Adulting Autism Interviews Mental Health Neurodiversity Podcasts

Autistic Burnout and Autistic Rest with Carole Jean Whittington

autistic burnout autistic rest carole jean whittington

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Neurodiverging Podcast. I’m Danielle Sullivan and I’m your host, a certified life coach, and an autistic parent. I am so excited to welcome Carole Jean Whittington to the Neurodiverging Podcast today. She’s known as Social Autie throughout the Autism community and is known for her unique approach to Autistic Burnout.

We’re discussing Carole Jean’s new course, Rest Is More Than Sleep, in the Autastic community, as well as both of our own personal experiences with autistic burnout. Plus, Carole Jean is sharing some specifics of what burnout looks like, and how eight different kinds of rest can help you with autistic burnout. Here we go!

Want to support the podcast and get fun perks? Consider pledging $1, $5, or $10 a month to fund the Neurodiverging Podcast. Find out more and pledge today at patreon.com/neurodiverging.

Speaking of Patreon, I would love to give a very, very warm thank you to RW Painter, Klara, Zach, Teresa L., Sara, Marti, Kristin, Galactic Fey, Theresa B., Claire, David, and Laura! Thank you all so much for supporting this episode of Neurodiverging!


? Want to listen? This post is based off of Episode 39 of the Neurodiverging Podcast! Listen on Apple Podcasts Spotify | Youtube


Show Notes:

Guest Bio:

carole jean whittington unveiling method

She’s known as Social Autie throughout the Autism community and known for her unique approach to Autistic Burnout.  She hosts the Mind Your Autistic Brain Talk Show for Late Identified Autistics.  Meet Carole Jean Whittington, a late identified, ADHD-Autistic, who discovered at 39 years old why life had been so confusing and such a struggle.

Today, she teaches a global audience of adult Autistics how to go from Burnout to Balance through The UnVeiling Method™.  Carole Jean uses her *NeuroDistinct perspective to share a common language from a place of deep knowing and experience. She carefully combines this with relevant science research and easy to implement strategies that won’t overwhelm or create stress in your life.  Her purpose is to present a variety of solutions and new ways to approach your own life as you begin to answer the big question, “Who am I under all the masks?” 

Carole Jean and her Coaching Partner, Ali Arena, host the Coaching Cafe Membership Community where they teach their exclusive Communication EcoSystemTM for Neurodiverse Relationships.

Carole Jean has been a featured writer for the International Institute for Learning, a guest on The Grateful Leadership Podcast, Neurodiverse Love Podcast, Peeling Back the Mask Podcast, What is Autism? YouTube Show, Alexis Autism Acceptance Channel on Parenting as a Late Identified Autistic, The Chatty Auties as a co-host, and a celebrated keynote speaker.  Carole Jean is a featured Guide on The Autastic Community where she hosts the Rest is More Than Sleep Course.  She is the soon to be published author of, “Ladies Don’t Say Butt, The Social Struggles of a Late Identified ADHD-Autistic Adult” and the upcoming ebook, “Autistic Burnout: The Burnout to Balance Transformation for Late Identified Autistics.” 

To get started on your Burnout To Balance Journey, download the Top 20 Warning Signs You May Be in Autistic Burnout at https://mindyourautisticbrain.com

*(NeuroDistinct is a term coined by my friend Tim Goldstein of The NeuroCloud.  It is our alternative to neurodiverse as we feel we are “wonderfully distinct” and we all have gifts and talents that go beyond just “diversity.”)

Transcript of Ep. 39 / Autistic Burnout and Autistic Rest with Carole Jean Whittington:

Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Neurodiverging Podcast. I’m Danielle Sullivan and I’m your host, a certified life coach, and an autistic parent. I am so excited to welcome Carole Jean Whittington to the Neurodiverging Podcast today. She’s known as Social Autie throughout the Autism community and is known for her unique approach to Autistic Burnout. We’re discussing Carole Jean’s new course, Rest Is More Than Sleep, in the Autastic community, as well as both of our own personal experiences with autistic burnout.

Before I get to that, I’d like to thank all of my patrons for supporting this episode of Neurodiverging. 

If you want to be one of these amazing folks and support Neurodiverging, please check us out on Patreon at patreon.com/neurodiverging. You can pledge a dollar, five dollars, or ten dollars a month to support the podcast and keep it going. Funding also goes to help me provide support for low-income neurodivergent coaching clients, so it’s very appreciated!

