I have been under various levels of Autistic burnout and poor mental health for years, and I developed some mitigation strategies over time. I made a brain dump about this for a Mastodon post, and since a few people found it helpful, I decided to clean it up and post it here.
I intentionally use the term mitigation in the title. In other words, the things listed here reduce the impact of burnout for me, but I'm still in burnout.
While writing this, I kept getting stuck, wanting to expand with all the other related concepts to clarify what I meant. That way lies never actually publishing this, so instead, I will focus on the main topic and then try hard to convince my brain it's OK to ignore that I haven't defined burnout etc.
If you haven't heard about Spoon Theory, having a quick read about that will be helpful - in general, and for this post.
The Mitigation List
The ordering of the list is semi-random, and I haven't differentiated between short, medium, and long-term mitigations.
Walking in nature. I was sceptical of this as it feels like a cliche, but it helps me. I can't feel any change the same day, but I can typically clearly feel an improvement in mental health the following days. I have two different places I go, so it's also pretty routine, and I usually walk when there are fewer people around - both mean less risk of unexpected spoon usage. One caveat for walking in nature is that I need to be relatively sure the problem isn't that I'm "physically sick" with, e.g. a cold, as then walking may drain the rest of my energy and make me feel worse.
Spoon budgeting. I try not to use more spoons than I have each day, and after high spoon activities, I keep the rest of the day light. Sometimes this can extend to knowing spoon use for one day will borrow spoons from future days, so I plan those follow-up days after that. For example, travel (especially with kids) is a very high-spoon event, so I will plan at least one day to recover.
Determining what costs many spoons. It's only possible to budget spoons if you have a reasonable idea of what things will cost many spoons. This is rather difficult for me, as I often don't feel the effects of spoon depletion until later. For social stuff, I also find it hard since, for some things, I still need to get a better idea of what is the expensive part. E.g. for work meetings, while I know some types are costly, for some (mainly the less formal ones), it can vary a lot how expensive they are - and some can be mostly "free".
Determining silent spoon drains. Some situations don't drain energy quickly but are quiet continuous background drains that I frequently only notice after I have spent many spoons. Some examples:
Even if it's not loud enough to cause immediate issues, continuous background noise slowly drains me over hours.
When I'm on-call for work (if something breaks, my phone makes a lot of noise, and I have to fix it) - even when I don't get paged to have to do anything, it's in the back of my mind as a risk all the time, and drains spoons.
High uncertainty events like work having rounds of layoffs, meaning I don't know if I will have a job in a month.
Fight hard to get my sleep under control. My mental health heavily correlates with poor sleep, so poor mental health leads to worse sleep, and worse sleep lead to poor mental health. For me, the key is keeping a consistent schedule going to bed and waking up at a similar time each day. That is hard, and when my sleep is messed up, it usually takes me weeks to recover - and sometimes longer. One part of this challenge is that late evening is the quiet time when I can relax, so there is a kind of incentive to go to bed late. I use a fitness tracker, so I have some data for how much I sleep, which can motivate me to course correct and see if sleep may be a significant factor when I'm feeling poorly.
Listen to my body and brain. If my body starts to complain, try to listen and react. E.g. even though I may be able to continue for a while, if I'm starting to feel overwhelmed or anxious, taking a break is better to recover and avoid becoming completely overwhelmed.
Sensory protection. I protect myself sensory-wise as much as possible. I wear noise-cancelling headphones most of the time when there are people around. A great direct side effect of this is that it's less of a problem with my kids being loud, so they don't have to worry about how their (normal for kids) noise level affects me. I also dim the light more and "hide" in a quiet room when needed.
Tactically do less / do as little as possible. I don't try to fight through it when feeling poorly, but I reduce the program to as little as possible. I will postpone any non-essential tasks (this is why kitchen chaos correlates to mental health for me :-) ). For required tasks, simplify as much as possible. For example, if I need to make/get food for my family, I take the spoon-wise cheapest option, such as making stuff I can do without thinking). Doing less for a while builds up a backlog of important but non-critical things - so it will probably have a negative impact at some point.
