 I guess one of one of the good things to perhaps go on to is like, what about the like the preventative strategies? Whether you are, you know, why building up to a burnout sounds like it's an accomplishment. Whether you're building yourself up to a burnout, or you are actually within a burnout, what kind of sort of strategies or thinking or like lenses do or framing tools to use to help yourself in those situations? I look at that list of stressors that I've got and think about ways in which I can produce them. Every little helps and the more you can reduce it now, the less severe the burnout is going to be. I find it really easy, especially at the start of my journey, in terms of treating myself like I was physically ill. If I had the cold, I would not be forcing myself to sit at a computer for eight hours a day. I might need to take some sick days. I know that being outside helps for me. Excusing myself from social occasions is a big one just because I think I should. It doesn't matter at all. I need to recover. I wouldn't go there if I had a cold, would I? And declining unimportant meetings. These are all sort of small quick wins which will all depend on your situation and what is on your stress list. But there's an analogy that I use that's really helpful in terms of thinking about the big picture and just taking a step back. It's the three leg of stool. It's basically the way that you can imagine your life as a stool. So it's the little chair with three legs. And everybody's going to have different legs and they might change throughout your life but they generally tend to stay quite stable. For me, one of mine is nature. Another one is art. That's where I do all my happy autistic lady illustrations. And then finally the last one is friends and family. If you've got a store with three legs and one of them breaks or is wobbly, you can still continue sitting on the stool but it's going to be difficult. It's going to be a real workout for your abs. And you won't be able to do it. And the legs are trying to stabilise yourself on there. Exactly. You'll figure doing wall sets and stuff like you had in PE. The burn. You'll feel the burn. Your body will start shaking. It's not going to be great. If your stool suddenly has two legs that are broken, you're going to fall off. Three, completely on the ground. Shattered. Thinking about what your legs are can be a little bit daunting but it is imperative for me for understanding why I'm feeling wobbly. In the past, my legs were, one of them was education. So it was my school. One of them was sport. I did a lot of frisbee. And then one of them was sort of nature. All my advocacy work. All my nature work. All my autism work. Everything. And you'll notice part of those wasn't a friend and family leg. They were integrated into all three of those legs, which meant that I was only ever spending time with my friends or family if we were working together on one of those things. That made overworking so much easier. It also meant that when I had an injury in frisbee, I suddenly lost almost all of my social life and made me feel really, really awful. Or if my education wasn't going really well, we had some cell biology modules which I absolutely hated. Oh, microbes. No, thank you. So that then made my entire... So I did my degree in. Oh really? Yeah. How? My condolences and admiration at the same time? Immunology, parasitology. Wow. To be honest, it was very, to do with human cells. So it's more about the interaction of human cells with the microbes. Interesting. Well, I'm an oncology girl and I like to think about the big things. But part of that is I did loads of climate change modules and I was doing a lot of climate change advocacy and so that's all a bit much. And I continued doing it because I was very passionate about it and that's where all my friends are. So I didn't feel like I had a choice even though I really did. So thinking about how I needed to rearrange my stool really, really helps. I've got friends and family separate and we still do things separate to the other two legs. So there you go. Trying to think about what my legs would be. I think there's always been through my life kind of... I guess, yeah, probably about three different pillars of things that I do. I think one of them is definitely YouTube. It's watching YouTube videos or playing a mobile game or something. One of them tends to be work related. Like, I don't know, my online stuff, my part-time job, things like that. They tend to be another pillar. And then the last pillar is some kind of sport or exercise like yourself. I do need to figure out more ways of enjoying life. It's one of things. I was saying too earlier about quite often, well, not quite often, but for myself, a big part of my depression diagnosis is that I'm very apathetic. I don't know if that's the right word for it. But I don't really experience emotions as easily. Anyways, just thinking about the elixir time. Obviously, that's a big impact. But also like SSRIs and medications that I'm on, the SSRIs, they don't just boost your mood all around. They just flatten you out. And so it's very hard for me to notice and value a lot of things that aren't related to productivity. It's definitely something that I need to work on a lot more. But I know the reason for why I'm doing that. That's the way we're raised to be. It's a system that makes us that way. And we'll get on to how I've changed my success evaluation in a little bit, I'm sure. But it's just easier. It's just easier to think about how much you've achieved