Is it a lot harder?

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Fifty. Forty Five wonderful years coping with Autism. Just before I fell off the wave I looked and felt much like I did when I was 22. I suffered from horrible depression at age 21 and came very close to getting institutionalized. I could barely walk up a hill. I forced myself into a running routine; eventually 10K races; I came out of the depression and never looked back. I was able to get three college degrees. I started after college at a job in a military Bowling Center (I was still not socially apt to do any stressful work), was able to buy a house, get married, and managed to go from the last kid picked on the teams in school to an Athletic Director at a Military Installation. I never gained the ability to play team sports. I credit most of what I did in my life to the adversity created from Autism.

Often people burnout in middle age as a result of Autism. My stress was continuous most of my life. At 21 the depression was related to girl trouble, stress, and mild burnout, but youth is often the best ally a person can have to recover from burnout.

At forty five I was going strong. I considered myself to fall off the wave at this age because this is when I lost balance, in the sense that I lost the ability to relax and recover. I operated on adrenaline and adrenaline fumes for two years. If I had understood the physiological process of this at the beginning, I might have been able to prevent the damage it ultimately did to my health. I even had a degree in health science, but didn't get much valuable information on the warning signs of severe stress.

The burnout at 47 was horrific. I could barely walk down the street without collapsing. I have worked myself back to some level of health; but my cognitive functioning and memory is much different than the way it was with the daily adrenaline boost.

Sorry for the long post, but if it motivates anyone to manage stress better, I can at least hope I have helped someone avoid the danger of burnout associated with Autism. Per your topic, worry and stress is harder on people with Aspergers/Autism, because they tend to accumulate more of it in their life. My sister has Aspergers and she is still moving full steam ahead, but her level of stress is high. She watched what happened to me and made changes in her life to avoid burnout.

Why could you barely walk down the street without collapsing?

Stress at its severest level causes strange physiological effects. Mine started with a state of hypervigilence that I received slight relief from intense aerobic exercise. At age 46 I was in the top ten percent of aerobic fitness as measured by military standards. At 47 I was working out and getting cold instead of hot after a workout. I could mow two yards in 100 degree heat and still feel chilled by a breeze. I knew something was very wrong, but I still had an enormous amount of energy fueled by adrenaline to meet the demands of stress.
Always a hot natured individual, I lost my ability to warm myself. I also developed severe alexithymia and started to experience emotion as pain; of which the only escape I could find was creating music to release the emotion.

Finally I could no longer tolerate sound and light and had to take a leave of abscence from work. I still could not shut the adrenaline off. Doing Aerobic exercise I found that my heart was beating unusually fast and would not slow down under 100 beats. I found my self dizzy and with a strange feeling in my head that I had not felt before. My feet and legs continued to be cold, but after walking they became warm and heavy. I did not realize it at the time, but my body had been accomodating the stress by shunting off blood to my extremities to get the blood flow to my head; finally it lost the ability to do this, and the blood no longer flowed to my head as it should. My heart was having to work harder to get it there.

I could not sleep and eventually my legs felt wobbly and I became semi-conscious with any exercise effort. I could not sleep because my heart would awaken me every time I attempted to sleep. I went with about an hour of sleep for about 35 days and finally five with no sleep. I ended up in the hospital; Ativan did the trick and I finally slept and slept and slept. At this point no one knew what was wrong with me.

I was in a state of disbelief, because I thought I was in good health. I went back and forth to Doctors for almost a year before they gave me a tilt table test and determined I had Neurocardiogenic Pre-syncope; a type of dysautonomia.

Basically the brain and cardiovascular system are no longer in sync to get the blood pressure and heart rate balanced. It was strange for me; I never actually fainted just kept coming close. At the time I thought I was dying. That eventually stopped, but ever since I have been afraid of doing intense Aerobic exercise.

I can ride a bicycle for ten miles, but my heart rate does not rise much. I can still lift the same amount of weight at the gym, but I feel weak when I walk. My light sensitivity and sound sensitivity is still extreme. I can longer wear my corrective lenses because the lenses intensify the light.

I've taken omega 3 fish oil and I can barely think of anything. So yes, ruminating less but it's never really a problem for me. Distractions work well when that does happen.