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Hustle and bustle of life, things are getting very overwhelming for me at the moment, and it's very apt for the conversation that we're going to be having today, because we are talking about autistic burnout, how to avoid it, how to spot it, some of the more personal experiences that myself and my guests will have to give a bit of background, a bit more of a personal angle to the experience so that hopefully you'll be able to relate to it in some ways and implement some of the things that we have in our own lives for your own benefit. So I think it's a good idea to first introduce my guest, Vera. How are you doing today? I'm very well, Thomas. Thank you for having me. Well, I know that from having our chats before, you said that you've listened to the podcast a fair bit. What has been your favourite episode so far? Well, some of the ones about self-advocacy really spoke to me and definitely inspired a lot of my own attitude to how I do things. I'm very keen on those, but I was also mentioned to you some of the recent ones about adapting your environment to your sensory needs and that's something that I'm very interested in and something that I'm doing currently in my own house. I remember the self-advocacy one because it was, I think, the one with autistic column and they're really interesting because they, I think they do the kind of in the world of law and things like that. So they have to be really overly specific with their language. So like when they moved to social media and started off with Twitter and budding up an Instagram page, a lot of that transferred into how they did their posts and did their tweets and things like that. I can really see that because it's very comprehensive, anything that I've seen from them on Instagram. So it might be good to learn a bit more about you. Would you like to tell us a little bit about what you do in terms of your work as the happy autistic lady? Love that name. Thank you. Absolutely. I'm Vera. I started my happy autistic lady illustrations on Instagram shortly after I was diagnosed autistic. A few years ago, I think three or four now. Wow. So not not too recent, not too far away. I just wanted to connect with other people in the actually autistic community and to really learn to embrace my neurodivergence. It was something that I had not encountered autism before. I'm from the Czech Republic. We don't, we don't have any of that. I mean, we obviously very much do. It's just not spoken about and I really wanted to come to it with a positive attitude hence the happy autistic lady. Whereabouts is the Czech Republic? Because I have heard about it mostly through like, remember there was these activities that we did around like the World Cup, where like all the students in the class had to like pick a team and stuff like that and Czech Republic was part of that and I was like, oh, that sounds like a cool one. I'll go for that one. It's a fantastic country. It's underneath Germany and Poland and we speak Czech. We've got about 10 million people and I was born here in the UK but I've lived my life half and half, which explains my name is I've got a Czech name, but then my accent is quite English. Yes. Yeah. And is that, is that more or less the kind of, because I know that for a lot of English kids, English autistic kids, when they grow up, they listen to a lot of like American based shows and so they start picking up on like the accents and stuff. Is that something that you're experienced with? Definitely. My accent goes all over the place and it depends on who I'm working with. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, it's a kind of a weird thing because like it's not something that I do consciously. It's very much like my my like behavior and speaking style seems to very much match the person that I'm talking to. It's very strange sometimes. But what about because you said that you you were diagnosed like three or four years ago, what was kind of the like the situation around that? Like, why did you go for it? Yeah, I was diagnosed at university because of mental health and I realized that there was something more there. It wasn't just depression and it was actually because of autistic burnout. And one of the things that I was exploring at university and through my happy autistic lady illustrations was how do I deal with my own energy? How do I stop over-exerting myself and how can I work with my own needs, with my sensory needs, with my energy needs, my social needs, everything so that I can work with myself and not against myself. And that's where happy autistic lady came in because I wanted to really embrace being myself and being happy in the sort of neurotypical world. So since since starting those illustrations, I've actively pursued autism advocacy with lots of different organisations, including on the UK charity, Ambulance About Autism. They've got a huge council. Yes, I remember you saying so I'll I'll mention one or two of their resources. And then currently I've worked for the UK civil service in environmental IT and I do a few hours every week with our autism and ADHD network. But I still mainly I still mainly do just happy autistic lady with myself and my sister and we just have a great time. We do lots of illustrations online, what we also do, empowering neuro-positive stationery and stickers. We've got a great community there, so. So what was it like? Because for me, it's it's very much been the case that I'm very good at sort of independent work, like things that I can get on by myself, being being creative and, you know, organising things for myself. But one area that I really struggle with is stuff around organisation and comms. That's something that I just never have been able to get around. So I know that you were mentioning something about like the autism ADHD network. Do you have a lot of oversight of like tying things together? I actually am the comms and engagement lead. And through my work on comms and engagement there, I moved into my current role doing comms and engagements with this big environmental IT program, which is really funny because a few years ago, if you told me I was semi extroverted and dealing with communication and getting your message across, I would have been absolutely shocked. I was mostly nonverbal, had massive stutters and speech impediments and didn't didn't like talking to people very much. But the journey through that was because I've learnt how to do communication. I've learnt how to look at things from other people's perspective and really consider audience, timings, planning. I've almost overcompensated to the point that it's now natural to me. I've got so many different spreadsheet formats, list formats. It's it's very helpful. But with happy autistic lady having my sister on board has really made things easier in that we share the load of comms. And it's just nice to talk to other people about things that are interesting and not have burden of responsibility. That's probably what drives me most is in working with other people. Is that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with other people. Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. I mean, it would be really cool to know about like the work that you've done with ambitious about autism, because I have had some comms with them. I think I think I've worked with them a couple of couple of times. Why is it that you you gravitated towards that organization sort of as opposed to other ones? I actually found them through their employability programs for young autistic people. They were doing a civil service internship. And this was at a point where I'd just been diagnosed. I didn't know any autistic people. I mean, it turns out I did retrospectively. Yeah, they just didn't know or. Yeah. And I was being quite loud about it, loud and proud. And it just took a few months for people to come out the woodworks if you'll excuse me, and I applied for this internship. I got it, but then Covid happened. So it couldn't go ahead. If one door closes, another one opens. I was able to join the youth network and we do every Tuesday and Thursday. We do really awesome peer support sessions where we just do art or listen to our favorite comedy videos and just have a great time. And together we we learn about each other, share our special interests. And with the Youth Council, we're able to focus a little bit more on policy contributing to various government papers, looking at resources, one of which I'll mention later, it's the Know Your Normal resource. And during Covid, we actually did a big series about autistic people's mental health for mental health. We've got a video series, we're going to be doing a new one soon. This was during lockdown, we did a series with Mind where we had a few thousand mental health professionals come and learn about autism and our experiences in the mental health. Industry and basically any autism through our own words and how they can adapt their practices to to our needs. Yeah, I think that sounds all really interesting and great. And it sounds like you're, you know, both having sort of an impact and a voice out in the autistic community, but also going and doing some like more direct work for for improving things for autistic people, which I think is very under underrated at the moment because. You know, you mentioned about mental health services. Like I've hardly ever found any positive experiences of autistic people with mental health and getting support