keep it front of mind. So I had mentioned cognitive overstimulation, cognitive exhaustion, being one of the contributors to burnout. And that's kind of the motivation behind this episode about being about the book and about burnout and so on, because I've been really wrestling with that lately. And in particular, is the difficulty that I have with expressive language.

So that would be trying to put thoughts and experiences and feelings into words, you know, writing verbally, it's easier, you know, when a person feels like they've got time to think about what they want to say, and even in again, writing can be easier than verbalizing, you know, if you verbally can feel really put on the spot. But there's sort of pros and cons to each. Regardless, a lot of people do struggle with expressive language, even though, of course, it looks quite different for each person. And you may have found yourself thinking or saying these

kinds of things before, you know, just you feel you're just running out of words, you have got this word quota each day, and you might use them up all in the first couple of hours, having trouble with word finding or going kind of blank in the middle of a sentence, these kinds of things. Generally, expressive language can just feel it has a high cognitive load. So just be very like mentally taxing, especially under pressure and or when emotions are intense. Things like dysgraphia can have some relevance here as well. But we can also have processing

delays just taking longer to organize our thoughts into spoken words, being a particular problem during real time conversation. A lot of autistic people use a lot of scripting to help themselves overcome this or prepare or having like those common phrases or explanations for things that they often end up talking about. And then back to the idea though, that this can show up differently for everybody. So you know, you may be really fluent in writing, but struggle verbally or vice versa, or be fine in low pressure situations, but struggle in situations where you feel pressure or

especially like more social pressure. And it can just be inconsistent, you know, some days it can feel quite easy. And some days it can feel like you're pulling teeth and just very difficult. So for me with the book writing, I often will take three to five days set aside specifically for that. And I find that just truly exhausting. And if you gave me six days, seven days, 10 days, it wouldn't really be more useful. You'd think, well, I might think I could get in the groove and stay in the groove. But after about four or

five days of that kind of work, I'm just so exhausted that more time is not helpful. And in fact, what I need is a break. So either time off or just time doing other things, tasks that I'm quite used to doing like my regular assessment work. Despite being quite complicated, I tend to find it quite regulating and enjoyable and it helps my brain cool off so that I can get back to the writing later. So in recent months, I've really been going back and forth between bouts of writing and then bouts of regular assessment work.

So I have been doing fewer assessments lately, which it is a struggle. And again, I had mentioned earlier sort of refusing to be burned out. And like I have to work on the book, I can't just work my previous full time assessment hours and write a book at the same time. It's like hundreds and hundreds of hours of work. And I still will find myself at midnight working on the book after having worked all day doing assessments and then getting up early and working on it again. I'm not complaining, but like literally right now, I

should be prepping for an assessment. And instead, I am overworking and recording this. So it's a balance. And I shuffle all these things around and I think I make it work, but I can feel like a bit of a pinch sometimes. So it can be really critical for me to manage burnout or to stay away from it. One of the key things is that I need to have a very high level of agency that I really need to be able to control how much I'm working, what kind of working I'm doing. I need to be

able to take breaks when I need, work hard when I need or feel up to it. And I'm certainly very lucky that I do have as much control over that as I do have. And I've worked really hard to get here and I continue to work extremely hard, but even so I do feel very grateful for that. Flexibility, I certainly didn't used to have it when I worked for other people, which was the preceding 15 or 20 years. And sometimes when I do feel that grind of working super hard and trending towards burnout because of

the work I'm doing, I can find it really helpful to remind myself why I'm doing this work, which I've talked about, I think in previous episodes, but the whole be who you needed when you were younger. And broadly speaking, it's based on having really clearly defined my values and then defining goals based on those values. And I would really encourage people to deliberately and fully articulate their values. I think that this kind of exploration and writing it down tends to force very clear and full thoughts on the subject. It's easy to think we've got it

sorted out. It's like teaching something. Teaching something well will almost always reveal to you blind spots or areas you've made assumptions or incomplete logic and these kinds of things. So maybe that's just me, but I don't think so. Richard Feynman as well famously talks about this, but I found it really, really useful to define my values and review them pretty regularly. So and again, that can really help me kind of keep my shit together and feel good about the work I'm doing. That's one of the contributors to burnout is like cynicism. And so having high

agency working on things you find very important, or really combating against that, if I'm feeling burned out from just like other shit that I have to do or other people are asking me to do, that's pretty different. It's I think Warren Buffett says the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. So if you've contacted me about things that aren't my like direct focus, I've probably declined whatever it is you have asked me for, which again, I wish I could say yes to more things. You

know, I wish I could clone myself or something and help people in all these other creative ways they're asking for. But obviously, I can't do that. So there's that's the like work stuff that's outside of my exact like narrow focus, but then it's like personal stuff and all these other kinds of priorities we have. So burnout can really come from all of these areas. So it can be a lot to, I don't know, monitor, I suppose. But between the sense of control and then remembering my values, I just laser focus on work a lot of