rather than quality. So it's difficult. But from my own experience of what you were saying with the legs, it sounds like you've got quite a lot of different components within each of the legs. I did that as well for many, many years. And I just thought, oh, I can just grow more legs. I can do four or five different types of things. When in reality, I need to task which between each of those, right? If I want to do five things, it means I've got to divide my time up between five things, which means I need to switch between tasks multiple times. Those transitions and those transitions aren't easy for me. They take a lot of spoons each of them. So just practically speaking, I'm a big fan of maths. You can't math out the fact that you're doing a lot more transitions. That's just not going to add up, isn't it? And so yeah, having a think about where where the community lies and where you're getting the most value from. And yeah, so if we've done stop, we thought about why the next bit really is accepting that I have I struggle with transitions, I accept that I am neurologically sensitive. And I accept that I have a lot of differences to the way it should be. And I am quite happy that way. I don't want to be neurotypical. I'm very happy the way I am. Obviously, there's there's drawbacks, but instead, I'd much rather go down the route of accepting where I'm at working with myself, not against myself, just taking a moment to say well done me for recognizing that I'm struggling. Yeah, because even that, I think that's that's a big, that's a that's a big thing for a lot of autistic people. There's neurotypical expectations that we have about where you should be in a certain number of years and what age you supposed to do what. And, you know, like, it could be as simple as something like having a car and using a car. Like, that's such a big thing for a lot of people. Like, you know, you should be should be independent, you should be able to go places your own and stuff around food, perhaps, you know, instead of buying individual ingredients for food, you know, sometimes you don't always have the energy to to do that. Yes, like little little things that make you individual and different and have different needs from other people. But recognizing that stuff and also contrasting it with your skills and the positive things that come from you having a different brain. Yeah, addressing that internalized ableism is a lifelong journey and I accept that. And where I'm at now is that I'm trying to take my own struggle seriously, and accepting my needs and behaviors as an autistic person. It's been really validating to prepare for this podcast and talk to my friends about burnout, because it's not something that's talked about very much turns out two of the five or six people that I talked to are currently in burnout. And we were just talking about all the different ways in which their experience is similar to mine. And it's been so validating to hear that I'm not alone. That's really what happy autistic lady is about and what I set out to do that you're not alone. There's a whole wide world of autistic people out there and we all can learn from each other and find out ways to recover from each other as well. It's been lovely to do that. I think I suppose the good good, you know, that the just going off when you were talking about some of the differences between burnout and autistic burnout at the start of the podcast, we were talking about the sensory aspects, in particular. I don't think a lot of people, especially if they've just recently been diagnosed, or people who have their own sort of internalized ableism or stigmatized stereotypes around various things, like this, this you can get so much relief and so much, you know, it's not necessarily a real big thing. It could be as simple as getting some earbuds or getting some some noise cancer go listen to more music or wearing shades, adjusting your environment so that you've got nice orange coloured lights instead of white lights. And there's so many little things that you can kind of do, especially like within your own living space that really help. And also when you're out and about, like, do you really need to, if you if you find jeans extremely difficult to wear, do you really need to wear jeans a lot? Unless you're going out on a night out and some clubs will let you in because you don't have jeans on. I can't go to clubs. I've given up on them. I'm more of a crochet lady myself. Yeah, no, absolutely. Reducing sensory stimuli is a big part of my recovery plan. I just need to give myself the space to be without any of those sensory issues or masking. So all the things that you mentioned there wearing the comfortable clothes, but also things like eating safe foods. I've got a list because during burnout, I will forget what food I've liked. I like is on the inside of my fridge because the outside has my illustration. So the inside like it's frozen. You just you just every time I open the fridge, there's a list of the food that I can always eat and it's always in my pantry. Because otherwise I will forget. Yeah. So that that kind of consistency with foods that aren't too overwhelming. I think that's important. Mine at the moment tend to be like these protein pudding yoghurt and protein pancakes that are just store bought. You just microwave and Very nice. little things like that, you know, because I think that I do have a tendency to gravitate towards the sugary things. And sometimes if I'm not feeling able to prepare myself food, or I don't have anything