In computing, an idle process is supposed to mean the system has nothing to do. The CPU cycles are free. Resources are available.
My brain has never once done that.
I can clear my calendar, turn off my phone, lie flat on the couch for an entire Saturday — and by Sunday morning I'm more drained than I was on Friday. For years, I assumed I was doing rest wrong. Turns out, the concept of rest I was working from was never built for a nervous system like mine.
The Process That Won't Terminate
Neurotypical brains seem to have a genuine low-power state. Remove input, and the system throttles down. For autistic brains, removing input is when the background processes take over. The queue that's been building all week — sensory fragments, unresolved conversations, ambient pattern-matching — starts executing the moment there's nothing else competing for attention.
I've described this to people as lying in bed while your brain runs a defrag. You're physically still. But the disk is thrashing.
This isn't rumination in the clinical sense. It's closer to deferred processing — things your system flagged but couldn't handle in real time because you were masking, or working, or just surviving the sensory landscape of a grocery store. The moment you "rest," that backlog comes due.
Three Background Services That Never Stop
Sensory monitoring. Even in a quiet room, my system is tracking the refrigerator hum, the barometric pressure shift, the texture of the pillowcase, the way the light from the window changed angle in the last ten minutes. None of this is conscious. All of it costs energy. It's like running an antivirus scan you can't cancel — your machine looks idle, but the hard drive light never turns off.
Interoception lag. I wrote about this in The Open Loop — the gap between what your body is experiencing and when your brain registers it. The practical consequence is that I blow past the "you should stop" signal without ever receiving it. There is no yellow light. It goes from green to red, and by the time I notice, the system is already in recovery mode. So rest often starts too late and from too deep a deficit.
Non-restorative sleep. Eight hours of sleep means nothing if your autonomic nervous system spent the night doing maintenance. I've woken up with a resting heart rate that says I ran a 5K in my sleep. This isn't insomnia. The body was asleep. The nervous system wasn't. It's the biological equivalent of your laptop sleeping with fifty Chrome tabs still loaded in memory.
The Wrong Recovery Protocol
The standard advice — "just take a break," "do nothing for a while," "unplug" — is designed for a system that actually goes idle when you remove the workload. If your system doesn't do that, "doing nothing" just frees up bandwidth for the background processes to run harder.
What I've found actually works is targeted input — not less stimulation, but the right stimulation. Something absorbing enough to give the background threads something to settle into. For me, that's a deep-interest rabbit hole, repetitive physical work, or time in a natural environment where the sensory inputs are complex but predictable. These don't add to the processing queue. They give it a place to land.
This is why a two-hour hike leaves me more rested than a two-hour nap. The nap lets the backlog run wild. The hike gives it structure.
Why This Matters
If you're someone whose rest never seems to work — if you keep trying to recover and keep falling further behind — it's worth considering that the recovery model itself might be wrong for your hardware. Not morally wrong. Architecturally wrong.
I spent decades assuming I was lazy, undisciplined, or just bad at relaxing. The reality was simpler and more structural: my system doesn't idle. It never has. And once I stopped trying to force it into a low-power state and started designing recovery around what it actually does, things shifted.
The Auticate newsletter does thoughtful work on autistic energy systems — worth a follow if this topic resonates.
The Protocol: Stop optimizing for stillness and start optimizing for load management. The brain that never idles doesn't need more downtime — it needs a different kind of engagement. Map what actually replenishes you versus what just looks like rest from the outside. The difference is the whole game.