for it and sort of recovering from things. So it's definitely an area that I think needs a lot of work. Absolutely. And it was really powerful to come together and discuss that and sort of validate each other's experiences, but equally share with the professionals our positive experiences. Yeah, positive stories of when somebody had stepped up and taken time to understand our sensory needs or when they sort of had a thought of, hey, maybe this cognitive behavioural therapy isn't working for you. For obvious reasons, your pain is completely can't rationalise pain. So let's try something else. And and all putting all of that together into this this amazing resource funded by mind as well, which was really lovely. It's awesome. I suppose in a similar vein to mental health, you know, today we are talking about autistic burnout. And I think it's something that that I think most most lay people, most neurotypicals will know about in terms of just general burnout at work and with life, you know, those kind of. Social experiences, those life situations to do with like finances and the workplace, it seems to be that a lot of people experience that sort of burnout experience. But for autistic people, it's obviously going to look a lot different. There's going to be some things that perhaps are a little bit different for us in terms of the way that it happens and how we cope with it. So I think it would be good to start off with, you know, what what is an autistic burnout and what can it look like in daily life? Sure. I'll explain maybe what burnout is and then how personally I would. That sounds good. Define sounds good. The autistic side of things. Burnout is subtle. It's long term and it's really, really debilitating. It is classed as a psychological condition and generally it's people feel exhausted, they feel cynical and really ineffective like any kind of any amount of energy that you put into something. It's just not having the same results as it usually would. Yeah. There's one book which I have found enormously helpful and I'll just reference it briefly. It's the book called How to Calm Your Mind by Chris Bailey. I picked it up once by complete chance and it was super, super helpful. So I'm mentioning it now because in it, the author mentions the six triggers of burnout. So there's six of them. It's workload. If you've got too much work to do, you're going to struggle. A lack of control about that workload but also the content of the work is, but when you can do it, if you're working shifts, for example, and you're a morning person but your shifts have been assigned to you into the evening, that's going to be a source of tension. The opposite in my case. Are you an evening person? I am. I have a solid night owl. There's just no getting away from it. I've been through a stints of going like, long times with waking up in the morning, but it just never works for me. Do you know it's genetic? Yeah. Like the chronotypes and stuff. Yes. So your chronotype preference is genetic. And this just comes to my message of work with yourself, not against yourself. There's so much messaging out there for, oh, be a morning person. Four steps to become a morning person. Wake up at five and go to the gym. No. It always just blows my mind that kind of thing because it's not like getting up any earlier is going to give you more time in the day. No. Because if you're an evening person, you know, that person who might be, well, I feel so great about getting up and getting a work out in at the start of the day. Like, like yourself maybe. I'm holding my hands up now. I am a morning person. My body wakes me up at six. I can't do anything about it. But imagine me. A switch. Yeah. Imagine it turned around where somebody was telling me, oh, Vera, this is what you need to be an evening person. Have you tried waking up? Working in the nightclubs. No. No, no, no. You've been a bartender. Oh my God. Yes. I've been more of a bartender. It's interesting out there. I think that dynamic, though, because I think at the moment, there's so much of that like work culture whereby, you know, people are like glorifying these perfect schedules and like working loads. And one of the aspects is always about getting up in the morning and doing that kind of thing. And I just think because, you know, as I said, there's not the exact same amount of time that you would get if you woke up later and went to sleep later. Like, why can't you be the person who goes to sleep later and goes to the gym, you know, just in the afternoon or something like it? It doesn't make much sense to me. It feels very strange sometimes watching stuff like that. That ties into another one of the six triggers. So it's the workload lack and control. Another one is fairness. If you're constantly being assaulted by a barrage of unfairness, especially as autistic people, we're very, we're very aware of things being maybe not the way they should be or somebody saying one thing and doing another. So that unfairness can have a big, big impact. Yeah. The other ones are insufficient reward. So if you're not being paid at all, but socially as well, if your team aren't acknowledging the work you do, you are going to struggle. You might not have a team. So you're a freelancer mainly, right? So socially you want to be able to see that kind of reward. Yeah. It sounds like a lot of these points that you're bringing up are very much like pretty much core to being a content creator. Like every little reward, you know, you've got to work a lot. You don't see much success in the short term and it's a very long process. Seeing those outcomes is a big part of the insufficient reward. It's definitely something that I feel I've recently changed jobs and I'm really, really enjoying my new job, but you don't see the work that you're doing immediately. And that's absolutely normal. It's just part of that. So I need to do other things where I can see my rewards, my outcomes basically instantaneously, whether that's making an illustration or doing a bit of gardening. Yeah. I'd say it's safe for me. That's probably going to the gym and getting all pumped up with blood from workouts. That's my instantaneous reward of the day. Yeah. Do you measure how you're improving? Do you race against yourself? Oh, I don't like... I know there's some people who go and like measure themselves and do like body fat tests and stuff like that, but I think for me, it's mostly just, you know, if I can add like one more repetition of a movement every week that I go, I'm like, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it works, but then like if I drop by one or it's the same, I'll be like, oh my God, everything, life is so hard on me. And it has such a massive impact on my day. Yeah. How we measure that success is something that I'm going... I would definitely like to talk about towards the end. It's difficult, isn't it? Yeah. What's the last thing? The last thing is that I'm going to be able to do Yeah. What's the last thing? The last things are lack of community, which we've sort of touched upon already, and our values. Big thing. Yeah. Big thing at the moment for the atomization of people. You know, everyone... Community groups sort of in your physical area are very much dwindling, especially for like the younger generation. I think that's a big, big contributor. Yes. You know, yeah. You see a lot online of a lot of people being very sort of insular and... Well, I suppose fairly like myself, except that I do go out to the gym. So it's... I get a little bit of exposure to the outside world, but I do hear a lot from people that, like agoraphobia and not being able to go outside is quite a big issue, especially for a lot of autistic people. And for us autistic people, we are extra prone to burnout. Because it affects not just our energy and the traits that I mentioned earlier, the sort of feeling exhausted and cynical and everything being just so much harder than it usually is, but it also affects our ability to communicate, completely going non-verbal, and it just makes it hard to take care of our basic needs. I think two things that contribute to us being very, very prone to that burnout is masking and sensory issues. Yeah, totally. I'm not sure if I should define masking. I don't know if it's how familiar with people are of it as a term. Yeah, I think... That's a thing. It's not a very defined term, is it? I mean, you could say that it's hiding your autistic traits or social camouflaging. The specifics of it tend to vary very greatly from person to person. Definitely. I find in myself that it can either be conscious or subconscious. I often find myself thinking, even though I'm very open about being autistic, I will sometimes think, okay, these are new people. Let's not flap our hands. Yes. But then a few minutes later, I can feel the pressure in my chest start to build when the lights are too bright and I can feel my head getting foggy. And at that point, I generally slap myself over the head with a newspaper. Just chill, it's fine. You can move your hands about to stop this feeling of pain from the lights just being open about being autistic. It's fine. Nobody is going to care at all. And generally, they never do. But masking can also be not just subconscious, masking can be not just conscious, but also very subconscious, where if you spent your entire life trying to fit in and appear normal and copying people's behaviors, then it's going to take a lot of effort. Yes. All masking just takes so much energy. Yeah. I