Meltdown, shutdown or bad mood? Why unpredictability makes being an autistic adult so hard

The thing nobody tells you about being an adult#

Adulthood is sold as a list of big things. Jobs, money, relationships, a home. Those are hard, but they are not what wears me down.

What wears me down is the thousand small things that were never on the list. The meeting that moves. The delivery that arrives early. The supermarket that has rearranged the aisles. The friend who texts to say they are running late, or cannot make it, or want to go somewhere else instead. The email that changes the deadline. The road that is closed.

None of those is a disaster. Taken one at a time, anyone could cope. But I am autistic, and I do not take them one at a time. Every one of them is paid for out of the same budget, and that budget is smaller than most people's and is already being drained by things most people never notice.

That is the thread through this whole post. I am going to cover meltdowns, shutdowns, masking, sensory overload, not knowing what I feel, and why a changed plan can flatten me. They look like separate topics. They are not. They are all the same story: a nervous system with a finite capacity, in a world that is unpredictable by default, with very few people adjusting for it.

A quick note on what this is. It is one autistic adult's account, backed up by research where I can find it. I am not a clinician, and autistic people are not all the same. Some of this will sound like you. Some will not. Take what fits.

Meltdown, shutdown, or just a bad mood?#

From the outside, a lot of this looks like "he is in a mood". From the inside, there are three quite different things going on, and mixing them up is how people end up making each of them worse.

Ordinary irritation#

This is the one everyone knows. I am annoyed, tired, hungry, or someone has said something stupid. My thinking still works. I can see the problem, I can decide whether it is worth saying anything, and I can choose to take a breath or take a walk.

From the inside: I am cross, but I am still in the room. I can hold a conversation and I can be talked round.

What helps: food, sleep, a bit of space, being listened to. The normal stuff.

What makes it worse: being told to calm down, being wound up deliberately, or having the thing that caused it repeated at me.

The key feature is that I still have choices. If I snap, I know I snapped.

A meltdown: overload going outwards#

The National Autistic Society describes a meltdown as an intense response to an overwhelming situation, where someone is completely overwhelmed and temporarily loses control of their behaviour. It can come out verbally, physically, or both. They are explicit that it is not the same as a temper tantrum and it is not bad or naughty behaviour.

In a study of 32 autistic adults describing their own meltdowns, most said they felt overwhelmed by information, senses, and social and emotional stress. They described extreme emotions such as anger, sadness and fear, trouble with thinking and memory, and a sense of not being themselves. Many described the meltdown as a way of releasing something that had built up. And many tried to get away from people, or make sure they were alone, when they felt one coming, to avoid harming their bodies, their emotions and their relationships.

That matches my experience closely.

From the inside: there is a build-up first. Everything gets louder and sharper. Words get harder to find. I get short, then shorter. Then there is a point where the lid comes off. I might shout, cry, swear, throw something, or say things I would never say with a working brain. My thinking narrows to a pinhole and the only goal is to make the input stop. Afterwards there is a drop. I am wrung out, ashamed, often shaky, and the replaying starts.

What helps:

• Getting out of the environment, or making it quieter and dimmer.
• Fewer words. Not zero, but a short calm sentence at most.
• Time. It does not resolve on request.
• Being left alone if I ask, or if I am heading for the door.
• Talking about it later, when I am back, and not before.

What makes it worse:

• Being asked to explain or justify myself mid-meltdown. The part of my brain that does that is offline.
• Being told to calm down. That has never once worked on anyone.
• An audience. Staring, other people hovering, someone filming, or someone trying to manage it in public.
• Being touched or crowded without asking.
• Arguing the facts. You can be completely right and it will still go nowhere.
• Being punished for it, then being expected to be fine.

The NAS also points out that many people show signs before it happens, sometimes called the "rumble stage". Pacing, repetitive questions, going very still, rocking. That is the window where backing off, cutting the input and giving space can sometimes stop it going over. I have learned to notice my own version, and I am still not good at acting on it in time.

A shutdown: overload going inwards#

A shutdown is the same overload with the direction reversed. Instead of coming out, everything goes down.

