When we finish any big task, it is fair to be tired and need some recovery time – you take a break after running a marathon, you don’t just run a second marathon. If we push too hard, we might push beyond our normal cut off limits, burning out both our normal everyday resources and dipping into our emergency reserves, and thus need longer to recover. This is regular burnout, where a 1 to 2 week break is sufficient. The problem with neurodivergent people is that we can be very bad at recognising reasonable cut off limits, leading us to keep going when most people would have stopped long ago. We call that Autistic Burnout, named after the most common neurodivergent group who experiences this (Autistic people), where our system (body and mind) is very, very depleted. Recovering from this can take months to years.

Understanding Burnout

Normally, when we do a task, we use easily available pre-generated resources, like blood sugar and neurotransmitters, to perform that task. So long as the intensity doesn’t exceed what we can generate on the fly, we can just keep on going. The reason why we want to have a break after a hard gym workout, marathon or study session, is that we have dipped into our emergency reserves to keep going. This isn’t good for us to do without assurances of time and safety to recovery from the greater than normal effort. If we do keep going, we can deplete these reserves beyond our safe limits, which can leave us vulnerable if we there is an emergency. In that emergency, we would need to dip into those reserves to ensure survival of ourselves or our loved ones – but they are empty.

Our body signals impatience with a task that goes on for too long as we inherently recognise that a task is starting to cost us more than average, especially if we are skipping meals or sleep. Once we have dipped into emergency reserves to keep that task going, we will get a much stronger signal, such as anxiety / aggression, lethargy / depression, or life ambivalence, so that we stop doing unnecessary tasks and allow our body to heal and our reserves to recover back to their normal levels. If we keep going, we will hit the end of our reserves and our body will respond with pain, melt downs, odd behaviours and possibly psychosis.

To recuperate from this kind of burnout generally takes a few weeks of rest, healthy food and mild exercising building to moderate exercise. To be complete, we should also review what happened that led to our burnout and make some life adjustments if it is a situational extreme that is likely to repeat itself. If it was an anomaly to normal, then that is exactly what those reserves are there for.

For neurodivergent people, most commonly Autism, Anxiety and ADHD, the common neurotypical limits are ignored and we learn to not pay attention to the next few levels of warning until we are for more depleted than the neurotypical people can get in an ongoing emergency situation.

Recovering from Burnout

Imagine you broke your arm, a serious fracture of your humerus, which likely did not seem humorous when you did it.

The most likely treatment plan for this follows. Your doctor is likely to give you pain relief, you may need surgery and you’ll be in a cast for at least 6 weeks. For around 12 weeks, you’ll need to be very careful not to jar or strain your arm or entire body system, so no hard sport, no long physical jobs and no lifting of any significant weight with that arm. Once you have completed that time of healing, should the bone be good, you can then start rebuilding strength with exercise, starting gently and building your way up to full strength.

The physical proof of a broken bone and the mainstream general understanding that it takes time to heal means that it is much easier for people to understand that “I can’t do that, I broke my arm”. Even so, I have talked to many people who did not follow this treatment plan, which led to further operations to fix the bone, muscles and tendons (in the worst cases), and many more months to repair the damage.

Burnout is very similar to a broken bone. Unfortunately, this invisible damage is hard to see and harder for people to understand. We also struggle to recognise the level of damage that we have sustained and are so used to pushing ourselves unfairly that we do not give ourselves sufficient time to heal.

Time and Space

The most common impediment to Autistic Burnout recovery is not enough time and an unsafe space.

We need to allow ourselves the time to heal in an environment that is not counter to our healing. You might need to take time off work, hand over responsibilities to someone else (often hard for us), or live with someone for a while – someone who is supportive and not toxic.

The most common period of time it takes to recover from Autistic Burnout is 3 to 6 months. A very few can do so in 1 and 1/2 months (rare), some people need years (less rare). Those who spent years often did not have the safe space to heal, or did not allow themselves the time to heal.

