I’ve been making an attempt to drink less alcohol this year. Not only have I previously used alcohol to appear more outgoing in social situations, but I also get the worst hangovers—migraines, nausea, the lot. I need a full day to recover after consuming alcohol, and I can’t eat or get out of bed most of the time, wasting an entire day following an event. But alcohol hangovers aren’t the only kind of hangover I suffer from—as an autistic person, I also experience crippling social hangovers. And these, I find, are just as challenging to recover from.
I’m writing today after my brother and his family have been visiting. We’re going to Japan together later in the year, so I hosted them on Friday night while we did some travel planning. As they’d made the journey up here especially, we went together to an arcade club on Saturday afternoon. I come from a family of gamers, so the prospect of spending an entire day messing around on various machines and partaking in numerous activities is quite exciting to me. In theory, it sounds like my ideal day. But the reality of actually doing it is entirely different.
It turns out that these sorts of venues are loud… deafening, even. Not only that, but there are also a lot of bright lights and (on a weekend at least) they’re extremely busy. Picture masses of unsupervised children high on sugar, speeding up and down stairs and bouncing from machine to machine (eek!). The experience quickly became a sensory nightmare for me and, although I found a lot of enjoyment when I was zoned into a game, I found myself getting more and more anxious as the day went on, to the point I had to remove myself from the situation and return home after just a few hours. There’s only so much sensory overload I can endure before my brain starts screaming for a reset.
But the overwhelm I feel in these sorts of situations doesn’t just magically disappear when I’m back in the comfort of my own home. It can last for hours, even days, after a social event. And what does that look like for me? Well, as I write this, I was supposed to be taking part in a 5k run today, but instead, I’m at home wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa, unable to even make breakfast despite my body telling me it’s hungry. Even the simplest tasks feel like they require an impossible amount of energy.
When I used the term ‘crippling’ earlier, I meant it literally. For me, a social hangover includes feeling multiple emotions at once, including guilt for bailing on following events, as well as anger and sadness for not being able to enjoy things like a ‘normal’ person appears to. There’s a constant internal battle between wanting to be involved and knowing the price I’ll pay for it later. All these feelings and more, alongside the exhaustion from trying to mask throughout the event itself, are quite simply stifling for me, to the point I’m unable to function properly for several days afterwards. It feels like there’s a physical weight inside my head—I’m not tired in the sense that I need more sleep; I’m mentally exhausted to the point that even carrying out daily routines such as eating and showering feels like trying to climb Mount Fuji. And if you’ve seen the number of steps involved in that, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge.
Just like how I’ve been refraining from drinking alcohol to avoid the hangovers it causes, I’m aware that I could avoid social hangovers by skipping social situations altogether. It would certainly make things easier. But why, as a neurodivergent person, should I have to hide away at home to prevent the after-effects of spending time with people I care about? The issue isn’t always with the situations themselves; it’s also how I’m looking after myself (or not looking after myself, in this case) afterwards. I need to learn how to recover properly, rather than avoid the things I enjoy.
I like to think that deciding not to attend the 5k event today is a step towards that—yes, I feel guilty for skipping something I paid money to do and have been training towards for the past two months. However, weighing that against pushing myself to leave the comfort of my own home when I can’t even muster up the motivation to brush my teeth this morning, I feel like I made the right decision that will benefit me mentally for the days ahead. I’ve given myself one additional ‘reset day’ before going into a new week that will include attending college, the gym, book club and the various appointments I have coming up before I go on holiday in two weeks; things that will contribute to burnout if I don’t look after myself in between. Pushing through exhaustion just to meet commitments doesn’t make me stronger—it just makes the inevitable crash even worse.
Of course, there will be plenty more times in life when I have multiple events in a short space of time. But, going forward, I need to learn to prioritise my mental health, not try to meet the demands of others when agreeing to plans. There will always be some level of guilt involved in feeling like I’m letting others down, but that doesn’t even come close to comparing to the guilt and various other emotions I feel during a social hangover. It’s not about avoiding life—it’s about managing it in a way that actually works for me.