When Life Forces You to Rest: Lessons from Injury, Burnout, and Energy Debt

Are you or someone you care for always in fight-or-flight mode? In today’s post, I’m sharing how a foot injury forced me to stop, rest, and confront the fears I’d been avoiding for years – stillness, emptiness, and a relentless desperation to distract myself. I also answer a podcast listener question about viewing autistic burnout through the lens of energy debt. We’ll explore why this parallel makes so much sense, unpacking some of the unique challenges neurodivergent individuals face in eating disorder recovery.

Autism and Being in Fight-or-Flight Mode

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I injured myself really freaking bad on Nov 9th, 2024 – 10 days before my birthday (although I know that’s completely unrelated…or is it?). That morning, I woke up in ULTRA fight-or-flight mode, as has been the norm for me lately. Over the past year, this heightened state has only worsened, largely due to mold in my apartment and constantly moving from place to place every few months. I’ve never had the chance to settle down, which has made it impossible to establish or maintain routines for more than a short period. On top of that, I’ve been putting immense pressure on myself to be productive at all times, struggling to sit with myself without distractions, and dreading any moment that isn’t packed with activity. All of this has kept my nervous system in a constant state of overdrive. It's led me to dread just about everything – even the things I typically enjoy. I’ve definitely been in a state of burnout, but it's something that I haven't been wanting to admit or face because that means I would have to do something differently – which I told myself I obviously didn’t have time for!

But the way life often works, at least in my experience, is that when we don't follow these inner nudgings – when we don't honor what our body is telling us to do – our body decides for us. More directly put: when we don’t stop, our body makes us stop. And that’s exactly what happened on the morning that I was shaking my whole body, doing these really intense dance moves because I was so anxious and so desperate for regulation, that I twisted my entire foot sideways. What followed was one of the most terrifying, out of body experiences I have EVER felt (aside from getting food poisoning in Bali in the middle of a tropical storm power outage, but that’s a story for another day).

When Pain Becomes a Wake-Up Call: The Foot Incident

I was dancing, jumping up and down like crazy, and all of a sudden, KABOOM. I felt the most excruciating rush of pain radiate through not only my foot, but my entire body. This might sound super strange, but in that moment, I felt like I was being torn between two universes. I started sweating, getting heart palpitations, felt super super dizzy and lightheaded...I was terrified I was going to faint and no one was going to know about it. I could clearly perceive my physical reality – being all alone in an Airbnb in Southern France – but there was also another reality. This "other" reality was the shock of the injury, and I was being sucked into a void between physicality and pain. This void was going to confront me with something, something I knew I didn’t want to be confronted with. So, I limped myself to bed and prayed to stay awake. Like I said, I didn’t want to faint, because I'm here all alone and literally no one would know about it.

Although this was obviously awful and terrifying, the interesting thing is that I felt this moment coming – not the foot getting injured specifically – but I've been writing in my journal for months about some radically painful experience that was just bound to happen. I have been in so much existential pain the past six months, a type of mental suffering that I’ve never experienced this deeply before. I wouldn’t describe it as depression because when I read about depression that doesn’t really resonate, but more like a super intense disconnection from reality meets dissociation from one’s own body. And because it was so intense, and I felt like I was floating in a cardboard cutout of life, I kept saying to myself: this is going to end with a wake up call moment. Well, here it was.

My foot injury, and being utterly incapable of walking – which, by the way, is the form of regulation I have depended on for years – has forced me to confront my fear of getting quiet with myself. Listening to these "inner nudgings" as I like to call them, and confronting the terror of the void. The emptiness. Because that’s what I’ve been so afraid of. All the distraction, Constantly feeling like I need to either be walking or working or stimulating myself in some other way were all attempts to avoid the emptiness. In the context of autism and eating disorders, this avoidance is part of an eating disorder's purpose: it numbs you from the emptiness, while at the same time being nothing but emptiness itself.

Viewing Burnout Through an "Energy Debt" Lens

And here’s where I want to transition into the question I mentioned I would answer at the beginning of this post. Kenyan writes:

Thanks for the invite to send questions for upcoming podcast episodes.  The topics below feel like giant question marks in and of themselves for me, so while not "questions," I am currently internally wondering:

Taking a look at Autistic Burnout through the same "energy debt" lens as in Extreme Hunger, except from a demands/sensory/output-energy angle. (I personally am experiencing how though I may have an "energy paycheck" now, I can still "overspend" because I still "owe" myself SO much rest for being chronic burnout (deeply in debt) for so long. Combine it with the extreme hunger energy debt....and well...rest and honoring self (or learning to do so, that's a whole other topic, to be sure!) go hand in hand. (..and/or.. the way ED's can be part of surviving during burnout - a cope. In my experience they are all wound together.)

