How Your Neurotype Influences Burnout

If you’re a mum who feels utterly exhausted, foggy, flattened, or unlike yourself, you might be wondering whether this is “just burnout”… or something more specific.

For neurodivergent mums, burnout isn’t one-size-fits-all. How burnout shows up, how long it lasts, and what actually helps can look very different depending on your neurotype. Understanding this can be deeply relieving. It helps shift the story from “What’s wrong with me?” to “Oh… this makes sense.”

Let’s gently explore how burnout can present for ADHD, autistic, and combined (AuDHD) mums, without judgement or deficit-based language.

ADHD burnout often comes after a long stretch of over-efforting.

Many ADHD mums are used to pushing through. You might rely on adrenaline, novelty, or urgency to get things done. You juggle, hyperfocus, sprint, crash, then repeat. For a while, this can work. Until suddenly… it doesn’t.

ADHD burnout can look like:

• A sharp drop in motivation or dopamine

• Tasks that once felt doable now feeling impossible

• Emotional overwhelm, irritability, or tearfulness

• Brain fog, forgetfulness, and loss of executive functioning

• A sense of shame or self-blame for “not keeping up”

What’s tricky is that ADHD burnout is often misunderstood as laziness or lack of discipline or even misdiagnosed as depression. In reality, it’s a nervous system that’s been running on empty for too long.

Rest helps, but ADHD burnout also needs gentle reactivation. Too much rest can feel stagnating; too much pressure deepens the crash. Support often looks like:

• Reducing demands and slowly reintroducing meaningful stimulation

• External structures and supports without criticism

• Compassion for fluctuating energy, not forcing consistency

• Outsourcing cognitive load

Autistic burnout is different in both depth and duration.

It often builds slowly and invisibly, especially for mums who have spent years masking, adapting, and putting others’ needs first. Many autistic mums don’t realise they’re heading toward burnout until their system says “stop” very abruptly.

Autistic burnout can include:

• Profound physical and mental exhaustion

• Loss of skills (communication, organisation, tolerance)

• Increased sensory sensitivity

• Withdrawal from people or environments

• A strong need for sameness, quiet, or reduced interaction

Unlike typical stress or fatigue, autistic burnout can take months or longer to recover from, especially if the environment doesn’t change.

What helps here isn’t pushing or “building resilience”, but reducing mismatch between the person and their world. Support often involves:

• Lowering sensory, social, and cognitive load

• Permission to rest deeply and without guilt

• Environmental adjustments, not self-fixing

• Validation that this is a real, embodied experience

• Identifying and reducing areas of masking

Autistic burnout is not failure. It’s a sign of having carried too much, for too long, without enough safety or accommodation.

If you relate to both, you’re not imagining things. Combined profiles are more common than previously thought. Often diagnosis or exploration starts with one an extends into the other.

This type of burnout can feel particularly confusing because the needs can seem to conflict:

• The ADHD part longs for stimulation, novelty and momentum

• The autistic part desperately needs rest, predictability, and low demand

Many mums describe cycling between short bursts of energy (often hyperfocused on “fixing everything”) followed by deeper crashes that feel harder to climb out of each time.

Combined burnout may include:

• Intense all-or-nothing energy patterns

• Frustration at strategies that help one part but exhaust the other

• Feeling “too much” and “not enough” at the same time

• A sense of being misunderstood, even by professionals

• Intense periods of exhaustion

• Loss of skills in one part of life (or context) while functioning in other parts of life.

Support still focuses on:

• Reducing Demands (cognitive, emotional and sensory)

• Building supports and scaffolding

• Supporting nervous system regulation

• Understanding and managing energy needs

• Building acceptance and compassion

But support here is about balance, not extremes. Gentle pacing, flexible routines, and permission to change approach as your needs shift can make a big difference. It is OK - and expected - that what was working last week, might not work this week. You have not failed.

If any of this resonated, please know this:

Your burnout is not a personal flaw. It’s information.

Your nervous system is responding exactly as it should to prolonged stress, overload, and unmet needs. Understanding how your neurotype influences burnout can be the first step toward responding with compassion instead of criticism.

You don’t need to push harder.

You don’t need to “be more resilient”.

You deserve support that fits you.

And if you’re still figuring out what kind of support that might be, that’s okay too. One gentle step at a time is more than enough.

If this resonates and you’d like to understand more about what neurodivergent burnout actually is (and why it can feel so different), last week’s blog explores this gently and in more detail.

You can find that blog here