to prepare, sometimes just having a real big stock of these foods that I know that I can eat and they're not too bad for me. A big component of smash instant mashed potato. Some people, it's a malmite situation. Some people hate it. Some people love it, but it's it's always there for me, you know? Yeah. So yeah, anything just to reduce the sensory stimuli, I know that I probably won't be able to do with crunchiness. So smooch it is. No, that's not the word. Mash, mash it is. Mash, yeah, yeah, smooch. I think that there's a lot of other things that you can you can think of that. I think because it's a very individual thing, it can be hard for some people who are just getting into it. And it's really good. You know, I have a podcast, which is a bit far back where I talked to I want, I want to tell you books, Natasha, about sort of sensory environments and sensory supports. And within that we were we gave a lot, a lot of lists of different things that you can try. And there's also a part of that kind of sensory sphere. There is the stimming, you know, because for a lot of us, we get stimming kind of lint out of us. Just free life and the experiences that we have, or perhaps from parenting or teachers. And so finding stims that really that are really good for you, that help you regulate a lot, it can be really good. And it doesn't necessarily have to be those kind of stereotypical stims. You know, for me, the biggest thing that I do is go to the gym, because it's a vestibular, it's proprioceptive. I get to listen to music. So it's, it's auditory as well. And it's, it's also part of my routine. And it makes me feel good after and helps me sleep and stuff. So, you know, I would classify that as a stim. There can be lots of things like that. It's also something that brings you joy. And so it's as part recovery, it's really important to think about what gives you joy, and where are you getting relaxation? And is it really relaxation? Or is it just something that other people find relaxing? That taking a bath? It's weird. It's also sense like things like loads of people enjoy running. I can't get into it. Because for me, it's so overwhelming. I can run on in the gym on a treadmill. But if I'm running outside, even though I love being outside, I just get so much information. It really tires me out. Totally. So you have to really find time for that recharge and find those ways of making things easier and meaningful for you. I think that's definitely just going to be a lifelong journey, especially as my needs evolve, as I try new things, as my special, special interests change. You know, it's joy, fleeting thing. Yes. Yes. A good way to think about the joy is making a happy list. So something that my sister taught me and I really recommend is making a page of all the recovery activities that you can do, all the happy things that you have in your life divided up by energy. Hey, YouTube, just popping on to say if you have enjoyed this podcast clip so far, why not check out the full episode which you can find on my YouTube channel on Spotify, Google, Apple, pretty much anywhere that you would want to find it. And if you have enjoyed this, please make sure to like, drop me a subscribe if you want to see more stuff from me and drop a comment down below because it really does help the algorithm. Other than that, you can check out my Instagram, which is in the link tree down below in all of my videos. There's daily blogs, weekly updates on the podcast and lots of other stuff that you won't find here on YouTube. I hope you've enjoyed this clip and I'll let you get back to it. I've got that right next to my bed so that if I'm in bed and I'm doing scrolling Instagram because that's the only thing that I've got energy for and we all know how addictive Instagram reels are, then I can just look up and I can see the three three categories of energy for happy times. That's a good idea. It's definitely something that I'm going to think about implementing. Yeah. I think that's really interesting when you talked about sort of divvying up energy because there's quite a common and analogy theory people have and stuff around like spoons. It's not something that I've really used a lot myself. I think it's more just that I kind of over time have kind of intuitively understood how much energy I have to spend in the day. So I have a bit more awareness around it. So I've never really used it myself, but I know that it's helpful for some people. I use spoon theory a lot. I learned to bat it through. It's a Wikipedia page, surprisingly. It's got a great Wikipedia page. Thank you to have a look at. It's basically exactly like your battery, your percentages that we were talking about earlier, and it's just thinking about how much energy will it cost me to do a certain task. So you would think, oh, this is going to cost me five percent of my battery. This is going to cost me two spoons. It's equivalent rather than just thinking about time and how much time you've got to fit things in. Yeah. And I feel like maybe your battery in our do works a bit better because you can understand that today, my phone is draining very quickly. Yes. It's I think as well. I mean, I definitely. I don't know. I think I implement a lot of things while I'm doing things that require energy that help me mitigate it. Like I'll have some sensory lights on my desks and now and again, I'm just going to play with them and I've got music that I listen to that that calms me down. I've got like this really tough chewing gum that I can use if I get need some