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What if you could just show up as yourself, in your natural slightly chaotic form, knowing that you were already enough exactly as you are? Damn… that would change things up a bit, huh!?
The other day I sat down for a ‘quick rest’ (apparently they are a good idea, along with regular water and snacks. Who knew!?). Just twenty peaceful minutes with a cup of tea, biscuits and absolutely no expectations of myself whatsoever. Other than to breathe, drink and consume said biscuits.
Unfortunately, within minutes my brain had munched all the biscuits and wandered off into the ‘thoughts wilderness’, creating a long list of things it would prefer me to be doing instead. Tidy desk, answer all those emails I’ve been ignoring, plan next week’s content… you know, relaxing things.
Because relaxing, for many of us, doesn’t actually feel relaxing at all. It feels vaguely irresponsible. Like there’s something important we should be doing instead. Our brain is on high alert, like a dog when you’ve stupidly uttered the W word (walk) 15 minutes before you are planning to take them out. So, they get their ball, then follow you around with a “is it now” look in their enthusiastic eyes, until you finally put your shoes on and fulfil the promise you accidentally made fifteen minutes earlier. Exhausting!
I think a lot of neurodivergent people carry around this belief that our value is directly linked to how useful, productive, capable, helpful or exhausted we are. Which becomes a bit of a problem when your nervous system is already twitchy and operating at max capacity.
Most of us don’t consciously decide this. It develops slowly over years of trying to compensate for feeling different. You become the person who works harder, pushes through, overdelivers, stays late, always says yes, helps everyone else, and somehow keeps functioning long after your body is googling retreats.
Eventually, proving yourself stops being something you do occasionally and becomes your entire operating system.
This stuff doesn’t appear out of nowhere. A lot of us grew up receiving very mixed messages about ourselves. We were intelligent but inconsistent, creative but chaotic, capable but somehow still “hard work.” It’s a very strange experience being told you have loads of potential while simultaneously feeling like you are constantly disappointing people in tiny invisible ways. Like you’re somehow being tolerated rather than fully accepted.
I had an English teacher who once told me that 50% of my essay was “incredible” and the other 50% was irrelevant. How can someone be incredible and irrelevant at the same time? (thanks Mrs Levay… this still haunts me, ha ha!)
So many of us learned to compensate. It just slowly becomes part of who you are. You become hyper-useful. Hyper-reliable. The person who cracks on with it, figures it out, replies quickly and somehow keeps functioning long after your body has filed a complaint.
If you’re forgetful, you become overprepared. If you struggle with consistency, you overcompensate with effort. If you’re worried about letting people down, you become the person who says yes far too often and then burns yourself out trying to keep everybody happy.
Because after a while, productivity stops being something you do and slowly becomes part of who you are. Being useful earns praise, approval and acceptance, so your brain starts treating rest like a slightly suspicious activity that needs justifying.
I figure that’s why so many of us struggle to rest properly. Not because we physically can’t stop moving, but because stopping can trigger guilt. The second things become quiet, our brains start scanning the horizon for ways to justify our existence again. You finish one task and immediately look for another. You clear your inbox and instead of feeling calm you think, “Right… what catastrophic thing have I forgotten now?”
It’s like our nervous systems are permanently waiting for Ofsted to arrive and inspect our worthiness as humans.
That level of pressure is exhausting. Not just physically, but emotionally too. Because when your self-worth becomes tangled up with output, slowing down can start to feel less like rest and more like failure.
But productivity isn’t the only place this shows up. I think for many neurodivergent people, the need to prove ourselves spills into almost every social interaction too.
You start noticing which parts of you seem welcome and which parts seem to make people uncomfortable. And you adapt.
Not necessarily in huge dramatic ways at first. Sometimes it’s tiny things. You speak less. Tone yourself down. Rehearse conversations before you have them. Think carefully about how you come across. Become easier to manage, easier to understand, easier for other people to sit comfortably beside without feeling unsettled by your intensity, emotions or honesty. You become the “good” person.
Because when you spend enough years feeling slightly “wrong,” safety can start to feel connected to how successfully you make yourself fit around everyone else.
That’s why so many neurodivergent people become absolute experts at reading rooms, reading moods and monitoring themselves constantly. You become hyper-aware of people’s reactions, expressions, pauses and tone changes. I can tell people how they are feeling before they have worked it out for themselves. Often to their annoyance!
Because I’ve got an entire emotional detective agency running in the background while I’m trying to hold a completely normal conversation with someone.
Eventually, all that self-editing becomes so automatic that you barely notice you’re doing it anymore. You become so focused on being accepted that you rarely stop to ask whether constantly reshaping yourself might actually be exhausting you.
Spoiler alert: it is!
Self-employment can make all of this even worse because business gives us endless opportunities to measure our worth against output. Hustle culture is constantly telling us that there is always more we could be doing. More visibility, more networking, more strategy, more content, more learning, more optimisation, more growth. There is no natural stopping point.
If your self-worth is even slightly tangled up with achievement, business can become one long audition for your right to exist comfortably in the world.
That’s when you start undercharging because you feel lucky someone picked you. Or overdelivering because you’re terrified of disappointing people. Or replying to emails at ridiculous hours because you don’t want anyone thinking you’re lazy, flaky, disorganised or “not committed enough.”
Meanwhile your body is sending increasingly aggressive warning signals that you continue to describe as “just being a bit tired.”
I also think hustle culture absolutely loves people like us. People who already feel they need to earn rest are basically productivity culture’s dream audience. There’s always a tiny part of us wondering whether maybe we just need to try a bit harder. Wake up earlier. Push more. Achieve more. Become a shinier, more efficient human being.
Honestly, I can barely remember why I walked into a room half the time. I do not need a man with a standing desk shouting about “6 figure salaries” and telling me to start every morning by plunging myself into an ice bath.
What I find really interesting is that I don’t actually think many of us are frightened of hard work anymore. We know how to work hard. Most neurodivergent people I know could probably organise an evacuation plan during a nervous breakdown while simultaneously apologising for being emotional.
No, I think what frightens many of us more is slowing down.
Because if you’ve spent years defining yourself through resilience, capability, productivity or usefulness, stopping can feel oddly exposing. Who are you when you’re not fixing, helping, striving, producing or proving?
What’s left when the performance ends? And I don’t mean “performance” in a fake sense. I mean the constant internal pressure to justify your existence through effort.
I think this is why so many of us struggle during quieter periods in business. We tell ourselves we wanted more balance, more breathing room and more calm. Then it finally arrives and suddenly we’re emotionally pacing around the house because our nervous systems don’t entirely trust it.
