What’s different? 

Someone asked me what I’m doing differently in my business this time that made the difference so that I can work without burnout now. And the answer is pretty much everything, and not a lot at the same time.

Hi, I’m Heather of Autism Chrysalis, and I want to share the answer to this question and also let you know that I’m putting on a course starting soon—May 2nd—on how to do this: How to structure a business that is neurodivergent-friendly and sustainable, so that you can keep working for as long as you choose to without burnout.

Okay, so I’ve run five businesses over the last 20 years, and I’ve learned more each time about making it more sustainable, but this one was a significant improvement. Not just an incremental, less terrible version. 

This time I’ve worked for myself for six years without even getting close to burnout, and there were two really critical things that changed everything for me.

Thing #1: Making things work for me

The first is that I prioritized figuring out how to make it work in a way that works for me, over following standard advice.

When I first started this business, I thought of that as prioritizing my health, both my physical health and my mental health. But over time, I realized that what I was really doing was figuring out how I worked, and what created positive outcomes for my body, my mind, and the life that I liked.

It doesn’t matter what other people say should work for you, or whether it works for other people. Whether to-do lists work for them or they don’t. Which project tracking tools work for them. What marketing strategies work for them. What statistics to track on your YouTube channel. 

What matters is what works for you. 

What matters to me now is that I do things in a way that I care about, in a way that is healthy for me and healthy for my clients, and that doesn’t have to look like what a lot of mainstream business advice says it should look like.

And at the same time, it’s not really *that* far off. It’s not like I’m doing something completely foreign to humanity or modern business. It’s more that I’ve let go of a lot of the guilt and the blame and the shoulds and the shame and the comparisons–that I should use subconscious triggers to close more sales. Or that I should create a false sense of urgency or scarcity to drive faster (and incidentally less well-thought out) decisions. Or that I should be charging more money (I have had that conversation with so many business advisors, and yes, I am charging less than other coaches with my experience and training and the results that I get for my clients, and they think that I’m devaluing myself, but I’m not, it’s a strategic decision).

Like, all of that–I don’t need to do that, and I still get plenty of clients who are very happy with my style.

How I make things work

Another example is: I don’t have to present myself in a particular way. I don’t have to dress like a therapist. I don’t have to wear makeup. I thought I did at the beginning, and I tried, and it was just like I wanted to claw my face off all the time.

I want to wear clothes that I’m comfortable in. And I want my environment to be comfortable for me, because I’m spending a lot of time here. It doesn’t have to look like a magazine, and interestingly, it actually does look quite pretty, and I get a lot of compliments about my painted trees. But it doesn’t have to. I’m not doing it because of some image–it’s just what I like. And I like pretty things. I like comfortable spaces. I like earth tones. I like spaces that make me sigh in relief. I like soft knits.

Another example, I don’t see clients before 10am, because I am not a morning person. I gave up years ago trying to force myself into standard business hours–eight to five or whatever. Screw that. Who cares, right?

You can’t schedule with me before 10am my time, because I will be up about an hour before that at the earliest. My body naturally wakes up around eight, and then it takes me about an hour to wake up enough to willingly get out of bed. Around nine, nine-thirty-ish, I’m actually awake enough—my body has done its hour-long wake-up process—and I’m happy to get out of bed and do things. I don’t set an alarm clock either. I haven’t set one in years, except maybe one time I needed to take someone to the airport, but beyond that, I won’t set an alarm clock, and I don’t need to anymore. 

Because my body is naturally ready to get up about that time. And then I don’t have to drag myself out of bed. And I’ve arranged my life to make that possible, not something that I’m trying to force myself to do that is against my nature.

Okay, so a lot of this is about getting rid of the internalized “I should do it this way,” or “I should be better at this,” or “I should be farther along,” or “I need to do this thing in order to have some particular outcome that I don’t even really care about, just because some people in my life, or general cultural messaging, says that I should want this.” 

So an important part of the way out of responding to those shoulds, and that messaging, is getting really clear on what you do actually want, what is actually important to you, and then make a beeline for that and chuck the rest. I know it’s not as easy as just doing that, but that’s basically the idea. And I’m going to get into how to do that in excessive detail in my course on self-employment without burnout.

Thing #2: Teaching my nervous system

Here’s another critical thing that I did differently in this business.

And the first couple of years were very much like that. That was very intentionally my purpose. It wasn’t really about making money, although that was important, of course. But it was really about creating the systems, creating the foundation, being okay with working a little bit and not diving into working full time.

The first couple of years were really, really part time.

The first year, I was probably working 10 hours a week max, and I literally capped it at three hours of client time a week. That was an intentional cap. I set up my scheduling limits on my scheduling calendar to do that because I needed it, and I refused to go over that.

The second year I was working maybe 20 hours a week, and only half of that was client-facing. Because the point wasn’t to get more clients. The point was to prove to myself that I could do this in a different way. That I could work and not burn out for the first time in my life.

Because I knew that if I was ever going to be able to work continuously, that it would take that. I gave myself the grace to take some time for the first year or two to not actually make a whole lot of money or not work very much, because my project was a long-term project. I knew that if I was ever going to be able to continue working, it would take doing this. It would take teaching my nervous system that I could do this in a different way.

And that was more important to me long-term than making the money short-term.

The money helped. Money was important. But I was already living on so little that I knew I could keep doing that. Even if it sucked, even if it was really, really hard (and it was). But I could keep doing that because I had been doing that.

And if it took a little bit longer of living like that in order to teach myself that I could work differently, that would pay off for the rest of my life. And it was worth it to me.