This question excites me because everything Kenyan has written resonates deeply with my current experiences. My injury has forced me to rest and begin paying back the energy debt I’ve accumulated from years of being in GO GO GO mode. Over the past few months, I’ve been dissociating and feeling profoundly disconnected – especially from my creativity – and it’s brought me closer and closer to what one of my clients described as a “last straw moment.”

Kenyan has read my book How to Beat Extreme Hunger, where I dive deep into the concepts of energy deficit and energy debt in the context of eating disorder recovery. We’ve discussed these ideas before, so her question ties in perfectly with those conversations. If you’re not familiar with these concepts, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of the book! In it, I not only explain the biology behind eating disorders from a neurodivergent perspective, but also explore nervous system regulation, polyvagal theory, healing digestive issues, managing hormonal changes in recovery, and – because it’s me – delving into existential topics and key mindset shifts to move from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance. Now, let’s dive into Kenyan’s question about viewing autistic burnout through a similar lens.

What Are Energy Deficit and Energy Debt in Eating Disorders?

As I write in my book, when you are not eating enough calories to sustain your body’s needs, you go into energy deficit. In other words, you create a negative energy balance. For brief periods of time, energy deficit isn’t a huge problem. For example, if you have to fast before a surgery. Although threatening to your body, it’s just a one time thing – so as long as your nourish yourself afterwards and continue eating adequately, no problem.

The problem occurs when the energy deficit continues. When day after day, week after week, month after month, perhaps even year after year, you don’t consume enough calories (which are of course, just units of energy). You’re still continuing your day to day activities, perhaps even engaging in additional exercise. The result? You’re outputting more energy than you’re getting in. Over time, you start to build up energy debt. Energy debt is very similar to credit card debt, in the sense that the more debt you build up, the more you’ll have to eventually pay back.

Why Viewing Autistic Burnout as Energy Debt Just Makes Sense

The reason I love Kenyan’s question so much – about viewing autistic burnout in the context of energy debt – is because for my autistic brain, this parallel just “makes sense” if you know what I mean! Whereas energy debt in the context of eating disorders is directly caused by inadequate calorie intake (which of course, goes hand in hand with too much energetic output, often in the form of compulsive movement), autistic burnout is caused my inadequate time for rest and rejuvenation, and excessive energetic output in the form of masking, sensory overwhelm, executive functioning demands and societal demands, not to mention the insane amount of energy we burn just by thinking so deeply about EVERYTHING!

I think for a lot of autistic people too (and I’m drawing from my current personal experience) constantly distracting yourself in order to avoid or numb yourself from the existential thoughts is in and of itself a way to wrack up energy debt. My recent foot incident has made proven this could no longer continue!

As Kenyan said in her message, the compounding effect of paying back multiple types of energy debt is a very difficult and very overwhelming process. When I was paying back my caloric energy debt while going through extreme hunger, I was nothing short of terrified. If you’ve read my books (because I talk about this in my memoir Rainbow Girl as well!), you know I do not hold back on the details when it comes to the existential crisis and complete loss of identity I felt when gaining weight. And to be honest, that moment I twisted my foot brought its own crisis with it as well.

Here’s where I want to share a quote from my next book, How to Get Out of Quasi Recovery:

"While times of crisis are, by definition, difficult, they’re valuable for precisely the same reason. The word crisis stems from the ancient Greek words κρίσις (krisis) and κρίνω (krinō), meaning “to decide” and “turning point.” The perceived loss of identity after an eating disorder is an opportunity to gain clarity on your values and decide what actions align with them. You may feel temporarily empty, but that’s merely because you can’t yet see what’s behind the corner of your turning point."

The ramifications of my foot injury have been SO challenging. Like I said before, my walks are one of my greatest sources of self-regulation, so literally being forced to sit with myself and my thoughts is a bit of a crisis! But at the same time, I’m so grateful for fucking up my foot. Learning to sit with myself is something I know my inner wisdom has been nudging me to do for a while now. The only reason I haven't been listening is because there was an alternative path, the path of GO mode. But now that I've been embracing the rest, I genuinely feel that spark again. I am excited again. I have mental clarity again. And most significantly, my creativity is flowing back in enormous waves!