or a motor stimulation. And if I if I'm a bit bored, I can kind of look out the window and just see what's happening outside. So it's it's I suppose at the same time as giving rest, which is something that I need to work on. I think you can you can also do a lot to reduce the impacts of like things that that don't need to be an issue. Like if you're in the workplace in an open plan office, you know, it's not just the fact that you've got to spend spoons on doing the piece of work, but it's also the sensory that unpredictable social environment and meetings and, you know, things that are not necessarily part of the plan, but just all that. Yeah, so one bullet point that definitely falls under the recovery is reducing commitments. And it can can be awful saying no to meetings if you've not ever put yourself first. Yeah, believe me, I've been there. But reducing commitments is essential so that you can then avoid those spikes and energy use, especially if they're unexpected. Now I've sat down with quite a few of my friends over the years so that we can actually make a spreadsheet to decide how to reduce commitments. Because we all love doing things. We're just so many things. And it's just amazing to do stuff. And it hurts to say no and step back. So we always just sat down and made a list of all things that they do. And then a column to rank them at how important they are to us. And they can be important to different ways. They can be an important part of your social life. They can be financially important. For example, going to work is important financially for me. But it's also important socially for me. And I do feel like I'm contributing. So that's where I'm really, really privileged to be able to do that. So it would be very high up my keep list, obviously. Whereas other things like going to my neighborhood litter pick clean up day is going to be nice to see people. But I don't know a lot of them. I don't know what the weather's going to be like. I don't know what the route is. There's a lot of uncertainty. And so that would be very likely to be removed from my to do list and just saying no. I found it really hard to learn to say no. So I literally have a list of ways in which to say no. Use it all the way. Thank you for this indirect message of indirect methods of saying no to things. I try and be I try and be fairly clear just because I want other people to do the same to me because I don't pick up social cues at all. And so it's generally around the sort of format of thank you for thinking of me. I am currently unable to do this. Another day or generally, no, thank you, not today. Goodbye. All sorts of that. Those roses, yeah. I like that. I'm definitely with you with the directness. I kind of I stopped doing it because I got really obsessed with neurotypicals for a lot. But it's it's part of the reason why it started to learn more about autism because I was just so fascinated with people. And so I started to learn about it. And then I was kind of like trying to be kind of like translating and and trying to fit into other people's way of communicating and being and I have done that in some cases with people. I think there's, you know, as I'm sort of getting older and kind of trying as much as I can to shift the communication style towards something that I agree with more, which is that that kind of directness and, you know, just highlighting to people that it doesn't mean that I'm, you know, I'm literally just saying the same thing, just straight to the point rather than going about it all weird and fluffing it up. Yeah. And that's the same of a lot of other areas of my life. It's, you know, I feel more confident in kind of advocating for how how I like to have relationships and to communicate in things. And there's some places where I compromise, but I think in general, you know, it's sometimes good to stick to stick to what feels good, especially if you're burnt out. You don't really have a choice. I mean, you like you do have a choice to continue it, but it's much easier to be authentic to yourself and ask people to meet you there. Obviously, it's difficult when it doesn't go the way you were expecting. So if you ask for help and then it doesn't doesn't go the way you would have liked, but it's quite rare that that happens. And also we just have to learn to ask for help. It's something that I've was focusing on for the last two or three years, where I struggled to identify that I needed help, but then be asking for help with really hard. And it's imperative to recovery because it's not my fault that I got into the situation that I'm in. Life was just too overwhelming and it's not a it's not a nothing about me. It's just the way life is. I mean, in a rut. It's not a personality trait. No, it's not that you just aren't capable of dealing with life. It's just you need to shift it towards a way that's more conducive to you having a good life. And so being with people in that recovery phase can really help without masking in a non-transactional way with no expectations. That's that's all that's needed. And asking for help is important because that's what friends are for, right? I help so many people, but really, really struggle to reach out. So I've got a few ways in which I have learned to do that. One of them is something that a study mentor at uni taught me is do delegate, dump or delay for every task. You know, either do the task but I'm burnt out. I can't do anything. Yeah, you can delegate it so you can ask somebody else to do it for you or if it's something like cooking, you