Building up trust

So I slowly built up that capacity. It took a while, but I built up the capacity, I built up the trust in myself, and I got better at learning how to pay attention to myself and how to respond to my needs.

How to notice my body signals when I was deep in a project, when I was tunnel-visioned and hyperfocused on something. And how to actually pay attention to: “Oh, I’m getting kind of tired.” Or often it was more like, “I’m noticing I’m rubbing my eyes a lot. Maybe my eyes hurt. Oh, maybe I’m tired. Maybe I should stop.”

Doing that over and over slowly built trust that it would be okay and that I could do that. And the anxiety reduced.

About my course

This is what I’m going to be teaching how to do in my self-employment course, AuDHD Alchemy–how to teach your nervous system that it’s safe to work, and how to structure things that actually work for your brain, your nervous system, your body, your health needs, your values, and the life that you want to have. The things that you actually care about, whether or not they overlap in any way with normative ideals.

For more info on that course, go to autismchrysalis.com/alchemy, and there’s a post here describing it. And either way, I hope that some part of this answer was useful to you.

Wishing you a neurowonderful day.

The post 2 Things That Transformed My Business (6 Years Burnout-Free) appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

How do you get out?

One of the most common questions I get is some variation of, “how do you get out of autistic burnout, or build an Autistic life you feel good about, when you have all of these responsibilities and/or people around you are not supportive?”

There’s a lot that could go into answering that, and there’s definitely layers and nuances and it will be somewhat different for different people, but a lot of it really comes down to one critical thing. And without this one thing, all of those other strategies and help and ideas won’t be nearly as effective as they could be.

Want to know what that is?

Dissolving internalized ableism.

Dissolving internalized ableism will free up the most amount of internal energy, and give you the most freedom, and it will support you in your ability to do everything else.

If you do that—and I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy—but doing even a little teeny tiny bit at a time, moving at the speed of trust, it will make the most difference out of everything else that you can and will ever do to improve your burnout, reduce rumination, improve relationships, and all the other parts of making a life you love to live.

Because it’s the internalized ableism that is pushing you to do things that you’re not OK with, and that gets on your case when you can’t do them as well as you think you should be able to, or that others thought you should be able to, or your hypervigilant safety system is trying to get you to do to protect you from potential consequences later.

And it’s the internalized ableism (among other things) that is telling you that you can’t ask for help, or that you can’t ask for accommodations, or that is blocking you from giving them to yourself even when there’s no need to interact with anyone else.

And it’s the internalized ableism that is scared of unmasking, or that paints unmasking as an all-or-nothing proposition with dangerous consequences.

And it’s the internalized ableism (among other things) that looks at every job description and freaks out, painting in your mind the most horrible version of what that job will be like, and puts your body through the stress of that imagined horrible scenario while you’re sitting at home, looking at your computer, and not actually dealing with that job yet.

And it’s the internalized ableism that tells you that you’re never going to succeed in a capitalist society and that there’s no hope for you until capitalism and the patriarchy and the current government (among other things) have all come tumbling down.

Again, I know there’s more going on than this, but this is a critical piece of the puzzle.

And that’s why I’m dedicating a whole workshop to how to identify internalized ableism and to start to root it out of your own thinking.

So that it doesn’t hold you back from making things better that you can make better. From doing things that you can do. From unmasking to the extent that you choose, when you choose. From providing yourself with your sensory accommodations when possible (and it’s more possible than the internalized ableism would lead you to believe).

The live workshop was November 8, but it was recorded and transcribed.

The post The Critical Secret To Getting Out Of Autistic Burnout appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Getting my thoughts together

Hi there. This is Heather with Autism Chrysalis, and I’d like to reflect for a moment on this burnout recovery course that I’m creating called Beyond Autistic Burnout. And this is going to be a free form post, I’ve not scripted this particularly. I have some thoughts about what I want to say, but it’s going to be a little bit more ramble-y than some of my other posts. So it is what it is.

As I’ve been making this, I’ve been working on it roughly for about a year and a half, and especially the last several months, I’ve been really, really diving into it and trying to get together all of my thoughts around burnout and create this system that’s been developing in me for several years, but really refine it, and really get to the core of what it is, and refining it enough that it can be presented to other people and actually make sense in their heads, not just in my head.

Understanding the resistance

So it’s one thing for me to talk about burnout in a general sense, even autistic burnout in a general sense, and to get some really specific, useful things to say about it. And that’s all coming from having far too much personal experience with being in what I call “the deep depths of burnout”, and all of the different stages coming out of it and recovering from it.

But when I’ve been really making the course materials, not just making notes about it (I’ve been making notes about it for ages, I’ve been putting down thoughts here and there, I’ve been kind of working out the system in my head, in a sort of general sense), but the last few months when I’ve been really making the materials itself, and especially in the last month or so that I’ve been making the slides for the first day’s workshop, it basically involves me having to go back to some of the worst times in my life, to really embody that (and that sucks), in order to not give your general pat answers to, “Oh yeah, you should just take some time off, take some bubble baths, get a babysitter.”

There’s a part of me that just wants to say, “screw you” to all of that advice, because, I mean, like I couldn’t figure that out? I need some time off? Do you really think that I didn’t figure that out yet?

But that’s never enough. It’s not really getting to the root of the issue. It’s not solving the burnout. And yes, when you can take some time off, that does help a little bit, but it’s not solving the issue. It’s just not piling on more. (And yet, sometimes it does pile on more, because when you take time off, there’s generally less income coming in, which creates financial stress, which just creates more stress and adds to the burnout in a different way than by working too much.)

