# 46 - The Boom-and-Bust Cycle

Why do you seem incredibly capable one week and completely depleted the next? In this episode of Quietly Autistic at Last, Dr. Allison Sucamele explores the boom-and-bust cycle—a common but often misunderstood pattern experienced by many autistic and other neurodivergent adults. 

Resources & Support

Crisis Support

• 🇺🇸 United States: Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
• 🌍 Outside the U.S.: Contact your local emergency services or crisis hotline.

Autism & Neurodiversity Resources

• Autism Self Advocacy Network (ASAN): https://autisticadvocacy.org
• Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network (AWN): https://awnnetwork.org
• NeuroClastic: https://neuroclastic.com
• Embrace Autism (screening tools and educational resources): https://embrace-autism.com

Mental Health Resources

• Psychology Today Therapist Directory: https://www.psychologytoday.com
• Open Path Psychotherapy Collective: https://openpathcollective.org
• National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI): https://www.nami.org

Research Mentioned

• Raymaker, D. M., et al. (2020). Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew: Defining Autistic Burnout.
• Botha, M., & colleagues – Research on autistic burnout and minority stress.
• Porges, S. W. – Polyvagal Theory.
• Milton, D. – The Double Empathy Problem.
• Attwood, T., & Garnett, M. – Autism in women, masking, and late diagnosis.

If this episode resonated with you, please consider following, rating, and sharing Quietly Autistic at Last. Your support helps more late-diagnosed autistic adults discover that they were never broken—they were simply living in a world that often misunderstood their nervous system.

