 The Thoughty Autie podcast. 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 maybe not just what the contents 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. And you're an evening person. I have a solid night owl and there's just no getting away from it. I've been through a stance 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 workout in at the start of the day, like yourself, maybe. I'm holding my hands up now. I am a morning person regrettably. My body weighs 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. You've been a bartender. Oh my God. I've been a horrible 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, 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, there's 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 go 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 adequately, 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 life. 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 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. Sometimes 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 to, I would definitely like to talk about towards the end. It's difficult, isn't it? 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, very much dwindling, especially for like the younger generation. I think that's a big, big contributor. Yes. You know, yeah. You say 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.