Dear neurodivergent woman,
Have you been told to take cold showers? To skip breakfast, shrink your eating window, get up at 5am, and "optimise"? If you are in burnout, you may have tried some of it and ended up worse.
That is not because you did it wrong. It is because most of this advice was never built for a body like yours.
Why a lot of wellness advice backfires in burnout
Ice baths, long fasts and punishing workouts all work the same way. They put the body under a stress and rely on it recovering and coming back stronger.
That can work when you have energy to spare. Burnout is what it looks like when you don't. There is nothing left to recover with, so another stress doesn't build you up. It takes more.
What the research says about autistic burnout
In 2020, researchers interviewed 19 autistic adults about burnout and analysed 19 public accounts alongside them. People described chronic exhaustion, a loss of skills, and a lower tolerance for sensory input. Burnout built up when life stress piled on and there was no way to get relief, so what was expected of people outgrew what they could do.
What helped people recover was time off, lower expectations, understanding and support from others, and doing things in an autistic way, including taking the mask off. Every recovery factor they named was about taking load off. Raymaker et al., 2020
This was a small study of autistic adults, and it is not about perimenopause or ADHD. But what it describes matches what I see.
Why cold and hunger are a lot for a neurodivergent body
If your tolerance for sensation is already low, an ice bath is not a gentle reset. It is a shock. The same goes for the sharp, light-headed edge of a long fast. Your nervous system reads both as danger.
This is how I see it with my clients. When the body is stuck in the cell danger response, it needs to be told it is safe. Cold, hunger and pushing say the opposite.
What I do instead
I work with two things: fuel and safety. The reasons are in why burnout is a metabolic health issue.
Steady fuel. Regular, steady eating, so your blood sugar isn't swinging and your cells get a reliable supply. A fasting window does the opposite for many of the women I work with.
Signals of safety. Fewer demands, more rest, gentle movement, and room to be as you are without masking. "Pushing is poison" is a line that stays with my clients, and it is true.
I start small, with one or two changes your body can take without a fight. Then we build. Working this way is how I healed myself fully, and it's how I help my clients. We get very good results.
If you are in burnout right now
You do not need a better routine. You need less on your plate, and a body that has enough fuel and feels safe. If you want to read more, start with why neurodivergent burnout is a metabolic health issue and why burnout is not a mindset problem.
Sources
Raymaker et al. (2020). "Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew": Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood.
