Autistic burnout and how I (unknowingly) designed my business to support my Autistic brain

If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll know that in 2019 I burnt myself out pretty badly. As I started to heal, I rebuilt my business in a way that supported – what I called back then –  my "very sensitive nervous system" as that was the only language I had.

I call this burnout The Big Burnout (TBB) because, unfortunately this hasn’t only happened once in my life. Looking back, it’s happened: at the end of high school (after I was bullied severely for years), at the end of my 10 year corporate career, at the end of my first business’ failure (TBB) and, actually (and there’s some shame when I say this)  now again right here right now today (sigh). 

Fortunately, I’ve caught it before it got as far as TBB (thank goodness!).

A few weeks back, as I prepared for my mid-year solo retreat, I noticed the signs – absolute exhaustion that doesn’t go away with sleep or rest, severe sensitivity to light and sounds, gut problems, rigidity and inflexibility in my routine, overfunctioning and anxiety (so much anxiety).

I couldn’t believe I was back here again. With all I know and with everything I had put in place. What am I missing? Why does this keep happening? Why can’t I function like ‘normal’ people can?

To cut a long story short, you can probably guess where this is going – yes, I have been diagnosed Autistic.

As I let the news of this settle in, I started to reflect on my lifestyle over the past few years through the lens of Autism. And the answers to why I’m burnt out suddenly made a whole lot of sense.

Then, as I reflected on my business, yes I saw things I needed to address but I was also pleasantly surprised by how much I had unknowingly designed my business around my autistic sensitivities, needs, special interests and strengths. 

If you’re a late-diagnosed or self-diagnosed Autistic woman running your own biz, you’ve probably noticed that there’s not a whole heap of helpful stuff out there on this topic made just for us. So, in an attempt to explore this more, I decided to share the things I’ve (unknowingly) done in my business to support my Autistic brain (plus a few things at the end that I still struggle with).

Table of Contents

Self-employment and working from home

I want to start by acknowledging how grateful (and privileged) I am to have the option to be self-employed and work from home. I know for a lot of Autistic women this is not an option, and it’s not surprising that unemployment rates for autistic people are exceptionally high.

Looking back at my corporate career through my twenties and thirties, what wore me down wasn't the work so much as it was the environment.

As a consultant, I was front-facing a lot. Running meetings, travelling to unfamiliar workplaces, a work routine that changed day to day and working with people I didn't know in environments I couldn’t control. Such an intense level of masking and sensory overstimulation meant I'd get home most evenings and collapse into bed. I couldn't understand how other people had the energy to do after-work activities. In the book Self-Care for Autistic People, Megan Anna Neff describes this as ‘sensory sickness’ where you’re so overstimulated that you literally feel sick (100% can relate).

Now that I run my own business and work from home, so much of that is no longer an issue because I get to choose where I work and when, how I communicate and – best of all – who I work with, based on shared values (which is a whole point of its own I'll come back to later). I still collapse into bed at the end of a work day though, ha!

There are obviously pros and cons to running your own business as an Autistic person, and later on I'll talk more about the things I still struggle with. But overall, getting out of the corporate world and having the option to create my own business has been one of the best things I've unknowingly done for my Autistic brain.

Low-masking communication

We late-diagnosed autistic women are expert maskers. We’ve learnt from a young age to suppress our Autistic traits and mimic neurotypical traits in order to fit in. In business, this can be particularly exhausting if we’re required to be forward-facing a lot of the time.

I’ve always been conscious – even before I knew I was Autistic – that calls are exceptionally draining for me. It’s not just the call, it’s the lead up and preparation to the call, transitioning in and out,  that also takes loads of energy.  As such, I have to limit the number of calls I do and find other ways of communicating that are less draining.

As a website designer, sales and check-in calls with my clients are part of the deal. To limit the impact on my energy, I started stacking my calls onto one day a week and I cap the number of calls at three in a day. The rest of my week generally stays free of forward facing demands like this (I don’t always nail this ha!).

This has meant that I’m not able to do as many sales calls as other designers might do and it does limit the amount of work that I bring in (and therefore my income). However, I know from past experience that if I push past my limit and fill my calendar with calls (which is easy to do), I end up a shell of a person and not able to show up in the other areas of my business (or life) in the way I want to.

