Managing life in an unaccommodating world is exhausting for autistic people.
They’re expected to mask their symptoms daily, navigating a world that’s designed to work against them. It requires energy and focus, and if it continues for too long without the right supports, autistic people can experience burnout.
Recognizing the symptoms of autistic burnout is essential to supporting your clients and their families. It can be difficult to navigate burnout alone, and it can last for months without relief. But pinpointing the symptoms and addressing the causes can help clients reclaim their calm and reduce burnout before it spirals into an even more severe mental health crisis.
What causes autistic burnout in children and teens?
Autistic burnout is rarely caused by one isolated event. It’s usually triggered by an accumulation of stressors that compound into chronic stress.
Suppressing autistic behaviors
Many autistic people deal with life by masking autistic traits. It requires excessive mental and emotional energy on a daily basis, causing mental and physical exhaustion and leading to burnout.
Chronic life stress
The neurotypical world is not designed to accommodate autistic people, and navigating it on a daily basis is grueling. Noisy environments or stressful, over-stimulating situations ebb away at their ability to mask, eventually overwhelming them.
Life events or transitions
Sometimes, the transition from one life stage to another can trigger autistic burnout, especially for teens and young adults who are navigating the world outside of their homes or in new circles of friends and colleagues.
But young children can be affected by transitions or life changes, too. Toddlerhood, changing schools, or the death of a loved one are deeply disconcerting in any child’s life; for an autistic child, these situations might cause them to regress.
Difficult or unreachable expectations
Unattainable goals – placed on autistic individuals by their family members, friends, and society – can cause them to feel overwhelmed, ashamed, and exhausted.
Common autistic burnout symptoms
Autistic burnout is often called autistic regression because it can cause children and teens to lose some of the life skills they’ve worked so hard to attain. Often, the loss is temporary, and autism-focused mental health support can, in many cases, give children the tools they need to regain their abilities.
Signs of autistic burnout include:
- Struggling with executive functioning
- Inability to self-regulate
- Increased sensitivity to noise and sounds
- Decreased ability to make small talk or to socialize
- Increase in mental health issues like anxiety and depression
- Increase in repetitive behaviors like stimming
- Changes in normal sleep patterns
- Heightened need to maintain routine and consistency
- More frequent meltdowns and/or shutdowns
- Self-isolation
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it tells you the types of coping strategies your client or student might seek when they’re burned out.
Autistic burnout vs depression
Autistic burnout symptoms can mimic depression, especially in a teen or young autistic adult who’s been masking their autistic traits for several years. But while these symptoms – social withdrawal, emotional sensitivity, fatigue – may look like depression in a neurotypical person, they could signal burnout in autistic people.
Distinguishing autistic burnout and depression requires nuance and insight. Listen closely to your client to hear whether they’re describing overlapping symptoms in a way that indicates burnout or depression.
The nuances between these symptoms are described in detail in this NeurodivergentInsights.com article.
How to help a child or teen experiencing autistic burnout
Understanding autistic burnout allows you to guide your patients and their families through the condition’s heightened anxiety and stress. As a professional, your task is two-fold: help the child manage sensory overload, and guide the parents through their own emotional exhaustion so they can offer their child the support they need.
Practice patience
Autistic burnout can feel like a huge setback for parents, but it’s crucial that they have patience with their child’s recovery process – and with themselves. Placing blame on themselves or their decisions won’t change the outcome, and it will only place additional stress on the situation and the child.
Encourage parents to practice self-care routines and seek emotional support as they help their child recover from autistic burnout.
Reintroduce calm for both mental health and physical symptoms
Return to the activities and environments that bring the child calm. This might mean taking more breaks, or spending less time in the company of others. Remove planned activities from the schedule and let the child take a breather. Alone time can help restore their inner sense of safety and peace.
Return to a “sensory diet”
Encourage parents to put their child’s sensory system on a “diet” by removing overstimulating activities. Make more room in the day for stimming and cut out noisy, crowded, or hectic situations that might trigger sensory overload.
Relax together
When parents and their child relax together, the child sees a powerful example of self-care from the parent. This normalizes the child’s need to reduce their sensory input and prioritize their own well-being, so they’re more likely to make their needs known the next time they’re feeling overwhelmed.
Reduce expectations
Autistic burnout can be hard for parents to accept. It’s crushing to see their child regress and disorienting to watch them lose skills or social abilities. But no child can thrive under pressure, and your patient will find recovery far easier if their parents aren’t tied to specific skills goals or timelines.
Encourage your patient’s parents to view burnout as a chance to realign their own parenting goals and focus. Help them see that by reducing their expectations, they’re avoiding pushing the child beyond their limit and tuning in more closely to what their child actually needs and wants from them.
You can read more about autistic burnout from RDIconnect® here.
Online Professional Training
If you’ve been using traditional models working with families of autistic children and aren’t seeing the progress you hoped for, it may be time to try something different.
Relationship Development Intervention (RDI®) is a next-generation developmental approach to working with individuals on the autism spectrum or with other developmental challenges. It’s often described as “the missing element” because instead of focusing on surface behaviors or teaching scripted responses, we work to activate the growth-seeking drive—the key to meaningful, lifelong change.
This year, RDIconnect® is offering professional certification training courses online in multiple time zones and languages—including the U.S., Canada, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Latin America.
Learn more here https://www.rdiconnect.com/rdi-professional-autism-certification-program/
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