We’re so used to operating in urgency that calm can actually feel unfamiliar.
Even rest becomes productive somehow. We’re not relaxing, we’re “recovering efficiently.” We’re not watching television because we’re tired, we’re “regulating our nervous system.” Which sounds significantly healthier than admitting you’ve just binge watched an entire series of a new crime drama while emotionally dissolving into a family-sized packet of digestives.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying ambition is bad. I love ambitious people. I am ambitious. I enjoy creating things, building things, helping people and earning money. But I would quite like my future to involve slightly fewer panic-Googles about tax and a refillable coffee cup. But I digress.
This isn’t about pretending none of that matters.
I often wonder what life would feel like if we stopped treating exhaustion like evidence of worthiness. What if rest didn’t need to be justified first? What if boundaries weren’t something we only attempted once we were already completely burnt out? What if slowing down wasn’t failure, but actually the first sign that we’d finally stopped treating ourselves like machines?
Because a lot of neurodivergent people have spent years unknowingly building lives around compensation, proving themselves and trying to become useful enough, successful enough, productive enough or easy enough to finally feel safe, accepted or “good”.
And the problem is, when you build your whole identity around proving yourself, you can end up trapped in relationships, businesses and patterns that reinforce the belief that you are only valuable when you are performing.
So you tolerate things you shouldn’t tolerate. You over-explain, over-give and overwork. You say yes, and even manage to sound enthusiastic, when you desperately want to say “hell no”. You take on clients you don’t even like because being chosen feels safer than having standards. You keep pushing yourself long past the point of exhaustion because some part of you still believes rest has to be earned first.
Eventually, life starts to feel less like something you’re living and more like one long attempt to justify your existence.
That’s the bit that has to change.
Because the goal was never to become endlessly efficient, endlessly useful or endlessly accommodating in order to finally deserve your place in the world. You were never supposed to spend your whole life reshaping yourself into somebody more manageable, more productive or more convenient just to feel accepted by the people around you.
At some point, the proving has to stop. Not because you’ve finally become good enough. But because you always were.
There is a very specific brand of frustration that comes with knowing exactly what you need to do… and still not being able to do it!
It’s not because you don’t care. Not because you don’t understand it. Not even because you’re particularly busy. You can be sitting right in front of the task, fully aware that it would take about twenty minutes if you just cracked on with it, and yet your brain is skipping around a field, picking daisies. Not a care in the world!
For most of my life, I didn’t have any language for this. I was late diagnosed, which means I spent 51 years assuming that this was just how I was. Inconsistent, easily distracted, a bit unreliable when it came to getting shit done. I had zero idea my brain was neurodivergent, which is laughable really now I know that it clearly is.(Narrator: the signs were always there!)
I just thought it was ‘special’ and not in a good way. And that conclusion didn’t come out of nowhere either. It was born for a million moments where I was quietly made to feel like I was buffering ‘normal’.
I still remember an English teacher telling me “80% of this essay is brilliant, and the rest is pure fairy land,”. Now I’m proud of that part of me that wanders off on fabulous tangents, mid sentence. It’s a hugely important part of who I am. But back then I was filed under “lovely, but a bit strange”. And it left me pondering whether it was a world problem, or my brain. I had no idea that my magnificent brain just needed the right conditions.
So I did what most of us do. I tried to fix it.
For years, I assumed this was a discipline problem. That if I could just be a bit more consistent, a bit more focused, a bit less prone to wandering off mid-task, everything would finally get in line. Then when it came to work I bought into the idea that the ‘winners’ were the ones who showed up the same way every day and just got on with things, regardless of how they felt. It never crossed my mind that I might be aspiring to a rulebook my brain missed the memo for.
The majority of business advice isn’t neutral. It’s built for a very specific type of brain. And that brain is not mine. Which kinda sucks really.
It’s built for people who can decide to do something and then… just do it. No internal negotiation. No sudden urge to make a cup of tea, scroll something deeply irrelevant, and then question all of your life choices halfway through opening a document. No weird moment where your brain nopes, and disappears off to learn something fascinating but entirely unhelpful. (I once lost a solid hour researching what to do if you’re stuck in a lift. Do I need that information? No. Do I now avoid lifts? Absolutely yes!.)
And the thing is, this generic advice is given like it’s universal. Which means that when your brain bumps into it, it feels like a ‘you’ problem. You’re inconsistent, you need more self discipline. You haven’t found the right system. You’re just not good enough. (Spoiler alert: you absolutely are.)
But what if it’s not that you haven’t found the right system — it’s that you’ve been trying to force yourself into ones that were never built for your brain in the first place? Read that again. Because once you understand that, things start to make a lot more sense. Not in a dramatic “everything is fixed” kind of way, but in an ‘aha’ lightbulb above your head kind of way. Because it explains a lot.
When something doesn’t work, the natural instinct is to push harder. To sit there longer, try to force focus. Override whatever resistance is showing up. And to be fair, that can work for a while. You can absolutely drag yourself through a task with enough internal pressure and a slightly aggressive pep talk. But it comes at a cost.
Because every time you factory reset your brain in the hope it will operate against its natural patterns, you’re overriding signals that are there for a reason. That starts an energy fire that leaves you with tiredness and some lingering shame that something relatively simple has wiped you out for the rest of the day.
This is where the boom-and-bust cycle can creep in, and this was my strategy for far too long. You have a few days where everything flows, you get loads done, you feel vaguely invincible… and then suddenly replying to an email feels like you’re in an internal small talk convo. From the outside, it looks inconsistent. From the inside, it feels like your brain has just done an emergency stop with no warning.
One of the most useful shifts, and also one of the most annoying to accept, is that your patterns aren’t random. They’re information.
The times you can focus for hours without noticing. The moments where starting feels completely impossible until something suddenly clicks. The tasks that you avoid with Olympic-level skill, even though you know they matter. That’s not chaos. That’s data.
Executive dysfunction often shows up as that gap between intention and action, where you know exactly what needs to happen and yet… tumbleweeds. Not because you’re incapable, but because the conditions for action aren’t in place. Once you start looking at what those conditions actually are, things get a bit clearer.
You begin to notice when your brain is more receptive, what kind of tasks pull you in, and what are your resistance triggers. It doesn’t magically solve everything, but it does mean you’re no longer trying to operate blind.
There’s a particular brand of shame that comes with only being able to focus on things that are interesting. It can feel childish, or unprofessional, or like you should really be able to just get on with things regardless.And yet your brain has its mouth clamped shut and is shaking its head vigorously as someone is trying to spoon rice pudding into it. (Is that just me? yuck!)