Back in the burnout

So in order to solve for the equation, to figure out what actually works, I’ve had to put myself back into the place of when I was in the deep depths of burnout, when I was in that place where everything felt like too much, where every suggestion felt like “F you”, everything was just too hard, and everything took too many steps, like basic tasks were just overwhelming.

And then there’s that stage, that’s what I call the “deep depths”, but there’s also these other stages where it’s not maybe quite that bad, but it’s still just like, “come on”. Like, “I don’t have the energy for that. I dealt with other things today, I can’t do more.” And it just feels that there’s always too much to do, and you’re never gonna get caught up. You’re never gonna make any useful progress to it. Like, how do you do that? Or how do you get the motivation when you’re just like, “all I want to do is sleep for five years”.

Yeah, so going back to that place, that I haven’t been in a while, that’s been hard for me. And I know that I’m not actually in that mindset anymore, I’m not actually experiencing that anymore, and there’s this transition between my real life now, where I am able to do more, where I do have energy and motivation and I can work essentially full time – sort of.

Then vs. Now

And I’m also able to protect my rest. I’m able to say, “You know what, I’m pushing too much.” Or, “If I did this, it would be too much, so I’m not going to do that.” I’m not going to push here. I’m going to take time off. I’m going to take the evening off. I’m going to take the day off. I’m going to take half a day off. I’m going to go do this thing that is just for me, that is restorative. 

I’m going to do these things even while I’m working, even when I am putting in the effort. I’m doing it in ways that work differently. My mentality is different. How I’m thinking about things is different. How I’m approaching tasks is different. What I’m stressing about and what I’m not stressing about is different.

There’s a lot of things that I’m not stressing about anymore that I would have before, that would have been overwhelming to me, that just doesn’t matter as much anymore. Or it matters, but in a different way, like I’m thinking about things in a more relational way when I’m approaching people and when I’m talking with people. And sometimes I’ll slip back into old thoughts for a little while, but I’ll come back to it.

But what I want to say is that this transition – I’m living in this reality where I’m not in burnout, but I’m having to go back into those memories of burnout in order to create the course material – and the transitions between these have been kind of a bit of a whiplash and that’s where I’ve been getting a lot of resistance to it.

Like I feel like I need large amounts of protected space in order to be able to make the course materials. And the reality is that that’s hard to do sometimes, especially when there’s lots of other things going on. And so it’s been feeling hard, but I realized that thought of, “oh, I need large amounts of protected space”, that’s one of those burnout thoughts. That’s one of those feelings that I had when I was in the burnout, and in burnout that is real, but my actual reality now is that, “no, I don’t”.

And when I figured that out a couple of days ago, it was this sense of relief, of like, “Oh, that’s what’s been going on. That’s why it’s been hard for me to do this.” And I was able to give myself the grace of going, “Okay, I’m feeling and thinking some of the things that I used to think and feel that were true for me at the time, but they’re not true for me now.”

And, reminding myself of that, just these last few days I’ve gotten more done on the slides for the first day’s workshop than I have in the last month, because I recognized what’s happening, and I can give myself some grace around that.

And here’s the biggest part, that’s a prerequisite to what I’m about to describe, like you have to understand what’s going on, but then dealing with it in a different way. And this is one of the things that I’m going to be talking about early on in the course, is differentiating between “that was then, this is now”. Like, “I’m thinking those things, because that was true for me at that time, and my reality is different now. I don’t have to think that way. I don’t have to feel those things.” 

When the feelings come up, I acknowledge them, I remind myself, “This is why I’m feeling those things. And these are feelings that belong to a different time and a place.” And that pulls me into this present moment, and then I can feel the relief of “okay, this is my life now”.

Getting out

And this is exactly what I want to be teaching in this course. It can be different when you start getting more energy. When you start genuinely coming out of burnout, it’s not just “Okay, I have energy, and now I can go back and do all of those things, like my gigantic to-do list, and push in ways that I used to do.” No, that’s just going to get you back into another burnout.

And that’s what I used to do. That’s why I was in that cycle of burnout, where it was just one burnout after another, but it’s close to a decade since my last burnout, because this time I did it differently. It’s not just “get some energy, get a little motivation, then do stuff the same way again”. No, no, it’s doing things in a different way so that you don’t go into burnout again.

That’s what I really, really, really want to impart. That’s what I want to help you figure out, what’s your different way. And there’ll probably be some similarities to mine, but yours is going to be somewhat different. But the core of how you get there is the thing that I can teach.

Hope and reflection

So I guess what I’m trying to share here is two main things. One of them is hope that it can be different. And the second one, I guess, is more for me than for you, is just me reflecting for myself of why this has been hard, and why this has taken so long, and why I’ve had so much internal resistance to making it at the same time that I also really, really, really want to make this. 

This is the thing that comes up the most often with all of my clients. This is a thing that I coach people around the most often. Where I get the most questions around is this. It’s like, “How do you get out of autistic burnout? Like, how do you genuinely make it better?”

And I talk about a lot around autistic burnout, because I think that the ways that Autistics get into it, the reasons why we end up in it are different. But it’s not exclusive to autism. I think that there’s a lot of similarities with any neurodivergence or marginalized experience, or highly sensitive people. There’s a lot of overlap, especially if your sensory and social experiences of the world are a little bit out of what is the most common range.

Anyway, now I’m just rambling again.

I hope that something in this was useful for you, and if this strikes you as what you’ve been looking for, you’re welcome to join us in the course. You’ll be surrounded by other people that are going through the same types of things. It’s a group thing, in the sense that there’s multiple people doing it together, but it’s not group as in, like, “we’re going to go into breakout rooms, we’re going to find a partner, do team things”, eugh! None of that stuff.