The NAS notes that meltdowns are not the only way an autistic person shows they are overwhelmed. They may also withdraw, avoid, or refuse to interact. Researchers who interviewed autistic young people about burnout, inertia, meltdown and shutdown found that each is a multi-faceted experience with emotional, cognitive and physical parts, and that they are often misunderstood by neurotypical adults, which leads to inadequate support.

From the inside: I go quiet and then I go blank. Speech becomes hard or impossible. Not "I do not want to talk", but "the words are not reachable". I can hear you, but replying takes more than I have. I go still. I stare at nothing. I might know I need to move, eat or answer, and be unable to start. Sometimes there is a heavy, grey flatness, and sometimes it feels like being behind glass.

From the outside, it looks like sulking, ignoring, or not caring. It is none of those.

What helps:

• Low demand. No questions that need an answer, no decisions, no "what is wrong?".
• A dark, quiet, familiar place.
• Letting me have a way to signal without speaking. A thumbs up, a text, a pre-agreed word.
• Warmth without conversation. A drink left nearby, a blanket, someone in the room who asks for nothing.
• Time, and then easy re-entry. Not a debrief the moment I resurface.

What makes it worse:

• Being asked "are you okay?" five times. Each question is another demand I cannot meet.
• Taking the silence personally.
• Forcing eye contact or conversation.
• Interpreting it as a punishment or a power move.
• Pushing me to "just talk about it" before I have the capacity.

How I tell them apart#

When I am in the middle of it I cannot reason, so I have learned some rules of thumb for afterwards.

• Can I still choose? If I can pause, think, and decide what to do with the feeling, it is ordinary irritation. If the choice is gone, it is overload.
• Which way is it pointing? If it is pushing out of me (noise, movement, words, tears) it is a meltdown. If it is pulling me in (silence, stillness, blankness) it is a shutdown.
• What has the day cost me so far? A trivial thing after a heavy day is rarely about the trivial thing.
• How long does it take to come back? Irritation fades in minutes. Overload takes much longer, and is followed by a crash.
• Is there a trigger I can find? Usually there is, and it is rarely the thing that looked like the cause. The last straw is not the whole load.

Getting this wrong is expensive. Treating a meltdown like a bad mood means demands and arguments at the worst possible moment. Treating a shutdown like a mood means "cheer up" and "talk to me" at someone who cannot. And calling plain irritation a meltdown would let me off the hook for the times I am just being grumpy. I want to keep that distinction honest. Not everything is a meltdown, and I would rather know the difference than use autism as a blanket explanation.

Dysregulation is not a tantrum#

"Overreacting" is the word I hear most, and it is the word that misses the most.

It treats a reaction as a decision. A tantrum, in the way people usually mean it, is a move. It is aimed at someone, it has a goal, and it can often be stopped when the goal changes. If you say "that is enough" or the audience leaves, it ends.

Dysregulation is nothing like that. When my nervous system has run out of capacity, there is no strategy and no audience. There is a system that has hit its limit, doing the only thing left. The NAS is clear on this point: when someone is completely overwhelmed and finds it difficult to express that another way, a meltdown is understandable, not naughty.

Flooded versus chosen#

I wrote in Feeling more is not emotional intelligence that being flooded is not a skill. The test I used was simple: after the feeling, can you still choose? A flooded brain cannot. Stress impairs the prefrontal cortex, the region that handles higher-level thinking, and working memory takes a measurable hit. Choosing well gets much harder in that state, whoever you are.

So what is the difference between a flooded autistic adult and the flooded person I was criticising in that post?

It is not the biology of being flooded. It is the history before it, and the intent after it.

• A chosen reaction is a response I could have held back and did not. I take responsibility for it, and I should.
• A flooded reaction is what happens when the holding has already been done, for hours, and the capacity has gone.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to use "I was flooded" as a get-out for everything. It is not one. Being flooded explains a reaction. It does not remove the responsibility to repair it. The tell, as I argued before, is what happens next. Do I come back? Do I apologise for the impact, even when the cause was not my fault? Do I work out what I need to change so it happens less? That is where the adult work is.

Autistic people can feel intensely and still be doing the regulating#

This is the counterpoint I think matters. In that post I argued that volume of feeling is not the same as skill at handling it. I stand by that. But it does not mean autistic people who melt down are the people who "feel more and manage less".