For many neurodivergent people, interest isn’t optional. It’s the thing that actually switches the lights on. When something engages you, properly engages you, focus can be almost effortless. Time disappears, ideas connect, and you suddenly look like a highly functional adult who absolutely has their life together.
When it doesn’t, even simple tasks can feel weirdly impossible. Not hard, just… inaccessible. Like they are in a giant claw machine and no amount of pound coins and patience allows you to access one. Which is why trying to ‘business’ whilst ignoring that reality tends to backfire.
Designing work that has some level of ‘shiny new thing’ built into it isn’t indulgent. It’s practical. Because It’s the difference between pushing a giant rock uphill and surfing the focus wave.
There’s also something annoying that I’ve noticed over the years. Well, there is plenty that is annoying, but I won’t gallop after that squirrel. Tasks change depending on how they feel internally. I can have things collecting dust on my ‘to do’ list for days…weeks even, that feel impossible to start. Then suddenly the planets align, or whatever, and I complete them in 20 minutes.
The task didn’t change. Neither did the deadline. The only thing that shifted was my brain moving it from something it was told to do, to something it came up with itself. Like that boss (we’ve all had one) that dismisses your genius idea in the bored-room (yes that was intentional) only to “I’ve got an incredible idea” weeks later!
Because the moment something feels like a “should,”we’re back to the rice pudding shoveling. Not because the task is unreasonable, but because it feels imposed.
When it feels like a choice, even if nothing else changes, there is less friction. It becomes more doable, and far less dramatic. And once you notice this, it’s really helpful. But also horribly inconvenient, because you can no longer use the “push through the pain” strategy anymore.
What becomes clear over time is that this isn’t about a lack of effort. Most people I know with neurodivergent brains commit to everything like there’s a million pound prize at the end of it. Cleaning the bathroom? I’m spending 4 hours with an old toothbrush making sure every inch of it is showroom sparkly. You with me? But…and it’s a big BUT. That effort, when it comes to business, is being poured into toeing the line with systems that don’t actually fit. And applying more effort to a mismatch doesn’t fix it. It just makes you even tireder, even faster!
A more useful question at that point isn’t “how do I try harder?” — because let’s be honest, you’ve already tried that and look where that got you! (no shame, just fact stating!) It’s “how do I make this easier to start?” Because that’s usually where the whole thing falls apart.
And that might mean changing when you do something, how it’s structured, or what you pair it with. Not in a dramatic, “new life, new me” kind of way, but in small, slightly less punishing adjustments that your brain might actually agree to. It’s not about lowering the bar. It’s about removing enough friction that getting to it doesn’t feel like wrestling a grizzly bear every single time.
The biggest shift isn’t tactical. It’s how you see yourself. Because when you move from “I’m unpredictable” or “I’m an out of control nightmare” to “my brain works differently,” something settles. Not in a dramatic, life-is-fixed kind of way, but in a quieter, “oh… that explains a lot” kind of way.
You stop trying to force yourself into ways of working that never quite fit, and start paying attention to what actually does. Less fighting it, more working with it — which, annoyingly, turns out to be far more effective.
You start to notice your patterns, and after a bit of practice, you start to trust them more. Instead of constantly second-guessing yourself or trying to override everything, you begin to work with what’s already there. I’d be lying if I said it suddenly made everything easy, but it does take the edge off that constant feeling that you’re getting it wrong. And without that shame everything feels a lot more doable.
You take this and you use it. Not perfectly, not consistently, and definitely not in a way that suddenly turns you into one of those people who just “gets things done” without thinking about it. Knowledge is power… but it’s not a miracle. Annoying, but true.
The goal is to stop assuming the problem is you. Because it isn’t, so let that shit go. When something feels hard to start, or weirdly impossible for no obvious reason, you pause long enough to ask a better question. Not “what’s wrong with me?” but “what does my brain need here?”
Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And after that, you can no longer pretend you don’t know any better. So you build something that actually fits your fabulous brain. Bit by bit. Adjustment by adjustment.
And then comes the life-changing bit: you realise you were never the problem. You were just trying to run on instructions that weren’t written for you.
There’s a very particular kind of energy that shows up at the beginning of something. You know the one. Slightly unhinged, blindly optimistic and off its face on dopamine! Convinced this idea is the idea.
You’ve had an idea and suddenly everything feels urgent, important and like this might actually be the ‘thing’ that changes EVERYTHING! You maybe even tell someone about it, which is always a risky move because now it feels real and you’ve essentially committed to becoming “a person who finishes things”.
And then… a few days later… it just quietly evaporates. No drama. No official announcement. You don’t sit down and go, “I am now abandoning this project.” It just becomes weirdly harder to return to. The excitement disappears, the urgency fades, and suddenly you’re left with… the actual work. Which feels a bit like turning up to a party and realising you’re committed to 400 different versions of small talk. Arghhhhhhh.
We talk about productivity as if it’s one thing. You either get things done, or you don’t. As if there’s a magical group of people who are just “good at getting things done” and the rest of us are out here… vibing and starting seventeen things at once.
But starting something and finishing something are completely different processes. Starting is powered by novelty. It’s curiosity, possibility, and that lovely dopamine spike that comes with a new idea. It pulls you in. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Starting, in many ways, is the easy bit.
Finishing, on the other hand, is less sparkly. Because it relies on regulation and sustained attention. It demands that you keep going when something is no longer exciting and has become a series of boring fiddly steps that require you to stay engaged anyway. Think ‘trapped in a corner at a party answering “so what is it you do’ questions’ on repeat! This can feel like our brain has personally betrayed us. Because it’s not that we’ve lost interest for no reason, but the task itself has changed shape.
The beginning of a project is all potential. You’re imagining what it could be. You’re connecting ideas. You’re sitting on your fancy office chair with a slightly evil look on your face stroking an unusually hairy cat. The world is your lobster!
Then you hit the middle. And the middle is where your dreams go to cry. It’s repetition. It’s decision fatigue. It’s working out things that are no longer interesting but still very much required if you’d like this project to ever see the light of day.
For brains that run on interest, that drop in stimulation can feel like you’ve been unplugged. Not because you don’t care anymore, but because the thing that was fuelling you at the start has left the building. Rude, really. And you’ve been left with a different kind of energy which stalls your momentum.
You would think the closer you get to finishing something, the easier it would be to just… finish it. You’d be wrong. The ‘almost done’ trap is the ‘getting to work then remembering you left the iron on’ moment in the process. It’s feeling like you are so close to success, then realising you have to go back and clean something else up.
