 The 40 Autie Podcast. 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 it. I mention it every episode that I can. You need to get yourself a bingo card for listeners. Yeah, put like a little counter in there. How many times has Thomas mentioned Alexithymia? Alexithymia, there you go. So, Alexithymia, with my difficulty in identifying and describing my feelings, I've got a little emotions wheel 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, all 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? If I start getting anxious, then I get little ones. If I have a meltdown or something, they get 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. 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. They're still elated. So, you know, we work together. Yeah. 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 rereading 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, which is interesting. 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 might be just at the empathy aspect of it because you kind of, you feel a lot more because it's something that 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 all right. 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 that the company, the road to burnout for me are sort of forgetting what makes me happy and feeling meaningless, just being overwhelmed more easily and getting more meltdowns. And I know that if I ignore all the behaviors 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 that I 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 sensitive. Sounds of low immune system. Because it does anxiety and cortisol and things like that. They do affect your body in a lot of different ways. Definitely. And so these are, 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, okay, 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, I think, 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 You're 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 favorite interests, my favorite 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 utilize 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 a bit funny talking to some parents about it because 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 and get into rest mode. But in terms of burnout, for me, 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 times 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. I want to move. I just can't. I'm just locked into the environment that I'm in and not able to transition both from rest to work but also from work to rest to sleep. So all of those things are kind of compiling over each other 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 a 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. Just reaching the top of your limits. Whereas usually 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, okay, this task is low priority. This task has high priority but I'm going to find it difficult so I'm going to ask a 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 out all the struggles trying to do everything at once and clearly 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 that 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 that we don't have that empathy for ourselves and we don't stop and just 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 and pause. But same like a drowning person they're going to be thrashing their arms around when actually what they need to do is just put their arms under water and just breathe but that takes practice and is terrifying because it doesn't feel like it's the right thing to do. 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-solving to get out of a stressful situation. And as I said might be good in a very simple situation where your life's in danger sounds a bit weird me saying that but 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 impedes impacts your cognitive function you're related to think clearly and think over stuff slowly and problem solve is needed for those complex tasks Yeah Stepping back taking your 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 will stop really 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 it feels great exhausting and not always the best option nooo I did it