ADHD and Autistic Burnout

What are they, and how are they different?

My spouse was away on business for nearly 3 of the past four weeks. We have a 9-year-old son, and I work from home trying to make a living at this writing thing.

Saturday mornings I have a regular tutoring client, and this past Saturday evening our son had a friend sleepover. The boys are both 9, so they’re quite self-sufficient, and entertain each other very well.

Sunday my husband was home. I slept 10 hours and still woke up with a migraine headache. This was a culmination of the previous month’s additional socializing, work, and executive functioning required of me — and we haven’t even gotten to the holidays yet!

ADHD burnout can be a lot of things and will look and feel different for each person, but there are some commonalities. I can only speak from my own experiences, but hopefully they will be relatable and helpful for others.

It often comes with exhaustion, increased anxiety, and sometimes irritability. For me, it definitely brings muscle tension, headaches, anxiety, and fatigue.

I’ve always been an overachiever. Growing up I had very little internal self-worth, so my value as a person always came from what I could do for others, and what I could accomplish.

I have extremely high expectations of myself. They’re realistic in that they’re attainable, but sometimes at a significant cost to my physical and psychological health.

Having lived most of my life with undiagnosed ADHD, I internalized beliefs that I was lazy and careless. Turns out it was the opposite: I sometimes had to work significantly harder than neurotypicals to achieve the same level of success due to my divergent neurology.

Yet these negative beliefs about myself led me to overcompensate for my perceived shortcomings. I constantly felt I had to earn the acceptance of others and prove myself worthy.

Ironically, one positive belief I had about myself was not entirely true: I thought I had an amazing sense of time.

I really don’t.

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