Netball Super League 2025: Aliyah Zaranyika of Birmingham Panthers on the autistic burnout
Aliyah Zaranyika has been used to putting a person to adapt. But in the middle of the Super League season of last year, he reached a breaking point.
Daily tasks and regulation of his emotions have become so overwhelming that it found difficult to articulate the way in which it felt and a reinterpreted of painful broken blisters and wounds on the leg left her unable to walk.
The England player Future Roses was experiencing an autistic burnout.
He believes that this has been caused by masking his autism and ADHD – Hyperactivity attention deficit disorder – around people for long periods in the high pressure environment of his sport.
“As cute people are – I did some of my best friends in Netball – I fought with natural policy and knowing my place in the team,” said the Birmingham Panthers player at the BBC Sport.
“It was an aggravating situation. I burn in navigation in different situations, relationships and spaces and trying to adapt without giving up a part of myself.”
He was aware that he elaborates new information more slowly than others, and also worried that he could cost her a place on the team since others may not want to take time to teach them at its rhythm “when you can get someone else who can learn them quickly”.
He reached the point where Zaranyika said he felt “mentally out of control” and his team at the time, Saracens Mavericks, gave her a week to the Netball break.
“I was completely burned. I could not work,” said the defense of the 23-year-old wing, who will have to face his former team-hour known as London Mavericks-Domenica in a game that you can watch On BBC Sport (15:45 BST on red button, website and BBC Sport app).
“I was fighting so much,” explained Zaranyika. “The additional physical pain was difficult to ignore, so my mother took me to the hospital.
“My mom describes my condition of the skin as” my body keeping the score “because I don’t recognize that I am stressed. Even if it can be debilitating, it indicates my mental state.”
The autistic burnout refers to the extreme tiredness often accompanied by an increase in collapses, sensory sensitivity and physical arrest, while masking is the suppression of the autistic characteristics to appear “non -autistic”, according to the National Autistic Society.
