Self-reflection tool · Love Psychotherapy

Autistic Burnout Baseline Check

A structured way to look at whether your current state has shifted away from your own usual — across the features that define autistic burnout in the research literature.

Read this first

This is not a test, a screener, or a diagnosis. No validated cutoff score for autistic burnout exists, and anyone who gives you one is inventing it.

What this does instead: it asks you to compare your recent experience against what is normal for you, across the areas that autistic-led research has identified as defining. That comparison is the actual construct — the first empirical definition of autistic burnout was built on it.

Nothing you enter is saved, sent, or seen by anyone. It stays in your browser until you close the tab. Skip anything you want. There is no timer and no score to fail.

How to answer

Every question compares the last three months against what's usual for you — not against other people, and not against how you think you ought to be.

Less than usual your usual More than usual

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Exhaustion

The first of the three features in Raymaker et al.'s definition — and the one most often mistaken for ordinary tiredness.

Compared with my usualI have felt physically drained in a way that rest doesn't fix.

Compared with my usualI have felt mentally or cognitively used up.

Compared with my usualOrdinary tasks have cost me more energy than they should.

Compared with my usualI have woken up already depleted.

Loss of function

Skills that were previously available becoming harder or unavailable. Autistic adults sometimes call this regression; it is usually temporary.

Compared with my usualI have had trouble thinking clearly, planning, or holding things in mind.

Compared with my usualFinding words or getting my meaning across has been harder.

Compared with my usualBasic daily things — food, hygiene, admin — have been harder to manage.

Compared with my usualI have lost access to skills I know I have.

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Tolerance for input

Reduced tolerance to stimulus is the third defining feature, and the one that most clearly separates this from depression or general burnout.

Compared with my usualSound, light, texture, or smell has been harder to tolerate.

Compared with my usualI have needed more recovery time after ordinary environments.

Compared with my usualInterruption or unexpected change has been harder to absorb.

Withdrawal

Higgins et al. added interpersonal withdrawal as a defining feature after autistic experts by lived experience identified it as central.

Compared with my usualI have pulled back from people I would normally want to see.

Compared with my usualCommunication I could normally manage has felt out of reach.

Compared with my usualI have avoided things I usually enjoy because of what they cost.

Episodes

Burnout, inertia, meltdown, and shutdown interlock rather than occurring separately. A rise in episode frequency is one of the clearer signals of the loop tightening.

Compared with my usualI have had more, or more severe, meltdowns.

Compared with my usualI have had more, or more severe, shutdowns.

Context

Not scored, and deliberately so. These are the conditions burnout tends to grow in. They tell you where to look, not how bad things are.

I have been masking more than usual, or in more situations. My accommodations have been reduced, refused, or never existed. Something major changed recently — job, housing, relationship, health, caregiving. I have had little or no time where I could be unmasked and unobserved. This has been going on for three months or longer.

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Mood check

These nine questions are the PHQ-9, a public-domain depression measure. It is here because burnout and depression overlap heavily — in one study of autistic adults, two-thirds scored above the depression threshold — and because the two call for opposite responses. This part asks about the last two weeks, not three months, and uses its own scale.

You can leave anything blank. Unanswered questions are excluded rather than counted as zero.

What your answers show

Read these as directions, not verdicts. Each bar shows how far that area has moved from your own usual — the centre line is your baseline.

There is deliberately no total score. Summing these would produce a number that looks authoritative and means nothing — no threshold for autistic burnout has been validated, and the cutoffs circulating online are borrowed from studies that never proposed them.