talked to the creator, Paul Michelef from autism from the inside when we're talking about the differences between the ways that the autistic people go about things like socializing and small things. And I really empathize with it a lot because when I was younger, I used to be extremely confused about how neurotypicals would just go about doing things without contemplating and thinking over and having a reason to do it. And it makes sense because we do have two modes of being. One is that kind of unconscious, like going with your gut kind of emotionally based decisions and behaviors. And then you also have the more higher cognitive aspects of analyzing and like, you know, doing something that's really sort of key to being a human. And a lot of autistic people, we don't use that sort of lower emotional brain to do things. And so we end up expending a lot of energy for things that other people might not spend hardly anything. Like, a good example is, you know, you decided to go out for a run today and you're going to start running every day for a week, let's say. That's going to be much harder than, you know, if you've been running for a year and it's just part of your routine, it's like, you don't have to think about it so much and you don't have to prepare yourself so much because it's like a set habit, a set routine that you have to just go out and do. And I feel that that transfers a lot into social situations as well. Like, if you're thinking about social situations and masking to such a large extent, it's obviously going to cause you to be a lot more taxed and tie in the aspects of having like a lower social battery. It just sets you up for getting completely overwhelmed by very short situations. Do you do social scripts? I don't because my waking memory in social situations is not very good. That's it. No, that's interesting because recently as my working memory has been improving with time, I'm not depressed anymore. Doesn't wonder. That helps. Who knew? I've been using it more because but in a sort of they help me make fewer decisions in life in my daily social communication at work. I've got these little notepads on my screen different colours for different topics and they just filled with blank sentences to fill in. Thank you for reaching out. I currently cannot do this because it just helps automate all of that. I feel like they're social scripts but they just help reduce the amount of energy I've got. I've definitely seen myself using that kind of thing especially through emails and social media. I've only just realised that you can have saved replies on Instagram or you can just send a reply that it'll pick up if someone's asking you a similar question to what the other person asked and you can save that and then the next time that a question like that comes up, you can just click the button. I haven't started using it yet but I'm excited to all this automation makes so much sense, right? But then if a neurotypical person comes along and sees all my notes they just... They just think hey, how do you manage to use all this? Isn't that a lot more effort? But for me it's actually less effort to have that all prepared. What you were talking about there, the fancy biological word for that is habituation. That's the word from animal behaviour science, ethology. That describes how animals, we're animals as well, get used to stimuli in their surroundings. So every time a plane goes by generally animals will look up and see what the plane is, see where the noise is coming from and eventually they'll just learn to tune it out. Whereas us autistic people we don't have that habituation effect. We don't know how to do that. We will always be looking at what the sound is. My fridge, my mortal enemy in the room behind me. Got a little bit of a buzz. It's unplugged today. I'll put it back on later when I'm upstairs. But we just don't have that habituation. Which brings me nicely onto sensory issues. The other thing which I feel cause is autistic burnout. Because we don't have that habituation we can't ignore sensory issues. If you're forcing yourself to withstand painful environments purely because you think everyone else can do this then that's going to have a massive negative effect. Schools, workplaces just going on public transport all of that is really really hard. And I think there's something that I was talking to Natasha from I Want to Tell You Box she does like neurodivergent neurodivergent of firming parenting. I mean we're talking about how weird it is that teachers and parents think that it's a bad thing to offer autistic children sensory supports because they have to expose them to it. They're not going to have that in the real life. They're not going to be able to use the headphones and the shades and things like that. And I'm like really? I don't use them all the time. It doesn't impact my day from using those sensory supports. I was very worried about starting to waste noise counsellors and some others in public because for some reason, and I've had it for my whole life I attract the odd people on public transport I generally go out and sit and do some drawings of some interesting landscapes or any interesting buildings and people come up and chat to me. I don't know why, it's just my vibe. And I was kind of worried that I'd lose that because it's a really wonderful way to bring a little bit of joy into my ward and meet people who I'd never word usually. So I was concerned about it but actually nobody cares. Especially those people who come up just for a chat whilst you're drawing. They don't mind you're wearing sunglasses and noise counsellors at all and at work nobody notices. In the workplace you've got the quality act you're allowed to wear whatever you need to help. And so it's just, that's just odd to me, especially because it is backed by scientific evidence, habituation. We literally cannot learn to deal with the stimuli. Yeah. It is insane. I think I'm very much happy with the noise counselling aspect of things. I think the only reason why I don't wear shades is because I don't know. I feel like I feel like people can very easily paint a picture of me if I'm a tall man and I have a beard at that point and I'm wearing sunglasses. It's kind of like a bit of a stereotype for like there's alpha male, red pill people and that's I just can't get around it because I'm always like self-conscious about wearing them. Especially because you're autistic and then if they make that assumption and you start having a shutdown and a meltdown or start losing your ability to communicate or you need help from them because it's an invisible disability you might need that extra support in a public area and they've got a bit of prejudice against you that would go against you and so I completely understand why you made that choice. That's exactly why it's kind of one of the among the large list of positive things it is definitely a negative to me going to the gym so often as well because it's almost like people are less likely to think that I'm capable of struggling and having negative experiences whether it's men or women it just tends to be the case that if I dress my very goffy as my very goffy self and I look like I go to the gym it's like I come up and say that I'm struggling it's almost like people just kind of double take and they don't really go into caring mode it doesn't happen a lot but when it does it's a bit hard. I completely feel that. Well I think there's perhaps another aspect to autistic burnout that I wanted to touch on and I can't remember it right at this moment because it's gone as it does I think another aspect of autistic burnout that might be quite important I think is stuff around sleep as well because reading some of the research behind I think the circadian rhythms and melatonin it does seem that from statistics and from talking to people that a lot of autistic people struggle with their sleeping aspect of things struggling to get off to sleep not having very high quality sleep not being able to wake up as easily and sort of get straight into life and I know that sometimes if that happens and you kind of you have a plan for the day and you kind of wake up late it's kind of like you're always running behind and you kind of stressed out and then it gets to the evening and you've got stuff from the previous day that you need to do in the next day I know that's something that can be quite a vicious cycle and I think as well part of us performing well is aspects to do with diet and hydration which is something that again I feel like a lot of autistic people struggle with keeping on top due to things like inter-reception like it's such a massive massive part of your blood sugar levels and how that impacts your well-being I think it's quite a big contributor to that if you're very stressed and you're very hyper-focused throughout the day you might forget to drink as much water as you should do that can impact your sort of mental well-being same with food I think it's I suppose these are more kind of indirect sort of additive things to the experience I found it really I found it was really helpful with anything to do with stuff to do with your mood and stuff to do with your productivity and overall well-being understanding things from like a neuro chemical or hormonal sort of set point is really important I did a podcast, not a podcast I did a post about trigger stacking in dogs and how that I feel like it can help explain a lot of the experiences that autistic people have when