But I hope there will be some sense of: I’m not in this alone. Other people are experiencing the same thing. I’m not the weird one out. No, we can all be weird together, lovingly weird.

And if you just don’t want to do the group thing, you can just watch the recordings and not have to participate actively with anyone. Even if you come live, you don’t have to participate.

The post Reflections on Making this Burnout Course appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Most people think autistic burnout is caused by having too much to do, or too much stress.

And while those things are important—I don’t want to diminish them in any way—they are only surface level symptoms of a much deeper situation.

Through my own recovery Journey, and supporting others through theirs, it is clear to me that autistic burnout fundamentally starts with the mental strain of having been taught things that cause us pain, that deep down we know are not true, and trying to live in that tension.

The thing is, when we’ve been trained into a false belief (by society’s expectations, or family who carry their own trauma, or a bad situation, or whatever), shame develops, and once it’s there, it’s really, really hard to break. 

Beliefs like, there is something wrong with you, or how you think, or your high values. That you can’t survive in capitalism. That it’s not okay to need the things you do or live the way that feels right to you. That when people invite you to events, they’re just following social protocols and no one actually wants to be around you.

(BTW, is your brain right now screaming, “But of course those are true, they’re not false beliefs”? I get that. I was absolutely convinced of every one of these for a really long time. And I am now living the proof that the exact opposite is just as true or more true.)

When you start to see what’s really going on behind these beliefs, that the shame you’ve been carrying isn’t because there is anything wrong with you, or because you don’t fit standard expectations, that shame starts to dissolve. The cognitive dissonance starts to resolve. And new options start to feel doable.

And I really, truly believe that that’s the key to getting out of burnout. 

The common misconception is that burnout is just about having too much stress, too many things on your plate, too much going on in your life. And I’m sure that’s part of it. But where does having too much to do come from? 

Is it from not being able to say no when you’re at capacity? From trying to meet others’ expectations? From trying to maintain a lifestyle that causes financial pressure? Because you think you have to in order to feel some faint echo of acceptance?

Is the stress from trying to meet conflicting, incompatible expectations? From not living the way you know is right for you? From talking yourself into normalizing sensory inputs that hurt you? Because others have given you the message that you’re too much?

When you live with that cognitive dissonance out in the world for long enough, it drains your reserves until you’re no longer able to cope with it anymore.

Hence, burnout.

But when you poke holes in those shame stories, and see what’s really going on, the cognitive dissonance resolves, the tension of those false beliefs dissolves, and many things become possible.

The brain fog begins to clear. Your creativity comes back and begins problem solving the very practical issues of day-to-day life.

And new options feel possible that weren’t before.

It takes a while to implement the changes you want to make, and to try things out, and tweak them, and try again. I’m not going to pretend it’s all easy peasy. It’s not. But it is possible.

And it’s more possible with support and guidance on how to do it, from someone who really gets it.

This is what my autistic burnout recovery course is all about. It’s the how. Broken down into manageable steps. With support and guidance for six full months, so there’s no pressure to rush (as if you could, ha ha). 

If this resonates for you, and you think this might just be what you’ve been looking for:

Get all the juicy details here

(It’s a long read, but worth it.)

Or, if you’re ready to join us,

Sign up here

Starts September 7.

The post The Most Common Misconception About Burnout appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on my own burnout recovery journey, the ups and downs, and the things that made the biggest positive differences.

I’d like to share one of those with you today, in the form of an entry from my journal during the time that I was feeling better enough to start imagining that I could work again, and hope that it could be a better experience, but not yet able/ready to actually do any.

Here’s what I wrote:

I have been extraordinarily hard on myself. For a very long time. I have especially been hard on myself about my lack of consistent career direction, on the basis that I changed goals all of twice and tried out two or three other side ventures that didn’t work out the way I wanted (though nothing came crashing down in flames and no one was hurt except my ego) and because I burned out twice badly enough that I needed to take significant time off to physically and mentally recuperate. 

Recently I started calling this period of ten or twelve years (depending on what I include) my “self-destructive decade,” and that felt a bit better, in that it felt shorter and less final than the previous version of “I screwed up my life.” Yet it didn’t quite sit well with me, either.

It seemed so judgmental and so hurtful. I decided that I needed a different name for the decade, because words matter. What you name something gives it power, and what I would name this would in some way determine its reality in my mind, and either let me integrate it and be at peace, or let me continue bashing myself over it.

Then I heard someone mention that she forgave herself for something she had gone through, and that felt better to me. I spent several days feeling into the idea of forgiving myself for this decade, yet it also didn’t quite sit right. It still felt unnecessarily judgmental. I had changed career tracks and pursued other people’s goals, after all, not killed a single mother in a car crash. 

Then, over breakfast with a wise friend, I was discussing this dilemma, and something he said let it click into place in my mind, and I started sheepishly grinning, and then beaming from ear to ear. He said I was glowing. I felt giddy and sheepish at the same time, like I was wondering if I could get away with something, something so simple and completely corny and yet it just might work.

The idea that came to me, and in fact played out in my mind right there at breakfast, was: what if a judge were to sit on a bench and declare me not guilty. Not guilty of screwing up my life. Not guilty of that decade. This isn’t a plea bargain, a deal, or getting off easy. This is a judge weighing the evidence and considering the facts and declaring me objectively “not guilty.”

In my mind, an image came to me without my conscious prompting of a prison door being swung open and letting me out. Setting me free.

