Autistic burnout recovery requires a low-demand life. Read on for how one midlife woman with AuDHD discovered how frugal homemaking helped her to heal.
There are a lot of reasons to love frugal homemaking. There are innumerable benefits you glean by creating a home with an eye toward being thrifty and wise with your spending. I might be the first person ever to say that it was part of my autistic burnout recovery.
I’ve only realized in retrospect that I’ve been pushing through burnout since my early thirties. Until my early fifties, I had no idea that I was neurodivergent, no clue how perimenopause affected neurodivergence. I told myself that the constant fatigue and feeling a failure was because I’d made all the wrong decisions.
Or because of hormones.
Or because of the full moon.
But looking back, and knowing what I know now, I was in midlife AuDHD burnout.
And my frugal homemaking habits were part of what helped me to heal more quickly than I otherwise would have.
As this blog is all about helping neurodivergent women live more simply so they can find greater fulfillment, I want to share the eight ways that frugal homemaking helped me through the difficult journey. My hope is to give someone the encouragement they need to keep taking one step in front of the other.
#1: How frugal living reduced my money worries during midlife AuDHD burnout.
Frugal living for neurodivergent women is almost a necessity.
Back when we were first married, my husband and I could have afforded a suburban home that cost twice as much as the one we purchased. We could have afforded to lease new cars every three years. To buy all new furniture for our new home.
To send our son, once he was old enough, to a preschool (because “everybody else” in our suburb did).
We did none of that.
I married a man almost as frugal-minded as I, and though we would splurge once in a while, we always spent well below our means.
Not having financial worries significantly reduced my emotional load. That likely helped me into autistic burnout recovery more quickly than would have otherwise happened. Not having financial worries is one of the top AuDHD burnout recovery tips I could offer.
#2: More mental bandwidth: the hidden gift of living beneath our means.
Because I didn’t have those worries, I had more mental bandwidth to try to ferret out why I was feeling so old and spent at a relatively young age. Not that I got anywhere close to the truth back then. But I did end up incorporating good habits that I needed anyway. Those included taking a magnesium supplement and making sure I got enough nutrition in my diet.
Simple living for autistic women can lead to more benefits than you might think.
#3: How gardening supported my autistic burnout recovery and low demand living.
When our son was about four years old, I started a vegetable garden. The main reason was to eat food with higher nutritional value than what supermarkets sell. But I was hoping to save money on our food budget, too, so it was a facet of my frugal homemaking lifestyle.
I continued gardening after we moved onto our rural homestead, and the work and the plants taught me a lot of important life lessons. Things like:
- Patience brings rewards.
- I’m more resilient than I think.
- When roots have lots of space to grow, they produce a lot more fruit.
- Bugs happen.
The various truths I gleaned while working in my garden helped me to slowly let go of the anxiety I felt over life’s imperfections.
It helped me along my (as yet unconscious) goal to learning how to create a low-demand life.
#4: How downsizing to a smaller home became a lifesaver in midlife burnout.
At what was close to the height of my burnout, my husband and I decided to declare financial independence and move.
I’ll be the first person to admit that making a huge lifestyle change is NOT a recommended part of autistic burnout recovery.
And that’s putting it mildly.
But as I said before, I didn’t know. The reason I felt so down on life, I told myself, was because we lived in the city, and our house was too big, and we didn’t have enough space to grow everything I wanted to grow, and our son didn’t have enough room to run around outside and so he drove me crazy.
Misinformed and ignorant as I was, my husband was eager to quit his job and live somewhere with trees and fewer neighbors. So, we did.
And our eventual permanent home – an earth-sheltered house – ended up being nearly a quarter of the size of our suburban home. It was in part because we weren’t sure how our investments would do over the next few years, so we needed to continue to be frugal. But a bigger part was that I.
Hate.
Housecleaning.
Living in 576 square feet meant I had a lot less work to keep it clean and tidy. This took a huge load off my executive function and emotional stress.
It brought another advantage, too.
#5. A smaller home gave me more time to rest and recover.
Not having as much house to clean meant that I had more time to rest. Not that I rested nearly as much as I should have, but I did more than I could when we lived in the ‘burbs.
Don’t get me wrong; you can live in a conventionally-sized home and still be a frugal homemaker. But living in an almost-tiny home forced me to slow down.
And believe me: back then, I needed some forcing if I was going to slow down!
#6. How moving closer to nature helped my neurodivergent brain heal.
One of the reasons we purchased the property that we did was that back in the early 2010’s, land here was super inexpensive. So our decision to purchase it was as much to save money as for the land’s beauty.
However, I had been craving a life snuggled in the arm of nature, a place where I could be surrounded by trees, a place where I would have to look hard in order to see a neighbor’s house – if I could see one at all.
I was tired of hearing traffic, tired of hearing lawn mowers and leaf blowers, tired of seeing mowed lawns and perfectly sculpted bushes that ran up to boring brick facades.
What I didn’t realize was that my neurodivergent brain had become overloaded with all of the sights and sounds of the city. That had bred anxiety from the feeling of constantly being surrounded, with no room to breathe.
I didn’t know that a huge answer to the stress I’d been feeling was nature.
Because we made a frugal choice, I got exactly what I needed.
And it played a big part in healing my neurodivergent midlife burnout.
#7. Frugal homemaking helped me create a cozy, regulating, low-demand home.
Some of the furniture in our house belonged to my husband when he was single. A few items we’ve purchased (or my husband has built) since we moved here.
But then there’s the side table, an elegant consignment store find. The rocking chair I’ve owned for decades. The two nightstands I bought years ago for my second apartment. Stuffed animals sitting on a shelf.
These things are familiar. They reflect my tastes and happy memories.
If being out in nature is the best autistic burnout treatment, then being inside surrounded by familiar, cozy, beloved items might be second best. Because I believe in using things until they wear out, because I don’t regularly (or even irregularly) replace everything in my home, I am surrounded by things that bring me comfort.
This is an important part of a low-demand life, the kind of life that heals burnout.
#8. How frugal living helped my husband retire early –which supported my autistic burnout recovery.
That my husband retired in his early forties had as much to do with consistent investment into the stock market for the eighteen years that he worked. However, living frugally allowed us to save and invest even more than we would have been able to otherwise.
Consequently, I no longer had to be the sole caregiver of our son on weekdays. Being a highly sensitive (and undiagnosed) autistic himself, our son was a handful. He required attention and energy almost every second of the day, attention and energy I didn’t have to give.
My husband resigning from his position meant that he could be a full-time dad. It took a great burden off me, allowing the healing of burnout to move along more quickly than it otherwise would have.
A low-demand life is the path to healing autistic burnout.
If you take a look at a list of autistic burnout recovery tips, they all boil down to one thing: a low-demand life. Living beneath one’s means is an important part of this life, since financial worries are one of the major stressors for most people.
If you suspect you’re in autistic burnout, or are close to it, I recommend that you take a look at your spending habits. However, if you’re already doing the best you can, then you’ve already taken a huge step toward a faster autistic burnout recovery.
If you know you can do better, I encourage you to do so. Talk to someone who can help you, if need be. Learn to become a frugal homemaker.
Your future self will thank you.
What have you been doing to move your neurodivergent burnout recovery along? Please share with us in the comments!