A review of emotion regulation in autism describes autism as associated with amplified emotional responses and poor emotional control. It names contributors such as physiological arousal and differences in how information is processed and perceived, and suggests poor regulation may be inherent in autism. That is a statement about mechanisms, not about effort. What I notice in my own life is that I am regulating almost constantly:

• I rehearse conversations so they do not go wrong.
• I monitor my face and my tone.
• I count the noise, the people, the light.
• I decide in advance how long I can stay, and where the exit is.
• I eat on a schedule, because a skipped meal makes everything worse.
• I leave situations early so I do not blow up in them.

All of that is regulation. It is skilled, and it is relentless. And because it all runs on the same finite capacity, I run out sooner than someone who has none of that to do.

So it is not "more feeling, less control". It is closer to: the same amount of control, applied to more input, with less spare capacity. When it fails, it is not because I stopped trying. It is because I had been trying so hard for so long.

That is also why "you are overreacting" lands so badly. It judges the last two minutes and ignores the previous twelve hours.

The cost of masking#

Masking, or camouflaging, is hiding or suppressing autistic traits in order to fit in. Forcing eye contact. Copying how other people talk and react. Hiding stims. Scripting small talk. Laughing at the right moments. Keeping my face doing what faces are supposed to do.

In a qualitative study of 92 autistic adults, Hull and colleagues found people camouflaged to fit in and to build connections with others, using a mix of masking and compensation techniques. The consequences they described included exhaustion and a threat to self-perception.

Exhaustion is the word that matters most. Masking is not free. It is a second job, running at the same time as the first.

Hold it together all day, fall apart at home#

There is a parenting term, "after-school restraint collapse", for children who hold it together all day at school and then fall apart the moment they are home. It is a parenting idea and not a clinical diagnosis, and it was not written about autistic adults. But I recognise the pattern in myself completely.

All day, at work, in shops, with strangers, I hold. I keep my tone even. I do not react to the noise. I reply to the message that should have been an email. I do not mention that the lights are making my head hurt. I am, by most people's account, fine. Reliable, even. Calm.

Then I get home, and the restraint goes. It does not go because I am a different person at home. It goes because home is the first place all day where I do not have to hold anything up.

What that looks like, in practice:

• Irritability over things that are not the real problem.
• Shutting down for the whole evening.
• A meltdown over something minor, like a noise or a question about dinner.
• Being unable to talk, or to be spoken to.
• Needing a lot of time alone, in the dark, with nothing asked of me.

Why the people closest to you see the worst of it#

This is the cruelest part. The people who love me most see me at my least regulated. The colleagues and strangers who see me at my best get the version I can only keep up in public.

It is not because I care less about my partner or my family. It is the opposite. They are the people I am safe enough with to stop performing. The collapse is, in a strange way, a form of trust. But trust does not make it easier to be on the receiving end. For them it can feel like they get the leftovers, the worst of me, and the bit of me everyone else gets praised for.

Both things are true. The collapse is real, and it is not fair on them. The answer cannot be "just mask at home too", because that is how you end up in burnout. It has to be an honest agreement: here is what the evenings look like, here is what I need, here is what is not about you, and here is what I will do to make sure you are not carrying all of it.

Where it started#

I wrote about bullying, social anxiety and RuneScape, and masking links straight to that. For me it did not begin as a decision to hide. It began as protection.

When being noticed gets you hurt, you learn to be less noticeable. You learn which reactions get you targeted and which do not, and you copy the ones that do not. You work out how to look like you are fitting in because the cost of looking different is too high. That is not vanity. It is a survival strategy that worked well enough to become the default.

The trouble is that it outlives the danger. I am an adult now, in safer places, but the habit stayed. The body still hears "stand out and you will be punished" when I walk into a meeting.

What it costs#

Masking is linked to some serious outcomes, and I do not want to skate over them. In a survey of autistic adults, 72% scored above the cut-off for suicide risk, compared with 33% of the general population sample, and camouflaging was one of the things that predicted suicidality in the autistic group. Researchers describing autistic burnout found people described chronic exhaustion, loss of skills and reduced tolerance to stimulus, which built up when expectations outweighed abilities and there was no relief from the load. They described recovery as helped by acceptance, reduced expectations, and being able to do things in an autistic way, including unmasking.

