As an AuDHD person, the college dropout story is relatable to me, except for the YouTube career success. I grew up in a madhouse during my traumatic childhood, and going to college free from my backwards, overprotective, overly strict parents was essentially like falling off a cliff. I was already burnt out during my last year of high school, and I was too excited with the freedom and ended up wasting time playing video games and skipping classes regularly because I had little energy to function as an adult. I still struggle with burnout to this day due to being an overworked IT contractor for years.
There’s a lot of moving parts in that question lol
So different people seem to be more or less sensitive to caffeine and medications or sometimes even other things like diet or especially supplements can affect how caffeine affects you - for example L-theanine with caffeine seems to really smooth the rough edges of caffeine and it’s something that naturally occurs in tea so a person might notice that the caffeine from tea doesn’t affect them in the same way that coffee does. Likewise different ways of processing coffee changes the amount of caffeine you get so two coffees of the same volume can have different effects due to their respective caffeine levels.
Then there are certain things that can inhibit the way your body processes caffeine so if you drink an energy drink with taurine or guarana in it, for example, then that can interfere with how your body metabolises caffeine, making it feel stronger and making its effects last longer.
Then there’s other factors associated with lifestyle that impact this. If we take an ADHDer as an example then it’s well known that poor sleep quality really fucks with ADHDers and they might find that caffeine doesn’t seem to have much of an effect when the have been struggling with sleep.
There’s more that I could go into with this but I’ll wind it up there so this reply doesn’t drag on unnecessarily.
Without knowing more, at a guess that sounds like you might be on the far end of the arousal curve. Don’t take this graph as being the be-all end-all but:
Any stimulant is going to push you further to the right on that curve. (I don’t think that anxiety belongs strictly in one part of the curve but it’ll do as a rough guide.) If you’re already feeling fatigue, especially if it’s a chronic sort of fatigue then caffeine might push you into hardcore anxiety. Or it might push you beyond that point into the complete exhaustion/burnout zone where you are just ready to collapse.
It gets more complicated with ADHDers because for some ADHDers they find that the stimulating effects of caffeine to help them feel centred and relaxed, so often ADHDers will report that caffeine can put them to sleep. Though that’s not the case for all ADHDers, certainly not for myself except in rare occasions, so I wouldn’t use this to rule anything in or out especially without knowing a whole lot more about what’s going on for you.
General advice?
Sounds a lot like burnout, which can affect anybody. I would do recommend trying out the general advice for burnout management and see if that improves things for you - focus on improving your sleep quality, try to avoid additional stress, opt for light exercise that isn’t too prolonged where it’s within your capacity to do so, cut some corners where possible so you have fewer demands on yourself, go easy on caffeine/alcohol/other drugs, regular mindfulness and relaxation are good habits to cultivate etc.
Worst case scenario from gradually integrating burnout management advice into your lifestyle?
You end up feeling more relaxed and less overwhelmed so the risks from trying this stuff out are pretty minimal and even if it’s not the answer that you’re looking for it’s probably going to be of minor benefit to you. The risks of not addressing burnout early enough, on the other hand, can be pretty disastrous.
I’m always glad to share info, especially when it’s helpful for others.
Good luck with the treatment!
Keep at it, even if you feel disheartened, because the more treatments you try the more you will be able to narrow down what works for you and what doesn’t. Over time this can form a picture of what’s going on for you so that you are able to get to a diagnosis/treatment/lifestyle that fits your circumstances.
yeah, that tracks. my current journey started because of more than half a decade of being in a constant state of burnout.
i have, and have been, for about three years now. it’s made the bad less bad, but it hasn’t made the good any more good (or stopped or slowed my semirapid decline).
what i already know is that i have autism and cPTSD. i’ve been in a constant state of stress for over a decade.
in my first journey: i was tentatively diagnosed with ADHD in another country, but i wasn’t granted autonomy yet, and the stigma and cost of ADHD treatment didn’t make it an option for my owners.
so, the second journey was of course court-ordered applied behavioural analysis and institutionalisation for suicidal depression. i’ve been on just about every single antidepressant and antipsychotic and been thru every CBT-derivative psychotherapy you could probably name. y’know: treating symptoms (chronic depression, ‘conduct disorder’) rather than causes (horrible environment, trauma, executive dysfunction). the consistent effect was that it made everything worse (and in some ways: permanently).
now, in my current country, the barrier is that my doctors are suspicious of how direct and articulate i am with what evaluations and treatment options i’m considering. they’re all either incompetent or their knolwedge is 40 years behind, and they’ve seemingly decided that i seem too introspective and too selfaware to possibly be feeling like shit. their prescription? join a book club and go back to work. and of course postcovid and burnout and shit sleep are making it hard to find the energy to argue with these people. so, that’s cool.
i understand being direct can make doctors get defensive, but i’ve tried the coy social engineering approach and it got me involuntarily hospitalised. *shrug*
anyway, thanks for the information and support.
