As I listened to the peers in this week's groups and from my experiences, it became clear how little credit we give ourselves. Particularly for those of us who are late diagnosed, we have spent our whole lives finding ways to thrive and survive in a world where we didn’t fit.
But rather than beat ourselves up when we have a tough day, we must challenge ourselves to remember that we have a 100% record of surviving.
Challenging our own thinking
Perhaps the most challenging part of self-realisation or a diagnosis is the avalanche of feelings and emotions that hit us…continually. Not all of us can name or understand these feelings, which requires an additional level of learning, and there is a steep learning curve for all of us.
We have often coped all our lives by masking, people-pleasing, and doing whatever we had to in order to get by and function. The lack of knowledge and understanding about our neurodiverse brains and this pressure to fit in often lead to developing habits and strategies that are more self-destructive than self-serving in the long run.
Many of us suffer from additional mental health challenges, such as anxiety, depression, or even misdiagnoses. These often go hand in hand with neurodivergence, as we’re trying to navigate a world that doesn’t fully understand or accommodate us. It’s common for these struggles to be exacerbated by the pressure to mask or “fit in” and can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms like addictions to alcohol, food, or drugs. Understanding that these are not personal failings but responses to our environment can be decisive in reclaiming our well-being.
Self-realisation or diagnosis may bring some ‘relief’ that there is now an explanation and some answers for how we have been feeling, but it generally raises more questions than it answers. As many of my peers have shared this week, the period after self-realisation or diagnosis is often much tougher than we imagine. Now we know things should be better and more manageable, right? Yes and no. We must remind ourselves that we have lived our whole lives through a different perspective, built habits (some good, but often unhelpful) and an outward persona that rarely matches the authentic person inside.
New, healthier, kinder, more compassionate habits that serve us well, such as challenging automatic negative thinking, self-care, and boundaries, are not established overnight. As I have found, it is much easier to intellectually understand what is happening in our brains and what we need to do than to successfully implement these habits.
Spoon Theory
What I recognise frequently in myself, and has been shared by our peers this week, is that it is hard to gauge how much is enough by anyone else’s standards. There are two issues here—firstly, we need to learn to judge what is enough by our own standards. Ditch the ‘shoulds’ and learn our limits and capabilities to prevent frequent and long-term autistic burnout. This is harder said than done when our ‘spoon capacity’ is highly variable and dependent on so many factors such as sensory needs, how much sleep we’ve had, nutrition and hydration, social demands and so on. What we can do is begin to learn our triggers and how our energy varies.
One helpful concept we’ve recently discussed in our group is ‘buffering.’ This might sound like a new term to some, but it’s a simple yet powerful strategy. Buffering means intentionally placing a soothing or self-care activity before or after something that could drain your energy—like social events, work meetings, or even chores. It’s a way of giving yourself space to recharge so you don’t go into the next task feeling depleted. For example, instead of jumping straight from one long online meeting to the next, you could schedule a walk, some quiet time, or a cup of tea to help reset your energy. .
I learnt my lesson hard this week because I overestimated what I could realistically achieve, and I burnt out.
Boundaries
This leads to the second issue—boundaries. Most of us are not great at self-care but great at overstretching ourselves (people-pleasing, the desire to fit in, the negative self-talk “I could/should do more”). This tends to be because we are also really bad at creating healthy boundaries, so we overcommit.
This is precisely what I had set myself up for this week. My urge to plan everything, control my routine and my day, and sense of “I should be able to…” set me up for a fall, not just once, but three days in a row! I ended up crashing by trying to push myself to achieve what I thought was acceptable. On day one, I drained my social battery by overcommitting (and instead of excusing myself from a late meeting, carried on). On day two, I felt the effects and had to push myself hard to get done what I had planned and thought “I should” (because anyone else would have been able to, right?). On day three, having spectacularly failed to learn my lesson, I crammed in 3 online sessions. Needless to say, by the end of day three, I was in a terrible pickle!
However, two good things (which are not things I find easy at all) came out of this. I realised I had overdone it, and this was building up to a meltdown or shutdown. So, I listened to my body, set a boundary, and communicated it to my partner. Instead of pushing myself to have a phone call, I sent a video message explaining I needed time and space to recharge. In the past, I would have had the phone call because I thought “I should, " which would have resulted in a meltdown/shutdown. The second good thing that happened is, even though I resorted to some less helpful coping mechanisms, rather than chastising myself with negative self-talk and guilt, I told myself, “I’m doing my best; I’m going to let go of the rest” (a phrase I learnt from the Balance Mindfulness Meditation app that has proved very helpful.
Meet yourself exactly where you are.
So, I guess my moral for this week is learning our capacity, and that’s its variable. So we need to learn to set realistic goals and expectations of ourselves—and ditch the shame, guilt and internal abelism it may trigger. There are many ways we can help ourselves to avoid burnout—scheduling down / recharge time, ensuring we get enough rest and sleep, eating as well as we can and staying hydrated, creating time for ourselves and self-care, setting healthy boundaries and learning to say no and connecting with other autistic people who we can unmask with and feel safe. These all take practice to implement, and I suggest just trying to make one small change a day that will help you towards these goals.
You don’t have to do it all at once—start small and be kind to yourself.
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