 Hello my beautiful people! Welcome back to another video with smooth talking Thomas Hainley. Today we're going to be talking about autism, aspergers, and burnout. What it is, why it differs from autistic people to neurotypical people, and why you should know about it for your daily life and for your stress-free relaxing time on the surf. Oh very pretentious. Okay let's get into the video. So today I'm going to be talking about what burnout is in general, why it differs from autistic burnout, and I'm going to give you a few analogies of... not analogies, what's the word? I'm going to give you a free... I'm having a burnout now. I'm going to give you a few stories of the burnouts that I have, when it occurs, how I know that it's coming on, and I'm also going to give you some tips on how you can avoid burnout and stop yourself from getting overwhelmed and having a meltdown in public, because that's not a fun thing to do. No it's not. So burnout is described as a state where you are mentally exhausted. This can be from anything from anxiety, working too hard and not sleeping enough, not eating well, not doing any exercise, not having a very high amount of energy, maybe you're suffering with anemia or something, and you need some bit of B12 and some iron. Anything like that is going to contribute to a burnout, and what burnouts feel like is it's not always relaxing to have a burnout. Let's just get this out of the way, but you do have a significant drop in your energy, not physically, although it can kind of bleed over to that, but it's mentally, so it's very taxing to do any thinking anymore because you've done too much. You've done too much thinking and you've burned all your energy supplies, your brain needs to go into shutdown mode, maybe it's the middle of the day, and you can't do anything. You're flat, you could put, you've run out of gas. So as well as feeling sort of worn out, you can also feel very emotional, you can get a bit angry and irritable and mean to people when you're in the state, you could be prone to outbursts of crying, and I've got no idea what the, there's a lot of things that could happen, but it's sort of like losing a grip on your own brain, and there's nothing you can do about it because you are your brain, and in order for you to do things and help your brain, you need to think and that uses energy, so you're sort of in a cyclical cycle where you can't do anything but mellow out and just try not to do anything. When it comes to burnouts in autistics, as with the video that I did on anxiety, where I talked about all the sensory issues and the social issues, burnout happens a lot quicker in autistic people and it's very hard to catch just when you're doing too much because of the emotional perception component of autism. It's very, very long word, sounds very scientific, it's not, I'm just stringing words together like a loony. Burnouts for autistics generally occur from social interaction or they occur from periods of time in a very overwhelming environment or environment, you know, like an environment that's too loud, too many lights, too many people talking or talking to you, all of those things can contribute to a burnout. An example of a burnout in my own life would be when I go to taekwondo competitions, so when I go to these competitions, I'm already in a state of anxiety, you know, because I've got to fight, I've got to take someone on, I've got to beat them up and there's a lot of stress and that, you know, with stress comes a lot of thinking and overthinking and worrying. In this state, I'm not very good, I don't talk that much, I don't make eye contact, I'm quite focused what people would call it, I just think of it as being withdrawn to save energy, but taekwondo competitions are particularly notorious for spiking up my anxiety. Even when I'm not fighting, if I go to these places, I hate it. Taekwondo atmospheres, if you haven't been to one before, usually in a sports hall with very, very powerful white lights, so that's the visual component, the sensory visual drains your brain, just makes you feel uncomfortable. The noise, lots of people shouting, lots of people shouting when they kick and stuff, making those taekwondo-ish noises and there is also a lot of people, so a lot of people that you know around making eye contact with you, starting conversations on a nearly constant basis and there's not really any way of getting around it unless you go out of the venue that we have for the competitions. And you can't really do that if you're fighting, so I often got very burnt out in these situations, particularly when I was expected to be in them, if I was preparing for a fight, I needed to be in that area, so a lot of these these burnouts occurred and then I wasn't able to sort of calm myself down and emotionally regulate because my brain was so fried from all the sensory experiences that I was having, and I would have a lot of meltdowns in competitions, so it was quite a common occurrence for me when I was fighting just because of the environment, typically. So that was the first sort of burnout that I've had. You can also get social burnout. There was one time where I went to a festival in Thailand called Jaitet Festival. We went to there and we camp there for three days, which means that I was around my friends with no way of sort of giving myself some time. They wanted to go out in the morning quite early. As soon as I woke up I got out and went and did stuff for us, I just lose them for the whole time I was miss out on the festival. And then at night we'd be dancing and stuff into the into the early hours of the morning. A lot of people, a lot of noises, a lot of lights everywhere, all the time. Throughout the whole