Could that really work? I felt free. I was smiling from ear to ear and giggling like a little girl and apparently my face was glowing, so, yeah, I guess it worked. And all day long I kept having visions of jail cells and prison doors being opened, and shackles being removed, and letters of freedom being signed, and my heart felt free and open. Open to an entirely new reality, to new possibilities.

I hadn’t realized that I had felt imprisoned, chained, captive. But I wouldn’t have had all those visions otherwise. 

Another thing I realized: in my mind, as I pictured the judge sitting high and mighty on a very impressive and official looking bench, the judge was me. I didn’t try to put myself in that role, it was just what immediately came to mind. And as the jailer opened the prison door, I was the jailer, too. I have been doing this to myself all along. No one else.

Sure, I got plenty of influence, plenty of guidance, modeling, teaching, as I grew up, but I accepted and internalized the expectations of others and applied them more ruthlessly than my mentors ever would have. I was more exacting and hard and judgmental on myself than anyone else ever has been in my life. 

And now I don’t have to do that to myself anymore. 

This has been growing for a long time, and though I feel like I overcame the biggest hurdle, it will probably take a while before old habits are unlearned and I’ll probably fall back upon old messaging from time to time as I forge a new path. A path more in alignment with my own goals and values. A path of grace and peace and joy. 

These are the things I want to cultivate, so I need to keep repeating this, and in the present tense. This is what I have, not what I want or wish for or intend. I am beginning a life of grace and peace and joy. I have grace and peace and joy. I am grace and peace and joy.

How is this landing for you?

This moment was a turning point for me. 

Things didn’t magically change after this, but my whole attitude and demeanor and outlook shifted, and I started seeing new possibilities and doing things that took me in the direction of making my new goals happen. 

Within two years, I was starting this coaching practice, which has steadily grown to help hundreds of others and support me and my family. And I am more free now than I have ever been in my life, in multiple very real ways.

What is your key insight that will change everything?

If you would like help finding it, this is one of the things we’ll be working toward in my burnout recovery course. 

If this resonates, you’re welcome to read more about the course here. Or, if you’re ready to join us, sign up here. We start September 7th.

The post Facing The Judge appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

When I was in the heart of recovery from my last burnout, I had quit my job and was living in a van and had basically no responsibilities besides taking care of myself on a daily basis, living with my own thoughts, and finding new, legal places to park for a few days at a time.

And yet, even that sometimes felt like too much to deal with.

Sometimes I would get fed up with doing nothing and try some small project and be really productive for a short time, but it would completely wear me out and I would crash for days or weeks, and often my sensory issues would intensify or my frustration would flare up at everything around me.

It felt like I was going backwards, and I was scared that I would never be able to do anything ever again.

My mind would have this conversation with itself:

“Well, shit, you can’t even do that small project. Look what it’s done to you. You’re pathetic.”

“I know, I need to rest. I need to get better.”

“You can’t rest forever. You need to do things. You need to bring in some money.”

“How am I supposed to do that? I’m not ready for that.”

“You need to get serious about starting to work again.”

“No, I don’t. It’s OK. I can relax. This is what I’m supposed to be doing right now. Resting. Recuperating.”

“It’s taking too long. You don’t have time for this. Get your butt out of bed and start doing something.”

“But I don’t know where to go from here. What else can I do?”

And then I would panic and end up on my phone or reading a book or staring out the window for hours.

What I know now, having gone through this more times than I care to admit, and having watched more than a hundred other people going through this, is that this is completely normal. This is an expected speed bump in the road of burnout recovery.

This is an entirely predictable experience. And it will get better.

What’s happening?

This is what happens in the early stages of burnout recovery, where things are starting to look better.

Things are moving in an upward trajectory, but it’s still slow, and it’s gradual. And you don’t have a lot of energy to give. But you’re starting to get interested in things again, you’re starting to even get antsy occasionally, and think, “Oh, I could do more stuff.”

And what happens—and this is the predictable part—is that your old programming kicks in and it goes from “I can do this tiny unimportant thing for fun,” to “I need to do it right and make all the things work, and if I’m going to do that, I might as well do this other thing.” And it snowballs into this gigantic thing, and of course that’s overwhelming because you’re not yet out of burnout enough to be able to deal with all of that.

So your self-protective mechanism kicks in and is like, “No, no, no, we’re gonna remind you that you’re not there yet. So we’re going to intensify the symptoms of burnout to remind you to not do all of that.”

If I can anthropomorphize burnout for a moment, it is trying to keep you from going back into situations that didn’t work for you.

But your internalized messages from productivity culture is frustrated at that.

And we just want to be well, we want to be able to do things, and of course there’s an element of general frustration there.

But it does NOT mean that you’re not making progress.

It does NOT mean that this will never work.

It does NOT mean that you’re never going to be able to handle things.

It’s so easy to think, “Oh, look, I tried to do something and I couldn’t do it, so I’m never gonna be able to do anything again.” That’s a very common thought. But it’s not true.

Things will get better

You will be able to do things again.

When you’re doing all of the things that you need to get out of burnout, you will absolutely be able to do things again.

It might take longer than you would like. But you can’t go from this early stage of recovery to later stages of recovery, where you can take on bigger projects all at once.

Personally, it took me three years of not working, and just resting, and working through my old shit, and healing old wounds, and dealing with my thoughts, and taking on tiny projects, before I was ready to start some bigger projects and start working consistently again (and even that was very part time for a while).

It will take a different length of time for everyone, but however long it is for you, it will probably be longer than you want it to be.