we have meltdowns and shutdowns and things like that it's kind of going off the principle that it's the same in humans cortisol is released when you experience like a stressor and then but the cortisol it doesn't just like rise up and then die down really quickly it can, I think the half life of it is like and now we're two hours something like that so it sticks around for quite a while after the events and so if you go through your day and you sort of as you said constantly bombarded by sensory, social things things of that nature that cortisol builds up and then you get to a point where something very little happens and you have keys to your house and it's just buried down at the bottom of your bag and so you chuck the bag to the side and you get overwhelmed and you have a difficult time with that whereas usually you would just be like my keys are going to be in there so I'm going to check that so I think that that really has helped me to be more aware of sort of the small daily things that would cause me stress and how that would impact whether I need to relax or whether I can work and search in sort of the evening it's very interesting that you've mentioned cortisol there and previously a few sentences ago you mentioned how difficult it is to get going in the morning so exactly as you were saying sleep wake stuff exactly as you were saying that cortisol for us is spiked by when we've experienced something stressful and like we were discussing before with the habituation we struggle with not becoming calm we just can't ignore these constant stresses whereas neurotypicals can the fridge they just tune it out a calendar change they've had it a thousand times before for us it's still a stressful thing every single time and so our cortisol is stronger than most as well and then if you combine those factors together you've got a situation where a person has very high cortisol all the time and it is going to cause exactly what we're talking about today burnout it's mentioned in the book that I recommended how to calm your mind if you enjoy the chemical and science understanding of things it's not neurodivergent specific but it's still a really well written science book there he talks about how burnout is you losing the ability to create the stress hormone just because you've had it so high the whole time you get like what's the opposite of ever sensitized desensitized you just don't respond to it as much anymore and in the mornings cortisol and adrenaline and all of these stress hormones is what gets you up and out of bed and if we're just not responding to them anymore you're going to physically struggle getting out of your exercise literally chemically not your fault I think that there is a tendency I think that I've seen a lot of people to separate out psychology from physical things I think people forget sometimes that your brain is an actual organ that it does it is impacted physically by things I feel trying to a lot of the ways that I feel I've been able to understand my mental health conditions and things like burnout a lot more is by actually looking at what are the physical things that are happening at the moment can I keep you a bit more grounded you can be like cortisol is very high got a little bit of adrenaline coming through because there's a deadline coming right how do I deal with this rather than staying very in the moment and obsessed and like hurrying and playing into the adrenaline and the cortisol it's just not very good I think it kind of goes back to the reason why we have these systems because as you said for wake sleep sometimes a bit to do with appetite sometimes to do with avoiding dangerous things and having the energy to do things but our modern day although our stresses are a lot less sort of life-threatening they're still important to us and they happen chronically over a long period of time you're going about your day chillin and then the line pops up and you have to run away from it it's oh there's this deadline and there's that thing and then I've got this thing that I have to reorganize for that thing and there's these things and there's some papers that have come through and I need to read those letters and then oh my god the fridge is broken it's making a horrible buzzing noise there's so many things that we should do that we could do that we might do that choice isn't it what is it that choice paralysis and there's so many of these things that we should be doing either we think that ourselves or we have been told that this is important to somebody else expectations expectations are very high and I don't know if it's just me am I black and white thinking but I am very very hard for those reasons because if somebody's told me this is important to them can I help I put myself into it 100% even if I don't necessarily have the energy and that's not because I don't recognize I don't have the energy, I know I'm tired but I'm really a dog spark obviously yes somebody could cut it off he just runs halfway down the stairs and stares at me cortisol is going adrenaline spike there you go the thing is dog then just goes back upstairs to sleep whereas I just that's my car do you I don't even know what I'm talking about anyway well I realized that we talked a lot about burnout and things like that for a long time so it might possibly be good too I don't know would you be able to go through sort of your own experience with burnout and I guess looking back in hindsight sort of listing off some kind of red flags for what happened for you when you were approaching a burnout sure I knew that autistic burnout was applicable to me the first thing when I finally managed to sit down and research autism I did not know how to take breaks I always over-exaggerated myself and said yes to everything and really rarely had any kind of recharge time at school I was in quite a stressful environment and there was so much work to do I was there for many many hours a day and I was still all the time I was ill maybe for two weeks then I'd be back in school for three weeks ill for two weeks this was diagnosed as psychosomatic and it was really but it was to the point where they thought I had tuberculosis because I had such bad illness but it was always psychosomatic but never investigated further then going into uni sorry so it tends to be something that with things like BPD and borderline all these other things everything but autism and the psychosomatic component is literally just like you think something and therefore you feel it and it happens it's very funny to me retrospectively because you can either laugh or you can cry it might as well laugh right then going into uni I struggled massively with my mental health and was only able to work for about three and a half hours per day tops the only thing that really helped was being outside so I did a lot of volunteering and through that I met some awesome people and started to learn how to talk about mental health through them and I so grateful for all the vocabulary they introduced me to once I recognised what chronic burnout was it was one of the main reasons I pursued getting my diagnosis because I just wanted a reason for why my brain and body felt so disconnected the brain and body that it's all connected, it's all one thing it's not separate and so I figured there must be some sort of reason behind this and I wanted to figure out why my energy levels were so spiky why when I was interested in something and it was amazing I felt like I could live and breathe and eat just that thing I was interested in well I missed a robot to slight type of coding for hours and hours making my gardening plans yes thinking about advocacy making spreadsheets, just having a great time but yeah so it all made sense after that and I've really been working on understanding my needs my capability and capacity capability and capacity they're two different words capability is do you know how to bake a cupcake and capacity is how big is your oven yeah so those are really important distinctions because I was capable of doing all the work that I wanted to do but I did not have capacity so understanding that distinction was really really important for me and ultimately enabled me to join in the workplace I'm able to work full time which is a massive privilege and something that gives me so much joy but I'm still still been teaching on the edge of that burnout and it's something that I want to put a stop to I've generally just confused being driven with overworking and that's a strong strong note overworking there's such a societal trend towards that at the moment though it's almost like it's glorified like um it's really important when you're talking about capacity um you could probably stuff a lot of cookie dough or I don't know what would you say muffin dough yeah cupcake into the oven and just absolutely ram it full and come out with this huge Minecraft-esque blob of cupcake but that doesn't mean that it's a good cupcake um like and you can't eat that much cupcake for all the love in the world there's not that many that I want to eat after a while they're all going to start tasting bland can you see where I'm going with this metaphor the lack of joy from overworking creates is palpable yeah I don't know I definitely agree that there is a societal trend towards this and I completely blindly accepted it despite the fact that in my current workplace I've got awesome workplace adjustments I've got a really supportive and calm working environment but I was always chasing the