Because the last 10% is where things suddenly become serious. It’s the detail. The polishing. The “just one more tweak” energy. The part where your brain decides this is now incredibly important and must be done properly. You’ve been there, right? You skim the first paragraph of a final draft, decide it sucks, and want to rip the whole thing up and start again. Even when it really doesn’t!
The final stages tend to need more detail, more decision-making, which increases friction rather than reducing it. Slightly inconveniently — it’s the point where the thing becomes real.
Because once it’s finished, people can see it. Have opinions about it. Potentially misunderstand it. And now we’re in a whole different emotional landscape. So, what do we do? We hover. We tweak. We leave it at 92% complete like it’s in some kind of protective limbo. Because “almost done” feels safe. Finished feels exposed.
On a slightly random, but very relevant tangent, my personal brand website was meant to go live in August…..2025! (7 months ago, at the time of writing this!). I have prevaricated, tweaked, read and reread, loved it, hated it….and still not pushed the ‘get on with it’ button. I am stuck somewhere in the middle of “I just need to do it”, and “what if it isn’t good enough”. And the reality is that it is not that important that it needs to be taking up that much of my brain energy. But here I am anyway.
Unfinished tasks don’t just sit there quietly like polite little items on a list. They lurk. They pace. They are the kid in the back of the car alternating “are we nearly there yet” with “can I have a wee”.
They pop into your head at inconvenient moments. They create that low-level background noise of “you should probably go back to that thing”, even when you’re trying to focus on something else.
Over time, that builds into a sort of mental clutter. A collection of open tabs that never quite close. And with that comes a bit of guilt, often a creeping frustration with yourself. It can start to feel like you’re constantly behind, even if you’re actually doing a lot. Which is a wildly unhelpful narrative, but unfortunately quite a convincing one when you’re surrounded by half-completed projects. This is where the narrative begins to form. When enough things remain unfinished, it’s easy to start telling yourself that you “never finish anything”. That belief isn’t accurate, but it can feel very real.
This is where it stops being about tasks and starts being about identity. “I’m just not consistent.” “I always lose interest.” “I never follow things through.”
And once you start telling yourself that, every unfinished project becomes proof. So now, finishing something isn’t just about completing the task. It’s about fixing something about yourself. It becomes tied to proving something about yourself, which makes the process feel heavier and more loaded than it needs to be.
Which is a lot of pressure to put on, say, editing a document or replying to an email. No wonder it feels hard, because that pressure reinforces the cycle, rather than breaking it!
I’ve said it before, but we’re taught to expect motivation to be steady, as if caring about something should automatically mean we keep showing up for it in the same way every day.Which sounds lovely. And also… not reality.
In fact I could pull together a panel of house plants that would attest to the idea that ‘caring’ was not enough for me to ensure they got watered! In fact, in the mid 80’s I even had a rabbit that broke free from her cage and ran in search of a more reliable carer (RIP Miffy). She eventually came home, with the realisation that braving the elements and wilderness was not a preferable alternative!
Motivation, especially for ND brains, tends to be more “peaks and troughs” than “gentle rolling hills”. It spikes. It disappears. It comes back at 1am with a brand new idea that is definitely more important than the thing you were doing before. Eg sleeping.
So, when motivation drops mid-project, it can feel like something’s gone wrong. But nothing’s gone wrong. You’ve just moved past the exciting part, to the less exciting bit. Unfortunately, your brain was not consulted about this transition.
If finishing relies on something different, then it makes sense that we need to support it differently. Relying on motivation alone will only take you so far, which is why structure becomes important.
Not rigid, life-sapping structure, but enough scaffolding to stop things drifting off into the void. Breaking projects into phases helps. Knowing what “done” actually looks like (before you start moving the goalposts halfway through) helps. External accountability can help, provided it doesn’t immediately trigger your nervous system into rebellion.
Also, a small but important lesson I keep relearning: not everything needs to be in version one. If I don’t separate “must have” from “nice to have”, everything becomes a “must have”, and suddenly I’m six hours deep adjusting something no one will ever notice.
And perhaps most importantly, removing perfection from the finish line.Because if “done” secretly means “flawless”, you will never be finished. You will simply be… circling. Waiting for perfection to show up with her perfect skin, and expensive handbag.
There’s a lot of freedom in deciding that something can be complete without being perfect. Says the woman that’s still not fully taken that concept on board! Because perfection is a moving target. You can always tweak, adjust, improve. There is always one more thing you could do. Which is how things stay open indefinitely.
Sometimes, finishing something at 80% is infinitely more useful than leaving it unfinished because it never quite felt ready. Once something exists, you can improve it. Refine it. Build on it. But you can’t improve something that never makes it out of your head.
Allowing work to be “good enough” is not lowering your standards. It’s creating a sustainable way to actually complete things.
Finishing isn’t about suddenly becoming more disciplined, more consistent, or more like those mythical people who seem to just calmly complete things without emotional drama. It’s about understanding how your brain works and building around that, rather than fighting it.
When you recognise that the drop in motivation is predictable, that the middle of a project is often the hardest part, and that the final stages carry more emotional weight than we expect, it becomes easier to respond with something other than frustration.
Because unfinished doesn’t mean incapable. It usually just means the system you were relying on stopped working halfway through. And if the only way something gets finished is by dragging yourself through it with stress, pressure, and a growing sense of “why am I like this”, then it’s not a system you can rely on long term.
A better goal? Finish things in a way that doesn’t make you hate the process… or yourself. Quietly. Imperfectly. Repeatedly. Because trust isn’t built on perfect starts — it’s built on things you actually finish.
Firstly, I just want to give a shout out to any readers who have mastered the art of understanding the unpredictable beast that is ND energy. A confusing little fecker that might give you a whiff of hope that there’s some petrol in the tank… and then you do the most mediocre of chores and feel like your brain has been turned into a smoothie.
If you haven’t mastered that, then… well, how the devil are you going to protect it if you don’t even know how it works? Just kidding. As you were. Keep reading.
So, let’s assume you’ve got at least some understanding of how your energy behaves, in all its unpredictable random sparkliness. The next step is protecting it. Because you’re living in a world that won’t slow down. Not even a teeny bit. Not even if you ask it really nicely.
And this is the bit no one wants to talk about. The world isn’t going to adjust itself around your capacity. Deadlines still exist, clients still want quick replies, and life in its many forms keeps moving at the same pace regardless of how you’re feeling. Which is why protecting your energy isn’t optional. It’s sanity maintenance.