And all the while I had to actively resist those productivity messages that kept nagging me.

Messages like, “what am I doing with my life?” and “I’m wasting my time” and “I should be doing more than this” and all that kind of crap.

I had to actively resist the impulse to do more than I could at any given time in my burnout recovery. Even as my capacity to do things increased, I had to actively resist the impulse to do even more than I could.

But it will get better.

Part of why it took me so long, I’m now convinced, is because I had no clue what I was doing. I was experimenting and figuring things out as I went.

And that’s why I’m so motivated to systematize what does work consistently for us Autistics who have been raised in productivity culture and have been hurt by toxic systems.

And that is exactly what I will be teaching in my recovery course.

The post Frustrations and Fears In Burnout Recovery appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

The wait is over!

It’s here! Finally, my course on recovering from autistic burnout is available now.

Some of you have been following me for the last year and a half as I’ve been working on this, diligently getting things together, refining my thoughts, figuring stuff out. And you can sign up now!

Okay, here’s a little bit about how it’s gonna work. We’re gonna start on September 7. And, in my workshop on autistic burnout recovery, I talked about the five areas that I believe are critical for fully and sustainably recovering from autistic burnout. For each month, we’re going to work on one of those areas.

We’re going to focus in on it. It’s going to be somewhat connected to other areas as we go, but we’re going to really focus on that one thing. And the first meeting (the first month, in fact) is going to be setting up the system itself, talking through some of the tools that we’re going to be using consistently throughout the framework, why this has been so hard, how this all connects and how you make it better.

So it’s, in total, going to be six months. That first set up month, and one of the five areas for each of the next several months.

How will this work?

The course itself is set up to be a five hour workshop on the first Saturday of each month (that five hours does include some break time). That’s where we’re going to really get into the meat of that month’s topic area. And then, in the course platform, you’ll have access to additional resources, materials, videos, checklists, spreadsheets, worksheets, reflection prompts, all sorts of stuff. And you can dive into it.

And then the next Saturday (the second Saturday of the month), we’re going to meet for a live group coaching (for those who want to), and that’s 90 minutes. That’s when we’re going to be able to answer questions, practice some of the tools, watch other people get coached live.

Often, it’s really fascinating to watch someone else get coached, and sometimes the things that they’re bringing up applies to you. Because we’re not alone in this. Many of us have been isolated in our burnout, but we’re not the only one going through this.

So you can watch someone else, and the few people who are willing and open to being coached in front of others can bring up their issues and get some personal coaching from me. And we can answer some of the questions that have come up so far since workshop day.

You’ll have access to all the materials for the whole month. You can do as much or as little as you’re interested in (I know that you’ll probably be more interested in some topics than others, that’s totally fine). As we build up each month, as we go, it’ll connect more and more. They’ll connect to each other in a nice, webbed format.

So that’s the idea. Each month, we’ll be meeting on the first and the second Saturday. Which neatly avoids major holidays, especially around the holiday times. You’re also going to get some extra support during the holidays to deal with the stress and the overwhelm and the burnout of all the extra stuff that usually comes with the end of the year holiday season.

The ‘perfect time’

In burnout, you’re stressed and overwhelmed about everything. If you’re waiting for the ‘perfect time’ to do this, does that mean that you have to wait ‘till you’re out of burnout to take a course on how to get out of burnout?

The idea here is doing it during this time, when it is a more inherently stressful time of the year, is so you can have support during that stressful time. So you can learn how to deal with this stuff as you’re going, so that you can get the community, get the support that you are hoping for, that you need, that will help you through it.

So, it’ll go September through February. And if some of those times you’re more active at it than other times, that is totally fine. That is expected, that’s built into the program. And there’s also ways to to ask for feedback, to ask for support, built into the program. You don’t have to spend a whole lot of effort to get that. It’s going to be built in because, again, the idea here is to support you through the hard times.

So that’s the whole thing. That’s the overview.

I’m probably going to be selling this course in the future for around $1,200 because that’s a lot of material, a lot of support, a lot of time, and I think it’s worth that.

But because this is the first run, and I’m expecting there to be a few bumps along the road as we’re refining things, and figuring out the systems, and getting some feedback on what works best for you and others, I’m offering this first run at a significant discount. It’s going to be only $500, and there will be a payment plan available (so if you can’t come up with that all upfront, you can pay it over time).

And if this works, if this actually helps you move in the direction of getting out of burnout, this is going to be there for you for the rest of your life. You’ll be able to do things. You’ll be able to take care of yourself, take care of your family easier. You’re going to be able to work, to get a better job, to get a job at all, to increase hours, this will come back to you many, many fold.

So that’s the idea, and I genuinely believe that will happen.

It’s how I started working again, getting myself out of burnout so that I could start to get interested in things again, and pursue those interests, and monetize some of those interests (like autism and burnout recovery). But whatever yours is, you’ll be able to do the things that you want to do, the things that you need to do, the things that people are relying on you to do, and, to some extent, unlearn the things that society tells you you should do. They’re actually sucking a lot of energy without giving you anything back.

That’s part of the whole point of this course, unlearning the things that you don’t need to deal with anymore, and being able to actually do that. Not just intellectually, but knowing deeply inside that it’s okay.

Making a change

Okay. So if this appeals to you, if this resonates for you, if this sounds like what you’ve been looking for, if this feels like this might actually help you: You can read more about it (about the details of the course, what exactly is going to be involved) at autismchrysalis.com/burnout.

And if this turns out to be the right thing for you at the right time, great! I look forward to seeing you in the course, and we’ll be working on your burnout recovery journey together. And if this is something that you think might benefit others, please just share the post with them, or share the website with them.