That is a heavy paragraph, so I will say this plainly. If you are in that place, please talk to someone. In the UK you can call Samaritans on 116 123, free, at any time.

For most days the cost is smaller and quieter. It is the Sunday where I cannot talk. The weekend that disappears into recovery. The reply I cannot send because I used up all my words at work.

Sensory load is an emotional problem#

This is the one that surprised me most when I understood it. A lot of what looks like emotional dysregulation is not emotional in origin. It is sensory.

The NAS explains that many autistic people have sensory differences, being over-sensitive to some senses, under-sensitive to others, and often a mix. And that sensory overload can lead directly to meltdowns. Sound, light, touch, smell, taste, movement, and the sense of where your body is can all be affected.

Here is how I think about it. Every day I start with a budget. Every sensory input, every social demand, every decision, every small change takes a cut. Emotions come out of the same pot. So by the time something actually upsetting happens, the budget may already be nearly gone. The emotional reaction is not too big for the event. It is the event arriving at an empty account.

Research in autistic children has linked sensory sensitivities with anxiety and with intolerance of uncertainty. The direction of cause is not simple, but it fits what I experience: the senses, the anxiety and the need for predictability are not three problems. They are tangled together.

The supermarket#

A supermarket is close to the worst-case environment, and it is something I am expected to do every week.

• Fluorescent lighting that hums and flickers at the edge of vision.
• A constant layering of sound. Beeping tills, trolley wheels, announcements, music, other people's conversations.
• Smells from the bakery, the fish counter, the cleaning products, other people's perfume, all at once.
• Narrow aisles with people moving in unpredictable directions.
• Social demands. Moving out of the way, "excuse me", queueing, the self-checkout telling me there is an unexpected item.
• Plus the extra load when something has moved, an item is out of stock, or a promotion has changed the layout.

By the time I get to the car park I have not had a bad emotional experience, but I am wrecked. I have spent most of my budget on a task most people do on autopilot.

What helps: going at quiet times, using headphones, a list in the order of the aisles, ordering online when I am low, or going to the same shop every time so the layout is known.

The open-plan office#

Open-plan offices are, in my experience, designed by people who do not mind being interrupted.

• Overheard conversations that I cannot filter out. Every one of them gets processed, whether I want it to or not.
• People walking behind me, which I can feel before I see.
• Visual movement in the corner of my eye.
• Phone calls, keyboard clatter, the coffee machine, someone laughing.
• No retreat. Nowhere to go to reset for five minutes without it being noticed.
• And the constant background question of whether I am being observed, which comes from years of being watched in order to be bullied.

All of it is cost before the work starts. Then the work, which needs deep focus, has to be done with what is left. I know how it looks to say that the office is exhausting. But it is the honest explanation of why I can get more done in two quiet hours at home than in a whole day at a desk.

What helps: noise-cancelling headphones, a desk with my back to a wall, working from home for deep-focus days, meeting-free blocks, and quiet rooms I can book without justification.

The loud restaurant#

A restaurant is supposed to be a treat, and it can be a trap.

• Hard surfaces, so the sound bounces. A noisy room is not just noisy, it is a wall of unfiltered sound.
• Following a conversation across a table while every other table is competing with it.
• Smells from the kitchen, plates arriving, candles, scents.
• Unpredictable timing. When the food arrives, whether the order is right, whether the waiter will interrupt.
• And social performance, because there is an expectation to be relaxed and chatty while I am working very hard to hear.

I might enjoy the food and the person I am with, and still come away with a headache and nothing left. I have had to learn that choosing a quiet place, going early, sitting in a corner, or picking somewhere I know well is not being difficult. It is how I get to enjoy the evening at all.

Clothes, and other things nobody sees#

Clothing is a quieter drain, and one that is easy to dismiss. Labels, seams, stiff fabric, tight cuffs, the way a collar sits. Most people stop feeling their clothes within minutes of putting them on. I do not, and a bad texture is a low-level alarm running all day.