And when you’re neurodivergent, then that’s double funzies, because your energy isn’t linear. It fluctuates. It spikes. It drops. It goes out for a pint of milk and comes back 3 days later. It’s that crazy unpredictable drunk uncle that you don’t want at your wedding.
So, this isn’t about escaping the world. It’s about learning how to stay in it without acquiring yourself a one way ticket to burnout town!
Most systems are built on the assumption that energy is stable. That you wake up, work, produce, and repeat. Nice, neat, and predictable. Lovely for people whose brains behave like that. Big fan. Congratulations to them. Except that’s not how a lot of ND brains work.
Some days you can fly through work like you’ve unlocked a secret level of existence and suddenly you are unstoppable. Other days, opening your laptop feels like a hostage negotiation between your fingers and your brain. Same person. Same workload. Completely different capacity.
And yet… none of those changes how the world responds to you. You’re still expected to show up, deliver, reply, and keep things moving — even on the days where your brain has very much not signed off on that plan. No one pops up and says, “Ah, I see your brain has gone offline today, let’s circle back when it returns.”
The problem is that external demand stays consistent, while your capacity didn’t get the memo. So, when those two things collide, pressure builds. And when that pressure sits there long enough, it turns into stress, then exhaustion, and eventually burnout.
Which is why this whole “just push through” approach doesn’t really work for brains like ours. (It barely works for anyone, to be honest, but that’s a rant for another day.)
One of the biggest drains on your energy isn’t actually the work itself — it’s urgency. Everything suddenly feels important. Everything feels like it needs doing now. Everything feels like it will fall apart if you don’t respond immediately.
But a lot of that urgency isn’t real. It’s artificial deadlines, other people’s poor planning, and those “quick favours” that somehow take half your day and leave you wondering why you opened your laptop in the first place.
If you’ve spent years being reliable, helpful, and responsive, you’re probably very good at jumping straight into action mode without even questioning it. It feels productive. It feels responsible. It also quietly sucks the life out of you.
The problem is that urgency pushes you into adrenaline. And adrenaline is great … in small, occasional bursts. As a lifestyle choice? Less ideal. You end up running on “just get through it” energy, which works, right up until it really, really doesn’t.
A small but surprisingly effective shift is asking yourself: “is this actually urgent?” Not “does it feel urgent” but is it genuinely time-critical. Because those two things are very different. Even if your brain insists they’re identical.
I’m the queen when it comes to chatting about boundaries. It’s like I discovered them, 51 years later in my life, and now they are my specialist subject. In fact, it pretty much is that! But most of those conversations are about emotional ones. Protecting your feelings, managing relationships, that sort of thing. Energy boundaries are slightly different. They’re about protecting your capacity.
Because you can technically have the time to do something, but not the energy. You might look at your calendar and think, “Well, I’ve got an hour free,” but your brain is already fried, your sensory load is maxed out, and you’ve made approximately 47,000 decisions already that day. That hour is not usable. It’s like a mirage hour.
This is where one of the most useful sentences you’ll ever learn comes in: “I don’t have capacity for that.” Not followed by your life story. Not turned into something apologetic, or a giant discussion. Just that.
It sounds simple, and it is. It’s also wildly uncomfortable if you’re used to over-explaining, over-justifying, and making sure everyone else is fine first. But it works. Quietly, efficiently, and without wringing out what little energy you had left.
If you’re anything like me, saying no doesn’t just happen. It comes with a full internal production. You draft the explanation, rehearse the tone, anticipate their reaction, and try to make it sound reasonable, valid, and entirely non-offensive to anyone, ever.
The irony being that by the time you’ve finished explaining, you’ve used more energy than the original task would have taken. How’s that for efficiency…or lack of it!
The truth is most of that explanation is for us. It’s working hard to make the discomfort of setting a boundary feel safer. But “no” doesn’t require a backstory. It doesn’t require a breakdown of your week, your mental state, or your entire life context. As Stu taught me once, it’s an entire sentence. And the more you practise it, the less energy you leak trying to make your boundaries palatable for everyone involved. I promise you it starts to feel easier the more you try it on for size. In fact, it’s so incredibly freeing. Because it’s you having your own back.
One of the biggest shifts that comes with protecting our energy is realising that just because something is possible, it doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.
We ‘could’ say yes. We ‘could’ take it on. We ‘could’ push through.
But then we could also decide to deep clean our entire house at 11pm on a Tuesday night. Half of my teenage years were spent piling the entire contents of my bedroom floor onto my bed at about 10om, then crying and putting it all back onto the floor. The question is… should we?
Because every “yes” is stealing from a limited resource. And if you’re not consciously deciding where that energy goes, it gets spent by default. Usually on the loudest, most urgent, or most guilt-inducing thing in front of you.
Protecting your energy means getting honest about trade-offs. Letting go of “shoulds”, looking properly at commitments, and actively choosing long-term stability over the short-term approval that we can often crave. Sweet dopamine.
Sometimes that means making decisions that don’t look particularly impressive on paper but feel a lot safer in our body. Which, frankly, should be the only measure that really counts.
One of the sneakiest things about energy is how quickly we decide we’re “fine again”.
You have one good day. Maybe two if you’re feeling particularly wild. You wake up, your brain is cooperating, you answer a few emails without wanting to lie down afterwards, and suddenly you’re like, “Right. I’m back. Power Rangers…let’s go!.”
And off you go. Rebooking everything. Saying yes to things. Catching up on the 463 tasks you’ve been avoiding. Possibly reorganising a cupboard for emotional reasons. Fully convinced you’ve turned a corner.
Newsflash. You haven’t turned a corner. You’ve just found the exit of the car park.
Because early recovery energy is not a full tank. It’s not even half a tank. It’s more like your car has stopped making that alarming flashing noise and you’ve gone, “Great, let’s drive to Scotland.” You’re out of the danger zone. That’s it. But you’re not on the home straight yet.
And this is where we accidentally undo all the progress we’ve made. Not because we’re reckless (well, some of us can be!), but because it feels so good to have energy back that we immediately spend it. All of it. In one go. Like a toddler with birthday money.
Then we’re surprised when we crash again.
Protecting your energy at this stage means doing something deeply unnatural: not filling the space. It means leaving gaps. Building buffers. Resisting the urge to “catch up” on everything all at once. Saying no to your old pace, even when your brain is loudly insisting that this time will be different. (It won’t. Your brain is a liar when it’s excited.)
