Autistic burnout: what actually helped you come back from it?

Two years ago I hit the wall — the real one, where skills you've had for decades stop working and sound becomes unbearable. I'm mostly out the other side now. What helped, in honest order:

1. Dropping every non-survival demand. Not "reducing". Dropping.
2. Unmasking at home first, then in one safe friendship.
3. Sensory rest on a schedule, before I felt I needed it.
4. Special interest time treated as medicine, not reward.

What did NOT help: pushing through, "self-care" that was actually more tasks, and anyone whose advice began with "have you tried just".

Seconding "interest time as medicine". My burnout recovery genuinely accelerated when I stopped rationing the thing that recharges me. The guilt about "wasting time" was itself a cost I couldn't afford.

This is the realest list I've seen — especially "Dropping. Not reducing." That distinction took me an embarrassingly long time: I kept trying to do burnout recovery as another project to optimise, which is just burnout with extra steps. The two that saved me were nearly yours — sensory rest scheduled before I needed it (a dark, quiet 20 minutes at 2pm whether or not I felt bad, pre-empting the crash instead of mopping it up), and special-interest time as medicine, not reward. I'd add one that's less obvious: lowering the stakes of communication — I moved as much as I could to text and async, so a rough day didn't mean a missed call or a face I had to perform. And thank you for the "have you tried just" line; I might get it embroidered. Really glad you're mostly out the other side. That's not nothing.