Burnout

I've struggled with recurring burnout for as long as I can remember. I never really understood why. The intensity of burnout seems to have scaled as I've gotten older, and again, I haven't been sure why. Lots of whys without all the answers. But I may have some today.

I've wanted to write about burnout for years and years, but no matter how much I tried, I could never get the thoughts out, at least in a way that was helpful to others. I wanted to shine some light on burnout, not simply share my mental health struggles with the world.

I also felt like I couldn't write about something that I hadn't solved yet. I feel like an imposter when I do that. But I no longer think it's entirely solvable, or that it'll ever go away completely.

I always thought my struggle with burnout stemmed from my tendency to hyperfocus on things — to become utterly obsessed with something, and only that one thing. And after that hyperfixation ends, I have to let myself recover. But sometimes I can't afford to let myself recover — I run a business after all, and I'm a husband and parent to 3 kids.

(During hyperfocus, I can get weeks or even months of work done in days — typically pushing it off until the last possible moment.)

If I fail to give myself room to recover, I usually enter into an episode of burnout. How long? I really have no clue — days, weeks, even a month, maybe. How intense? I again really have no way of knowing.

During these episodes of burnout, sometimes I can switch gears and do something else work-related, like going from coding to marketing. Other times I have to stop completely and indulge in some other interest. Other times I just completely shutdown.

There are other ways I burnout, too. Another common cause of burnout is working on 'something' for months and then either hitting a wall that kills my momentum, or completing the 'thing' without seeing an immediate payoff making all that effort worthwhile.

Of course, there are other triggers that've caused me to burnout over my career, but I think those are the most common work-related causes that I've experienced over the last decade or so.

So let's clear the air —

I'm currently in the midst of burnout, and I've been in an identifiable burnout for about 6 or 7 months (though it's likely been longer and I was just brute-forcing my way through it in the early days). I've never had it last this long, and honestly, it's been very scary.

(For somebody that hasn't experienced burnout, all that may sound rather silly and overdramatic, but I promise it's not.)

In the past, I'd reduce my workload or even change jobs to escape the burnout. But I don't want to change jobs. And I've already tried reducing my workload, and it hasn't helped — it's actually made it worse, because then I feel guilty for being unproductive at work, and doubly guilty for even being at work instead of helping at home.

This time, for some reason, my burnout has been so intense that I've had days where I essentially become non-verbal. It's like my brain enters a complete shutdown mode, and I lose almost all executive function. I can't find words for even simple conversations.

I've also had my fair share of (mostly internalized) meltdowns, some of which made me feel like I was having a mental breakdown.

The burnout got so bad that I thought I was having a midlife crisis. I was willing to do almost anything to snap me out of the burnout and the executive dysfunction, even sell my company.

But through this season of unproductivity, and through the near total loss of executive function I had built my identity around, I've been researching what "burnout" actually is, trying to get to the bottom of what's been happening in my head, and now outside it.

Am I depressed? Am I in some sort of crisis? Is this just normal life for parents? Is running a business always this hard? Why does this, i.e. burnout, keep happening? Am I cut out for this?

Why is everything so f*cking hard for me?

One night, we sat down to watch some TV and my wife suggested we try out Love on the Spectrum on Netflix. After a few weeks of watching that show, I uhh… saw myself more times than I could even count. The weeks were filled with "wait, other people don't do that?"

Then I read a lot, I watched a lot, and I took countless online tests, and then I (nervously) started to joke to my wife about my scores. I'm not sure what she really thought at the time, but I started to have a lot of questions. Then I started to hyperfixate on that growing list of questions looming in my head.

The answer I got back is: I think I'm autistic.^[1]

I figured I was ADHD (runs in the family), and probably OCD too, but I never considered that I could be autistic. I didn't really know anything about asperger's or autism or AuDHD. (I thought autism meant you were "high support," and I'm one of those people that's never really wanted, and I didn't think I needed, anybody's help.)

(I didn't really know anything about neurodivergence in general, so I never considered ADHD under the "ND" umbrella.)

But my life would make so much more f*cking sense.

It was like a light bulb went off in my head.

After this realization, I literally spent weeks ruminating on everything. I replayed my entire life with a new lense. I was hyperfixed on ASD, and AuDHD in particular, for months, finally getting answers to the countless questions I've built up over my lifetime —

From social problems (I've always felt different), to issues transitioning between things, to miscommunications (usually revolving around tone or facial expressions), to a lack of communication, to not understanding my own feelings, to constantly fidgeting, to hating small talk, to overstimulation, to understimulation — the list goes on and on.

I can't begin to explain how much of a relief it was once I realized that a lifetime of struggles, misunderstandings, and miscommunication were shared experiences — that I might not be as alone as I thought. In fact, nearly everything I've experienced is so common among people with ASD that they have names for them! — from RSD, to PDA, to special interests, to rumination, to internalized echolalia, to infodumping, to stimming, to alexithymia — again, the list goes on and on.

(You don't need to know what any of those mean, and I'll leave it up to each reader to research those topics if they want to.)

With that relief, a lot of my decisions i.r.t. how I run my business started making a lot more sense. I've been setting up systems that worked for me, even if they didn't make sense to others — like not doing sales calls. It also explains my hyperfixation on writing essay after essay on the problems with open core and commercial open source (the crux of the argument being: say what you mean.).

But with that relief, I also dealt with pretty deep feelings of shame and brokenness for a little while. Both for myself, my childhood, but mostly for my family. I replayed every hardship I caused by my tone, or my expressions, or my seeming 'lack of empathy.' I ruminated on our journey as parents and how hard it's been.