Recovery isn’t just about getting your energy back. It’s about not immediately burning through it the moment it returns.
Protecting your energy isn’t just practical — it’s deeply inconvenient on an emotional level. Because when you start doing it properly, things come up. Guilt. Fear. That slightly sick feeling that you’ve just disappointed someone. And sometimes actual pushback from people who were very happy with the old version of you. The one that was constantly nodding like their head wasn’t attached properly. Saying yes, staying available, and overextending herself. Funny that.
That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’ve stopped being as convenient. And yes, it does feel uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. Like you’ve put on a jumper that technically fits but is somehow both itchy and judging you.
You’ll be tempted to soften it, to explain more, to just do the thing this once because it’s easier than holding the boundary. But every time you do that, you teach people (and yourself) that your limits are optional. The real work here isn’t setting the boundary. It’s holding it when it would be much easier not to. This is a huge part of my life story, so believe me when I say I get it. But I’m also now boundaries number one fan!
The world might not slow down. That’s true. Deeply annoying, but true. But that doesn’t mean you have to speed up to match it, because that’s how you ended up here in the first place. Remember?
Protecting your energy long-term often means your life looks a bit different. Less stuff, more intention. Not churning your output like a sausage factory. Which, depending on your previous operating style, can feel suspiciously like you’re “not doing enough”. But you are. You’re just not doing everything, thank god.
And yes, sometimes it can feel like you’re not keeping up with everyone else. Like you’re dawdling while the rest of the world is power-walking past you in Lycra, with a podcast on 3x speed. But I can promise you this: they’re exhausted too. They’re just better at pretending they’re not.
What you gain instead is something far more useful: stability, sustainability, and the ability to keep going without repeatedly crashing and having to rebuild yourself from scratch every few months. This isn’t about doing less for the sake of it. It’s about doing what actually works for your brain, your body, and your life in the long term.
Because if it only works when your brain’s on fire and your nervous system is halfway out the window, it doesn’t actually work.
ROLL UP, ROLL UP. THE WILDEST SHOW IN TOWN HAS ARRIVED! YOU’VE GOT A VIP, FRONT ROW SEAT TO SEE CRASH & THE BURNOUT BLUES BAND, featuring songs from their greatest hits album, like “Marshmallow Brain” and who could forget “ANGRY FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON!” plus that all-time classic “Zero spoons & fucks to give.”
I know, I paint a very rosy picture of the old ND “Burnout”, funtimes, shitz ‘n’ gigz… but until you understand exactly how your energy arrives and how you need to manage it, you will repeat the same pattern of burnout, over and over and over…
Ask me how I know? Yes! ::ding ding ding:: correct answer, I know, because I’ve been there several times, full send to destination fucked (said in “Matt Rose Aussie Guy Voice”).
I’ve been through the fully immersive “Life Hurricane” simulator on several occasions, from humble dust devil, to full on Cat5 Katrina and every time I reflect on how we got here and clearly see all the warning signs. From the first roof tile rattling all the way to “Oh no, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore…” in what seems like a blink of an eye.
But the real kicker is yet to land, when you inevitably crash-n-burn harder than a cut-price electric car using auto-steer, and you are absolutely wiped emotionally, physically, spiritually. You surface, as addicts might identify, with “a moment of clarity” (I know I did), as you realise that it all has to change, everything, what came before was unsustainable. The way you found that out was to Live-Action Role Play* using a strategy that required an ill-advised amount of energy burnt in an unreasonably short time-frame. (*hat tips to the LARPers!)
It’s called BURNout for a reason… You have literally burnt through your entire stock of “coping” and now have to rethink the overall game play, whilst attempting to continue living, earning and remaining sane.
And, as you lie there in that fragile state, where breakfast is a life goal, and “dressed before noon” is about as likely as winning a national lottery every day for a year, you realise a horrible truth.
The burnout is not done with you yet, oh no buster… it’s taken you everything you have, maybe even more than you had, to get here. The real challenge begins once you hit the eye of the storm. This calm center allows you to reflect from a vantage point, and assess the size of the storm, and you realise, whatever the magnitude there’s only one route to recovery… The way back is through the other side…
Staring at a blurred wall of thought and vortex of emotions, you’re not wrong to flinch away. Whatever your route to burnout there’s going to be a fair amount of shame and inward blame stacked up ready for you to process and no-one claps their hands together and exclaims “Goody gum-drops, lets play the blame and shame game!“. Here definitely be dragons, and in fact probably these dragons are mere dragonlets of the massive monstrous demon dragons locked behind the door marked “Childhood”. Those deep, ominous rumbling sounds are the bass-notes echoing through your head. Pulsing as your heart beats, an energy hungry beast that gives your enemies a 2X damage for every one hit and wakes you at 2am. Sweating.
It’s natural to want to shrink away. Your bed is safety, the duvet will protect you from the hooded claw, and, who knows, even keep some vampires from your door. But, that’s a lot to ask of bed linen, even if it is from M&S. Lying, passively and waiting for the pressure to release is not progress, that’s stagnation, rotting away in the depressed, comatose lethargy that burnout brings.
It is such a warm and tempting place to remain, forever at the eye of it all, life moving around you, whatever little routine or safety net you draw around you is “enough”. It is… for now. But do not get stuck there, that way victimhood lies, and that is living hell. A learned helplessness, of being coddled and cossetted. It’s tempting.
But you need to know, and fully accept that no one’s coming to help you.
That was my huge revelation from my first round of therapy, after my first major burnout, when my Dr’s were calling my absolute lethargy “depression”, and my all-gas, no brakes bouts of “mania”, were “Nothing to worry about. Drink less caffeine and get more sleep.” (what a Dr. actually said to me).
Oh, and there’s also the insomnia, yeah, “get more sleep“… good one.
At some point you have to make the effort, it’s you and only you. Not your partner, not your family, kids or friends. YOU.
You have to get yourself “well”, what that looks like is unknowable at this point, just accepting that this is on you is enough. When you have hit rock-bottom and the only way is up** an uphill struggle, right when you are at a point when you have no capacity for creating a rational strategy to make your way back is going to look like the least “do-able” decision.
This is why you have a plan before you go in, creating a disaster recovery plan in the middle of a disaster will give you a grab bag of dumb decisions and half-assed ideas. All the while depleting what little energy you already have. Again, hello, been there, done that. 1 star, do not recommend.
The acceptance of that truth will unlock everything else, being kind to yourself throughout will speed up the recovery. Word of warning, there’s “being kind” i.e. nope-ing the family reunion, or skipping the friend’s brunch and then there’s “slacking off on the road to recovery” with behaviours such as “one more hour of doomscrolling AuDHD memes before bed” and “Like my pants, this shirt will do another three days before it needs washing“.