The point is that none of these is dramatic. They are small, constant costs. And the maths is simple: the more I spend on sensory input, the less I have left for emotional regulation. So when I am short or flat or explosive at 7pm, the question to ask is not "what is wrong with him?" but "what did the day cost?"

Alexithymia: I did not know what I was feeling until hours later#

This one took me years to understand about myself.

Alexithymia is difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions. It is not the same thing as autism, but it is common alongside it. A systematic review and meta-analysis found alexithymia in around half of autistic people (49.93%) compared with under 5% of non-autistic people (4.89%). Common, not universal. And Bird and Cook argued that a lot of the emotional difficulties linked to autism may actually come from co-occurring alexithymia, rather than autism itself.

What it is like#

It is not that I feel nothing. It is that the feeling arrives without a label.

Someone says something, or something happens, and I know that something is going on. There is tension, pressure, a sort of fog, maybe an urge to leave. But if you ask me "how do you feel?" I cannot tell you. I can describe the body, and I can describe the situation. I cannot say whether it was hurt, anger, embarrassment, worry or disappointment.

Then, hours later, often in the shower or lying in bed, it resolves. Oh. That was hurt. That was why I went quiet. I was angry about what they said at lunch.

By then the moment has gone. The conversation has ended, I have said "I am fine" because I had no better answer, and the feeling is only now ready to be discussed.

The delayed response#

This delay is the part that causes the most damage. In the moment, I look blank, flat or unbothered. Later, I have a full, strong reaction that appears to come out of nowhere.

To the other person, it can look like I did not care, then suddenly cared a lot. Or that I am bringing up something old. Or that I am being dramatic after the fact. None of those is what happened. What happened is the processing was slow, and the output came late.

How it gets read as coldness#

If somebody tells me something awful, my face may not do what faces are meant to. If someone is upset in front of me, I may not know what to say, or I may say the wrong thing, or I may say nothing. If someone asks "are you okay?", I say "yes", because I truthfully do not know yet.

From the outside, that reads as cold. Uncaring. Detached. And that is the wrong conclusion. A lot of the time I am feeling it, intensely, and I just cannot see or say it yet. What looks like coldness is a lag. The expression on the outside and the feeling on the inside do not always match, and the gap is easy to misread.

Name it, hold it, choose#

In the emotional intelligence post I argued for a three-step test: name the feeling, hold it, and choose what happens next. Alexithymia makes the first step hard, and that is not a character flaw. You cannot hold what you cannot name, and you cannot choose well with something you cannot see.

So I have had to build a way of doing it that does not rely on real-time insight.

• Start from the body, not the label. Tight chest, jaw clenched, wanting to leave, stomach dropping. I treat those as data before I try to decide what they mean.
• Use a short list. Rather than asking "what am I feeling?" I check against a few options. Am I angry, sad, scared, embarrassed, overloaded, or just hungry and tired? The narrow list is easier than an open question.
• Buy time. "I need a bit of time to work out how I feel. Can I come back to you?" is one of the most useful sentences I know. And then I actually come back, which is the important bit.
• Come back, name it, and repair. When the label does show up, I say it. "I was hurt when you said that earlier, I just could not tell at the time."
• Do not make big decisions in the gap. If I do not yet know what I feel, I am not in a position to decide what to do about it.

That is the same argument as before. The skill is not feeling loudly. It is doing the work of identifying the feeling, holding it, and choosing. For me that work simply runs on a delay, and the courtesy I would ask of the people around me is to allow for the lag, and not to treat it as absence.

Why changes of plan hit so hard#

Of everything on this list, this is the one other people find hardest to believe. "It is only a change of plan. Just go with the flow."

The word that gets used is rigidity. I think that is the wrong frame.

Routine is a regulation tool#

The NAS says that consistent, predictable routines and structure are very important for autistic people, and that a change to routine can be very distressing. Research on intolerance of uncertainty found it was significantly related to anxiety in autistic children and adolescents, and proposed it as a useful way to understand where that anxiety comes from.

Put plainly, a routine is how I stop spending capacity. If I know what is going to happen, in what order, with what sensory conditions, and for how long, I can pre-spend the effort. I can prepare. I can leave things on autopilot. The whole thing costs less because there are no live decisions.

