The following is drawn from Session 4 of the Embracing Our Autistic Selves course, on the autistic bodymind, sensory knowledge, interoception, and burnout.

We live in a culture that has spent decades separating the body from the mind. Medicine treats the body, psychiatry treats the mind, and Autistic people, who experience both as inseparably entangled, get caught in the gap between them, told their sensory responses are symptoms, their fatigue is attitude, their dysregulation is a behaviour problem; it is none of those things.

The bodymind is a description of how we actually work, not a metaphor. The body and mind are not two systems running in parallel; they are one integrated system, in constant communication, constantly giving us information about the world we’re moving through. For Autistic people, that system works differently, not worse, differently.

Understanding that difference is, I would argue, one of the most important things we can do for ourselves.

Sensory Experience Is Knowledge, Not Pathology

Before any words are spoken, before any explanation is offered, your sensory world is already telling you things. Whether a space is safe, or if a person can be trusted, it might also tell us whether a situation is going to cost you more than is sustainable.

I know almost immediately if I can cope with a space. Wide-open spaces with lots of people; I know that’s going to be a struggle. Someone speaking at length about things my brain can’t compute, the same. A friend’s living room, a conversation about something I care deeply about, books around me? These are all sensory experiences that give me information; that is intelligence, not disorder.

When our sensory responses are treated as symptoms, what gets lost is the signal. Dysregulation is not manipulation, and it is not a behaviour problem.; it is a communication. Something is off-kilter, something is unmet. The appropriate response to a signal is curiosity, not correction.

This matters enormously in education, in healthcare, in workplaces. If someone is dysregulated, the question is not how to stop the dysregulation, rather it is:

What is this telling us about the environment?

Alexithymia And The Language Gap

A lot of us are alexithymic; alexithymia is the difficulty identifying and interpreting our own emotional states. Research puts it at around 50% of Autistic people, though I suspect the real figure is higher, and I also suspect it’s not always a fixed trait. Like most aspects of Autistic experience, it fluctuates, and interacts with stress, trauma, and overwhelm.

For me, anything that raises my heart rate can feel like anxiety. Exercise, excitement, actual anxiety; they all feel the same. Trying to work out which is which is genuinely hard work, and I’ve talked to so many Autistic people who describe themselves as emotionless, only for it to become clear very quickly that they’re not emotionless at all. They experience emotions, they just can’t always interpret them. The language they’ve been given doesn’t match the experiences they’re having.

This is a mismatch; between an Autistic neurocognitive system and a neurotypical emotional vocabulary.

Trauma compounds this. For many of us, lived experience of trauma teaches the bodymind to create distance between Self and experience. It becomes a survival mechanism; putting space between yourself and the things happening to you, that distance, over time, can become the default.

Meerkatting And Monotropic Demand Avoidance

Tanya Adkin’s concept of meerkat mode captures this nicely. It’s that desperate, hypervigilant state where you’re scanning constantly for the thing that will hook you in, give you that monotropic flow that will regulate you; but you’re looking for it in the wrong places, because by the time you’re meerkatting, you often don’t realise you’re doing it. It can look manic, it can feel urgent; it is the point just before the spiral, the moment before the rabbit hole opens up.

There’s also something worth saying about demand avoidance in this context. When we’re burned out, when we’re overwhelmed, the very signals from our body “you need to rest, you need to eat, you need to sleep” can start to feel like demands. If our bodyminds are already at capacity, those signals can get avoided alongside everything else. The result is what many of us know well; realising at 3pm that we haven’t eaten in 24 hours, or getting into bed and only then noticing the pain we’ve been carrying all day.

The Autistic bodymind under pressure behaves a bit like hypovolaemic shock; redirecting processing to what it has decided are the essential things, switching off channels to cope, much like a circulatory system redicrecting bloodflow in cases of blood loss. The problem is that the brain is not always right about what’s essential, and a lot of what gets switched off is more essential than we realise.

The Cost Of Conflict

When the sensory system is overwhelmed and we’re expected to perform as normal, when the body is going through the motions of functioning whilst the mind is in a state of overwhelm and desperation; that conflict is the costly part of masking. It is operating outside of what is sustainable. That conflict deserves to be noticed, bookmarked, and not pathologised; instead recognised as information: what I am doing right now is not sustainable.

This is where unhealthy coping mechanisms come in. Rumination, which in a monotropic mind isn’t just thinking about something, it’s thinking about it in ultra-high definition. Substance use, avoidance, hese things are attempts to manage an experience that has become unmanageable.

The question worth sitting with is: what boundaries do we need to set to reduce our exposure to those unsustainable situations? Not because we can eliminate them (we live in a world that is fundamentally not built for us) but because we can minimise them. This answer will look different for each of us.

Burnout Doesn’t Always Arrive Gradually

One of the things that came up in this session, and that I hear consistently from Autistic people, is that burnout doesn’t always announce itself. There’s no gentle slope; you’re in meerkat mode, hypervigilant, constantly on, scanning and seeking, and then you’re not. Suddenly you’re in it, crashed out, unable to leave the bed, unable to talk. The foggy, thick perspex between you and the world that some people describe; what feels to me like TV static. For many people, it’s others who notice the burnout before they do.

This is part of why checking in with ourselves matters. Knowing what our own early signals are and what our window of tolerance looks and feels like when we’re approaching its edges. Three check-ins across a day, just to locate yourself, it’s survival information/

Autistic burnout does not have a single profile. For me, it intersects with schizophrenia and tends to present as paranoia and anxiety, for others it looks like a depressive episode, for some it mirrors a hypomanic state. The stock lists of burnout symptoms are a starting point, not a map. Your burnout is your burnout, and it is worth knowing what it actually feels like in your body.

Sensory Anchors And The Path Through

So, What helps? Not the things people sometimes offer when they mean well; why don’t you come for a coffee, why don’t we go out for a meal. Those are often more expenditure.

What helps is meaningful rest; time stimming, engaging with interests, meeting sensory needs. The concept of sensory anchors, the experiences you can use not necessarily to feel better, but to not feel worse. To hold yourself safe and firm until the storm passes.

Those anchors are personal. Mine involve monotropic engagement, being allowed to focus deeply on whatever I’m doing, to be interest-led, to stop fighting with myself about how my brain works. For others it’s water, or quiet spaces, or weighted blankets, or specific scents, or music on their own terms, or the particular peace of a co-regulatory pet.

Sometimes, when those anchors aren’t available, even visualising them can help. Finding the thought that gives you a moment of felt safety. It sounds almost too simple, but the bodymind responds to what we bring to it, even in imagination.

Your Bodymind Is Not A Symptom

Your Autistic bodymind is not a symptom, it is how you have navigate a world that was not built for you. We struggle, life can feel endlessly difficult. Burnout is real and the cost of it is real.

But things do pass and improve. The work of connecting with our bodyminds (learning the language of our own internal states, practicing recognition of our signals, finding our anchors) is not a cure. It’s not a fix; it’s how we learn to take care of ourselves in a world that won’t always do it for us.

That’s not a small thing, that’s everything.