Dude. Don’t spend run this. I tried, and I made things much much worse. No job and no motivation to do anything.

Be careful.

silence. it can be overwhelming at first, but embrace it and everything will fall into place again.

listen to your heart, it will tell you what to do and what not to.

be honest with yourself

don’t be afraid of change but also plan ahead.

find yourself in nature. watch the sunsets and sunrises, the moon. watch the plants grow, listen to the animals around you, the seasons come and go. it’s soothing. learn about your own cycles in life, when your battery is high or low. and embrace it.

you are not alone.

there’s more to life than what society wants you to think.

burnout is there for a reason.

i love this cheesy line i found ages ago, somewhere on the web, but I keep coming back to it when i’m feeling low; you are where you need to be. just breathe.

I had the severe burn out that happens when you ignore the root cause and keep trying to push through it until you’re incapacitated by what can effectively be described as a brain injury.

My burn out left me feeling concussed for months. I lost a lot in that condition and I was forced to take medical leave from work that eventually became permanent. Fortunately, I was able to recover and rebuild myself into a, mentally, much healthier person.

1. Not a lot. I would lay in bed for half of the day, listening to the various aircraft fly over my home. I got to know their routines. I made the mistake of spending time online, and that delayed my recovery I’m sure of it. At the time… Reddit, Youtube, Netflix, gaming… all that stuff got in the way.

2. I was only able to convince someone that I was well enough to start a new job after 5 months of trying to heal. To be honest, it was closer to a year before I was really actually functioning alright, but I was down to the last few hundred dollars of savings that I had left and had to work or would have lost my truck and home. In a way I think I’m still recovering several years later (in a good way), but I knew I was better once I felt like I wasn’t trapped by the same old problems that led me to burn out in the first place… and that came a while after I was ‘functional’ and capable of working again.

3. Brain rest is what will heal you. Scrolling socials is not brain rest, its brain work consuming (mostly) garbage information. Watching shows or videos is not brain rest. Gaming is not brain rest. If you do these things, set very short and strict limits on it. If you can manage to not do them, that will help a lot. Brain rest is meditation. Brain rest is cleaning your home and keeping you hygiene up. Brain rest is reading a book. It’s a light hobby, like drawing or tending to plants. It’s writing in a journal by hand. Get exercise, it will speed up healing.

Meditation, once you get the hang of it, is like bathing your brain in cool cucumber water. It is a skill you can learn to protect yourself from burnout in the future.

I love/hate how all the top comments are kinda like “I took a long break and focused on my self.”

I have kids and a spouse. I’ve the most earning potential. There is no break for me.

Mostly I just want day(s) with no plans or demands. Maybe one simple thing at most. Sleep when I want. Watch a movie or do anything the mood strikes me to do. Sleep again. Whatever.

I know I’m better whe I don’t dread needing to go grocery shopping because I’m out of something.

I’m still recovering, and at the moment going through another stressful period that I try to manage as well as I can, so it won’t completely wreck me.

I realized I need to start changing the way I think and react emotionally to be able to recover (cptsd-related), so I found a couple resources, youtube therapists and podcasts that I’d learn from. I also found it useful to understand more about zen and philosophy behind mindfulness (I’m allergic to superficial “quick fixes”, I need to understand WHY things are supposed to work and what lead to developing the practice). Basically learning how to recognize and listen to my personal needs, what cues the body gives, where stress and anxiety gets “stored” in my body and so on. I realized I wasn’t able to stop and that’s what I really needed to do. I’m used to just forcing myself to do what I think I’m expected to, completely ignoring what’s actually good for me. Plenty of shame and fear to tackle.

I decided I need to do at least light physical activity every day, so I started taking “mental health evening walks” and observing nature while at it. I like to listen to these therapists’ podcasts while I’m walking to calm myself and minimize hearing traffic noise.

All in all learning about my sensory needs and minimizing sensory stress has been important. Also realizing what kind of social situations drain me and being conscious about how much I can take. It’s painful to have to give up on good and enjoyable things because they too drain me.

Then I started exploring what kind of social activities I’d enjoy and tried going to some groups. Peer support has been especially important!

Half a year later I became curious about possible study opportunities and got into one course. Being in a structured (social) setting where I could learn from interesting topics helped me a lot!

For me the most obvious signs that I’m getting better are: less sensory stress, less emotional dysregulation, more battery for social things and not feeling exhausted all the time. The progress is slow though and I think I’m just in the beginning about learning what’s good for me and balancing my life so that it supports my needs.

Last time I took a mental health sick leave was for three months after a breakup. Back then I moved into my parent’s in-law suite and basically just tried having one single task on my todo list at a time. Wether that was dishes, making my bed or showering. (This excluded taking care of my cat as she didn’t sign up to be neglected) I mostly worked on 3D modeling projects at the time and worked through the process of buying a sailboat to live on. The biggest help for me was being able to get “old people meals” from the local small grocery store and having.

These days I haven’t needed to take time off because I pre-emptively sail to a remote anchorage for a week or two and separate myself from being able to run errands or be available for people except the once that help me recover (they bring me food and cuddles :3). No neighbours, no noises that aren’t me (except the screaming kitty) Only me in my lil solar powered spaceship taking naps until I slowly start being able to do the tasks I wanna do.

I know I’m doing better when I start just naturally cleaning up the counters, working on lil projects and my brain doesn’t need 2-3 naps a day. For my sick leave I was starting to look forward to working on my work projects by the third month. Oh and the emotional disregulation started fading lol

But yeah, sleep and reducing demands (including even just the POSSIBILITY of doing things) is key for me.

Im not sure what autistic burnout but sometimes I feel like I have never really recovered from burnout. Way back in high school I was really burning it with ap classes and such and when I went to college I started strong but felt like I was falling a bit every semester. Like first semester college was A+ across the board but it kinda went down each semester. so semster two was like A and first sophmore was A- then B+ Then B then B- then C+ and C and here is the kicker I went five years to pick up a second major so like c- and D+ at the end. I like barely escaped with a decent gpa. Then I went into a PhD program which leaned heavily on my GRE score and ended up leaving that within a year (not totally burnout as a close family friend died and was very disillusioned with the path). I worked in the industry for a few years and I think recovered a bit from burnout and then moved into IT with a few certs and worked at a really interesting place but was kinda even burning out there despite how neat it was. That was like a decade though. then went into standard corpo type of work and was kinda excited to get good pay but oh man the first place was in finance and moved to the e-commerce which felt a bit better although I did wonder about data sharing type stuff and felt a bit less burnt out. Then I moved to insurance which was not bad when you look at insurance in the ideal and since we were providing services to companies I did not have to worry about the particular company dealing dirty. Still long years in the industry and as I said it never really feels like the burnout goes completely away. I have been unemployed for almost two years but that does not help as looking for work is stressfull and depressing.

i was on a leave of absence from college for a year and i focused on therapy, rest and hobbies - basically things i couldn’t do while i was studying. i tried to reduce my stress levels as much as possible, get good sleep, and also focused on learning how to cope with stress in therapy and eventually i felt i’d gotten to a good enough place where i could go back to school. so i completed a semester but then had to take another leave of absence because of health problems (got diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder and autoimmune disease) and that’s where we are now 🥲

it was something i was thinking about for a while but because my family disapproved i tried to hold it out as long as i could. one day i just had a panic attack after an exam and broke down. that’s when i realised i needed to stop and repair myself or my body would just forcefully schedule one for me haha.

don’t feel bad about having to do this, it’s important and necessary for your health and wellbeing. i hope your leave is restful and healing!

I took over a small forum on the Internet and now run it like a mad dictator to relieve stress.