The warning here is, if you have reached burnout, then you need to find a way to get time to heal in a safe space.

Biological Healing

Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. It happens on the back of months to decades of putting yourself after other more immediate things. One of the easiest things to put off until later is our own health, which leads to massive biological systemic failure with depleted body reserves and body damage. In order to heal, we need to replenish those reserves and take part in physical acts to improve healing.

This means giving your biological health priority over other people’s needs – we’ll cover that in the Mental Healing and Relapse Prevention section.

Your mental health issues are in your head. Literally. That is where your brain is. Your brain is a part of your body. It weighs around 2% of your mass, but consumes 20% of your bodies resources – that means that any physical irregularity in your bodies biology will strongly affect your brain, which results in mental health consequences.

Step 1 of improving your health is often making sure your body is healthy. In terms of Burnout Recovery, that often means taking steps to help your body heal.

Medication and the Right Diagnosis

Many people experiencing Autistic Burnout have not got a diagnosis, or if they do, it isn’t the right diagnosis. Even those who do, often the medication is not correct for your actual condition. Even those who do have the medication right, often you have sacrificed taking the medication as scripted due to constantly popping up urgent events.

Having the no diagnosis, the wrong diagnosis, or the wrong medication isn’t your fault. Often neurodivergent people go to see their GP, psychologist / therapist, and or psychiatrist, most of whom are not experts or even knowledgeable about neurodivergence. At its more bening end, frequently this leads to a faulty diagnosis of Anxiety or Depression when the these are features of the Autism, PMDD, ADHD etc neurological condition you have, or worse a diagnosis of Bipolar, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Schizophrenia or PTSD. All of these conditions are real conditions (except for BPD) that people do legitimately have, so reading your diagnosis here doesn’t mean it is automatically wrong per se, it just prompts you to check if they have missed your possible Autism and ADHD and thus erroneously misdiagnosed you with a condition they are more familiar with.

“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Abraham Maslow,1966.

It is very common for Autistic people and ADHDers to struggle to think, feel and behave due to poor medication, most often due to misdiagnosis or poorly educated specialists. We therefore compensate with adrenaline, often driven by negative thoughts, until we can’t do that anymore, and then we crash. We experience little crashes (depression) until we hit the big one (Autistic Burnout).

If you are experiencing a more profound level of burnout, then you may be experiencing this kind, which may imply that you are Autistic and or ADHD (probably both). It is important to consider this and seek a professional who is qualified and experienced in Autism and ADHD to properly assess and if relevant diagnose you for these conditions.

Even if you do have the right diagnosis, GPs and Psychiatrists prescribe medications based on some basic shallow flow charts. It can be difficult to talk to these professionals about your specific experiences and symptoms and be prescribed the medication that actually addresses the underlying biological cause. In my experience, this is too often the case. Part of what we do here at Joshua Davidson Therapy is look at what your symptoms and experiences are, make a model of which of the neurotransmitters are likely out of the Goldilocks Zone, and then discuss which medications to bring to your GP or Psychiatrists attention to for consideration.

If you are on the wrong medication, then you are at a significant back foot when it comes to burnout recovery. You are likely to have difficulties with:

• Clear cognitive thinking (brain fog)
• Appropriate mood [relevant to the situation, accurate strength] (mood dysregulation)
• Behaviour [due to not balancing thinking and feeling to make wise decisions]
• Impulse control [misplaced strong sense of urgency, acting without thinking]
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Fatigue
• Poor sleep

Sleep

One of the things we often sacrifice is sleep. We believe the internal lie that we can catch up later (we rarely do), or that if we just stay awake a bit longer, we can then use that extra time to catch up on other things. We can also experience Pre-Sleep Anxiety, a condition where you get an adrenaline surge when the lights go out, disrupting the ability to fall asleep and or stay asleep. As our bodies run down, we can find ourselves constantly exhausted and sleeping too much, or becoming photosensitive and avoiding bright light which can also lead to Insomnia and depression. Some of us have sleep apnea (sometimes due to extra weight, but mostly not).

