I push myself too much, it's true. I push through things and I think it's hurting me. I don't know when to stop, quite literally. Don't know my own limits.

I need to make a post about autistic burnout one of these days...

I guess my advice to you would be to take inventory of how you deal with things, especially when you're out of your room/the house.

One thing to consider is how overwhelmed you are.

Sensory overload, even if it's not at the point where a meltdown or shutdown is imminent, can make it impossibly difficult to figure out how I'm feeling internally. If that resonates with your experience some of the time/a lot of the time then it's going to be important to engage in strategies for better accommodating your sensory needs.

Being extremely anxious is another thing that makes it really difficult in a similar way because I'm emotionally/psychologically overwhelmed - similar experience, different cause.

The next thing to look at is how much masking you are engaging in.

Obviously masking takes on a lot of different aspects but one of the big indicators is whether you are suppressing stims a lot. If you are late diagnosed you it's likely that you got trained out of a lot of your stimming behaviour at a young age, either through the conscious actions of adults around you or by your peers with bullying and ostracism, so just because you don't feel the urge to stim doesn't mean that you aren't suppressing the urge to stim necessarily, it might just be an indication that you are so accustomed to suppressing your stims that it feels completely normal to you.

Another is how much people-pleasing you are engaging in.

People pleasing also takes on a lot of aspects and imo it's not just when you are saying yes to people without considering whether it's a good idea or being nice/friendly even when the situation doesn't call for it or when you don't feel like being that way.

For me, I'm fairly high in regards to social masking. What that means is when I'm around other people I am running heuristics in my mind constantly to try to understand what other people are communicating, what would be the best way for me to communicate what I'm trying to, and what is most appropriate in regards to things like etiquette and the expectations of reciprocity, and all of it feels like conscious effort because it doesn't come naturally to me.

For example, I am reading the subtle cues that the others around me are giving such as facial expression, body language, tone, choice of words etc. I'm consciously timing how often I should break eye contact. I'm retrospectively going back over what was just said in case I might have said the wrong thing or implied something that I didn't want to as well as trying to identify if there were any points that I am expected to inquire about or anything I'm supposed to reciprocate. And all the while I'm modulating my own choice of words, tone, body language, facial expressions etc. to try and best communicate what I'm trying to get across to others. I'm also assessing whether I've talked too much about something or if I'm boring others and stuff like that.

And that's only the most obvious things that I'm doing when I'm in high masking mode. When a person is doing all of that consciously, is it any wonder that they don't find a moment to stop and consider how they are feeling in the moment?

If I could liken my experience of high masking in a social sense, I'm like a skilled beginner or an intermediate at social interactions. You know when someone is learning to swim or ride a bike and they can do it, and often they do just fine, but it is kinda stiff and awkward and if they aren't focusing on all of the things that they need to attend to then they start making mistakes? That's how I feel when I'm socialising and meanwhile everyone around me seems to be experts who just socialise effortlessly (because a lot of the time it is actually pretty effortless for allistic people.)

To sum all of this up, if you are regularly pushing way beyond your limits and especially if you don't even realise it until much later on, then you are at a high risk of autistic burnout and, believe me, it's much harder to recover from autistic burnout than it is to develop ways to accommodate your sensory needs and to work on unmasking/reducing your level of masking.

What do you mean by it not being a "value-judgment"?

It's in the sense that there's a cultural value attached to the term or there's specific connotations associated with the term (think about the difference in connotation between saying "light skinned" and "fair skinned"; both mean the same thing but if you are using a term that also means nice, equitable, even-handed etc. the way that the word fair does then the subtle implication is that a person with a darker skin tone is not these things.)

With regards to that specific term, avoidance is pathologised in psychology and society; avoidant attachment style, avoidant personality disorder, "You're being avoidant again!". The implication is that avoidance is unhealthy, cowardly, problematic, and "not an appropriate way of dealing with your problems".

When someone leaps out of the way of a car that's barreling towards them, nobody would say that the person was being avoidant, even though this is true in a technical sense, because we typically only associate avoidance with the "wrong" sort of ways of doing things.

Excellent advice about pairing earplugs with headphones btw!!

I'll study this a bit more, but I'll try it out, and I think that I kinda know what it refers to in the end.

On an auditory level, a really good example is white noise or being near a fan - idk about you but for me it's so much harder to hear other sounds when I'm near a fan because of the noise it generates and how it kinda blurs out a lot of other sounds.