My personal mission is just to help as many Autistics as possible. To get out of burnout, to make a life in which we can function well and help the world with our gifts. And we can make real change. We can do things to make this world a better place for us and for others.

And when that happens, when every autistic, when every neurodivergent, when every neuronormative person can live in this world and be themselves and function together… Well, that’s what I’m working for. That’s what this is all about.

Okay, I wish you all a neurowonderful day.

The post Autistic Burnout Recovery Course Now Available! appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

What causes burnout?

Some of us who didn’t figure out we were autistic until adulthood sometimes managed to hide our natural communication style, thought processing, and physical regulation needs enough that even though we were often labeled as odd, or quirky, or weird, or things like that, we managed to tamp ourselves down enough that we didn’t get the label ‘autistic’.

Sometimes people describe these fitting in behaviors as ‘masking’, or ‘high-masking’ when it’s done intensely. I’ve heard ‘internalized presentation’ too. These all make sense to me as descriptors for what’s going on.

Also why burnout recovery is, in its essence, about aligning our internal and our external realities. This is what I mean when I talk about authenticity, and why I keep bringing up unmasking, and sensory care, and integrating thoughts with a useful awareness of physical and emotional reactions, and working through our negative internalized narratives. These are all essential to burnout recovery.

It’s not enough to get some energy back so that you can continue the cognitive and physical dissonance for longer. I believe that true burnout recovery is only possible when you reduce the dissonance at its source.

How is this landing for you? Does it resonate at all with your own experience? Take care and I wish you an aligned, authentic, neurowonderful day.

The post Autistic Burnout Recovery Is About Reducing Dissonance appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Three questions with one answer

Since I’ve been more active in both coaching and autism advocacy, people have asked me lots of questions. Here are the three questions I get asked most often: 

(Intensity warning: blunt answer.)

“How do I get out of burnout without changing much in my life?”

“How do I find friends without putting myself out there and risk getting hurt because I’ve been hurt too much and people are crap?”

“How do I know/get what I want, or make decisions, without rocking the boat for anyone?”

The answer to all of them is: you don’t. 

You can’t get out of burnout without making significant changes in your life. 

You can’t find new friends, or deepen existing relationships, without risking getting hurt.

You can’t figure yourself out without rocking the boat.

Why?

Broken down to its essence, you can’t feel better in a system that hurt you without changing the things that hurt you in that system. Or at least your very small part of it.

You don’t have to go out and change the whole world before you can feel better. Thankfully. But you do have to make changes in your life, work, relationships, internalized ableism, anxiety, and all the other crap that’s sapping your energy and holding you back from your power.

Which is exactly what the system wants. Because when you do break free of swallowing its lies and hate, you will be able to affect real change, for yourself and others, and that means that it will have to change. And it doesn’t want that. It wants the status quo.

The system wants you to believe that you’re the problem, and it’s willing to do anything to make you hurt enough and be scared enough to sit there and stew in your own negativity, so you will never take the risks needed to make things change.

You have a choice

And it will be a risk. I promise you, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to hurt, and it’s not always going to work out well, but things aren’t exactly peachy keen right now, are they?

So what are you going to do? Are you going to do the hard work to heal your own crap and keep tweaking things until you’ve got some real progress, even when it’s unfamiliar and scary sometimes?

Or are you going to write me off, say I’m full of crap, that the world doesn’t work that way, and complain that it’s not fair? That is a genuine option. Lots of people choose that every day. You are welcome to, too. (I mean that genuinely, not sarcastically, or as a form of reverse psychology. You get a genuine choice.)

And you’re right, it’s not fair. It is so fucking unfair. And that’s the way it is. So what are you going to do?

The post The Most Common Questions People Ask Me appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Brain fog makes processing info difficult

If you’re having a real rough time processing information because of brain fog, autistic burnout, or whatever, but you want to read, listen, or take in information that’s going to help you deal with those very real challenges, here’s a few pieces of advice. 

Short of a brain transfusion, my third best piece of advice is to take it slow. Let yourself off the hook for not processing much at one time. You can watch or listen to info in little chunks. You can come back, redo it, review it, forget and read or listen to it again. 

My second best piece of advice is to figure out what helps you process best. Does writing it down help you take it in? Does talking about it to others, drawing it, drawing while you’re listening or reading, or fidgeting while you’re listening? Moving around, lying upside down, having nothing else going on, or lots going on around you? What works for you? 

My best piece of advice, and this might seem counterintuitive, is to give your brain a guilt-free downtime. Not worrying about what might happen if you can’t think, letting yourself off the hook for processing this stuff. You don’t have to listen to it all. You don’t have to read it. That might be exactly what your brain needs to heal, so that it can think better. 

You might try telling yourself something like “I’m afraid of what might happen, but, in this moment, it’s not happening.”, “Right at this moment, I’m safe.”, “Right in this moment, I don’t need to think, I can think later.”, “Right now, It’s okay if I don’t.”

The post How To Process Info With Brain Fog appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Do you know which you’re experiencing?

One of my clients asked me a question recently, which he gave me permission to share with you. He’s been wanting to quit his job and he has this great idea for a new business, and he’s wondering if he’s deluding himself. If he’s not actually going through burnout, but it’s just a midlife crisis. He’s not by the way, it really is burnout in his case, but it’s a good question. 

Burnout

On the other hand, a lot of people who end up in burnout go through working really, really hard for a long time and doing all the things that they think are gonna make them happy. If you’re autistic, this is not just the job and power dynamics, but it’s also the masking. It’s doing things the right way, doing things the neurotypical way, meeting expectations.