Strategically do less. Realising that I can only do some of the things that many other people can and may want to do, so I should not try to do everything. E.g. while I can work, I can't work full time at the moment, so I work 60%. For some family situations, I need to skip them. E.g. I did not travel to my country of birth with my partner and kids for Christmas this year but stayed home.
Less compact travel program. As an immigrant with most of my family living in my country of birth, seeing family is a bit more complicated as they are 2 hours by plane away. It's tempting to pack each trip with visiting as many people as possible and doing as much as possible. That, however, leads to burnout or at least exhaustion.
Accepting that doing less is OK. Doing less applies to day-to-day stuff and longer-term things. Especially things like seeing family less and skipping things like Christmas is OK. It's still a balancing act. I'm not fully there in internalising that doing less is OK, but I'm trying.
Partner load sharing. This, of course, isn't fundamental to an autism/burnout context, but in general, my partner and I try to divide needed work in a way which works for both of us. While it's important to do less, it's also essential for me that it doesn't mean dumping everything on my partner - especially making it become the default. My partner may do more when feeling extra burned out, but I try to do more when she has less capacity.
Try not to think about external stressors. This is mainly for things that take a while, especially around uncertainty (job-related or anything else significantly impacting my life). I try not to think about it except when really "needed". Doing this is hard to impossible, depending on what it is, but it can help when it works. One reason I listen to audiobooks when cooking or doing other chores is to reduce my brain's tendency to dwell on those stressors.
Internalising that improvements take a long time, possibly years. Not that it's always bad for years, but there are mostly no quick fixes. Mental health tracking, where I mark things daily as Terrible, Bad, Meh, Good or Great, helps with perspective.
Dropping social norms at home and doing what works for me. Specifically, one of the "rules" I had internalised was, e.g. "Families should always eat together", except if I'm overstimulated, I can barely acknowledge people around me, so separately eating some of the time work much better (and always eating separately works better, that also seems perfectly fine).
Talking to my therapist. Again, I can't feel quick fixes here, but I think it helps over time. I'm relatively new to therapy. I only started seeing a therapist for the first time less than six months ago and have only been with one, but for me, having an autistic and LGBTQI+-friendly therapist was vital. I chose an autistic therapist who themselves are LGBTQI+ which made me more comfortable talking to them but also meant I didn't have to spend time explaining core autistic experiences etc., as they already know about those.
Shopping online. I never was particularly keen on shopping in stores due to the required social interactions, and with the pandemic, I got even less inclined to physical shops. Instead, I order stuff online, including a weekly grocery delivery where we get the most food. Delivery still frequently means interaction with a person I don't know, but mostly it can be scripted, and they need to go to the next delivery, so the interaction is shorter than a till etc.
A number of these things were only possible due to being privileged in many dimensions, especially financially and having an understanding family. Details of that are too complex for this post, but it's important to point out since it may mean some things I have been able to do will not be possible for some people.
One thing you may notice from the determining spoon usage is that I don't look back and try to identify what costs spoons. I don't remember things well enough to do this due to my probable SDAM (see my old post about that). For people who can remember things better, looking back probably is valuable.
Autistic Explain-The-Possible-Misunderstandings-Sections
I use the term autistic burnout here to describe my general feeling of poor mental health since I think it's the term that fits best, but I haven't seen a single clear definition of burnout. I use burnout fairly broadly, both for the short term (a couple of days) and long term over months or years.
I don't consider this advice! As in, these are things which I have been doing to try and improve my mental health short, medium, and long term - I feel "advice" requires more data points than just me.
The post also contains some items which are perhaps less specifically burnout related but more about life as an autistic adult. I decided not to fix this, as it's unclear how to split the two apart at this point in my autistic journey.
I admit that I may not be entirely consistent in all terms used, but I decided not to try and fix it as it would probably require writing a dictionary first :-).
The ":-)" are smilies meaning happy / the previous is said in fun. I prefer them over emojis since they are less ambiguous in having fewer nuances - that works better for my alexithymia :-).
Questions / Comments
If you have any questions about what I wrote, please reach out. The best channel is @simonlbn@autistics.life on Mastodon. You can reply to my mastodon post about this blog post at https://autistics.life/@simonlbn/110208919791795776.
