this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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Autism

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Study reveals why the brain 'zones out' when you're exhausted (www.livescience.com)
submitted 1 week ago by Captainautism@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/autism@lemmy.world
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Uh yeah, we autistics experience this regularly.

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[–] Australis13@fedia.io 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Interesting but I don't think it's necessarily related to neurodiversity. The article is talking about severe sleep deprivation; it suggests that the brain is attempting to conduct activities usually reserved for sleep (e.g. clearing out waste materials via cerebrospinal fluid) whilst you're awake, resulting in those loss of concentration moments.

Now, sleep is more often troublesome for neurodivergent individuals (particularly autistics), so some degree of this effect is potentially seen with greater frequency in autistics, but I would be hesitant to point to this as the main driver of attention-related difficulties without further data (especially when we know that there are other factors that influence attention regulation in neurodivergent individuals).

[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not directly tied to neurodiversity, but Autistic people tend go be extremely mentally exhausted regularly if they're forced to heavily mask all day long with both jobs and family or other social situations and overwork themselves for decades without being able to drop that and not allowed to sleep as long as they need due to work and responsibilities. I've had to go without any sleep for days at a time in the past due to work, school, and kids and I was in the Navy. Trust me, it's a very similar feeling to that a large part of my life.

[–] Australis13@fedia.io 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks, I appreciate the different perspective. As some who has experienced autistic burnout and also has sleep challenges, my personal experience is that the impacts are different, but that's just me.

[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, it's very similar for me. But I'm also AuDHD, So that might be a difference. The worst and best of both. Poor sleep, from ADHD and burnout from masking both Autism and ADHD. Plus a drive to use every last drop of extra mental energy to do what hobbies I can afford the spoon deficit for or the anxiety from ADHD will kick in hard, especially when I don't have the spoons to suppress it. It's a vicious cycle of conflicts, but has lots of advantages if I could just find a way to profit off of them. Neurotypical jobs just take advantage of me and kick me to the curb when I break.

[–] Australis13@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I hear you! Getting the balance right is very challenging. One of my approaches has been to try to set up systems to make day-to-day stuff easier to do, which means I have more bandwidth for work and hobbies. But that in itself can be a real challenge, as those sort of systemic "upgrades" are often big tasks that take a lot of time and energy to implement.

[–] Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

The key (to surviving) for me is similar. Simplify as much day to day stuff as I can. Build habits to reduce the cognitive load of doing day to day tasks. I've been at it for decades, and it is still a struggle. Always will be I suppose.

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

For sure that's a thing, but I'd it's more related to sleep deprivation than neurodivergence. I have a 1 year old and get sufficient sleep so I'm not zoning out all more than around once a month.

[–] Captainautism@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I wasn’t saying it was tied to ND, but rather our community experiences it much more often than the general population.

I call them the episodes as my brains screensaver.

[–] Australis13@fedia.io 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fair enough, and I'd agree that the sense of "zoning out" is more prevalent in the ND community.

I guess my main reluctance here is that whilst the effects may feel the same for some people, I'm skeptical that the underlying mechanism is (beyond the aforementioned increased risk of sleep issues), and wanted to ensure that headline-only readers didn't think this article was necessarily representative of autism.

[–] Captainautism@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

Ah, I gotcha!