dopamine I always wanted to do a bit more here, a bit more there whatever made me feel helpful or whatever I felt was valuable but if you combine that with all the external stuff that happens outside of work recently for me it's been pretty for long the last year it's been difficult I think it's weird isn't it like in the mornings when you're getting ready for like a work day it's like for some reason like you see perhaps your battery I don't know 90% because you had a bad night's sleep or something and so you're like oh cool I've got 90% of energy to use you use that entire amount of energy for your working day and you're like oh I'm on 5% you know I've got to get home and something happens and then you forget that you've got a social event and then it's like you don't have the energy to do that kind of stuff and you have to spend more energy for like reorganising things and so it's kind of like you just run your battery completely dry without giving you any wiggle room and that battery if you've got that 5% I was neglecting to realise that I still need some battery to recover I still need battery to clean up my house I need to make myself dinner even something like going for a walk is going to take some of that battery and I need that and so I came to this breakthrough which was very helpful in the words of Taylor Swift hi it's me I'm the problem it's me because I recognise that I'm taking those choices of running my battery dry and struggling to recognise when I need to rest I was overdoing activities I'd go into the forest I'd be there for half an hour and feel amazing so I continued walking for another hour and a half until it was dark and then I realised I'm in the middle of a forest with my dog I don't have a flashlight I don't have dinner waiting for me at home trying to min max resting and I also don't have any groceries so obviously that's going to be a problem and that's where I needed to genuinely re-evaluate my relationship to my energy and my capability and capacity properly hey up just popping on to say thank you for listening to this podcast this far if you could do me a real solid please make sure to rate the podcast if you're in a podcasting streaming service and do all that like subscribe, comment stuff on youtube damn even send a heart in the comments if you don't feel like typing make sure to check out my link which is always down below in the description or head over to my instagram page at Thomas Henley UK for daily blogs, podcast updates and weekly lives this podcast is sponsored by my favourite noise cancelling, noise reducing earbuds that you can adjust the volume on really really great thing they're called debuts and you can find the affiliate link down in the description of this podcast for a 15% off discount anyway I hope you enjoy the rest of the podcast that's all from me I think there was something that you were saying about um your school time having three weeks of doing loads and then having two weeks where you're sick I think that's been it was really interesting because the previous podcast it's not come out yet because I've been burnt out and so behind on things ironic yeah ironic for the topic of the podcast I'm not totally on top of it yet but I'm trying but we were talking about how very much my experience of life is like a roller coaster I have like peaks which are like really great and I'm doing so much and then I have absolute just tail off drops where I just I can't function and I need supports and things like that and I think that's a really good analogy for what happens when you just lean into that whole burnout thing you just get so over excited with the amount of energy that you've got and just burn through it all give yourself enough and things start to fall apart and then you have a burnout I love the analogy of a roller coaster because that is so true to my own experience and I'm just sick of it I don't want to be going up and down anymore I'm just tired and I know that I need to be here for a long time and a good time and that's part of my recovery journey has been slowing down even though I really don't want to because I love all the things that I do that's necessary and my goal for 2023 has been to have a boring year because I just need to slow down and figure things out and I've been setting myself up for success and learning what all my different red flags are for approaching that burnout and it's been incredibly invaluable and what would those sort of red flags be for you it's difficult because alexithymia I'm not sure how to pronounce it my favourite topic everyone knows I mention it every episode that I can you need to get yourself a bingo card for listeners put a little counter in there how many times has Thomas mentioned alexithymia alexithymia there you go so alexithymia with my difficulty identifying and describing my feelings I've got little emotions on my phone it's helpful but it's not going to do the trick right so I've had to adapt everything to fit that and so I have red flags for burnout which are my behaviour all my social behaviour and my energy and those are much easier to recognise than feed things you get feedback don't you exactly so the small behaviour changes include things like not singing eating less neglecting chores because they just don't seem worth it or a big one for me are ticks they're very hard to ignore my neck just goes back you know I get little ones it's mostly from the sides sometimes I get them with my arms but how do they have any when I'm not anxious but if I start getting anxious then I get little ones if I have like a meltdown or something they get like really intense yes same for me and I used to really struggle with ticks I used to also have a speech impediment I absolutely hated it but I've grown to love them because they're there to help me they're there to protect me they're literally my body telling me babes slow down foods we're still elated we work together socially I really become obsessed with any errors I might have made I reread emails and messages a lot anyway I've been trying to get a handle on them but it can escalate to like re-reading an email to a colleague 30 times I withdraw and isolate myself I lose my words and interestingly this is something that a friend of mine mentioned that she experiences and I definitely do the same I help people more when I'm going into that crisis mode of okay there's a lot of problems going on here I start helping others rather than stopping and helping myself first so you're like switching your focus onto someone else because that's like you know what I relate to that the worse that I'm doing the more likely I am to like offer up my energy and my time for people who are struggling to I don't know if that's just I think that might be just at the empathy aspect of it you kind of feel it a lot more because it's something that you are you're experiencing not perhaps for the same reason or at the same level but you are experiencing something similar so you're like oh man I really feel this and you just want to take care of people and make sure they're alright maybe I don't know why it is but it's definitely a thing and it's odd especially because I know that the general feelings my the road to burnout for me are forgetting what makes me happy feeling meaningless just being overwhelmed more easily and getting more meltdowns and I know that if I ignore all the behaviours that I mentioned earlier and these general feelings it can all escalate into physical illness I will once again get that psychosomatic illness of the weird cough that comes from nowhere that I mentioned had a lot as a child but I get cold sores on my lips and on my fingers sometimes as well which is generally being more present sounds of low immune system because it does anxiety and cortisol and things like that they do affect your your body in a lot of different ways definitely and so those are my red flags I have a list and I try and keep it fairly updated and then whenever a few of those flags are raised at the same time that's when I know ok it's time to go and do something about this and have a little meeting with myself and figure out where do we go from here it's really helpful because it's a good quantifier of don't worry about it don't worry if you're going into burnout until you've reached this point I'd like to mention a resource which is super helpful before you go out and make a list of burnout indicators it's called know your normal it's a resource we made with ambitious about autism you can find it on their website and it's a great way for you to figure out what your baseline is of when do I usually go to bed, how many hours do I sleep, who are the people I hang out with, what are my favourite interests my favourite foods everything that's your normal life it's a very accessible resource and really fun to fill in because that way you've then got a resource that you can utilise your natural strength and pattern recognition and figure out when you've deviated from your normal and spot when things are going wrong so much easier I think a good red flag for me in terms of burnout is a lot to do with transition times for a lot of autistic people it can take us a bit longer to switch it's been a bit it's a bit funny talking to some parents about it because it's they feel like it's something that would only be an issue when you're going in to do something that you don't want to do these transition times like it's for example it's not necessarily I need a long transition time to go from