• Do you have difficulty identifying burnout?
  • Do you have difficulty identifying when you’ve recovered?
  • How do you decide when to go back to work?

Sorry, no answers here. I was asking you…

I’m off sick from work, because I’m burnt out, and because I know what can often occur when I am burnt out (losing temper, upsetting people, getting really frustrated with people and it getting perceived as aggression).

I didn’t feel burnt out, but evidence was mounting and I had a hunch that I might be. And then I reacted kind of badly to something, and I knew “hey, I’m burnt out!”. The first two days off sick involved lots of sleeping, and not being able to begin menial tasks at home.

I started to feel a lot better yesterday - I say “feel”, but I don’t really feel it; my physical being does something or does not do something, and then I observe that it has or has not done something. I was back to doing things like housework and hobbies, and could hold a conversation with my mum on the phone without being to braindead to talk. I must be feeling better…

I started work this morning (from home today, just by luck of the schedule), and a few hours in it was clear to me that I shouldn’t be back yet. On reflection, it probably hasn’t really been enough time to recover, but:

  1. I experience guilt that I’m just bunking off work because I don’t feel like it today while I’m off
  2. Each day I’m off, I’m going to have to catch up on that work, which might be stressful, so I begin to get stressed that I might get stressed in the future
  3. I don’t feel much in myself, it all just feels very much the same - burnt out and normal. Introspection isn’t something I do well and I need to see the effects of what’s happening inside me to know what’s happening inside me.

I’m hoping others can share thoughts and experiences that might help me. Also, it’s just nice to dump my thoughts at times like this and see that I’m not on my own in some of my experiences.

Oh, and finally: a positive I have taken away from the experience is that I seem to be getting better at preempting my burnouts, as I had the hunch it was coming before it came.

  • Australis13@fedia.io
    6·
    3 days ago

    Burnout is a common experience for those of us with ASD. Autistic burnout in particular was only formally defined in 2019, even though the concept had existed for a couple of decades prior.

    In your case I’m wondering if it’s the more classic occupational burnout since you’re feeling up to hobbies (which presumably you enjoy?) after just 48 hours away from work. My personal experience with autistic burnout is that it is really hard going and takes a long time to slowly climb out of.

    I find it useful to distinguish between getting overwhelmed (which eventually will result in a meltdown) and burnout itself. Think of it this way: burnout drastically reduces the cognitive resources and energy you have available to deal with life. Effectively that means your available “bandwidth” to manage both sensory input and cognitively demanding situations is vastly reduced. That makes it much easier to get frustrated or overwhelmed. The reduction in cognitive resources also means that our ability to mask breaks down, so we more readily upset people (particularly NTs who don’t understand autistic behaviour).

    On the work front, I can empathise with points #1 and #2 (not so much #3 as my interoception is apparently quite acute; if you struggle with determining your internal state then I recommended looking up some exercises to help with this, as you can improve it through practice). For years I was the single point of failure at my workplace so I was carrying a lot of stress. There were plenty of tasks that if I didn’t do them, nobody else could/would; there were also time-critical things that if I didn’t push myself to do in time, I would inevitably end up dealing with the clean-up. My manager did his best to work with me to reduce my workload (I even worked part-time for a while, much of work-from-home), but I was already too burnt out for this to enable me to recover. I eventually collapsed in a heap, prompting my employer to hire additional staff. My (very slow) staged return to work has started with just some knowledge-transfer and advice meetings so that they can continue working on the projects I’ve been involved with.

    Determining when to return to work is not easy and it depends on how badly burnt out you are. If this is a repeated issue with your workplace, then I’d encourage you to talk to your manager/supervisor (if you can) to flag that the workload (and/or environment, if it provides high sensory input) is pushing you into burnout on a regular basis. It is in the interests of the business to avoid doing this, as it means you don’t work as effectively when you’re burning out and then have to take time off to recover. Usually employers can provide accommodations or restructure the work to some degree to help. The goal should be to avoid you burning out again, as not only is that the best for you and your health, but also gives your employer the best outcome (a productive, reliable employee).

    You mention work-from-home, so that’s something to look into further - if your job allows (and your home environment is less demanding than your workplace), you could either try to get a regular WFH schedule or have a staged return to work starting with lots of WFH and slowly increasing the time in the office.

    I don’t know if this applies to you, but I find meetings very draining and so avoiding back-to-back meetings is essential for me at the moment. If you have regular meetings, see if you can arrange with your colleagues to space them out a bit to give you time to recover inbetween.

    On the home life front, prioritise your health. Sleep is crucial and anything that disrupts it must be addressed. After that focus on nutrition and exercise, but don’t push yourself - that only exacerabates burnout.

    The toughest part of all of this is going to be learning to pace yourself. It takes time and practice to identify how much energy or bandwidth you have for a given day and how much you can realistically achieve without making the next day a write-off. Again, if you can look into some interoception exercises to help you better judge your internal state, I think it would help with this (and eventually help you prevent burning out again too).