You wake up one day and you realize that these things are not bringing you happiness, and so you actually make changes. You do stuff to get rid of those things that you are now realizing hurt you. You reinvest in finding the things that actually bring you happiness.

That may or may not involve a burnout, burnout is one of the wake up calls that some people get (one I got multiple times before I really paid too much attention to it), but it doesn’t have to be burnout. 

If you’re in burnout and you’re realizing all this stuff that you thought was going to be the keys to a great life just aren’t, and you’re trying to reinvent yourself, but not because you want to make a new mask but because you want to be more authentically truly you: that isn’t a midlife crisis. That’s a midlife wake up, or whatever time of your life wake up. 

I hope that helps and I hope that you’re finding the things that do genuinely create happiness for you, whatever that happens to be in your life. Take care, have a neurowonderful day.

The post Is It Burnout Or A Midlife Crisis? appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Resting is hard

A client recently told me “I don’t know a lot about resting,” and it got me thinking about how I don’t either. I’ve gotten a lot better at resting in the last few years, when I was seriously bad at it prior. I mean truly terrible. If resting had come up and bit me in the butt, I would have complained about the bite mark.

In fact, that’s pretty much what I did because burnout forced me to rest and I complained, and cried, and whined, and ruminated my way through. Through multiple burnouts. Before I paid attention.

I’ve gotten a lot better, and I’ve learned a lot, but I’m far from perfect. I’m far from decent, frankly. I still have to convince myself multiple times a day that it’s okay to rest. So take everything that I’m about to say with a grain of salt. I’m just going to flat out say upfront that everything I’m about to say is probably bullshit, it won’t apply to you, and you can safely ignore me.

On that cheery note, here are six things I think I know about rest. 

1. It feels unfamiliar

You can get so used to being busy that resting actually feels painful. It’s supposed to be restorative, right? It’s supposed to feel good, right? You’re supposed to want to do this thing, right? But when your standard M.O. is 110%, doing anything differently feels so unfamiliar that it’s scary and sometimes awful. 

Your nervous system is like “What the hell? This isn’t what we’re used to, and I don’t know how to do this. So this is bad, right?” and that bad feeling can drive you, or at least me, to want to keep going because it just feels normal. It feels familiar.

2. We’re bad at it

We US-Americans are really terrible at resting. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the world, but I don’t think it’s just us. I think a lot of the western industrialized world has gotten really bad at resting. I know a priest who said on every feast day that our modern culture is really bad at feasting. We know how to fast. We know how to deny ourselves. We know how to sacrifice, but we don’t know how to enjoy, and I think he’s right.

Tell someone to feast and they just think of overindulging in food, but that’s not really feasting. That’s not enjoying the experience in a congratulatory and joyful way. 

Ask a lot of modern industrialized westerners to rest and the only ideas we can come up with are spa days, bubble baths, vacations, and lying on the couch, scrolling through your phone or watching TV in your pajamas. I have nothing against any of that, and they can be restful, but it’s a very limited scope of what rest could look like. And it’s possible to do every one of those in an overly anxious and worried mindset. So the activities themselves are not inherently restful.

3. Worry and rest don’t mix

You’re not resting when you’re worried, ruminating, obsessing, freaking out, overwhelmed, getting on your own case, or judging yourself or others. Even if you’re not physically doing much, or anything, any thoughts that include those are not restful. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting the best massage ever, floating in a perfect sensory float tank, didn’t have to go out for a week, or got to stay in your pajamas at home and have food delivered. If you’re worrying and ruminating: you’re not resting.

4. Resting isn’t about activity

Which leads me to believe that resting isn’t about having a little, or a lot, of activity. Because you can also be restful while you’re out doing stuff. Engaging in your special interests without guilt can be restful. Some people find adventurous vacations restful, even though they’re physically active the entire time. 

I think that physically doing less is necessary sometimes, especially during burnout, but once you’ve gotten past sheer physical exhaustion, I don’t think that rest has very much to do with your level of physical activity. I think it has a lot more to do with your mindset and what you’re doing, not how much.

5. Do something you enjoy

6. It doesn’t need perfection

I don’t think rest has to be perfect. I don’t think you need the perfect setup, the perfect situation, having no guilt, or no worries. I think you can get a lot out of it even when it’s imperfect, even when it’s far from ideal, even when you have no particularly original or creative ideas and you’re just sitting in your pajamas on your phone, watching something that makes you laugh. I think that can be restful, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need. 

I don’t know exactly how this works. I’m doing a lot of that imperfect, not particularly creative rest and getting plenty out of it. But sometimes I also go do some cheap activity to get out of the house, like going for a drive. I’ll go see some nature, even if it’s through the car window, and it’s frickin’ cold outside. Just doing something a little bit different than usual can do a lot of good.

Closing thoughts

I know I’ve got a lot to learn, but I’m getting better at this every month and every year.

I’m curious how this is landing for you and what you’ve figured out about rest so far; maybe how you want to translate this to your life?

Okay, I told you this wouldn’t be revelatory, and that you could probably safely ignore it. But perhaps you might have gotten one little thing out of this that you found useful? If you’re open to sharing the comments, I’d love to hear what resonated with you.

And if you want some more on autistic burnout recovery, here’s the recording of my free workshop, which is a really good intro to the five areas that I have found are critical for true, sustainable recovery from autistic burnout: 
How to Recover from Autistic Burnout (5 Things You Need to Know)

The post What I Know About Rest appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.