Decoding Autistic Energy Levels
Is it burnout, unmasking, or fluctuating capacity?
If you just scroll through Tiktok or Instagram, you might get the impression that autistic people have only 2 energy levels:
Super high performing savant level genius
Burned out maladaptive hobgoblin
But the reality is so much more complex and nuanced. And to make it worse, you may observe your energy levels fluctuate a lot as you’re going through the autistic integration process and trying to understand yourself as an autistic person. Does more stress and less capacity for regular life stuff mean that you’re burned out? Not necessarily.
Let’s start with autistic burnout, and exactly what that means.
Autistic burnout is acute stress resulting from an inability to meet external expectations and a lack of adequate support. For example if you have a stressful job, perhaps you’re able to push yourself to meet those expectations for a while, but over time your capacity to meet the expectations diminishes unless something changes and you are able to get more help, support, or accommodations at work. In absence of that support, you go into a period of acute stress and further diminished capacity. Burnout symptoms include long term (at least 3 months), pervasive exhaustion, loss of function, and reduced tolerance to stimulus.
Many people discover they are autistic after they reach a particularly bad period of burnout that involves a drastic loss of function.
But for autistic people who have never experienced severe burnout, it can be a lot harder to suss out what burnout means for you, and what it looks and feels like.
It doesn’t help that many allistic (non-autistic people) use the word burnout to mean chronic stress, but not loss of function.
So colloquially in the workplace, lots of people say they are “burned out” from work, but that is not the same thing as autistic burnout.
Another thing to consider is that for some people burnout happens suddenly. They just CAN’T one day.
But for other people there are stages of burnout that lead up to that long term exhaustion and loss of function. You might be functioning at a level of diminished capacity for a while, thinking it’s “just stress”. Maybe you lose the energy for all else in your life outside of work, even the things you enjoy, and your life is a shell outside of your “productive” work hours. Is that just a normal autistic struggle with executive dysfunction, or is that heading for burnout in a few months?
The answers will vary for every autistic person and at different points in their life. But it all has to do with the pervasiveness of the stress (all the time, every day), the length of time it’s been going on (at least a few months) and that extremely diminished capacity to function and tolerate external stimuli. Consulting a therapist or coach trained in autistic burnout can help you figure out what’s going on.
I had a client reach out to me recently and assert that they were in burnout and needed a burnout recovery plan. But, when we talked more I wasn’t getting the impression that they were experiencing that long term loss of function that most often characterizes burnout. What they described seemed more like fluctuating capacity.
Fluctuating capacity is a common autistic trait, which means that for many people, it’s just part of their autism.
It means that some days you can do all the things! You have energy, willpower, drive, and motivation. You can check things off your list and you feel “productive”. Many autistic mistakenly label this state as “normal” and what they should strive for daily.
The problem is that the next week, all that seems to have gone out the window. You’re struggling with lack of motivation, brain fog, lethargy, and executive dysfunction. What happened? You feel so lazy and unproductive! Now you feel useless and like you need to do whatever you can to get back to your “normal” state of productivity.
Sadly, I’ve got news for you. Having “normal”— or what non-autistic people label as normal, but for you is actually very high— energy levels one week, and feeling “lazy and unmotivated” the next is totally normal for autistic people.
That’s fluctuating capacity. Some weeks it’s easy to get everything done, and some weeks it’s impossible. The trap that many autistic people fall into is thinking that the get-everything-done energy level is what they should be striving for every day, and that if they can’t achieve that then there must be something wrong with them.
Hearing that client describe exactly this struggle is what makes me think that they were dealing with fluctuating capacity, as opposed to burnout.
But wait! There’s more.
Sometimes the process of unmasking, or simply noticing your energy levels for the first time causes you to think that “something is wrong” because you’re not as productive as you used to be when you were masking.
Um, yes, sugar lump. The masking…the social conditioning to appear productive all the time (even when no one is watching) is so pervasive that you have fully convinced yourself that you *are* that productive person, and so you mask yourself into a state of self fulfilling prophecy actually becoming the masked productive person.
That is what masking is at its core. Your mask is there to camouflage the fact that you are actually a fluctuating capacity baddie. So once you take it off, that fluctuating capacity becomes obvious.
And so does the grief about not being able to maintain a “consistent” level of productivity all the time.
Because having fluctuating capacity, or a loss of capacity in a culture that prioritizes productivity so much is disabling.
That’s what this client wanted: to be able to do the things they thought they should be doing every day on a consistent basis.
But that is not what autistic people should be striving towards. That is what leads to burnout. Autistic people should be striving for sustainability. What can you sustain through your energy fluctuations? Have a plan for letting certain things go when you’re low energy and then picking them back up when you have more energy. But I digress…
More, more, more!
Sometimes autistic people who unmask experience skill regression, or the phenomenon of losing the ability to do something while unmasked that they could do easily in a masked state. This is really tough and frustrating because you really do have to re-learn how to do that thing while unmasked in order to be able to do it once more. It’s like learning how to play beer pong while slightly tipsy, and then only being good at it in that slightly tipsy state.
And even more!
As you build up towards burnout, your energy fluctuations might become more pronounced, with the troughs lasting longer, and the peaks being shorter. But it might be hard to know in those early stages if it’s your typical fluctuating capacity, or building burnout.
Whew!
All these things can be difficult to tease out as someone understanding their autistic brains and bodies for the first time. As mentioned before, trained professionals can help, but you have the potential to figure this out too if you turn on your pattern recognition and become a self reflective detective.