There are many myths about sleep that don’t help, such as everyone needs a solid 8 hours of sleep. We cover those in our page on Insomnia.

In burnout recovery, it is important to get our sleep back under control. Many ADHDers and Autistic people struggle with quality sleep, most often due to Pre-Sleep Anxiety mentioned above. Pre-Sleep Anxiety is a common side effect of Neurodivergence. Fortunately, there is medication for that, detailed in the Pre-Sleep Anxiety link.

“Biological problems need biological solutions” Joshua Davidson

Sleep promotes healing, both in body and mind. If there is a biological reason why you aren’t sleeping well (too much, too interrupted or too little) then this needs to be resolved to help Burnout Recovery.

Food

One of the things we can sacrifice is eating. We can put this off until later, which can trigger anomalies in our thinking and feeling, which we then mistakes as symptoms of mental ill health or substance craving instead of hunger (and sometimes thirst). We may also have food intolerances that we are either unaware of, or too fatigued to spend energy managing. This is a nasty cycle that leads to greater fatigue, cognitive problems and mood dysregulation.

We may be unaware of food intolerances as they don’t cause the anaphylaxis or external symptoms that GPs are looking for when they check for food allergies. We cover food Intolerances in our page on Understanding Eating Disorders.

Food is essential to our biological health. We turn what we eat into ourselves. Some things we can make from very generic sources – for example we can break down many proteins, fats and sugars into generic building blocks that we then configure into much of what our body needs. However, there are some minerals and vitamins that we cannot do without – these are fundamental building blocks that we can’t reconfigure something into, but rather we build on top of.

Some of these we can get a blood test to measure and check, some of these we can’t. For the ones that we can, ask your doctor to do a thorough blood test to see what you might be low on. The limit to this is twofold.

First, blood tests exist for things that are both common problems in humans, and things that are relatively easy to check. That makes it hard to check some things that might be out for you but either uncommon (low tyrosine) or hard to test (vitamin C). Sometimes blood tests do exist, but doctors are limited on how many they are allowed to test (vitamin B6).

Secondly, the blood test results are compared to an large average pool of humans, and local country standards often based on the government. Most people experiencing Autistic Burnout are not average humans, they are neurodivergent people with often add bodies and health conditions – healthy neurotypical levels may not be healthy for you.

• A hack for this is, if your result is a range between two numbers, try to be more in the middle than the edge of that range – for example ferritin, a fundamental building block from iron, should be between 30 and 250 ng/mL in Australia. GPs will often report that your ferritin is fine if you have 30 ng/mL, but be concerned when you have 29 ng/mL. Many Autistic and ADHD people experience poor sleep, headaches / migraines, cognitive deficits and poor mood when ferritin falls below 80 ng/mL.

Different countries may have different standards when it comes to what is healthy and what isn’t. For example, Australia has the recommendation for ferritin to be above 30 ng/mL, while Turkey has 10 ng/mL. If you had that ferritin level in Australia, the GP should be very worried and should be talking about infusions.

Lastly, often neurodivergent folk had neurodivergent parents, so our sense of “what is health food” is often distorted. We cover this in some detail in Nutrition, Health in Body and Mind. Even if we know what “healthy food” should be, we may have difficulty eating it due to a range of eating disorders, the most common and under reported one being ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) etc.

If you can, we are aiming for 4 meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack and dinner. We want the meals to be at least 4 hours apart, and varied so that your body can absorb what it is missing. The first meal after you wake up is breakfast, so if you wake up at noon, that is your start time.

Remember that your brain weighs 2% of your body, but consumes 20% of the resources. A fifth of your food goes to powering your brain – are you feeding it what it needs, or are you starving it of vital food building blocks? Deficiencies in your food will be felt five times more in your brain than your body. The other four fifths of your food goes into building and maintaining your body, which houses and nurtures your brain.