In addition to limiting the number of calls I schedule, I’ve set up a filtering system to make sure I’m only jumping on calls with people who are a good match. This looks like being super transparent about my packages, pricing and way I work so the people that enquire already know that their project or budget is  a fit for my offerings. And I have a detailed enquiry form that potential clients fill out first so I can assess  if we are a fit and email them if I need more detail. 

Even with all the structure around my calls, I know I'm masking heavily the whole time I'm on one. So I have scripts and questionnaires I follow – partly to jog my memory, but mostly so I walk in feeling prepared, confident and at ease, at which I’m able to give my full attention to my client and their needs.

For everything else, I lean heavily on email communication. And just like for my calls, I have scripts written for pretty much every step of a project, so I'm never reinventing the wording or second-guessing whether I've said the right thing or forgotten something. I love Text Expander to store all my email scripts and pull them up easily when I need them. 

Low-sensory and low-masking marketing 

Just like with communicating, certain types of marketing can also require masking. Things like being on camera, doing live webinars, showing up at networking events can be exceptionally exhausting. I flat out don’t do this type of marketing in my business (and I stopped shaming myself for it).

There’s also a sensory cost to online marketing. I find social media marketing particularly bad for this – with the notifications, potential for doom scrolling, keeping up with changing algorithms and just the sheer volume of noise (especially now with Instagram reels) is incredibly overstimulating and dysregulating for my system.

For years I had a love-hate relationship with marketing, because so much of what's "recommended" made me feel gross to do, and I didn't want to market to other people that way either. When I tried to (in my first business), I actually ended up burning myself out by trying to be everywhere at once. 

Then a couple years back, I began exploring ways I could become naturally and sustainably discoverable through search and realised this was the marketing unicorn I had been looking for. 

I then went on to develop my Calm Marketing Methodology around that.

Now as I look at marketing through an Autistic lens I can see why Calm Marketing feels so good to me. It's not pushy or performative. It doesn't rely on manipulation, manufactured urgency, being online all the time or being a content-creation machine. Plus it feels much more ethical and in alignment with my overall values.

I actually got proof of this recently. Around the same time I was diagnosed Autistic, I also went through an unexpected breakup. I spent three weeks in bed with earplugs in and the blinds drawn, protecting myself from any sensory stimulation while I tried to process everything. The idea of showing up online to market my business felt completely impossible. And yet, enquiries and product sales continued to flow into my inbox even though I wasn’t actively marketing my business.

Pattern recognition and super-efficient systems

One of the strengths of an Autistic brain is the ability for deep systems thinking. This is where we are able to look at something (like a process, project or business) as a connected whole, and can easily trace how a change in one part will ripple out and affect everything else. This often comes paired with strong pattern recognition in which we are naturally able to spot opportunities, details and bottlenecks that other people don't notice. 

And alongside both of these, a lot of Autistic people (myself included) thrive on predictability and repetition. 

Honestly, one thing I've always loved about my brain is how clever it is at spotting things others don’t see (highly useful in website design). I have a complete obsession with making systems repeatable, organised and highly efficient. Both of these traits serve me super well as a business owner.

Some examples of where I do this well in my business:

• My brain’s ability to recognise patterns means I’ve often been ahead of the game when it comes to new ideas and offerings. For example my signature guided website experience was developed in response to a gap I saw in the market place. 

• I then developed this into a full, repeatable system which I follow for every single website project (and teach other web designers how to do the same). Every step from first enquiry through to ongoing support has been mapped out to detail with documentation, email scripts, Asana tasks, questionnaires and forms. This helps me feel super calm and at ease when I enter a new project with a client (and my clients also feel calm too!).

• My Calm Marketing methodology has been developed and reverse engineered in response to a pattern I noticed across all my clients and their marketing efforts. 

• And across my entire business, I'm constantly adapting my systems to make them work as efficiently as they possibly can. If I notice a step that's clunky, or a task I'm repeating manually, it will infuriate me to no end until I fix it. 

Systemising and automating repeatable parts of my business gives me so much joy (total geek I know) and the happy by-product of this is that it also preserves my limited social and mental energy, saving it for the parts of the work that actually need my creativity (like writing articles like this one, yay!). 

