Hi ,

Quite a few parents have asked me to cover ‘burnout’ as sadly more and more of our children are either experiencing this or at risk of it. 

The National Autistic Society defines burnout as:

"a syndrome resulting from chronic stress and a mismatch of expectations and abilities without adequate supports. It is characterised by pervasive, long-term exhaustion, loss of function, and reduced tolerance to sensory stimuli."

So let’s think about that for a few moments…a mismatch of expectations and abilities without adequate supports. To me, this links with masking. When a child is masking and appears ‘fine’ in school then the expectations remain high and the support is low as there does not appear to be any justification for either a decrease in expectation or an increase in support. One of my children had months of appearing ok once at school but he was exhausted and would explode by the end of the school day. He kept telling us that he didn’t want to go to school but he couldn’t identify what was wrong. After a few months of this, getting him to school became a real struggle, he couldn’t get to sleep as he was anxious about going to school the next morning, I had to start sleeping in his bed with him, at school he started to become tearful and complain of stomach ache, his anxiety increased and over the course of 2 months things went drastically downhill and he could no longer attend school at all. This is where the next part of the definition comes in…burnout is characterised by pervasive, long-term exhaustion, loss of function, and reduced tolerance to sensory stimuli. For the first 5 months that my son was out of school he was completely unable to get dressed as his tolerance to sensory input was so low. On a good day he would wear pants and wrap himself in a blanket. The curtains had to be closed at all times and even small requests such as getting his own crisps from the nearby kitchen were seen by him as huge demands that he could not cope with. 

Before I discuss some strategies to support children in burnout next week, let’s think about how we stop children getting there in the first place. Most of you will have likely heard me talking about spoon theory. The basic idea being that we have limited reserves of energy or ‘spoons’ each day and that everything we do in a day uses up spoons. We need to make sure that we do not use up more spoons than we have. So if we wake up after a bad nights sleep we have less spoons and can manage less that day. If we are noise sensitive then attending a big gathering is going to take up quite a few spoons, if we a touch sensitive then even simply getting dressed uses up spoons and so on. What is happening for some of our children is that they are using up more spoons during the school day than they have; the demands are too high. And when the demands are consistently too high over a period of time and there is little opportunity to gain spoons back (adaptations such a movement breaks and quiet time can help give a child spoons back) then burnout occurs. 

What then sadly happens all to often is that there is pressure from ‘the system’ to send children into school when they have no spoons left and can no longer cope. If a coworker said to me “I’m exhausted, I just can’t manage anymore, I can’t sleep worrying about work and when I’m in work I just can’t function, I’m anxious and depressed and I’m thinking of having some time off”, then I’d say, “of course, you absolutely need some time off to recover, look after yourself, listen to your body and get well soon, take as long as you need and don’t overdo it”.  I would not say “well tough, you have to come to work, everyone else is going to work today so you’re going to have to manage too, you’ll be fine when you get there, ignore what your body is telling you and pull yourself together”. I realise that this is not always literally what we are telling children but it is often the implied message. 

I’m going to leave it there for this week. I’ll email again next week with some thoughts about burnout recovery and support. 

If you are reading this and your child is currently in burnout then I’m sending you so much love and good wishes. I can’t actually find the words to describe what it was like for my husband, son and I when we were going through this but just know that you’re not alone and that it will get better.

Hanna