I am so excited to welcome Carole Jean Whittington to the Neurodiverging Podcast today. She’s known as Social Autie throughout the Autism community and is known for her unique approach to Autistic Burnout.  She hosts the Mind Your Autistic Brain Talk Show for Late Identified Autistics. Like me, Carole Jean is a late identified ADHD-Autistic, who discovered at 39 years old why life had been so confusing and such a struggle. 

Today, she teaches a global audience of adult Autistics how to go from Burnout to Balance through The UnVeiling Method™, carefully combining scientific research and easy to implement strategies that won’t overwhelm or create stress in your life.  Her purpose is to present a variety of solutions and new ways to approach your own life as you begin to answer the big question, “Who am I under all the masks?” 

We’re discussing Carole Jean’s new course, Rest Is More Than Sleep, in the Autastic community, as well as both of our own personal experiences with autistic burnout. Plus, Carole Jean is sharing some specifics of what burnout looks like, and how eight different kinds of rest can help you with autistic burnout. Here we go!

Danielle Sullivan: Welcome, Carole Jean, to Neurodiverging! How are you doing today?

Carole Jean Whittington: I am fantastic Danielle, thank you so much for having me! I am thrilled to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this since our conversation last.

Danielle: I’m so excited that you’re here! I also really enjoyed our last conversation and it’s been very exciting to know that I was going to see you again soon and get to talk about your course. You just put out “Rest Is More Than Sleep” on the Autistic Community. I took it and it’s so good and I’m so excited to talk about it today. To start off, could you tell us a little bit about the course and what made you focus on this topic, which I think is really important for autistic folks?

Learning About Autistic Burnout

Carole Jean: Well, one of the hottest topics in the autistic community is our sleep, our sleep quality, our lack of sleep. The second big topic that we’re always talking about is burnout, especially as late-identified autistic ADHDers. We come to the knowledge of autistic burnout and it’s like, holy cow, that explains so much – not just being autistic, but the experience of autistic burnout and what that means.

Because autistic burnout is different from just a typical burnout for us. It can impact our skills and abilities. Some of the early research (and there’s not a whole lot on this yet, but I’m so excited to see that there are researchers who are digging into this and hopefully I’m leading that and cultivating more of this) is there are skills and abilities that we can lose permanently during some types of autistic burnout.

Especially if it’s that deep chronic cycle burnout loop, where you just start to emerge from it, you start to feel somewhat human again, and then a stress happens and then another stress and it layers on. The next thing you know, you’re right back in that burnout loop. It’s just like it’s like the hamster wheel. You can’t seem to get off.

And for me, I started autistic burnout once I started to be able to identify what they were, how they showed up in my life, and how they varied throughout my life in my seasons of life. My first autistic burnout happened at the age of six. And the more people I’m working with, and more of my clients, as we’re starting to unpackage and start to identify what their autistic burnouts are, what they have looked like, how they’ve impacted them in their life,  things that have led up to them, there’s so many that are identifying around that same age, you know, between six and eight, oh, my gosh, that was my first autistic burnout, I didn’t realize it.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Carole Jean Whittington: And one of the biggest factors to burnout for so many of us is our energy, not just our sleep, but our energy. It’s just, it’s just this overwhelming exhaustion, and, you know, there’s spoon theory out there, which is fantastic and it gives us sort of this visual and this vernacular for explaining our energy, but what I found was most people were talking about how do I protect the spoons that I have? How do I keep the ones that I have? And how do I keep from expending any? No one was talking about how do I replenish my spoons? How do I fill up my empty spoon drawer in an autistic burnout?

It’s one of the most critical factors and it’s one of the biggest components that help us as we’re identifying what our signposts are that lead to restoration, also the signposts that lead us to burnout. How do we gain energy? And I found that there are so many other areas of restoration and gaining energy, replenishing our spoon drawer, other than sleep, because sometimes in autistic burnout we can either be sleeping so much that we can hardly function, or the opposite, we can’t get any sleep, we can’t seem to fall asleep, or we just fall asleep and then like 30 minutes later the alarm goes off and we’ve got to start all over again and you’re in this chronic sleep deficit cycle. So when you’re in this chronic deficit cycle, how the heck do you get some energy?

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Carole Jean Whittington: How do you start to restore yourself in some way to at least feel somewhat human, and be able to function right. So that’s sort of why I created the Rest is More Than Sleep course and the thinking and the theory behind it.