Hyperfocused ‘deep work’ and minimising transitions

One of the things that's well understood about the Autistic brain is a concept called monotropism. Essentially this is where our attention gets pulled deeply into one thing (or a small number of things) at a time – hyperfocusing – and it becomes exceptionally hard (painful actually in my experience) to pull oneself away from that thing.

I see monotropism as a strength for an Autistic business owner because we’re able to deeply focus on something for many hours, particularly topics that are of special interest to us. This is how we become experts and have deep knowledge in the fields we love. It’s also why we’re able to give our clients exceptional, premium service.

Where the challenge lies is transitioning out of one task and switching attention. On a side note: when researching this topic, I discovered that this difficulty in transitioning actually has a name – “autistic inertia”. 

About a year ago, I was struggling with managing my email communication and my work load. I kept feeling like I was pulled in multiple different directions, which left me feeling a frazzled mess. 

After some trial and error, I implemented daily ‘deep work’ into my schedule. I figured out when I'm most energised and when my brain is functioning at its best capacity (that’s early morning for me).

During this time, I set aside four hours (two hours then a break then two more hours) where I hyperfocus purely on one client or one task in my business. This limits the number of transitions I’m doing in a day and it is almost always enough time to get to a sense of completion so I can close off my brain when I finish the four hours.

I also (unknowingly) structured my packages and timelines around these four hour stints. 

Why four hours? I tracked my energy for a while and worked out that four hours is my maximum – after that, my energy has dipped a lot and I'm not really that productive anymore. 

Later in the afternoon, I make time for admin like emails, invoicing etc. But the four hours in the morning are specifically for deep, hyperfocused work on one particular client or task and this really does mean I have a much more enjoyable and satisfying work day.

Values-driven, ethical business design

Values, justice and ethics are something I'm starting to discover matter a lot to Autistic people. It's something that's increasingly talked about in the Autism community, described as a heightened reaction to unfairness or inconsistency.

Part of this seems to come from pattern recognition as well. The same trait that helps me spot inefficiencies and bottlenecks in a business also means I notice when something is inconsistent or unfair. And once I've noticed it, it's hard to just let it go. 

For me, this has shown up throughout my whole business journey with the need to build an ethical business around what I value and believe. And it’s not enough to just state my beliefs. I need to see them play out in the actual decisions I make – like who I work with, how I price things, how I communicate and market and where my money goes.

Autistic-friendly web design

Autistic people often process sensory information more intensely and if our brains are taking in more information or demands than they can process this can lead to cognitive overload. Cognitive overload can make it difficult to focus, make decisions or complete tasks and can become so draining that it leads to shut downs and meltdowns.

This can happen across all areas of life, but where I’d like to focus here, is how this plays out for Autistic people in the online space.

My calm, kind web design philosophy was developed in 2019, when I was recovering from TBB. In burnout, I’ve always experienced increased sensory sensitivity (something that’s very common for Autistic people in burnout, I now realise). 

During this time, the internet was a really noisy, painful place to be. Things like moving animations, pop-ups, unpleasant colour pairings, pain-point and fear based copywriting, even just a difficult to navigate or messy website structure would throw me into a spin and have me immediately pressing close on the browser tab.

So I started designing and building ‘calm and kind’ websites in response to my own sensory outrage (ha!). My goal was to simply make the internet a nicer place to be. 

Now I understand that my kind design philosophy reduces cognitive load. It remove distractions and encourages curiosity, gently leading visitors on a natural journey with clean navigation, an intuitive site structure and digestible content. And this makes it so much easier for people to stay and explore. 

What I’ve come to realise though is that Autistic-friendly website design isn't only beneficial for Autistic visitors. These same improvements benefit all visitors to your website and it benefits your business too.

If you think about it, it makes total sense. When you remove the noise and let people actually explore a website calmly, they are more likely to stay longer, take in more of what you've said and make clearer decisions – which means you’re more likely to be remembered and you create more opportunities for connection and conversion.

Areas I still struggle with

Giving myself extra rest and recovery time 

Because of our intense processing and sensory differences, Autistic people tend to need a lot more rest and recovery time than the average person.

Understanding this has brought a lot of relief as to why I don’t have the same energy levels as other people (I’m not lazy!). But it’s actually also one area where a lot of grief has come up.

A couple of years ago, I started a four-day work week. Four days for client work or for specific projects in my business. And Friday as a free day – no commitments or plans. But a day where I could tune into whatever I felt like doing.