time. So in that work context, those two things together can really help me get on track, stay on track. And I said earlier, kind of like parent myself with these kinds of things to make sure that I'm working hard, but in a way that's very sustainable, you know, thinking about what level of output can I just continue to do like month after month for years, while also leaving me with the time and energy for a life that feels happy, fulfilling, and full like in my personal life, friends, partners, exercise, whatever else hobbies things that I'm

doing, you know, because I could push really hard and have some kind of exceptional level of output for a few weeks or a few months. But then I would definitely burn out. And so it's like, is that really worth doing? It's like, hey, that was exceptional for like six weeks. And now I can't do anything. And in fact, may may need help myself from other people, which is fine when you need help, you need help. But I don't I and I've done all those things before, unfortunately, quite a few times. But I try my best

these days to really focus on that sustainability. So writing the book, again, is sort of straining that system. And it really is a substantial task. So it can be hard for me to tell with the Alexa Thymia. And there's just so many variables within a person's life can be hard to tell like how am I doing? So I do find myself worrying about am I trending towards burnout? And I think I am a little bit right now. Another thing that I can keep in mind is, again, I'm lucky enough that I have this like very

interesting work I do and people reach out all the time and whatnot. But do I find these opportunities like engaging and interesting? Or am I starting to feel like, oh, man, there's just always something else I have to do and just feeling like, overwhelmed by my to do list and so on. So just another quick measure there. And I will note that even when we're doing work, we care about very deeply or whatever the thing is, I keep talking about work, but you know, you can generalize to your context, even when those things are very

deeply important to us, it can still be exhausting. I definitely acknowledge that. So that's not a sign that you're like in the wrong place or doing the wrong thing. It's, I think, a sign that you need systems that are more sustainable. And those are systems you build and sustain also like systems more broadly in society and at our workplace and amongst our communities and so on that are accepting and sustainable towards us as well. And in our, you know, in this case of autism, accepting and sustainable towards differing neurotypes. So it helps me to stay

aware of these kinds of things and take steps to focus on that sustainability. And as I've said a few times, just been hoping that it could be helpful for people if I shared openly about my experience with this burnout stuff. To very briefly talk about recovery from burnout, I've said it 100 times today, but I really think about sustainability here. Of course, a person needs to feel safe and secure. Those are just foundational parts of recovery. But beyond that, it tends to require a very significant reduction in demands for quite a long time, you know,

months typically or longer depending on how severe things got. And also other, you know, health concerns that can certainly be co-occurring. One of my worst burnouts coincided with post-concussion syndrome. And I'll tell you that really sucked and took a very long time to recover. So try not to get a concussion. To some degree, how long it takes to recover, you could think of as being somewhat relative to how long you spent becoming burned out. But yeah, months for sure for most people. Supportive environments, of course, are very helpful in burnout recovery and reconnecting with our

healthy social supports, our friends, whoever it is, the people we feel good around. Engaging with playfulness, hobbies can be a beautiful part of recovery, very important. Though, you know, you have to sort of recover enough to get to the place where you feel like you can start engaging with that stuff again. For me, it's not like a day one thing that I want to see my friends usually when I'm burned out. I'm sad or something, sure, but a burnout usually at first I just need to be alone and not talk to anybody. Probably go for

walks, actually, is really helpful, spend time in nature. But again, that's a very large, important, pretty well-covered topic. And so see the show notes for resources for that kind of thing. I wasn't trying to fully define it here for everybody. So that's where I'm at right now. Just working hard, trying my best to listen to my body, listen to these emotional and behavioral signals, and thinking a lot about balance and sustainability. There's sort of one thing I would leave you with today from all of this discussion. It's that burnout doesn't mean you're failing. It may

mean that you're doing too much or for too long, and without enough support or rest. Recognizing that as early as possible is going to help you stay on top of healing and staying away from burnout or recovering sort of as easily as possible. If you're feeling burned out or you are trending towards it, you're certainly not alone. Again, a lot of most autistic people really experience burnout. And some of the research that I link talks about the prevalence. And I can't remember the stats right now, but it's very high. So if you're feeling tired or

overwhelmed or just sort of out of sorts and not like yourself, it's okay to step back. It's okay to rest. It's okay to take a break, maybe read Devon Price's book, Laziness Does Not Exist. That's their book from just before unmasking autism. But yeah, a little bit maybe in a capitalist sense, keep in mind that your worth is not measured by your output. We all define success and happiness in our own ways, but I just really encourage you to take care of yourself and be as healthy as you can. Sometimes that feels like a little

boring or a little responsible, that sort of parenting ourselves idea. We all get to make our own decisions about this, but I encourage you to take care of yourself. So that's it for today's episode, a bit of a shorter one, bit of a different one maybe, but there we are. As a reminder, this podcast is for education and entertainment is not clinical advice. I do AMA episodes periodically. So if you have any general questions about the autistic experience, submit them at ndsych.com/podcast. And I may answer those in an upcoming episode, though of course this can't

replace professional advice. But anyways, whether you're autistic or not, I hope you're feeling happy and healthy these days. [Music]