Through that, I think I've come out of these ruminations with a better sense of self, and a better sense of what's been happening.

I've realized that, right now, I'm in autistic burnout^[2], cycling in and out of autistic shutdowns^[3], triggered by chronic overwhelm.

I look back and now I see that my other burnout episodes all stemmed from external factors causing overwhelm — from social problems in the office, to social problems outside the office, to moving between cities and states, to parenthood, to sales calls, to simply having to operate a business by myself (it takes a lot past a certain scale!), to new babies and the shattering of my unrecognized routines.

I always thought the "external factors" causing said overwhelm were all work-related, but I no longer think that's solely it, or perhaps not it at all. I think it's actually just a symptom of no longer being able to cope as well with the demands of everyday life, collectively.

(Or maybe it's all of the above, even.)

I feel like I used to have seemingly unlimited coping "energy points," and now I have very little points allotted each morning, if any at all.

(I've used the "energy points" term for years — which is very close to "spoon theory."^[4] My unconscious brain was ahead of me, it seems, which is a recurring theme throughout my life.)

I'm not sure why this change in my ability to cope happened, but it did. I went from being able to cope with the crying of a beautiful newborn — even sleep through it, much to my wife's dismay! — to literally having to throw my hands over my ears because I thought my head was going to explode, or that I was going to burst into tears, or have a mental breakdown in the middle of the night at 4am.

And that's just not like me. I've always been the type of person that can take the brunt of things for the sake of others that I care about, namely my wife. If she's overwhelmed, I can deal with the situation — or could. I've always been the person that could delay their emotions and deal with them internally later if needed. (I often process and deal with my emotions through writing, like I'm doing right now.)

Yet I went from being able to wrangle rowdy kids at the dinner table to every hair on the back of my neck standing up, on the verge of a meltdown, due to intense feelings of overstimulation.

I went from being able to have hard, albeit calm, conversations to uncontrollably exploding with emotion out of nowhere. I went from being able to control my tone and facial expressions to every word spilling out with unintentional vitriol. I went from being able to finish those hard conversations to becoming so overwhelmed I'd have to leave the room and sob alone in a corner somewhere.

(Or my mind races so fast that I enter into a verbal shutdown.^[5])

I went from being intensely driven and very self-motived, to feeling like I could no longer complete simple tasks, like respond to an email or send an invoice — much less move large projects forward. Instead, I'd find myself sitting in my office in shutdown mode waiting for (exactly) 5pm to roll around so that I could complete my "work" routine for the day and transition into my nightly "dad" routine.

(More than a few times throughout this phase, I went down rabbit trails wondering if an "autistic regression" was a thing, because I suddenly started showing more of these 'visible' autistic traits.)

(It is a thing — usually triggered by burnout.)

The reason why is complex and full of nuance, and I don't fully know yet. But after getting married over a decade ago, and becoming a dad over six years ago, and starting a business almost a decade ago, I think I stopped prioritizing my own needs and started to become a workaholic in "work" mode, and a people-pleaser in "dad" or "husband" mode — even if that meant total depletion and utter dysregulation.

Due to that, I've been slowly letting my coping mechanisms lapse — many of which I didn't even know I had or needed — and although it's been unintentional, I think this has caused me to enter burnout more frequently, and for longer durations, and with growing intensity.

I would blame work for this, which before I worked for myself, that was probably true. The social aspect of work was always a struggle for me, which I think is one of the reasons I fell in love with programming so quickly and switched careers from graphic design.

I could be (mostly) alone to hyperfocus, still have my creative outlet, not be told what to do (to an extent), and get paid well!

But I work for myself now, so I can't just blame work (and I'm not trying to blame anything or anyone! — I'm just trying to better understand my tendency to burnout). I especially can't blame work after building an environment I thrive in, without realizing I'd been shaping it around strengths and limitations I hadn't fully internalized yet.

And now that I've had that realization, I've started to reverse course. I've started to get better at recognizing when I'm becoming overwhelmed or overstimulated and removing myself from that environment, or avoiding environments that could trigger me to begin with.

(Well… to the extent a parent of littles can.)

All that means is I've started to "unmask" more — which I think means I'm giving myself more space to regulate, and giving myself freedom to do what's best for me — so that I can escape this long episode of burnout, so that I can avoid the shutdowns, so that I can be present again, and hopefully avoid the next 6 month episode.

Even though the episodes of burnout have been hard to navigate — especially this last one — and the shutdowns have been scary, I don't think I'd change my 'neurotype,' even if I could —

My brain can be dark and chaotic, but it's also creative and driven. I probably wouldn't have built Keygen if I didn't 'think differently.' I probably wouldn't have done a lot of things.

Now that I've come to these realizations — and now that I have a better understanding of myself and what's been causing burnout — maybe navigating it will become a little easier. (Maybe navigating everything will become a little bit easier, eventually.)

I think the biggest realization for me over these last 6 months is simply learning that there's nothing inherently wrong with me.

For the longest time I thought there was. I didn't really understand why some things were so hard for me. Now I do.

That understanding was very freeing.

This, too, shall pass.

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Open invitation: if you're experiencing burnout and you want to talk about it, my inbox is open. You can also email me if you don't have X.

[1]: I'm self-diagnosing my AuDHD. I may get a formal diagnosis in the future.
[2]: https://neurolaunch.com/autistic-burnout-cycle/
[3]: https://neurolaunch.com/autistic-shutdown/
[4]: https://neurolaunch.com/spoon-theory/
[5]: https://neurolaunch.com/verbal-shutdown/