This worked superbly well for the first year and the three-day weekend gave me rest and recovery time from work and enough space to be social and still recover.

Unfortunately, this last year, as I tried to balance my business with a weekly Friday music gig and a regular stream of visitors, my free Fridays weren’t so free anymore and my weekends were filled. I started to feel more and more frazzled, overwhelmed and anxious but didn’t have the language as to why this was happening and why having a couple days of rest here and there wasn’t enough to recover. I hadn’t realised how vital these free days were for my wellbeing and mental health. And I hadn’t realised how much internalised ableism and self-shaming was going on as I wondered why I couldn’t cope like everyone else.

Suffice to say, I truly paid the price of this with burnout and the loss of my relationship. 

The hard lesson I’ve learned here is that I need much more rest time than others. And I have had to redefine what rest looks like for me vs what it might look for someone else. I need to advocate for myself and ensure I’ve included lots of low sensory, no pressure, guilt-free recovery days into my week to rebuild my energy. 

Bigger than that, I’m also coming to terms with the fact that there’s actually a lot I can’t (and shouldn’t) do if I want to protect my mental health and wellbeing. If you’ve been late-diagnosed Autistic, you’ll know there’s a lot of sadness that comes with this realisation.

So yes, free Fridays are on the comeback now and I’ll be protecting them fiercely. 

Transitioning out of work at the end of the day

As we’ve talked about earlier, a monotropic mind gets pulled deeply into whatever it’s interested in and while this is a definite strength, when your special interest is your business and there are really no limits to what you can do or create, it’s very easy to get locked into work and stay that way beyond the point of exhaustion and with little regard for any of your other daily needs (like eating, drinking or moving your body).

With this ‘locking in’, transitioning out actually feels physically painful (for me, anyway), particularly if the task is not complete. An incomplete task, even if I step away from it, remains open in my brain and I can, if not careful, ruminate on it to the point of exhaustion.

I would say this difficulty with transitioning out of work at the end of a day and being able to put down things that are not complete (both physically and mentally) is my absolute biggest challenge when it comes to being a self-employed Autistic woman and is one of the leading reasons I have a tendency to burnout if I’m not on top of this. 

Negative self-talk and self-compassion

A lot of autistic people carry internalised ableism – negative beliefs about being autistic that get absorbed over years of being told, directly or indirectly, that we’re lazy, not trying hard enough, dramatic or too sensitive (a common one from my childhood). 

There’s also this study (which I found fascinating), exploring the idea that Autistic people often do the same behaviours repetitively and therefore may also have more repetitive thinking styles, which in turn can lead to repetitive negative thinking, like rumination and obsessing.

In my own personal experience, I feel like the same traits of deep systems thinking, hyperfocus and pattern recognition, that make me good at spotting inefficiencies and building repeatable systems, also can lead to pretty negative thought loops. So when something gets flagged in my brain as "not right" or "not finished," it's actually hard to just let it go.

In practice, this looks like a simple mistake that is not a big deal (the kind most people would feel bad about for an hour and then move on from) gets replayed and re-analysed by me for days. 

Being self-employed makes this harder to interrupt too. In a workplace, you might have a manager or a colleague who tells you "that's fine, let it go". Running my own business, there's no one doing that for me. And so the rumination doesn't get externally interrupted the way it might elsewhere and instead it just keeps going until I've worn myself out with it.

I’m currently reading Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself and the simple self-compassion exercises in this book have been really helpful in breaking me out of unhelpful repetitive and negative thought-loop spirals.

And honestly, just understanding that I’m Autistic – and that this kind of rumination is part of how my brain processes and functions – has alone, been helpful in giving myself more grace.

Looking back over all of this through an Autistic lens, I feel like I finally understand why my business has felt like such a safe container for me, even in the middle of a fairly chaotic, sensory-overwhelmed life the past year. It turns out I've been building something that fits my brain the whole time and I just didn't have the language for it until now.

There's a lot I'm still figuring out, especially around rest, boundaries and knowing when to stop. But if you're a late-diagnosed or self-diagnosed Autistic woman running your own business, I hope some of this resonated or has maybe even given you a bit of language for something you've been doing instinctively too.

I'd love to hear from you – what have you unknowingly built into your business that actually supports your Autistic brain? Or what are you still working on? Pop a comment below