Danielle Sullivan: Thank you so much. So much of what you say rings true to my experience and the experience of my clients as well, that very early on, once you start, especially I know you’re a late identified autistic too, those of us who are identified relatively late in life, when we start to rethink our lives in the past and start to notice all those autistic traits and concerns earlier on, it is amazing how early we start actually having problems or challenges that weren’t picked up on as being autistic in nature, when we were kids, right?

Like that burnout at six or eight or seven, I’m pretty sure I was definitely there by the time I was, I definitely remember by the time I was 10 or nine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it came earlier, my memory of younger is not very strong. But, when you’ve lived with cycling burnout for that long, then you’re just grabbing on to any kind of rest you can get and the idea of structuring it and building up routines around it can be very far out and kind of outside of your ability.

So I’m so excited about your course because I think it really, and I took it, and I think it really offers people a way to think about different kinds of rest and think about how they can, how you can enact that in your own life without it being this overwhelming huge change, that it’s just another thing you have to do. And I love your example of spoon theory, we actually have a podcast episode on spoon theory that I’ll link down below, but spoon theory is really great for like your daily cycle, right? Like you wake up in the morning, you have so many spoons, you use them. Hopefully you go to bed and you wake up with more spoons, but what if you don’t wake up with more spoons? What if all your spoons were used yesterday and then you don’t have any more left, what are you supposed to do? And there’s, you know, there’s just been a gap there in kind of the theory, I guess, of autism. So, I love that analogy. 

Carole Jean Whittington: Exactly. The beautiful thing is, is now you’ve got these seven other areas, and that was something that was really important to me because when we’re in burnout, our critical thinking and our capacity for executive function are so diminished and there’s already this huge feeling of I’m not doing enough, I can’t seem to function, and you know, all of the belief baggage that comes with that, especially when we’re late identified and didn’t know and we’re still sort of learning what being autistic means to us with this whole new vernacular.

The way that I set this course up was I wanted you to be able to immediately, with very little effort, identify something and start to use it in your life, and be able to really start to feel and gain some energy from something very simple that immediately meets you where you are, because we all are in a different place with our rest and our rest needs. There’s so many layers to that. So I’ve broken this down into seven main areas, and at the very beginning of the course it immediately says, Hey, let’s answer some of these questions, like, think about these and let’s identify the area of rest right now that’s going to serve you best. It’s really what’s going to help you right now, today, in this moment, and then jump down to that section and then I’m going to give you some examples and some different things for you to try. And I try and give at least three to five in each section, so that there’s something for everyone.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. It’s so practical, and I learned, I was telling you before we started recording, I learned something in the very first section, which was wonderful and kind of surprising, because I wasn’t sure, you know, what I was expecting out of taking the course. And like, boom, right out, it’s like, oh, cool. Like, I never thought of that before. So yeah, so I love how you laid it out. I think it is very practical and very something you can do today, just like you said. So we talked a little bit about how you’ve dealt with the cycling burnout in the past, can you tell us a little bit more about what, I know this is your specialty, so maybe this is too big of a question, but for folks who are newly identified or kind of on the path of identifying themselves in the neurodivergent sphere or umbrella, what does burnout look like for autistics? What is different about autistic burnout versus neurotypical burnout? I know, it’s a big question.

What’s the difference between autistic burnout and typical burnout?

Carole Jean Whittington: Oh, that is an excellent question. It is, and I actually put together a free download for people who have that question and it’s the top 20 warning signs you may be in autistic burnout. And this was a collection of the top 20 signs that you can experience in your life in different varying degrees, I mean, you’re not going to have all of them all the time, you may have had some of these in the past, and some may be different now. Some of the biggest things that autistics report is losing their ability to function, the executive function. Disassociating, finding that you’ve sat in the same place and sort of completely detached and zoned out for X amount of, I don’t know, because you couldn’t remember when you sat down. Feeling very other, out sort of existing, sort of floating in your body, not feeling very grounded is something that is a very common experience in that. Sensory sensitivities. Some of the things that a lot of my clients report most often, and I know that I have experienced for myself as well, most the time, most of my late identified clients have come to me because they were in autistic burnout and they didn’t know it. 

