The five-week shape
A typical some-band AuDHD burnout cycle runs roughly five weeks. Weeks one and two: you’re slightly more tired than usual, sleep gets worse, you skip one or two things you’d normally enjoy. Weeks three and four: your sensory tolerance drops, masking gets harder, small social demands feel bigger than they are, weekends stop recovering you. Week five: the wall hits — you can’t get out of bed, you can’t draft an email, you can’t handle a phone call.
If you can name the shape in week two, you have leverage. By week five, the same interventions cost three months instead of two weekends.
Five early signals worth taking seriously
These are the ones some-band AuDHD adults consistently report missing, in the order they tend to appear.
- Sleep onset delay creeping up by 15–30 minutes most nights.
- Cancelling plans you would normally enjoy, with a quiet relief afterwards.
- Reading the same paragraph three times in a row.
- Increased sensory irritation to things that don’t usually bother you (lights, ambient noise, clothing).
- A flat feeling about special interests that usually return capacity.
The two-variable intervention
At the some-band, two structural changes recover most burnout cycles. They are not glamorous.
First: cap one heavy day per week. If Tuesdays consistently run hot — heavy meeting load, heavy social, heavy commute — the intervention is to move one Tuesday item. Not push through, move.
Second: install a 90-minute solo recovery block, the day after a known-heavy day. Calendar it as a meeting. It’s the cheapest intervention with the highest return; it works because the AuDHD nervous system recovers in solitude in a way the neurotypical playbook doesn’t account for.
What not to do at the some-band
Don’t try to mask through it. Don’t add a new wellness routine; one more thing on the to-do list is not the answer. Don’t quit your job in week three — burnout-thinking will tell you the job is the problem when usually the load architecture is. Take two weeks of doing less first; if the shape doesn’t improve, then reassess at month three from a more regulated baseline.