Recovery from Autistic Burnout

hi everyone welcome back to asperger's from the inside you're here with paul i make weekly videos sharing the human side of autism so make sure you hit subscribe to get the latest content so this week's video is on recovering from burnout so you may or probably may not have noticed that i didn't release a video last week and that's because i've just taken nearly two weeks off because i had to i woke up on wednesday morning and realized that there was absolutely no way that i was going to get through the rest of my week so i lay awake at 4am in the morning planning all the emails that i was going to send to cancel all of my appointments that day and it was really hard it was a really hard decision to make and reality to accept that i really had to cancel what seemed to be really important i felt like i was letting people down because i'd made an appointment and i had to cancel it fortunately by the time i actually sent the emails i i got a reply almost straight away saying yes of course that's no problem we can reschedule etc so that was nearly two weeks ago and i realized that i had to take a significant amount of time off i already felt burnt out to use that word fairly lightly the week before i got to thursday and it was already really really hard and i thought that's it i'm going to take the rest of today off thursday friday saturday sunday surely that's going to be enough for me to feel okay it clearly wasn't enough i thought four days would be fine four days sounds like a lot but what i have learned with my own energy and my own tendency towards burnout is i usually need at least twice as much as i optimistically think i need it's so hard to justify to myself to not fulfill the commitments that i've already that i've already agreed to that i i find myself being overly optimistic okay okay i know i need to do something my body is telling me that enough is enough i know i need to do something what if i do this and this and this knowing full well that it's not going to be anywhere near enough but i just really hope that i really hope that four days would be enough but come monday morning clearly that was not gonna not gonna happen i managed to push myself another two days and then ended up taking the rest of the next two weeks off so why why am i telling you this i guess one of the reasons is because it's so much easier to tell to give this advice to someone else than it is to take it for myself so i just wanted to recognize that even though it's an intellectually it's intellectually it's a no-brainer of a decision that if i am not productive at all if i turn on my computer and within five minutes i'm already struggling to to read the screen because my eyes are so blurry i need a break that's an that's a no-brainer but from an emotional perspective it's hard to bring myself to take the time that i know intellectually i need especially when the time that i know intellectually that i need is a long time and it seems very very hard to justify you suddenly there's all these secondary thoughts like surely i don't really need two full weeks off surely there must be another way or alternatively why am i why is this such a problem for me this should not be a problem for me i wanted to find a way to to to change the way that i work so that i don't have this problem anymore and none of those thinking styles are particularly helpful at the time another reason that it is very important for me at least to decide in advance how long i'm going to need to take is because it's hard to know if the rest is working one day in two days in i still feel the same or alternatively sometimes after just a very very brief rest suddenly i feel fine again this is great i thought i needed two weeks it turns out i only needed one day and now i feel great i feel refreshed actually what's happening is i feel fantastic because i no longer feel overwhelmed i'm still incredibly stressed i'm still at my limit it's just that i'm this much on the good side of my limit which feels great compared to this much on the bad side of my limit that feels like overwhelming and things like that so it's difficult to trust how i feel in the moment which means that i have to trust my decision of how long to take off and then even if i feel better even if i don't feel better just do it i know that i need the time off and then when i get to work on monday morning like this morning sometimes i still feel terrible and i'm thinking do i need another week off i've already ignored people for two weeks what's another day what's another week maybe i should take more time off and that's because i don't know there's no way for me to actually tell what my state is until i go back to work until i test it again so i guess the the moral of the story for me is that long breaks are necessary uh i have quite a long transition time i can't just take one night off and expect that to do anything i need to take several days at least two or three days in a row to allow my brain the time to slowly unwind and to slowly relax and to actually appreciate the the um restorative value of having that time off whereas if i just take an afternoon off or an evening off or one or two days off then it just doesn't have time to actually de-stress and and recover in any way so the