A plan is not a preference. It is a load-bearing wall. Take it away and the rest of the day, which was built on it, has to be re-engineered, in real time, using a budget that I had not allocated for it.

Transitions are expensive in the same way. Moving from one thing to another means disengaging, re-orienting and loading a new set of expectations. Most people barely feel that. For me it is a cost every time, and a change of plan multiplies it.

Cancelled plans#

A friend cancels dinner an hour before. Other people think, great, a free evening.

For me, I have spent the whole day preparing for that dinner. I have budgeted for it. I have eaten earlier or later to fit around it. I have rehearsed what I might say. I have mentally walked the route. When it is cancelled, all of that preparation has nowhere to go, and now I have a blank evening with no structure to catch me.

And there is a second hit. Because I took a lot of effort to be ready for it, the cancellation can feel like all of that was wasted. And because of years of being bullied, a cancellation can also trigger a quiet voice saying that they did not want to see me. I know it is not true. The voice does not care.

What helps: a replacement plan, even a small one. "Cancelled, but can we do Thursday?" gives me a new structure to move into. A reason helps, too. And if the answer is "I just do not fancy it", then being honest, and kind about it, is much better than a vague excuse.

A changed route#

The road is closed. The train is replaced by a bus. The satnav says turn left where I had planned to turn right.

On paper it is a detour. In practice, the route was part of how I knew the journey would go. I knew where the noise was, where I could park, how long it took, what I would see. Now I am in unknown territory, with the clock running, and every junction is a new decision. It is the NAS example almost word for word: having to go a different way because of roadworks can cause anxiety that may trigger a meltdown.

What helps: checking routes and disruption in advance, having a known fallback, leaving early so a detour does not become a time panic, and being allowed to arrive a bit flattened without being asked what is wrong.

A moved deadline#

At work, a deadline is not just a date. It is how I have organised the entire week. The order of tasks, the energy I have set aside, the time I have blocked out for focus.

When someone says "can we bring that forward to Thursday?", the new date is not the problem. The problem is that the whole plan has just been invalidated. The sequence, the time estimates, the recovery slots. I have to rebuild everything, and I have to do it while also doing the work.

Even when the new deadline is later, which sounds like a gift, I can feel thrown. The structure I built is gone, and the space that opens up is not freedom. It is ambiguity.

What helps: as much notice as possible, being told what is staying the same as well as what is changing, a clear reason, and a short chance to re-plan before being expected to carry on. It is worth being explicit about this with colleagues: I do not mind change, I mind change with no warning.

What actually reduces the damage#

None of this means I can never handle change. I can, and I do, every day. What changes the outcome is how the change arrives.

• Notice. Even ten minutes is better than none.
• What stays the same. "The meeting is moved, but everything else today is unchanged" is a huge relief.
• A reason. Unexplained changes leave me trying to work out what they mean.
• A replacement. A new structure to step into, even a rough one.
• Recovery time. After a surprise, I need a little while to re-settle before I can take on the next thing.
• Not being told to relax. The surprise is not the problem. The cost is.

Why this makes adulthood hard#

Put all of that together and it explains why I find being an adult difficult, and why unpredictability is the centre of it.

Childhood, for all its problems, has a lot of external structure. School timetables, set meals, adults who plan the day. Somebody else is absorbing the unpredictability. Adulthood removes that. Nobody does it for you. You are the one who has to deal with the broken boiler, the email that changes everything, the appointment that gets moved, the shop that is out of what you needed, and the person who messages to change the plan. And you are expected to do all of it with a smile, immediately, and without any visible effort.

That is why the difficulty is invisible. If I fall over a large obstacle, everyone sees it. But very few people see me spending a little bit of capacity on a hundred small things, then having nothing left for the one thing that actually matters.

The pattern repeats:

1. The day opens with a finite budget.
2. Sensory input and social demands drain it from the start.
3. Masking drains it further, because I am doing a second job in the background.
4. Each change or surprise costs extra, because it removes structure that was saving me effort.
5. By the evening, the budget is gone, and the smallest thing tips it over.
6. It spills out as a meltdown, a shutdown, or an evening of not being able to talk.
7. And then I have to recover, which takes time I do not always get, before the next day starts again.