Transcript

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Welcome back to Quietly Autistic at Last, the podcast about discovering autism later in life and finally understanding yourself through a new lens. I'm Dr. Alison Sukamelli, and each week we'll explore the psychology, research, and lived experience of autism, especially in women and those who spent years masking who they were just to get by. And whether you've been formally diagnosed, you're questioning, or you're here to better understand someone you love, this is a space for curiosity, compassion, and self-understanding. Because the diagnosis isn't the end of your story. Sometimes it's the beginning of finally coming home to yourself. And kind reminder, this podcast is for educational purposes only and reflects one lived experience alongside current psychological research. It is not medical or mental health advice. And if you're struggling, please reach out to a qualified healthcare professional. And if you are in the United States and experiencing a mental health crisis, call or text 988. If you are elsewhere, please contact your local emergency services. Okay, let's get into this week's episode. So this is kind of like part two in connection with last week's episode on just pushing through. And if you missed that one, you may want to take a listen. Anyhow, I didn't want that episode to be too lengthy, so I left out this section on the boom and bust cycle, but I couldn't let it go, so I decided to give it its own episode. And this is one pattern I wish far more people recognized, not only among autistic people, but among many odd individuals and other neurodivergent adults. And it often gets mistaken for laziness or poor motivation or lack of discipline or inconsistency. And this is what is known as the boom and bust cycle. And if you've lived it, you probably don't need me to define it. Your body already knows, your calendar knows, your laundry knows, your nervous system definitely knows. And it often looks something like this. You push, you push harder, you exceed your capacity, you crash, you recover just enough. Key phrase, just enough. You panic about everything that accumulated while you were recovering, so you push again, and eventually you crash again. And it becomes a cycle that can last years before anyone recognizes what's happening. And here's one version of what it may look like for you. Monday through Friday, you give absolutely everything. You answer every email, attend every meeting, meet every deadline, smile, mask, perform, appear absolutely capable. Then Saturday arrives and you barely leave the couch. And by Sunday afternoon, anxiety starts building because Monday is coming yet again. And your body never truly recovered before you asked it to perform again. Then the week starts over. Or maybe your boom and bust cycle expands over longer stretches. Three weeks of incredible productivity, projects completed, the house is organized, meals are prepared, sometimes even in advance, everything seems under control. Then suddenly, you can as so much answer a text message. The dishes pile up, the laundry stays unfolded, simple decisions feel impossible, and people wonder what happened, and even you wonder what happened. Or maybe it's the social version of Boom and Bust. You host Thanksgiving, you organize birthdays, you volunteer at school, you smile through every conversation, you appear warm and energetic, and then afterwards you disappear. Three days, maybe five, sometimes longer. And not because you dislike people, or dislike all people, I should say, or regret going, but because your nervous system spent every available resource holding it together. Or perhaps it's the work boom and bust cycle. These can feel impossible to overcome at times. You meet every professional expectation. You're dependable, reliable, creative, helpful, the person everyone counts on. Then you walk through your own front door and suddenly there's nothing left. You can't cook, you can't clean, you don't even want to talk to anyone. Your family gets the version of you that's completely depleted while your workplace got the version fueled by every ounce of available energy. People often misunderstand this. They think the work wasn't hard because you made it look easy. They don't see the cost of it afterward. The difficult part is that society rewards the boom or the visible part. The boom is celebrated. People will say things like, Oh my gosh, you're so amazing! You're so productive. I don't know how you do it. You're a machine, you're incredible. But then the bust arrives, the invisible part of the equation. And suddenly those same people ask, What happened? You were fine yesterday, you're just being lazy, you just need better discipline, you're inconsistent. Then the praise disappears and harsh judgments arrive. And so many late diagnosed autistic adults grew up hearing versions of the same report card. Bright but inconsistent, capable but inconsistent, has so much potential, needs to apply herself, needs to try harder, could do exceptional work if she would just stay motivated. And for years, many of us believed and in a lot of cases, internalized those comments. We thought inconsistency meant something was wrong with our character, that we lacked grit, that everyone else had figured out adulthood except for us. But what if inconsistency wasn't always about motivation? What if it reflected something much more physiological? Executive functioning isn't a fixed amount, neither is sensory capacity, neither is cognitive energy or emotional regulation. They're dynamic. Some days you wake up after a good sleep with manageable sensory input and predictable routines. Your executive functioning is available, planning feels easier, task switching is easier, words come faster, you feel capable. Other days the fluorescent lights were overwhelming, the grocery store was louder than usual, three meetings changed unexpectedly, someone interrupted your routine, you slept poorly, you masked through difficult conversations, and now your brain is trying to operate with far fewer available resources. Remember the episode on spoon theory? And the demand may be the same, but your available capacity is completely different. Sometimes another way I think about capacity is like a battery on your phone. Your phone can run beautifully at 98%. At 22%, it starts limiting background activity, the brightness tends to lower, certain functions become slower, and eventually everything shuts down to preserve what's left. And we don't accuse the phone of laziness, we recognize that it needs charging. Yet we often expect the human nervous system to keep operating at 100% indefinitely. And especially autistic nervous systems that have often been running dozens of invisible processes all day long. And researchers studying autistic burnout have increasingly described exactly this phenomenon. Burnout isn't simply feeling tired, it's a prolonged state of physical, emotional, and cognitive exhaustion resulting from chronic life demands that exceed available resources. And often those demands include years of masking, adapting, suppressing needs, navigating sensory overload, and meeting expectations built for neurotypical nervous systems. And eventually the body says, I can't keep borrowing energy that doesn't exist. And it stops cooperating, not to punish you, but to protect you. And often it occurs way too late. And this is one reason I become cautious whenever someone says just push through. And cautious is actually a lie. What it does for me is it sends up a red flag or a red alert in my mind and even causes a greater shutdown because I won't hear anything that follows a just push through. I think it is also often a realization that the person saying it truly doesn't understand autism and nor do they want to. And sometimes pushing through is appropriate. And life occasionally requires short periods of extraordinary effort, short periods being the key phrase here. But if push through becomes your permanent operating system year after year, you may unknowingly teach your body that its signals don't matter. Pain, ignore it. Overload, ignore it. Fatigue, just ignore it. Shut down, fight it. Over time, your nervous system often responds by making those signals louder, not quieter. Because in the end, survival always wins. And here's something that changed my thinking. Recovery is not the reward you earn after productivity. Recovery is one of the conditions that make sustainable productivity possible. Again, recovery is not a reward. It's one of the conditions that makes sustainable productivity possible at any job, in any context, really. And recovery being a reward versus it's a required condition for sustainability are very different beliefs. One says, I'll rest after everything is done. The other says, if I rest, eventually nothing gets done. And preventing a crash often looks surprisingly ordinary. Leaving the noisy room before you're desperate to do so, saying no to one commitment or multiple commitments, eating lunch before you're starving, taking 10 quiet minutes instead of pushing through another hour, using accommodations before you're overwhelmed instead of after you've already crashed. And that's an important one. The goal isn't to eliminate effort, it's to make effort sustainable. And one of the hardest lessons for many late diagnosed autistic adults is accepting that pacing yourself is not failure. Pacing is strategy. Athletes pace themselves, marathon runners pace themselves, professional musicians pace their tours, elite performers build recovery into their schedules because they understand that performance without recovery eventually collapses. Yet many neurodivergent adults have been taught that needing recovery is somehow evidence of weakness. It isn't. It's simple biology. And if you recognize yourself in this episode, I hope you'll ask yourself a different question this week. Instead of asking, why can't I keep up? Maybe ask what keeps costing me more energy than I realize. Or instead of why am I inconsistent, try what changes my available capacity? Notice the patterns, the sensory demands, the masking. Notice the social recovery, the sleep, the transitions, and the environments where you consistently leave feeling emptied. Awareness alone doesn't solve everything, but it often becomes the beginning of self-compassion. The goal isn't to become someone who can push forever. The goal is to become someone who no longer has to recover from surviving their own life. Because a life built entirely on pushing through every situation eventually teaches your nervous system that existing is an emergency. And it was never supposed to feel that way. Okay, so there you have it. Thank you for spending this time with me today. And until next time, this is Dr. Allison Sukamelli. Remember, you don't have to earn your humanity through exhaustion. Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is stop proving how much you can survive and start building a life your nervous system no longer has to recover from. Okay, take care and I will see you next week.