can delegate that to a professional or instead of chopping the onion, you can buy pre-chopped frozen oven. Yes. Yeah. Dump, just don't do it or delay it until if it's actually important and doesn't need to be done, it can be delayed. So those four things were my initial step into asking for help, the delegation, thinking about the tasks that I can be helped with. Thinking less is less like internal, like emotionally internal. It's like I need help. So no, I'm just delegating a task. Exactly. It's efficient. It's business life. I can do this. Yes. Yes. And that's that's a really important distinction between the types of help is emotional and practical. So asking for emotional help is really difficult and you should really only be doing it with people you genuinely genuinely trust. But the practical help can can be a massive burden off your shoulders as well. Things like if you're stressed about presentation doing practical responses will be things like making a script, rehearsing your slides or somebody researching for you. That's everything. Yeah. Recently I had experience where I asked a really good friend for emotional support because I'd been helping them with emotional support for a few months and it went wrong and it ended up making me feel worse and it revealed to me how one sided that relationship was, which obviously hurt so badly. But surprisingly, this has persuaded me to reach out for help more often and earlier on in those friendships because so it sounds odd, but it's a good way for me to determine how much I should trust others. It's boundaries, isn't it as well? Like, you know, having boundaries about how much energy, emotional energy you spend on someone is equally important. And I think as well, I've been in situations like that as well. I think some people just kind of get used to you giving them everything and then when you stop doing that, like, oh, hey, what did I do? What was wrong with me? Like, why are you not helping me? Why are you asking me for help? Like, doesn't make sense to them to kind of forget that you're human sometimes and that you also have difficulties, especially if you're supporting them. That's why professional help is really helpful. But unfortunately, that's just not available to everybody. Although if you have any sort of opportunity to get regular interactions with a with a professional, and it really helps understand yourself better. I'm pick everything going on in your head. You can be a lot more selfish as well and feel OK about it. Yes, like in terms of what you're talking and who you're talking about. And. You know, what's what's brothering you is the topic of the conversation kind of thing. Because there's so much going on in our lives, right? And for me, it's all these small things in in how I was learning how to treat myself as an autistic person, learning how to work with myself rather than against myself in daily, everyday life, but then also dealing with big pictures things. I've moved country in the last year. I've changed job. I entered into the workforce and then dealing with saying no to all the other stuff I was doing previously. It's it's just a lot to process. Plus you've got all the external factors that inevitably everybody is going to have to to to deal with it in their lives, either that's family or friends or something unexpected like a few years ago, there was a global pandemic, you know, that was quite a lot to handle. So there's it's good to get a professional's help to unpick with everything and learn those healthy coping mechanisms because you can't magic the map out of the air. And so that's it's an integral part of setting yourself up for success. So for success, for me, it's sustainability. I want to recognize who I am and what my needs are without any attitude towards that with joy and kindness. And I want to accept who I am and I want to build a life for myself and to be able to do with all the crappy things that happen every day. So a big part of that was thinking about how I measure success. I used to do it quantitatively because that's easier, right? How many hours have I studied? How many lines of code did I write? How many books did I read? Website visits and social media followers. There's so many ways of measuring it quantitatively and it makes it really easy. But more is not sustainable. It's also comparative as well as it's dependent on other people, which we know as we were talking about expectations, it's not doesn't work like that in reality. No. So the alternative to that is quality and thinking about the quality of things you're doing. Connection is a really big one for me. I think about enough and balance. So for my three-legged stool in my friends and family, I try and schedule in time to connect with people. With nature, I try and think about what's a small thing I can do that will immediately I will be able to see an effect of that on one other person. That can mean going into the forest with someone just for a little bit coming back. It can mean just tidying up the yard in the local park or whatever. And in with my art, there's no such thing as enough or quality. It's just doing it just being purely is enough. And so kindling in time for all of these things and thinking about quality rather than quantity is such a big shift. And I'm still in the middle of all that. So it's something I'm learning to do and thinking about what I care about and just just in a way being straight with myself. Refocusing. Yeah, being straight with myself and stopping when when I feel like I need to do. Brilliant.