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Carole Jean Whittington: And that was how they realized that they were autistic or autistic and ADHD. And through that, you know, then you start to uncover what being autistic is and you learn about sensory sensitivities and that your perception of sensory things are different. In autistic burnout, these sensory sensitivities can exacerbate, they can be like to the nth degree, normally where the whirr of the ceiling fan didn’t bother you before, you didn’t even notice it, it didn’t register, when you’re in autistic burnout, it sounds like the playing card on the spokes of a kid’s bicycle wheel, duh, duh duh, I mean, it’s just everything is just so much more. It feels like you’re operating, I say I felt like I was living underwater. Sometimes it felt like the waterline was just under my nose and the water was constantly lapping and every now and then I could get a little bit of air but I never could get a deep full breath. And I think that that’s a very, when I describe it, my experience from that to a lot of autistics are like oh my god, that makes so much sense, I totally experience that. I can’t just like take in a deep full breath and let it out. You know, you feel like your shoulders are up around your ears all the time, but you don’t know it because that’s how you’ve been living for so long. 

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Carole Jean Whittington: And until you’re able to lower your shoulders, you don’t recognize that that’s what you’ve been experiencing. Some of the things that also happened are periods of mutism. You know, you might, I’m a very auditory person, I have auditory processing delays, but I’m also an auditory processor so put –

Danielle Sullivan: Me too, yeah.

Carole Jean Whittington: All that in your basket.

Danielle Sullivan: It’s great, isn’t it?

Carole Jean Whittington: Oh it’s just such a fun little bailiwick. But in autistic burnout, for those of us who have that, a lot of times it is much more common for us to experience periods of mutism where it feels like our tongue is heavy, or your mouth just won’t move, or you’ve got the words and they’re sort of fuzzy and floating around in your head, and you can’t quite seem to grab them in order to formulate a cohesive sentence and articulate anything, it’s just not happening. I can grunt, or moan.

Danielle Sullivan: That’s mine. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Carole Jean Whittington:  And there’s so many different aspects that throughout your life, if you’ve experienced these, they’ve been terrifying, they’ve been really scary. I mean, at one point, when I hit probably the worst burnout in my 30s, I honestly thought I was going crazy. I was so scared.  I was a mom, I had two young children, and all I could think was, I can’t afford to admit myself to hospital, because I have these two babies and I have to do this. But I feel like I’m crazy. And I was so scared, I was terrified to tell anyone because I thought something bad will happen if I tell someone this. 

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. 

Carole Jean Whittington: And so there’s so much that goes on with autistic burnout that, and there’s so many different ways that it shows up in our lives, you know, there’s a common thread. So hopefully, you know, I’ll share that so that your listeners can have some resources to look at to help determine some of these things, or maybe connect some of the dots for themselves.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. Thank you so much. And I will put the link to that work, it’s not a worksheet, but your 20 identifiers in the show notes as well, if that’s okay with you.

Carole Jean Whittington: Absolutely.

Danielle Sullivan: I have talked about like my own burnout in the podcast before, but I feel like it’s very personal and that different autistic folks experience it uniquely and it’s just always so great to get other folks perspectives too so that if you’re listening and you’re dealing with something that sounds similar, hopefully some of that will ping for you. I also had a really bad one, right, when my kids were young that in many ways sounds similar to what you went through, where I had not been identified yet.

I’d had burnouts in my 20s that I had sort of put down to depression spells or medication reactions or other sorts of, just I found other reasons and didn’t link it to autism or burnout at all. And then in my 30s, when I had also two young children and one was autistic, the other was an infant who was not sleeping, and I was just going into my room at 4pm every night and hiding under the covers and turning all the lights off and like the minute my partner got home, my co-parent got home and could take them, I was just like, nope. And I was still, you know, he’d bring them in to nurse and I send them out like because I was just so totally burned to a crisp by the end of the day. And that what you said earlier in the show about, you know, we might be sleeping a lot but we’re not waking feeling invigorated, or maybe that was when we were talking before we hit record, but we were talking about how sometimes one of the things that happens in burnout is that autistic folks can sleep extra, right, and you end up with 9, 10, 12, 14 hours of sleep per 24 hour period, but you’re not waking feeling rested or like you have those spoons back. And that was definitely one of my symptoms was that I was just, I just shut down.

It wasn’t restful sleep, it was no more sensory input, no more anything, like do not, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t move, I just was in my bed under the heavy blanket for hours. So and now it’s like, oh, clearly that was burnout. But at the time, and my partner too, we were all like, you know, am I just failing as a parent? Am I just not able to do this? Am I having some other kind of serious medical condition? What’s going on? And it was just, I mean, not just, but it was, it was just burnout, a really, really bad one. So yeah, yeah.

