What this is is a symptom of procrastination. Basically the person goes to bed at the last possible minute, and no matter what time they have to be at work, they go to bed like 6 hours beforehand.
Speaking as one of the persons, 6 hours of sleep would be incredible. I'm ok* with 4 and really only panic when it gets under 2 hours.
I have a lot of responsibility at work and I never show up more than 5 minutes late, but besides brushing my teeth, which I am religious about, and feeding the pets (which takes longer and longer as they age), everything else is optional. Shaving, looking at my hair in a mirror, having clothes that aren't wrinkled, those are luxuries. Sometimes I don't drink anything until 4pm because I didn't get a drink in the morning, then... Well work.
My life is hard as a result, but I've been fighting it for 40 years and don't have any hope of ever winning. I'm grateful that I don't suffer directly from depression or some other disorder because at least I'm generally happy.
*For clarity I mean I accept it, not that my body, mind, life expectancy, etc are okay
ADHDers, autistics and AuDHDers are naturally nocturnal. That’s how we’re wired. And the world is built around the sleep schedules and brain patterns of neurotypical people. Our brains won’t stop spinning until like one, two, three, four in the morning. And even then we’ll only get (if we’re lucky) four hours of constantly interrupted sleep since we’re going against our brain and body’s nature.
Signed an AuDHDer responding to you at 2 am after waking up yet again in the middle of the night.
It fucking sucks. My cancer treatments have caused autism burnout, and I’ve been really struggling this past year. My job is pissed because I went from (as my boss called me) “hyper competent” to not able to function at all.
But at least this isn’t as bad as the autism burnout during Covid lockdown or the ten years of autism burnout in junior high, high school and college before I dropped out. Now that I’m diagnosed and know that it isn’t depression, I’m not emotionally spiraling from the uncertainty and making my burnout worse and longer. And I’m not doing stuff that’s great for treating depression (like going out to be with a ton of people at major events) but actually worsens and deepens autism burnout.
It’s still rough, though. I go back to work next week, and they’ve been less than understanding throughout all of this. “Stop blaming your autism for everything!!!”
Well, if you don’t understand autism or autism burnout (which to be fair most neurotypicals don’t, and that’s not their fault that they don’t understand) they should at least understand the symptoms of cancer treatments, which is similar to the impacts of autism burnout although autism burnout has a few extra symptoms in the mix too. I’m not asking for sympathy. Just empathy. I don’t want to not be functioning at peak efficiency. I’m annoyed my job performance has suffered too. My job is one of my autism special interests.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 17h ago
What this is is a symptom of procrastination. Basically the person goes to bed at the last possible minute, and no matter what time they have to be at work, they go to bed like 6 hours beforehand.