I call it a Hard Reboot

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My first thread, YAY!

So I'm normally the quiet, bookish sort. . . But my mum didn't take to it because she didn't want me to close myself off from the rest of the world. I then actively tried to be more outgoing for her sake. It usually starts with decreased confidence in my academic ability due to being in a new environment where I don't have many friends, so I'm very conscious of how I appear to others. It then quickly devolves into social anxiety coupled with poor performance in school. A short year-long bout of depression later (along with isolation and terrible cramps), I reboot and basically do very well in all my classes with very little hindrance. This has happened twice and I'm hoping for a third now that I'm in college. When I describe it to neurotypicals such as my therapists, they don't really seem to get it.

I was diagnosed as an adult so I thought therapy and anxiety medication would accelerate the process. It didn't. But I feel myself becoming more aloof and basically becoming worse at social interactions. I also seem ro have to give something up for the other. Does anyone else experience this or do I really have to learn how to get the best of both worlds? This third time happened because I was aiming for that. And why do these breakdowns happen? Is it because I'm far too self-aware that I spiral or because I revert to a people pleaser because I think I can handle social interactions and my academic load?

I find that I regularly just need time to reboot myself. I work in a busy office and most of the time it's fine because they're very understanding of who I am and give me tasks where I can just ferret away at them but over time I get drained of socialising, office politics and just the noise. I start to feel exhausted and my social skills start to revert. I feel like the mask of 'normal but shy person' that I usually wear becomes impossible to keep up. I know that if I push things beyond that that I will start to get bouts of depression and really bad anxiety. So when I feel exhausted by society I take myself away from it and try to reset. I don't go on social media for a bit and largely isolate myself as much as possible until I feel recharged.

I've seen other people on blogs and websites describe a similar thing and call it aspergers/autistic burnout. They all say they have had struggles explaining it to therapists. So I would say that what you're experiencing is pretty normal. Look after yourself for a few days and you'll start to come back but don't push yourself any harder than you need to.

Yes, it sounds a bit like burnout, so I'm guessing you might be trying to handle too much.
Difficult to know what to do, except monitor yourself and how stressed you're getting. And when the burnout happens, maybe accept that you'll need to take things really easy for a while.

I agree with the previous opinions, it sounds like the boom-bust cycle of burnouts. My cycles seem to have slowed somewhat as I've gotten older, but it sounds the same: -> start to feel good -> bite off more than I can chew -> struggle to get through by using all my evenings and weekends to "soft reboot" -> rapid decline in my abilities plus meltdowns -> go into hermit mode ("hard reboot") -> rinse -> repeat ->...

I must have done getting on for a dozen laps since the first "hard reboot" that I can remember, in my mid-teens. I certainly do find them hard!

The linked article in this recent post <clicky> is a very well written guide to burnouts; I heartily recommend it.

Thank you all so much! I've been terrified thinking that I was insane because my therapists and my friends couldn't make heads or tails of it. I think that the socializing is the only thing causing the burnout. Academically, I never seem to bite off too much until I feel overworked by interacting.