Rebuilding your body reserves helps you recover from burnout.

Exercise

One of the things that we can sacrifice is exercise. It is easy to put of activities that include physical action in favour of devoting time to whatever it is that seemed important that led to our burnout. If we only get serious physical action in specific “getting exercise” activities (sport, going to the gym), this is even harder.

Did you know that once every 5 minutes you will take an extra deep breath in, expanding both your lungs and diaphragm to close to its fullest range? Sometimes you might see someone doing this and think they are expressing (or suppressing) an emotion. We actually do this to ensure that we keep the full range of lung capacity in case we need to take emergency physical action, which is likely to need lots of heavy breathing. Our autonomous brain knows that if we don’t use it (lung expansion) we lose it.

The same concept is true for everything else – that if we don’t use it, we lose the use of it. Except that we often don’t have an autonomous brain explicitly pushing us to do physical fitness things. It does push us to activity, but we often mistake it as nerves, anxiety or aggression.

A fit body improves overall biological health, which improves our brain health, which improves our mental health. That helps us recover from burnout.

Mental Healing and Relapse Prevention

We have covered why Burnout is caused by pushing ourselves too hard, and why Neurodivergent people often don’t have a good handle on when is a good indicator that we should stop (Understanding Burnout above).

After misdiagnosis and poor meds (covered in Medication and the Right Diagnosis above), the next most common cause for pushing ourselves too hard is

• poor Interoception
• poor boundaries
• poor social rules (aka self-care)

Interoception

Interoception is the awareness and understanding of internal bodily signals, encompassing sensations like hunger, thirst, pain, temperature, adrenaline, oxygen saturation, blood sugar, the need to use the toilet and so on. This internal sensory system allows you to recognise your body and mind’s current and anticipated state and translate them into feelings. Combining this inner perception with your feelings and awareness of your situation enabling you to self regulate and make informed decisions about your physical and emotional well-being. The brain, particularly the insula, integrates these signals from throughout the body to create an accurate map of your physiological state.

Many neurodivergent people have difficulties in interoception. This is for two major reasons:

• Difficulties perceiving your own feelings
• Difficulties in understanding those feelings

Interoception Perceptual Blindness

The feeling of hunger can be different for different people. While most people feel a reasonable strength of hunger at appropriate times, some people do not. Some people feel perpetually hungry, even after they have eaten a good meal. They may feel the tightening of their belly and even pain from their stretched stomach without feeling satiated. That is, their brian received the signal that there is a sufficient quantity of food in the stomach, but not the right quality and so the person instinctively seeks more food to meet the bodies requirement. On the reverse side of this spectrum is a person who does not feel hunger when their stomach is empty and their blood sugar is crashing. Their first awareness of hunger is dizziness and systemic weakness.

The ability to recognise how much adrenaline is in your blood can help you differentiate between the feelings of anger, anticipation, enjoyment and fear. While many people can tell that they are angry, some people mistake anticipation, enjoyment and fear as anger, or they may not be able to tell that they are feeling these states of mind, even though their actions have shifted as a result. Our behaviours are the result of our understanding of the situation, our feeling about the situation, our knowledge of the past and a decision at some level (perhaps instictictive/autonomous, perhaps cognitive/planned). You may not know what you feel, but your actions show that you felt something because they changed.

Fortunately, you can learn how to tune into your feelings – both physical and emotional.

Interoception Differences

There was a point in my life when I realised that my feelings were concealed from me. I theorised that this was due to my need to look okay and carry on, so I minimised my feelings in display, and so that I would not act on them, I concealed them from myself. This seemed plausible, and makes a good story, but it is just as likely that I didn’t really learn how to tell how I felt. This second hypothesis had some additional credence when I started asking people how they could tell what their feelings were. Everyone I asked had different ways to describe how they knew they were angry.

