Also, I have a question for people who are good at neuroscience

I'm interested in intense world syndrome, which is the theory that autism is caused not by being indifferent, but by having overly strong emotional reactions (especially fear reactions) and taking in more information than you're able to process. I'm really into this because it seems consistent with all facets of autism, whereas more socializing-focused concepts of autism seem to cut out large parts of what it is (see everything Simon Baron-Cohen's ever done).

Anyway, my understanding of neuroscience is really poor, but I have a question about cortisol. Isn't it the case that if you produce a lot of cortisol a lot of the time, you eventually become less able to produce it? The reason I'm curious about this is because I have been so fatigued in the past year (I thought I had anemia, but I just got back my blood tests and I don't), and I often find it really hard to get energetic about anything. Is it possible that having really strong reactions could eventually lead to having really dull reactions? All the stuff I'm experiencing now is, IIRC, the opposite of what I was like as a child.

Additionally: as a child I was extremely, unusually smart, and I think quite verbose; and although I'm not of below-average intelligence now, I am for example a pretty slow and dense thinker sometimes, often have to work hard to talk, and as I've mentioned before I often read very slowly especially compared to the way I read when I was younger (it's hard to remember when the change occurred; I remember having a lot of trouble at age 16 and being really quick at age 13, so it's somewhere in between them).