rest to work it's the opposite way as well it takes me a while to get out of work mode rest mode but in terms of burnout for me it's it's the case that I'll have periods of time where I just completely ignore all transition times throughout the day so I just won't give myself any rest or breathing time in between things it could be as little as going down and getting a glass of water that tends to become a lot harder for me to do to break things up in that way and not just jump from task to task it happens when I'm approaching a burnout and then I also have the opposite side where my transition sometimes just take forever for ages I'll finish the day at work and I really want to go to the gym but for some reason I've been sat on my bed for two hours just I want to move, I just can't I'm just kind of locked locked into the environment that I'm in I'm not able to kind of transition both from rest to work but also from work to rest to sleep so all of those things it kind of compiling over each other and because I'm setting myself such a high workload during that time because I am approaching a burnout I get behind on stuff and then it kind of builds up and the transition times get longer and longer and then I just find myself unable to cope with things I also give myself more to do when I feel like I'm approaching that burnout I don't think it's because I want to feel busy and distract myself I genuinely just think it's because in that moment when you feel like you're drowning all the small issues feel insurmountable and so everything has this sense of urgency because everything is equally bad everything is equally hard everything is equally terrifying and that's because it's all 100% awful reaching the top of your limits whereas usually you'd have not when you're not drowning you'd have much calmer processing you'd have all the executive function skills that you need and you'd be able to assess this task is low priority this task has high priority but I'm going to find it difficult so I'm going to ask the friend for help this task is important for my wellbeing so I'm going to do it now that sort of thing but because we're drowning you're just clutching at all the stores trying to do everything at once that's going to make things worse which is interesting the same friend who mentioned the cupcake I'm going to start that sentence again a friend of mine pointed out that when she's going into burnout she also feels the same way around everything being really urgent and trying to do all the things and it's sort of because she finds it easier to just get into the burnout and recover from there rather than stop and that surprised me because we've not really talked about it before I think this whole burnout it's a massive mental health topic but still not really talked about and so especially if we don't have those mechanisms for de-escalation we don't have that empathy for ourselves to stop and reduce pressure on ourselves then it's going to be re-tempting to just push yourself into burnout because then you're physically incapable of doing more and so it feels like less effort to recover when actually what we need to do when we're feeling that we're drowning we just need to take a deep breath hold it and float up to the surface but same like a drowning person they're going to be thrashing their arms around when actually what they need to do is just the arms underwater and just breathe but that takes practice and is terrifying because it doesn't feel like it's the right thing to do I think that that's really important that you mention that because the mechanism behind cortisol and adrenaline is that it's used to give you energy and to drive you forward to problem solve and to get out of a stressful situation and as I said like might be good in a very simple situation where your life's in danger sounds a bit weird me saying that but in it chronically in such a complex world that we live in it doesn't do us any favours because it does kind of feel like I really empathise with what you were saying about your friend because it's the same for me it's like once that adrenaline courses all builds up around something like perhaps you're trying to edit something and you've finished it and you've got a deadline in a bit but the programme isn't working and so you start opening up loads of different other programmes to try and figure out why the programme's not working and you restart it and so you halt the programme being able to to work and you just keep resouting it and you keep trying to do stuff but really what you need to do is probably just leave it for a bit and come back later even though you want to do it but I think very much when you're in the midst of that there's cortisol and adrenaline spikes everything in your mind and your body is telling you to work on it and try and get it sorted so that you can relax when as you said sometimes it's a lot of the time when you're in those situations it's good to step back because although it gives you more energy and you're more focused it also impacts your cognitive function your ability to think clearly and think over stuff slowly and problem solve is needed for those complex tasks yeah stepping back taking a breath can feel really illogical so there's no shame in it whatsoever that people continue doing it and there's no shame in burnout it takes me about an hour two hours sometimes like stepping back from something that first hour is always the hardest because I feel like everything could be solved by me completing this task brute force brute force problem solving yes it feels great exhausting and not always the best option no I did I guess we've talked about sort of your and my personal experience with autistic burnout and some of the red flags and what the difference is between normal burnout and autistic burnout neurotypical yeah neurotypical burnout so I guess a question on a lot of people's minds is how do you know if it is burnout because a lot of the symptoms and feelings and level of functioning that you have during a burnout might be quite similar to things like depression hmm with all the things that we've talked about and all the feelings it's always going to vary for everyone right people are unique and every neurodivergent person is different that being said we do have similar shared experience and so if any of these symptoms sort of speak to you and as autistic people we do tend to research autism quite a lot so I'm imagining this is one in the many of resources that people are visiting if they're interested in the topic as to your question about the difference between depression and anxiety it doesn't necessarily have to be one just because they go hand in hand what does make burnout different is looking at those causes of the energy looking at the different parts of your life and depression might be a part of that unless it's long term clinical depression but they are very very similar and anxiety at least in me is just a normal part of everyday life and it definitely definitely contributes to those causes of burnout massively it's such a drain of my energy everyday I think that's another thing that we perhaps missed out when we were talking about the contributors to burnout because mental health is very very common isn't it for autistic people especially that those anxiety related things I think I think for me the important distinguishing factor is that when it's very traditional when it's burnout there's different causes of being depressed as you were saying there's the psychological angle of things there's things to do with your neurochemicals there's sometimes existential philosophical reasons for becoming depressed and then there's also the situational aspects which I think a lot of people who say that they've been depressed before have experienced some stuff related to work related to life things breaking down causing you to jump into a period of time where you're depressed now for someone like me perhaps is a lot more psychological and neurochemical now I was diagnosed with clinical depression it's something that I've lived with for 13 years it's not something that's brought on specifically by my circumstances although it can contribute sometimes to burnout sort of in the long run and might sort of tolerance for things so I definitely say the situational aspect is important to know like looking back on the time before you got into depression or burnout has there actually been like a cascading building up effect of anxiety or mental health over a long period of time absolutely and because I didn't have a mechanism to release all of that energy or find ways to stop myself getting into the burnout then it was always getting worse I suppose as well you know there's that whole thing about depression you have that catastrophizing lint what's it called lint helplessness with depression if you're feeling very much that you can't control this and you just seem to be going down and down it obviously leads to a lot of feelings of lint helplessness which lint to that experience of depression either way with all of this it's important not to make any assumptions about what it may or may not be and not to panic because either if it's through my own choices of I have chosen to overwork because I wanted to I have chosen to not to overdo my rest or I have chosen whatever if it's my choices or if it's external factors there's so many things going on in our lives that we just can't control and a lot of them are really awful so if it's that or if it's genuinely