I find that a strict routine prevents slippage of progress. My plan when I fought back the first time was to regain all I had lost, the focus, the 18 hour days for 12 weeks straight. I was a machine, I just forgot to get an oil change, now I am back I am BACK! No, do not do that – it leads to some very fun prescription narcotics that “mellow you the fuck out” as my mate once said. When you recover, do not build the same bonfire just to burn it all down again…
** Never got why that song got the airtime it did, if the only way is indeed “up”, then you must be at rock-bottom, right? Why then are they so cheerfully singing about it?
My guidance would be; bed by 10pm, up by 6am, or 7am on weekends. Bed has to be made, bed clothes folded. 1pt of water, with pink rock salt (for the sodium and trace iron) and lemon juice (helps regulate bowel!), coffee and breakfast. Then get dressed.
That’s my morning and as long as I am in my office by 10am the morning is won! I am often in by 9am, but even though I am more regulated now than I have ever been, I do not chastise a slow morning, these are the perks of the self-employed life. As long as I am not letting anyone down, I can get in at 10 if I want. A “luxury” I afford myself, which is more a need at times.
I won’t detail my entire routine, but that’s my morning and it is part of keeping my life consistent and regulated. Consistency for me is more; accelerate, then coast, accelerate then coast. I cannot just be foot flat to the floor, that way insanity lies. Plus my routine may not work for you; you find the routine that helps, but I know that too many mornings without this simple strategy and things are going to get blustery and likely be headed towards tornado season.
My crawl back to sanity and return to a new-normal was not easy, and had all sorts of consequences. Lost relationships, changing social connections, finding love. But when I returned to a more regulated life, I was different, slightly less angry, slightly more wary of people. A decade of daily othering, and bullying will do that.
The way back is to re-evaluate what your energy budget will get spent on and accept it
You have to realise you have finite “spoons” and so have to ration how they get used. Arguing over a parking ticket? Yeah, I have done that, was it worth it? Yeah, in the moment, but actually that’s 4 or 5 high energy interactions where you spend your precious energy for little to no positive return to your life. Learning to “let it go” can be hard with an innate sense of right and wrong. Some things are simply “not worth it”, as a spend from the finite energy budget. Here’s a list of things that never made the cut after various burnouts…
If I do not respect these life rules I will burn out.
I know.
I have tried not doing these things.
I have burnouts 2, 3 and 4 to remind me of this. So, by a process of elimination I have curated my life to be as respectful of my time and energy as I can be, and ensure others respect these precious things too. No project, or person is worth my life on hold for months whilst I try and extinguish the flaming rubble my life becomes if I let others trample all over my own rules.
There’s no easy way back, and when you do emerge from the maelstrom and the destruction is apparent and everywhere and it can seem hopeless even trying to pick up and start again. But here’s the thing you have to cling to, you get to build it back the way you want. Fresh start, blank canvas, share your insights with those you love and who wish only good outcomes for you. Tell them what you have to do, or stop doing, if they truly love you , they will not only get it, they will advocate for you too.
Do not be shy about stating what you can and can no longer be expected to do. If you keep the household clean, fed and safe and it feels like a one-person crusade then delegate some of it or accept it will not get done anymore. This is not about alienating your loved ones, and those you live with, but more sharing with them the additional burden of the cognitive load and the overall weight of carrying it for the family. Teenagers and adult children living at home are quite capable of doing a load of washing. If they can work out playing a game on an X Box, they can figure out the right washing machine program.
Harder to do this at work, but if you are valued then you should have a conversation which shares the dangers of you shouldering certain loads. An explanation of burnout and paid time off might help them see the economic sense in making the accommodations?
Or think about job sharing, or adjusting your hours, which you should be legally allowed to do, we are in the UK, check local labour laws where you are before flicking the bird to your boss and saying “two days a week or imma be suing your azz”. Maybe not do that wherever you are employed.
After burnout your life is going to change, your capacity to do and cope may change, your tolerance to certain stimuli or situations may be different, and thousands of other minute but highly personal things may alter, but you have to give yourself permission to accept that these are things you have to let go. BE KIND TO YOURSELF. It’s handy to think “would I talk to my best friend/partner/kids like that?” and chances are you’re in an abusive relationship with your internal monologue.
BE KIND TO YOURSELF!
We’ve argued from Ep 01 that self employment is the perfect role for you if you have variable energy, focus and struggle with all the things that neurodivergent folk deal with on the daily. You get to show up as/when you can, and with the flexibility of letting you do what you can at a time that suits you. It’s not for everyone, but if you have a skill that you can monetise, then self-employment may just be the way out that you need.
A final bit of maths before I sign off.
If you work for the national minimum wage, for over 21s that’s £12.21 (time of writing 22 Feb 2026). A 38 hour week gives you £463.98.
Lets say you work in an office doing basic PA stuff, if you were self employed PA you’d charge a commercial rate of circa £30 an hour, and you only have to work 15.5 hrs to exceed your earnings at the full-time job. Work a 30 hour week and you earn £900, less tax and savings etc. and you will take home more than the PAYE position. With the right clients and projects you’d work 8 hours fewer a week and earn more, delivering at your own pace and timescale. It’s not for everyone, but for the right people, probably burnt out from attempting to scale the corporate ladder, then it could literally save your health and wellbeing.
It worked for me and whilst I still managed to burnout a few more times since the first, and biggest time, at least I didn’t have to explain to my boss why Fridays were “not doable” for the foreseeable future. Or playing the shame game, as you lie there on the sofa, feeling like you are letting everyone down, but unable to move.
With the right approach, right proposition to your local business community and a few local networking meetings you can earn a decent enough income without living a shadow life. Burnt out beyond recognition and probably self-medicating in the evening and twice at weekends. A story for another day I feel…
Be kind to YOURSELF and others.
There’s a very specific kind of tired that doesn’t make sense on paper. The kind where you look at your day and think, But I didn’t even do that much. You sent a few emails, had one meeting, put the washing on, maybe even cancelled something because you were “being sensible”, and yet by 4pm you feel like you’ve been dragged backwards through a hedge. Not dramatic burnout, not collapse-on-the-floor exhaustion, just that low, humming depletion that makes everything feel heavier than it should. Like you’re coming down with a bug that never turns up.
For years, I thought that meant I was weak, lazy, or just not built for “proper” business. Spoiler: it wasn’t that. It was energy debt, and I was quietly racking it up like it had no interest rate.