Ah that makes a lot of sense then.
I think that’s a really positive sign. I know how badly it sucks. Intimately. I’ve reached depths of burnout that I didn’t realise I was capable of.
Imo the worst parts have to be reduced in severity before you start seeing glimpses of improvement in the good.
Hang in there.
This makes a ton of sense.
This is a familiar story. Any therapist I see, I basically tell them straight-up that I’m allergic to CBT and that I ain’t fucking with that shit anymore.
I’m not opposed to CBT if it works for someone but I’ve heard so many bad reports about CBT from autistic people, not to mention having things made a whole lot worse for me because of it. It might be confirmation bias but if someone is autistic and thinking about CBT-based treatment I’m always going to tell them to approach it with extreme caution.
Also CBT I think is pretty bad for people who have CPTSD. Put CPTSD and autism together and CBT is horribly counterproductive.
Also antidepressants tend to be pretty garbage for autistic people generally. I can’t tolerate most of them. I’ve had some degree of success with mirtazapine, which is an unusual antidepressant in how it works, and same with agomelatine, which is a particularly unusual antidepressant (although I believe that it isn’t available in the US). Otherwise? I’ve only had awful experiences with antidepressants.
I feel this. “You’ve got a lot of insight” is like a trigger phrase for me lol. I had to find a really good psychiatrist before I could make progress - one that was genuinely interested in working in partnership with me, and it’s only since that point that I’ve developed an understanding of psychopharmacology, because I’ve been able to bounce ideas off of them and we’ve been able to talk about targeting specific things and to assess the effects of medication to be able to hone in on particular symptoms to find better medications.
Even then, my psychiatrist isn’t very knowledgeable about ADHD or autism and yet they’re better on these matters than any other doctor, psychiatrist, or psychologist that I’ve ever come across.
It sucks that it has to be like this. It sucks that I had to become my own amateur psychiatrist. But this is something that motivates my posting, especially in this comm - it was really fucking hard for me to bootstrap myself into understanding these things (I never paid any attention in science class) but I’m lucky that I have enough of the right factors that I can approach this subject and understand it to some degree. Not to shit on anyone else but I think I am extremely privileged to have the circumstances I do (e.g. I have a stable home life, I don’t have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet, I can bend a special interest to my will enough to learn things sorta on demand, I’ve done a lot of groundwork to learn how to do autodidacticism properly, I have a psychiatrist who I can bounce ideas off of and who’s willing to prescribe me most things if I can provide a decent case for it etc.) that make it possible to be knowledgeable about this stuff. And if I can make this stuff a little bit more accessible to other people who need it then I feel like it’s really important work since so many of us are just caught in a massive drought of services, support, and information.
That double bind really sucks, doesn’t it?
I think two things that have been really useful in this situation is to come off as jaded - I’ve been stuck in this damn system for years and I’ve been through so much of it, so I’m going to let clinicians know that I’m a veteran. If that makes them feel threatened or defensive then I know I need to find someone willing to work with me on my level.
The other thing is that I’m just extremely honest - if I have misgivings about a treatment I’m going to voice them, if I think a clinician is wrong I’m going to tell them. This rubs some people up the wrong way but that’s fine because if they can’t deal with me unfiltered then we won’t be able to make much progress.
If that puts some clinicians off from working with me then all the better. I’d rather identify the shit ones so I can move them along than to be stuck long-term with a clinician who I only realise is shit after investing a lot of time and effort.
No worries.
Sorry for rambling so much. I’ve started drafting a post on autistic burnout/catatonia in my head so I’m hoping that I’ll be able to produce something on this topic soonish. I should be able to put some stuff in there that will be useful to you which will be more than the boilerplate advice about managing burnout.