genetic like it is in so many people with all three of those things a portioning blame to it isn't going to help yeah and so much like we were talking about earlier about taking the time to step away and breathe for a second you've got to do that again just take a minute to stop and think of all the things on your mind which are making you overwhelmed just looking at all the things that are going on whether that's any tasks or responsibilities in your environment because if you're in an environment that is not conducive to you being autistic where you're being shamed for any of your traits being forced to mask a lot more the sensory elements of it are difficult then that is all going to make make you feel awful it's important just to stop and assess your situation and it it doesn't matter if it's because of burnout if it doesn't matter if it's because of depression or it's still going to help stopping you won't make a mistake by stopping yeah I think that that's really important although it can be useful to kind of go through when look at some like resource and stuff it could just be as simple as getting your notes page out and thinking about all the things that you're worried about and things that you have responsibilities for and just kind of seeing it like laid out and just thinking is this something that I would give to someone I love to do something that would be conducive to them having a a good time absolutely I make a list of stressors and absolutely everything from the clothes that I'm wearing currently one of my socks is a bit funky oh boy got the seams too too much of an inseam I took my clothes off earlier so I took them off and everything's fine now but anything from socks to big picture thinking about work uncertainty can be a big deal for us so writing all of that out that's recommended in the how to calm your mind book and there the author was saying that about two thirds of these are generally external yes however for me I found that overwhelmingly all of my stressors were internal they were caused generally by me putting a lot of pressure on myself me not scheduling in breaks my own high values and the way that I expect myself to behave I wouldn't expect other people to behave in the same way of not making mistakes you literally can't not make mistakes so all of that it was a real eye opener really about the way how I treat myself and like you said I wouldn't really give that list to do to another person yeah even if you thought they were incredibly competent there's a lot of stuff to deal with I guess one of the good things to perhaps go into is like what about the preventative strategies whether you are you know building up to a bare now and accomplishment whether you're building yourself up to a bare now or you are actually within a bare now what kind of strategies or thinking or like lenses do or framing tools do you use to help yourself in those situations yeah 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 8 hours a day yeah 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-legged stool it's basically the way that you can imagine your life as a stool so 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 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 a bit 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 stabilise yourself on there exactly if you're doing wall sets and stuff 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 you're 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 so it was my school one of them was sport I did a lot of frisbee all my advocacy work all my nature work all my autism work everything part of those wasn't a friend and family 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 was working 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 microbes, no thank you so that then made my entire so I did my degree in how my condolences and admiration at the same time immunology, parasitology 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 were so I didn't feel like I had a choice thinking about how I needed to rearrange my store really really helped so that I've got friends and family separate and we still do things separate to the other two things so there you go trying to think about what my my legs would be I think there's always been through my life I guess yeah three different pillars of things that I do I think one of them is definitely youtube just 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 to be another pillar and then the last pillar is some kind of sport or exercise like yourself I guess I definitely I do need to figure out more ways of enjoying life I think it's just it's one of the 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 elixaphime obviously that's a big impact but also like SSRIs and medications that I'm on SSRIs 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 it's the way we're raised to be the system that makes us that way and we'll get onto how I've changed my success evaluation in a little bit 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 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 and those transitions aren't easy for me they take a lot of experience each of them so just practically speaking I'm a big fan of maths 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 the community lies and where you're getting the most value from and if we've done stop we've 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 drawbacks but it's instead I 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 because even that 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're supposed to do what it could be as simple as something like having a car and using a car that's such a big thing for a lot of people you should be independent you should be able to go places your own stuff around food perhaps instead of buying individual ingredients for food sometimes you don't always have the energy to do that little things that make you individual 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 addressing that internalised ableism is a lifelong journey and I accept that and where I'm at now is that I'm trying to take my own struggles seriously and accepting my needs and behaviours 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 it turns out two of the five or six people that I talk 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 there's a whole wide world of autistic people out there and it 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 just going off when you were talking about 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 internalized ableism or stigma or stereotypes around various things you can get so much relief and so much it's not necessarily a real big thing it could be as simple as getting some earbuds or getting some noise cancel listening to more music or wearing shades adjusting your environment so that you've got nice orange colored 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 find jeans extremely difficult to wear do you really need to wear jeans a lot no unless you're going out on a night out and some clubs will let you in because you don't have jeans on but I can't go to clubs I've given up on them I'm more of a crochet lady myself anyway yeah absolutely reducing sensory stimuli is a big part of my recovery plan I just need to give myself space to be without any of those sensory issues or masking so all the things that you mentioned there wearing the comfort clothes but also things like eating safe foods I've got a list because during burnout I will forget what food I've liked it's on the inside of my fridge because the outside has my illustration so the inside like it's frozen you just every time I open the fridge there's a list of the food that I can always always in my pantry because otherwise I will forget yeah so 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 yogurts 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 if your other dates was they should agree 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 proponent of smash instant mashed potato some people it's a malmite situation some people hate it some people love it but it's always there for me yeah so yeah anything just to reduce this energy stimuli I know that I probably won't be able to deal with crunchiness so smooch it is no that's not the word mash mash it is yeah smooch I think that there's a lot of other things that 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 you know I have a podcast which is a bit far back where I talked to I want to tell you books Natasha about sort of sensory environments and sensory supports and within that we were we gave 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 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 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 for me the biggest stim that I do is go to the gym because it's a the stipular it's proprioceptive I get to listen to music so it's auditory as well and 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 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 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 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 ties 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 life long journey especially as my needs evolve as I try new things as my special interest change you know it's a joy a 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 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 that you talked about sort of divvying up energy because there's quite