Carole Jean Whittington: The gravity of it in our lives, and when you don’t know, you are looking for answers, so you’re looking to assign some causation to it yet nothing really fully explains it but you’ll just, it’s almost like you’ll take what you can get so that at least you have some idea to feel like you’re doing something to make yourself feel better, and then you try all the things best you can and getting the knowledge that, oh gosh, that’s autistic burnout that you experienced. And it’s just like, holy heck, you mean there’s a reason, there’s a cause?

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Carole Jean Whittington: And I’m not just this broken, defective individual that just can’t seem to get her stuff together? There’s a real valid reason and there’s things that I can do.

Danielle Sullivan: Yes.

Carole Jean Whittington: To keep from crashing and shutting down and going through this, like this, ever again.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah, because you go from being a failure of an individual person to part of a group who is unfortunately dealing with the same thing you are. And if there’s that many other people who are struggling with this, then you’re not the weird, off, broken human, you’re, you know, part of the community.

Carole Jean Whittington: Yeah, you’re not the failure to launch adult.

Danielle Sullivan: Exactly, exactly. You’re rejoining by being identified, you’re rejoining the community, you know. It doesn’t fix everything, but it reframes your experience in a way that can get rid of a lot of that like shame, negative self-talk, you know, brokenness kind of rhetoric, which is just so valuable. 

Getting Rest as an Autistic Adult

Carole Jean Whittington: And that’s why the Rest is More Than Sleep course was sort of born for me, it was that I didn’t want anybody else to go through that, the shame cycle, the horrible experiences of feeling like, you know, I’m in my 40s and I just can’t seem to get my act together, when really, that wasn’t the case. Just to know these things about yourself, and now that you do know these things, there’s some actual tangible framework structures and strategies –

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Carole Jean Whittington: From the autistic perspective, because, you know, you got all these people out there who are always trying to tell you how to sleep and how to do this stuff and it doesn’t make any sense to us, and it doesn’t really meet our needs.

Danielle Sullivan: Nope.

Carole Jean Whittington: And that was one of the really important aspects of this rest course, was that I specifically talk about sensory rest for us, and what authentic connection rest is for us, because to the rest of the world, you know, that might be social rest, and we need that, we’ve got that same need, but it’s an authentic connection that we’re seeking, it’s a different perspective, our lens and our approach is different. And this is written specifically by autistic for autistic because, you know, there’s a million and one books out there on how to rest, how to get sleep, how to manage your time, and all this stuff, but it doesn’t speak our language to our needs.

I wanted to be really strategic and very specific about approaching these rest areas from what meets our needs, what’s different about how we experience a rest deficit, and how can we address it in a way that if we’re in burnout and we’re barely getting by, I mean, you know like, you might brush your teeth if you can manage it when we’re like, when we’re in that place, you know, when everything is just too much, how do we get some relief? How do we get some restoration? That’s what this is for.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. It’s a really important piece and is, I think, one of the first steps to moving out of burnout. And I mean, you just gotten, I was just really impressed with how the course laid out you have sleep and then seven other types of rest, right, did I count those correctly?

Carole Jean Whittington: Yeah. Mm-hmm, that’s right.

Danielle Sullivan: And some of them were kind of like things I might have come up with myself if I brainstorm how to rest or how to reinvigorate oneself, but some of them I was really surprised by as categories where once I thought about it, I was like, oh, obviously, that is a way to get some energy back, to restore those spoons, right, but I would not have thought of them myself and I certainly would have, especially in a burnout cycle when I’m sleeping 14 hours a day, luckily has not happened anytime recently, but you know, I remember how impossible it was to string thoughts together in those moments and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to critically think about like, what could I be doing to get my spoons back, you know? So having that really detailed like, try these things, try these three things, like that I can follow directions, you know, so I just I really love that about the course. Do you have –

Carole Jean Whittington: Oh, I’m so glad

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. You’re welcome. No, I really, I really enjoyed it. I got a lot out of it. And like I said before, I wasn’t sure what to expect out of it just because, not to toot my own horn, but just because, you know, I like rest, I’ve learned a lot about it, I read a lot, I’m a coach and work in it a lot and I help clients with it. And so you never know what you’re going to get from a resource and I was really impressed with it. I really, I really got so much out of it. So I was very excited to like tell clients about it. 

Carole Jean Whittington: Well, I will take that high praise, Danielle Sullivan, thank you.

Danielle Sullivan: Please do.