Left long enough, that cycle ends in burnout. That is not a figure of speech. It is chronic exhaustion and a loss of skills, and recovery takes months, not weekends.

What helps, in practice#

I am not going to pretend I have it solved. But here is what has made the most difference to me.

For me:

• Protecting the routine on purpose. Mornings, meals, sleep, the gym, the things that hold the rest up. Training with a PT in a private setting has been a big part of that, as I wrote in the bullying post.
• Knowing my own sensory costs and planning around them. Quiet shopping, headphones, a quiet corner, controlled lighting.
• Building recovery into the plan. Not hoping for it, scheduling it.
• Building buffers, so that a surprise does not land on an empty account. Leaving early, and not stacking one demanding thing straight after another.
• Using the lag. "I need to think about it and I will come back to you" and then actually coming back.
• Telling the people close to me how it works, so that they do not have to guess.
• Looking after myself properly, which links to what I wrote in Discovering my self worth. A body that is fed, rested and trained has a bigger budget to start with.

For the people around me, and I say this with love:

• Give notice of changes, even small ones.
• Tell me what stays the same.
• Do not ask me to explain in the middle of a meltdown or a shutdown. Ask me later.
• Do not take silence personally.
• Allow time for me to find out what I feel.
• Assume there is a cost I cannot see, before assuming I am being difficult.
• Give me somewhere safe to land. I wrote about what that does to a nervous system in the post on safety and sabotage. Safety is not dramatic. It is the absence of manufactured crisis. It is also, for me, the absence of unnecessary surprises.

For me, again, because it goes both ways:

• Take responsibility for what happens when I am flooded. The reason is real, but the repair is still mine.
• Do not use autism as an explanation for everything. Some bad moods are just bad moods.
• Say what I need before I am empty, not after.
• Keep working out what my early warning signs are, and act on them.

What I am actually asking for#

I am not asking to be excused from adulthood, and I am not asking the world to be quiet and predictable. It will not be.

What I would like is for "overreacting" to be retired as an explanation. A meltdown is not a tantrum. A shutdown is not a sulk. A delayed response is not coldness. A changed plan is not a small thing when it takes out a load-bearing wall. And a person who has held it together all day and then falls apart at home has not been fake in public and real at home. They have been working very hard, in both places, with a finite budget.

The unpredictability is not going away. But I am learning to count the cost, plan around it, and ask for what makes it lighter. And I am learning to be kinder to the person who for years thought he was just bad at being a person, when in fact he had been paying a much higher price for the same ordinary day.

If this sounds like you, you are not broken, and you are not overreacting. You are running on a smaller budget in a world that spends it for you without asking.

References#

• National Autistic Society, Meltdowns: a guide for all audiences
• National Autistic Society, Sensory differences: a guide for all audiences
• Lewis and Stevens, The lived experience of meltdowns for autistic adults (Autism, 2023)
• Phung et al., What I wish you knew: insights on burnout, inertia, meltdown, and shutdown from autistic youth (Frontiers in Psychology, 2021)
• Mazefsky et al., The role of emotion regulation in autism spectrum disorder (JAACAP, 2013)
• Stress-induced cognitive dysfunction: hormone-neurotransmitter interactions in the prefrontal cortex (review, 2013)
• Hull et al., "Putting on my best normal": social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions (JADD, 2017)
• Cassidy et al., Risk markers for suicidality in autistic adults (Molecular Autism, 2018)
• Raymaker et al., "Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew": defining autistic burnout (Autism in Adulthood, 2020)
• Kinnaird, Stewart and Tchanturia, Investigating alexithymia in autism: a systematic review and meta-analysis (European Psychiatry, 2019)
• Bird and Cook, Mixed emotions: the contribution of alexithymia to the emotional symptoms of autism (Translational Psychiatry, 2013)
• Neil, Olsson and Pellicano, The relationship between intolerance of uncertainty, sensory sensitivities, and anxiety in autistic and typically developing children (JADD, 2016)
• Boulter et al., Intolerance of uncertainty as a framework for understanding anxiety in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (JADD, 2014)
• Samaritans, free support in the UK on 116 123