a common analogy theory people have 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 I've 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 about it through its Wikipedia page surprisingly it's got a great Wikipedia page I do remember that 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 5% 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 analogy works a bit better because you can understand that oh today my phone is draining very quickly yes 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 um like I'll have some like 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 calms me down I've got like this really tough chewing gum that I can use if I need some aura motor stimulation um and if I'm a bit bored I can kind of look out the window and just see what's happening outside so it's I suppose at the same time as giving rest which is something that I need to work on I think you can also do a lot to reduce the impacts of like things that that don't need to be an issue mm-hmm 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 the 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 it's reducing commitments and it can be awful saying no to meetings if you've not ever put yourself first yeah believe me I've been then but reducing commitments is essential so that you can then avoid those spikes in energy use especially if they're unexpected now I've got 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 very passionate about 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 about 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 privileged to be able to do that so it would be very high up my keep list obviously whereas other things like my neighbourhood 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 is 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 say 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 thinking of me there's indirect message of indirect methods of saying no to things 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 format of thank you for thinking of me I am currently unable to do this thing or generally no thank you not today goodbye all sorts of that those phrases 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 but it's part of the reason why I 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 translating and trying to fit into other people's way of communicating and being and I have done that in some cases with people but I think there's 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 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 over here then fluffing it up yeah and that's the same with a lot of other areas of my life it's you know I feel more confident in kind of advocating for how I like to have relationships and communicating things and there's some places where I compromise but I think in general you know it's sometimes good to stick to what feels good especially if you're burnt out you don't really have a choice I mean like you do have a choice to continue it but it's much easier to be aware and stick 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 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 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 nothing about me it's just the way life is I mean in a rut it's not a personality trait it's not that you just aren't capable of dealing with life it's just you need to shift it towards a way 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 all that's needed and asking for help is important because that's what friends are for right I helped so many people but really struggled to reach out so I've got a few ways in which I have learnt to do that one of them is something that a study mentor taught me do delegate, dump or delay for every task you can either do the task but unburnt out I can't do anything 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 onions dump just don't do it and don'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 it's less like internal, emotionally internal it's like I need help no I'm just delegating a task exactly it's efficient, it's business-like I can do this and that's a really important distinction between the types of help is emotional and practical 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 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 recently I had experience where I asked a really good friend for emotional support because I had 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 this 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 at them everything and then when you stop doing they're 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 doesn't make sense to them they kind of forget that you're a 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 professional and it really helps understand yourself better and pick everything going on in your head you can be a lot more selfish as well and feel okay about it like in terms of what you're talking who you're talking about and you know 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 how I learning how to treat myself as an autistic person learning how to work with myself rather than against myself in daily everyday life then also dealing with big pictures things I've moved country in the last year I've changed job entered into the workforce and then dealing with saying no to all the other stuff I was doing previously it's just a lot to process plus you've got all the external factors that inevitably everybody is going to have to to deal with it in their life 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 it's an integral part of setting yourself up for success so for success for me it's sustainability I want to recognise 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 be able to deal 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 how many website visits and social media followers there's so many ways of measuring it quantitatively and it makes it really easy and 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 it doesn't work like that in reality no so the alternative to that is quality and thinking about the quality of the things you're doing connection is a really big one for me thinking about enough and balance 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 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 with my art there's no such thing as enough or quality it's just being purely is enough and so calendaring 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 that I'm learning to do and thinking about what I care about just in a way being straight with myself being straight with myself and stopping when I feel like I need to do brilliant awesome well we've been talking for a while I think it might be good to kind of wrap things up it's been really lovely to talk to you Vera I'm just wondering did I tell you about the song of the day aspect of things or is that something that I lost song of the day what's that usually I ask my guests which I haven't been doing usually I ask my guests to think of a song which means something to you or something related to the podcast or I've got one okay I need to find what it's called though okay it's called Vienna Vienna and it's literally about slow down you're doing fine by Billy Joel yes cool awesome well that song Vienna from Billy Joel will be down in the playlist song of the day playlist that you can always find right at the bottom of the description I think what I want to do as well as that is I know that you do a lot of online related things so if my listeners can listen to this and they want to check out more of your stuff where would be the best place to go to we are on instagram happy autistic lady but we've also got a website where we've got a few free resources including talking about Burnout and as I please do follow us on instagram it's great to have people during the community and it's just a nice way for documenting everything I've learnt since starting happy autistic lady and sharing ideas and ways of being awesome brilliant and if you have enjoyed this podcast thus far please make sure to give it a rate if you are on any of the podcast streaming services apple podcast google spotify whatever really really does help and also give it a like if you're ever on youtube consider subscribing for weekly episodes all about autism and neurodiversity and if you want to get in touch with me you can always find my link links down in the description can find my email on there it's like a little like on at the top and if you want to check out my website see all the stuff that I offer check out the consultancy and coaching that kind of thing that is also in the link tree down below links and lastly social media come follow me on instagram see what I'm up to on the daily check out the daily blogs that I do over on instagram and yeah I guess one of the last things I want to ask is have you enjoyed your faulty experience Vera? I really have thank you so much for inviting me it's been a really good prompt for me to think about all of the work I've done on this topic in the last many many years and how that's all developed and how much I've developed with my understanding of the fact that I am autistic it's also given me a great opportunity to reach out to friends and talk about it more and if that's taught me anything you're not alone brilliant well I hope you have enjoyed this episode too thank you very much to Vera and hope you all have a good day I'll see you in another episode next week on the 40 Autie podcast see you later guys