I haven’t been doing it consistently, but I have stuck with therapy sessions since the back half of last year. My most recent one was in January, and in that session the therapist suggested that the burnout I had been feeling was not just “standard” stressed-out burnout. The feelings I described indicated that I was experiencing a form of neurodivergent burnout, a term that I’d encountered before but wasn’t super familiar with.
I decided to do a little homework on it, and reflecting back on some of my previous posts about overwhelm and burnout, I do kind of feel like it was an accurate assessment. My case was probably not on the extreme side — I was still functional enough to look after basic needs and show up at work — but I clearly found myself hollowed out and limited. The fact that I had low motivation to do much outside of the most needful activities, let go of most of my hobbies (except for watching YouTube videos about them), struggled with thinking things through, was frequently irritable or panicked, easily overloaded and overwhelmed, and just wanted to be alone in a blanket cocoon for most of 2024 and for period before that sounds clearly aligned with most of the definitions I’ve been able to find.
It was an interesting reframing of things to me for a couple of reasons. For one, it brings into relief something that I already intuitively understand about the workings of my brain. Mainly, though it helped me reframe even further that the absolute enervation and lack of will to do anything and general wallop I was feeling was not due to me just not being able to adult; it was my actual nervous system shutting down as a survival mechanism.
The other thing that jumped out to me once I started reading / reviewing the information was that my “aha” moment about “clearing the decks” is a core part of recovering from neurodivergent burnout. In some ways, this wasn’t really a new discovery as much as a semantic realignment that the things I was figuring out about myself were both medically recognised and on the right track.