When we are in preschool and primary school, we are taught how to tell if someone else is happy, sad and so on based on a particular set of idealised faces showing expressions. This is very helpful when people actually use those faces to display that feeling – their emotion (emote-tion – from the Latin routes “outwards” – “action”, that is, to emote what is inside). Unfortunately, this is not true. For example, 60% of people who are happy do show their mouth tightening, eyes widening and crinkling in the outer corners of their eyes, 40% do not, displaying their happiness in different ways. If I were to ask you what you physically feel when you feel happy, you might list a number of physical sensations that are different to what I or someone else feel. The neuronormative method of teaching people how to identify their feeling often leaves neurodivergent people without a good explanation.

Parents can also be a part of this problem. Most neurodivergent people have neurodivergent parents, who are also likely to be in a minority of affect (showing your inner state) types, or who are not good at interpreting their own body sensory state. Even if your parent is fairly switched on to their own system, they may not be able to recognise that yours is different and thus adjust to how your body and mind work. I think everyone can connect to times that someone, often parents, have said “but you like XXX” or “you must be happy that YYY happened” when you do not like XXX, and you are not happy that YYY happened. This can leave us doubting what we feel as true or legitimate. There are many times when we feel out of sorts, in pain, or like we should stop, and we are told to ignore that signal, so we keep going. We either don’t learn how to interpret the signal, or are taught to ignore it.

Interoception = Spoon Management

Spoon Theory is a method of helping someone to start to connect their internal state of being to how much you can put into a task while keeping enough ability for other activities that day. Spoons are the measure of how much resource you have available, and sometimes what kind of resource (I may have run out of social spoons, but I still have some creative spoons left – so I can’t interact with people well, but I can do some drawing fine). Interoception allows us to look inwards and determine how many spoons and of what kind, based on how I am feeling. If I need to finish this task, I might borrow some spoons from later, so long as I rest later.

In Autistic Burnout, we often do not look inwards and act on that information, which is what led to the burnout. We frequently overspend, which means we go into deficit. When we go into deficit (borrowing from tomorrow), we need to allow ourselves time to rest and replenish (the whole idea behind a lot of these “recovery” steps), except that our poor lifestyle and choices, or the rotten circumstances that we have found ourselves in, won’t let us.

A key to better spoon management is interoception.

Learning Interoception

If you have poor interception, then the odds are that you do not spontaneously notice the signals that your body is giving you. You miss the hunger cue, or the fatigue cue, or the pain cue, and continue on until you crash. In this situation, you are either ignoring the signal as it doesn’t seem strong enough to change your course of action, or you are insensitive to it and can’t perceive it yet. Your brain is waiting for a signal to indicate change, and it isn’t receiving a strong enough one to trigger that change.

If this is the case, we need to switch to a polling method. That is where you will pause every now and then, and check to see what state you are in. The most common times for this is prior to initiating a task – ask yourself “how do I feel?” and “do I have enough spoons for this?” and “will I have enough for what is coming later?” Another good time is every half an hour during the task, or between segments of the task.

Reflecting on how things went, especially when they went poorly, helps you see the signals in retrospect that you missed during the event. “Oh, I felt a headache about half an hour ago, then I had the melt down a few minutes ago… the headache was my warning signal – my check engine light”. What we are looking for is physical signals that our body sent that we glossed over, mistaking its meaning, but were warning signs to eat, rest, take medicine, get help or stop.

Another method is to look at your behaviours and notice when you are behaving oddly compared to a little while before, or compared to your normal average behaviour. Anomalous behaviours, like short tempered, or feeling pressured (urgent), or your hand movements have got bigger, or your speech has gotten louder or softer, are all indicators that you should do an interoception check.

Boundaries – Learning to Say No

As covered before, a major reason why people burn out is that they have continued when they should have stopped.

Why did you continue? A common reason is that either other people required you to, or that you required yourself to keep going, so you had no choice.