Carole Jean Whittington: That means a lot coming from you, I appreciate it. 

Spiritual Rest for Neurodivergent Folks

Danielle Sullivan: Thanks. Do you have a favorite kind of rest yourself? What was the most interesting piece to work on in the course for you, maybe is a better way to say it, like what’s your -?

Carole Jean Whittington: Oh, you know, I’m going to say that naturally I fall into an appreciative rest and a kinetic rest, kind of as a natural extension just of me, but one of the areas of rest that, in my late identified journey has probably made the biggest impact, has been the spiritual rest.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. 

Carole Jean Whittington: And that’s one that you don’t normally think about as being an area of rest or restoration. And I’m not talking about spiritual in the sense of, you know, like, woo woo, you know, what’s your religious, you know, denomination, but I’m talking about spiritual rest from this sense of who am I? What is my purpose? Why am I here? Why do we exist, you know, all these big existential things. But from a spiritual standpoint of just, I exist in the world. Because I think for me, I had spent so many decades feeling like I didn’t need, I didn’t belong, and I didn’t have a place in the world. And so for me being able to embrace some of the areas, and I share several different areas of spiritual rest and how to connect with and find my place in the world, that probably has been one of the biggest impacts in my late identified journey with rest.

Danielle Sullivan: We have, I have talked to so many late identified autistic folks who, because we haven’t been identified, have spent 20, 30, 50, however many years, not having a good sense of their own values, because they’ve been masking so hard that they’ve sort of just been enacting the values of other folks around them, their family, their friends, their work, whatever. And getting back to the basics and figuring out what are my values? What am I here for? That is so valuable for so many reasons, and certainly as a form of feeling connected to this sphere of life, this place that we find ourselves in, that that spiritual rest is so easily overlooked. And it was one of the aspects of the course that I was surprised at and really got a lot from because, like you said, it’s not necessarily a go to when you think of rest and restoration, but once it’s pointed out, it’s like, obviously, obviously, if I don’t know why I’m here –

Carole Jean Whittington: Like why didn’t I think of that?

Danielle Sullivan: And what my purpose is, then how am I supposed to be better? How am I supposed to feel connected to this world and this life as an individual? So, yeah, thank you for that.

Carole Jean Whittington: Sure.

Practical Tips for Rest in Everyday Life

Danielle Sullivan: Is there anything, I guess to leave folks off with, is there anything about rest that you would most like people to know? Whether they can take your course or not in this moment of their lives, is there one piece of advice maybe that we could offer out to folks who are struggling with this issue?

Carole Jean Whittington: Yes. Rest can come in some very unusual ways. And when you’re in burnout, it’s so hard to see what, where your energy is going. You just feel like it’s flowing out in every direction, and it’s just not coming in. And rest can feel like an asleep, can feel like it’s this elusive, huge thing that you can’t, you don’t even know how to identify what it is. And, you know, we tend to want to go big or go home, you know, we want to identify these big giant things, and really what I would like for everyone to know today, if there’s nothing else that you can do, I want you to start looking at the very small little things in your day. What is a very small little thing that brings and gives you pleasure? What is something that makes you smile? What is something that allows you to take a little bit fuller breath? Could it be something as simple as the first 10 minutes of your morning when you make your cup of coffee or your tea or oatmeal or whatever, and you just start to notice that using that same bowl, using your favorite spoon, that those things, those small little things, bring you pleasure, and through that pleasure, you’re energized. So don’t look at energy and rest as these big giant things, start looking at the little tiny, small things throughout your day and then think about how can I implement this a little more? Maybe one more time in my day? Or how can I be intentional to really take a second and just go, I love this food, it’s my favorite food? And it’s just that small and that simple.

Danielle Sullivan: Thank you so much, Carole Jean. I appreciate you being here today.

Carole Jean Whittington: Thank you so much for having me, Danielle. It is always a pleasure and a joy to talk to you.

Danielle Sullivan: I’m so glad you made it.

Conclusion

Danielle Sullivan: Thank you for being here with me today. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, please let me know. Leave a comment or email me: contact@neurodiverging.com I’d love to hear from you. Show notes and further links and Carol Jean’s link and all the stuff for the class is available at neurodiverging.com and also in the show notes below. Thank you again to my Patrons for supporting this podcast in everything we do at Neurodiverging, you are all wonderful and I really appreciate it. Join us for more stuff at patreon.com/neurodiverging, and I hope to see you there. Please remember we are all in this together.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Recommended Articles