day I slowly sort of lost touch with my own brain. I had burnout, social burnout. Social burnout is quite a big thing for us. For a lot of people who haven't sort of built up their tolerance to socialising and haven't got comfortable with socialising enough for them to stay in those environments for a long time, it can literally be the space of maybe one or two hours. If you're in, if you're maybe in half an hour, depends on the person, depends on the anxiety levels, depends on the environment. So when I would go for drinks with my friends at the pub, this is another example, I would often take breaks just to go outside or go to the toilet. I'd sit in the toilet for maybe five or ten minutes, recuperate my brain, get myself back to normal functionality and stop myself from having meltdowns and being burnt out and being unsociable when I'm around my friends, which is a big thing. It's okay to be like that on your own, but with you're in a group and people are like, oh, are you not talking that much and stuff? It can make some assumptions and stuff, you know. And it can affect your social life. So there's two examples. When I was a kid, typical example for autistic kids, supermarkets, noises, lights, people. Can't get out of it. It's very big, lots of people. And it's very stressful. And that's why a lot of kids can have temper tantrums, which are not really temper tantrums, they're just being overwhelmed and having meltdowns. That's quite a common occurrence for autistic kids. Not everyone. Everyone's different. But there's a lot of stuff out there that show that it's hard for autistic kids to go to places like that. And so they have these different schemes and stuff to give autism friendly hours for people on the spectrum to go and shop. And that's great. So now I've talked about the my stories of burnout. Now I'm going to tell you about how you can help stop this. One of the problems that we as people on the spectrum have is that we're very poor at emotional regulation. We're very poor at keeping ourselves in a stable condition, emotionally in very stressful environments. Now this is a combination of the sensory aspects, the social aspects coming in for the giving you a high level of anxiety. But it's also the fact that we can't perceive our emotions at the same degree as other people. I've always said this. I've said this quite a lot before, but we only really perceive them at a level that we can see. We can sort of go, oh, I feel that when it's too much, when we have panic attacks, when we have meltdowns. That's why meltdowns happen so much in kids. It's very hard for kids to understand what they feel. Same for adults, just love training and stuff can help with that. So taking all that into account, you need to make sure that when you go into an environment, when you go into a work environment where there's maybe a lot of people and you may be stressed about a project, that's another thing. Working, if you get stressed about not doing it perfectly or not doing it in a certain time frame or something interrupting your workflow and your schedule, that can lead to a lot of burnout because you think about it a lot. Whenever your schedule is disrupted, it makes you feel really uncomfortable and affects you really badly. So the best thing to do in a workplace, if you're at work or maybe just at school, is you need to talk to the people who are a part of that. If they know that you have autism, you may want to not do this if you're in a job, if they don't know that you have autism, but it's always good if it's on, if it's there, if everyone knows about it, you should tell people who dictate your work and who manages you so that you can get breaks when you need it. You need, if you have some very small feeling that you feel like your anxiety is rising, don't dismiss it. You need to fix it, you need to go take a break. It's very hard to do, it takes a lot of practice to notice the physical sensations. We can feel the physical sensations quite well, the changes to our body, the tension from anxiety, we just don't know that we're anxious. So if you've managed to pick up when stuff is getting too much for you, then you can take steps to give yourself a break, give yourself a breather, take yourself out of a stressful situation and sort yourself out. So I hope you found all of this very helpful and not at all patronizing, because I always feel like I'm being a little bit patronizing when I'm teaching people, say again, teaching God, helping people, still a little bit, a little bit less patronizing. There's no escape. Anyway, have you got any experiences with burnout? How did you deal with it? Let me know, put it down in the comments. If you like the video, make sure to hit the like button so that I know that you like it and I can make more of the stuff that you like rather than what I like, because that's the main goal, you're watching it, I'm not watching it, I'm only watching it when I edit it. Okay, good, good, good, good. And if you want to see some more stuff by me on autism, mental health, self-help, philosophy a little bit, make sure I hit the subscribe button to get my full package and make sure to hit the little notification bell, ding, ding, ding. And that'll make sure that you get notifications when my very irregular videos come out. I'm very sorry about that, but it's got to be irregular, it's got to be. I'm going to try it, I'm going to try to be regular. I'm not talking about bowel movements. Anyway, see you guys later. Hope you're having a good day. Hope you're feeling good. I'll see you guys, you howdy partners in the next video. See you later, folks. Feeling a bit burnt out? Am I going to listen to myself? Or am I going to let it affect my health?