cues for me are that when the cycles until i hit my limit are getting shorter and shorter and shorter i used to be able to do two weeks and then i could do one week and now i can do three days and now i can do one day and now i can do five minutes before i feel like i'm back to my limit again it's just like i'm not i'm not i'm not resting the rest is not actually restorative in any way and that's when i know i need to take a significant amount of time off in this case two weeks and i'm just hoping this is the first thing i've done coming back just telling you about it and i really hope that when i get back stuck into it that i'm going to be able to feel the benefits of the restorative properties of actually taking that time off and i guess another thing when it comes to taking time off is it's not a real break if you don't actually reduce the amount of commitments so i had to drop some things imagine if i instead of dropping some things i just let them pile up and now after two weeks the first thing i'm hit with is two weeks worth of undone stuff that i need to catch up on that is a recipe for diving straight into burnout again the reason that i reached my limit was because i was doing too much and not quite keeping up with it and when that happens for an extended period of time not quite keeping up not quite keeping up not quite resting enough then then it builds up and it needs it needs some some release and some time to to recover from that so if i were to go back and try and read two weeks worth of unread emails and try and respond to them with as much effort and energy as i was previously then what's the point of my two weeks off i'm just going to burn myself out in a day trying to catch up on all the stuff that i'm going to be doing so it's really hard to give ourselves permission but it's also in my opinion incredibly important especially for for for long-term productivity if those cycles are getting shorter and shorter and shorter then that's a bad trajectory i need to do something about that trajectory as soon as possible and unfortunately heartbreakingly sometimes it involves letting stuff go um the plus side is that it also involves allowing myself to say yes to the things that i would enjoy doing the things that would give me energy that i didn't think i had time for before so suddenly i was hit in the face with two weeks worth of time and time and time and lots and lots of time and nothing to do with it in lockdown here in melbourne this past couple of weeks that's been fun um and it's allowed me to look at what are the things that actually give me energy rest is not well recovery and recuperation is not just about rest it's not just about taking away the stressful things which is important but it's also about doing the restorative things what gives me energy what do i have more energy after doing than i did before doing so things like exercising things like phone calls and socializing for me actually getting some some some mental stimulation and social stimulation is really helpful um and sometimes when i'm in that really exhausted state that is when i'm most sensitive to noticing these things like i have lights here at the moment right i i always have them um it it's a necessary part of the process it doesn't bother me too much however if they are if i'm really tired suddenly lights bother me a lot if i'm really tired suddenly sounds and annoying things bother me a lot and what's happening there what's going on there they do they are not costing me more energy than they do normally the only difference is i have no energy to pay for it if someone says uh you need 20 cents otherwise you're not going to eat today if you don't have 20 cents it doesn't it doesn't matter how low the cost is if you don't have it so um for me that is really helpful information learning about myself learning what gives me energy and what takes away energy even the stuff that takes such a small amount of energy that i don't normally notice it because i've usually got plenty and it doesn't really matter it helps me to design a life where i have more of the stuff that gives me energy and less of the stuff that unnecessarily takes my energy away anyway i should probably leave it there um this video has been about recovery and and restoring and resting uh after burnout so if you have a story or um what burnout looks for you i'd love to hear what that is in the comments um and otherwise thanks for watching thanks for your patience thank you to everyone who was so accommodating for me allowing me and encouraging me to give myself permission to to take a break that's incredibly helpful emotionally and i will see you all next week thanks bye you

Channel: Autism From The Inside

Views: 78,196

Keywords: asperger syndrome (disease or medical condition), real life aspergers, coping strategies aspergers, aspergers emotional intelligence, autism emotional intelligence, autism communication, Recovery from burnout, Recover from burnout, How long to recover from burnout, Autistic burnout recovery, Burnout recovery plan, How to prevent autistic burnout, How to prevent burnout, How to destress, Paul Micallef, mental health, autism, autistic, autism in adults, mental health awareness

Id: Qy1FLm0oIAc

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021