This is almost always a lie. You had a choice. You didn’t like the choice, but you had a choice. There is an exception for when a child in your care has a health crisis that they would realistically result in their death if you stopped right now, and you therefore choose to sacrifice your future health for their immediate health. We will talk about that exception under the Sacrifice section later.

Other people have the choice to say “no” about these circumstances, and frequently do. For some reasons, you aren’t allowing yourself the same choice. Let us examine the common reasons to that people block themselves from being able to say “no”.

Sense of Justice

The Autistic Sense of Justice is the drive that neurodivergent people often experience “to do the right thing”. It is named Autistic Sense of Justice because on average it is an Autistic compulsion, however many neurodivergent people have this drive. The Strong Moral Compass that neurodivergent people have is a good thing, but out of balance, we blind ourselves to when acting on this sense of justice is harmful, misled, or counter productive.

In the article Autistic Sense of Justice, we explore how the above mentioned Adrenaline (Medication and the Right Diagnosis) ties in with the various modes that push the Autistic Sense of Justice. That is, we often use Adrenaline when we feel we should do a bit more, which can then trigger the “this is right” or the sense of outrage that injustice provokes, which we can then channel to doing a bit more. This then cycles and blinds us to the fact that we should stop, or at the least pause to re-assess.

While Sacrifice is Noble, it Should be Rare

Humans are social creatures. We live in communities and do our best when we have a group of like minded individuals working as a collective to achieve a common positive goal. Most of us have an innate sense that we should be in a group and help that group be better – some people are selfish focused and will tax the group so that they can get ahead without regard for the cost of that taxation (Conflict).

For the good of the group, if I have some spare resources, then I should help someone else to catch up or do better. If the individuals in the group do better, then the group does better, and so do I.

“The rising tide lifts all ships” – New England Council

While this aphorism is a nice idea, it only works if:

• you have spare resources (goods, health and time)
• the other person is a good contributing member of the group (that is, not selfish focused)

Let us put it in terms of math. If I give $50 to Charlie, then Charlie has $50 more dollars, and I have $50 less. If that loss doesn’t affect me, then I am not worse off, so this isn’t a problem for me right now. However, if Charlie only wanted it and didn’t need it, then Charlie didn’t really get an improvement either, so this sacrifice was a waste of time. Charlie is not incentivised to appreciate the $50, or the effort they would have needed to use to get what the $50 achieved. It can be nice as a gesture to give this as a “you are awesome, keep going” motivator, but that should be infrequent and be based on something that was positive for the group, rather than random for no good reason.

If that $50 means that I am now short, then I will miss out on something that would be good for me. If that $50 shortfall is less harmful to me than it would be for Charlie to have a $50 shortfall, then it may be worth me making this sacrifice – but I would want to know that this is true. If Charlie comes back to me next week for another $50, then I would want to know what is going on such that Charlie is again short. Maybe it is legitimate, but maybe it isn’t and Charlie needs to rethink how they are doing things.

If the $50 shortfall is going to hurt me more than it does Charlie, why am I doing this? I am making the group worse by this sacrifice.

Here is the summary position:

• It is nice to generous, but there are limits to that before you create a new problem – focused generosity is best
• If your sacrifice helps another more than it hurts you, it may be worth doing – but if it has to repeat and go on, then take a cold hard look at it in case this is the wrong move
• If your sacrifice is hurting you more than the person you are helping, then something is wrong, and a cold hard look needs to be taken

When dealing with toxic people (as discussed in various parts of the Conflict pages), toxic people will often make claims that are not substantiated with actions. They may claim harm that is not real, or risk that is overstated.

I think of this in terms of the Traffic Light System (similar to what is covered in the Conflict pages).

Green Circle – this means that I have some surplus

• I can give with some generosity to others without too much thought
  • But… if I keep giving to the same person:
    • They may become reliant on my generocity
    • Or they are taking advantage of my generosity, and that is a problem

Amber Circle – this means that it isn’t spare, but I can bear the cost without too much burden

• I should be careful with this gift and ensure it does more good to someone than harm to me
  • That means that I am going to go without something that I would use soon, or that I will sacrifice some health for now for the sake of someone else – so long as I have that health
  • But… I should be careful about this cost to me and:
    • ensure that it will truly help the other out of their much worse situation, so long as I can recover soon.
    • that it doesn’t go on for long, because that cost is going to stack up.

Red Circle – this means that not only is this not spare, it will cause me significant problems to sacrifice

• That means that I will get swift costs to the loss of the resource, which may include some serious health issues, so it had better be an extreme situation that requires this level of sacrifice (eg: I’d take a bullet for by child, but what kind of situation would require that?)

A Red Flag should be apparent if the other person needs you to sacrifice frequently and or doesn’t seem to be improving. If you find you need to sacrifice to multiple people, it may be that you are bad at judging how much help they need, or something is very wrong with your group.

When Helping Another Doesn’t

Helping another should be something that actually makes a difference to their situation and that helps them out of the problem they are in. At worst, it is a temporary maintenance to buy some time to make a better plan.

Helping people is a good thing. But too often we help people who don’t actually need it, or are claiming they need help (probably true), but aren’t doing their part to get their situation improved.

We need to be careful of:

• Enabling another’s bad behaviour and poor choices.
• Undermining their growth by:
  • Fixing their problems without their efforts
  • Taking away the consequences of their informed decisions
• Mistaking someone’s complaint or claim of problem for them taking advantage of your generous nature

Here are some heuristics that I find helpful:

• At the age of 18 in Australia, you are legally an adult. All adults, by default, are considered to be competent – unless there is a proven reason why someone isn’t, in which case they should be assigned a guardian and or administrator to look after them. A competent person is ultimately responsible for their own choices. It is fair to offer help, but not to live their life for them or be responsible for them, unless you are their guardian.
  • That is: let adults suffer the consequences of their choices, if you’ve given them fair warning.
  • “While I am sympathetic that this has happened to you, you knew it was a risk. So, what have you learned and what do you intend to do now?”
• You can teach a person to fish, even feed them some fish while they learn, but if you keep feeding them fish instead of teaching them, or they refuse to learn to fish (or some other way to sustain themself), then you aren’t actually helping them – you have a dependent.
  • That is: It is fine to try to help someone to do better, but if they don’t put the work in, then you aren’t actually helping them to do better.
  • “While I don’t want to be the one to tell you this, I haven’t seen what you are doing to address this situation, so I am concerned that I am just enabling you not to act. As such, without a good plan and some clearly seen actions, I’m going to stop supporting you.”
• You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. If they drink someone else, that’s just as good as where you suggested. If you didn’t show it where the water is, it dying of thirst may be your fault, but if you showed it where the water is and it refused to drink, then that isn’t your fault. If you try to force the horse to drink, you could drown it.
  • That is: It is a reasonable social obligation to warn someone about a problem, or offer them a solution. If they refuse to hear the warning or take the solution and still end up in trouble, then that’s on them – they are an adult and need to experience the consequence of their choices.

Toxic Environments

Work Smarter, not Harder

The signals we receive from interoception, or the small burnouts that we try to work through are warning signs. It is an indication that we are running out of our resources and that the pathway forwards is not wise.

This should prompt us to stop and examine the situation.

We need to Work Smarter, not Harder.

• We might decide that a little bit more will get the job done and we can then take a break and recuperate. That is a fine choice, so long as it is true and we follow through with the recovery.
  • That means creating a check in point to ensure that it was truly only a little bit longer of pushing before we check again if this was a correct assessment.
  • That means booking time out to recover, and then doing it.
• We might decide to change our tactics about what we are doing – finding a cheaper way to get this same job done, or bring in help to get it done – if it truly needs to be done.
• We might decide that this course of action is monumentally wrong for us, and we need to abandon the action.

If we blindly continue when we receive these warning, we will burn out again.