When I finally hit proper burnout, it didn’t arrive with sirens and flashing lights or announce itself with, “Hello Hannah, you have officially broken yourself.” It crept in. First it was overwhelm that didn’t shift, then irritability, then that constant feeling that I was forgetting something. Like my brain had 47 tabs open and I couldn’t find the one making the noise. I was saying “sorry” a lot; I couldn’t focus without it feeling like lifting 50lbs with my mind. Small noises made me jump, and I’d drift off mid-conversation and realise I’d lost entire chunks of what someone was sayin
I wasn’t dramatic, I wasn’t melting down daily, I was functioning, but everything felt tight. Like I was permanently bracing. And because I was still technically working, I told myself I was fine. That’s the problem. Burnout doesn’t start with collapse; it starts with erosion — paper cuts over and over until you realise you’ve been bleeding for months.
What I haven’t said yet is that my biggest burnout wasn’t twenty-something Hannah trying to prove she could survive London life. It was much more recent, and it wasn’t just mental; it was physical. I wasn’t collapsing in tears or dramatically quitting everything; I was just never switching off. Ever.
On the days when I was stuck…brain foggy, slow, distracted…I’d tell myself I’d make it up later, and later would come in the form of ten-hour hyperfocus sessions, weekends, evenings, “just one more thing.” I was constantly playing catch-up with a version of myself I thought I should be. I didn’t allow space to just be because there was always something I should be doing.
Underneath that was shame — deep, old shame. Why can’t I just work like everyone else? Why does this feel harder for me? Why does it take so much effort to do what others seem to glide through?
But it wasn’t just about work. My “always on” wasn’t limited to clients and projects; I was the reliable one. The one people called when things went wrong, the listener, the fixer, the one who usually knew what to do. And I was always the one putting my hand up when something needed doing. Partly because I’m capable, partly because I care, and partly — if I’m being really honest — because if everyone needs you, then no one leaves you. I was used to being left, which is probably a blog for another day, or a therapist’s office, or both, but being indispensable felt safer than being optional, so I stayed available. Emotionally, mentally, practically. Even when I was already running on fumes. Being the strong one is exhausting, especially when no one realises you’re carrying it.
So I pushed, because I thought the answer was effort. Turns out the answer was pacing, and eventually something had to give. And because I had proven that my brain wasn’t capable of looking out for me, my body stepped in and said “enough already” and physically stopped me.
I’ve said it before, but most business advice assumes your energy is stable. You wake up, you have X amount, so you use it wisely. And during the day, if you get a little rest, your energy increases again. For neurodivergent brains, that’s not reality.
Some days I can do a week’s worth of work whilst I’m still in my PJs. I’m on fire, with ideas flying, focus locked in, energy like a caffeinated golden retriever! Other days replying to one email feels like a university challenge, when you’re the only team member. Same life, same me, entirely different capacity.
That inconsistency used to terrify me because I mistook it for unreliability. But ND energy isn’t broken, it’s variable by design. We process more, monitor more, absorb more. Masking alone is an Olympic sport, and when you add sensory processing, decision fatigue, context switching, emotional labour, and background cognitive load, suddenly the reason you’re tired after “not much” becomes clearer. Time and energy are not the same thing; two hours on your calendar does not equal two usable hours in your brain.
The thing that nearly finished me wasn’t laziness: it was pushing through even when all the alarm bells were ringing, but I had my fingers in my ears singing “la la la not listening”. And the frustrating part is that pushing through works — for a bit. Adrenaline is intoxicating, the sparkly new thing is delicious, urgency masquerades as capacity, and you believe you can sustain it. I could override my body for short bursts, smash through projects, hyperfocus until 2am and feel invincible. Such a natural high, ticking those things off the list and feeling like I was winning. But borrowing energy from tomorrow is fine until tomorrow arrives and the account is empty
The dangerous part was that I thought I was being responsible. I thought this was what commitment looked like, what professionalism looked like, what business grown-ups did. You got the job done, whatever that took. I could see that not everyone seemed to have to put in such a huge amount of effort, but instead of questioning my comparison, I just doubled down. A lifetime of subtle messaging that I needed to try harder, be quieter, be better, be less meant slowing down didn’t feel safe; it felt like failure.
So I kept overriding every signal until my nervous system stopped negotiating. Burnout isn’t sudden; it’s compound interest on overwhelm. I was living on an overdraft.
Even when I knew I was tired, resting felt wrong. If my capacity is already unreliable, how can I afford to stop? If I pause, won’t I fall further behind.
Somewhere along the way, I’d internalised the idea that rest was a reward for finishing everything, but you never finish everything. Rest isn’t a reward; it’s maintenance, it’s preparation, it’s charging your phone before it dies instead of waiting until it’s at 1% and pretending you’ll be fine.
When you’ve lived your whole life feeling like you have to prove your capacity, rest feels like exposure. If I stop, someone might notice I’m not keeping up; if I slow down, it confirms the fear that I’m not built right. So I didn’t slow down, and that’s how burnout became physical . Not just tiredness, but inflammation, disrupted sleep, my body essentially saying, “You clearly aren’t listening to the gentle messages, so here’s a louder one.”
My burnout wasn’t dramatic; it was cumulative, and it cost me more time in recovery than pacing ever would have. Slowing down wasn’t a brave, enlightened decision; it was enforced. And if I’m honest, this slower, kinder version of me rocks. She definitely is a work in progress and needs to be dragged back in line from time to time. But now she generally just says yes to the things that bring her joy.
She doesn’t volunteer for everything, she doesn’t answer every message immediately, she doesn’t try to prove she can outwork her own nervous system. The old voice still whispers, You should be doing more. You’re falling behind. Everyone else is coping, but now my body answers back, and for once I listen.
Looking back, the signs were obvious — irritability, foggy thinking, snapping faster than usual, feeling like the anxiety hamster was permanently on a wheel, flinching at small noises, brownouts where you just disappear for a few minutes, and there’s no signal. But because I was still functioning, I ignored them. We’re not taught to see those as energy signals; we see them as personality flaws.
Now I have had to redefine what a better-balanced life looks like, and I’ve realised it doesn’t mean producing the same output every day. It’s responding honestly to what I can afford. Some weeks, I bounce between big output and recovery. And some days I’m on low power mode, running lights only. That isn’t failure, it’s pacing. Self-employment allows me to build around that variability rather than fight it. If I’d forced myself into a rigid mould, I would have burned out permanently.
Energy isn’t a moral issue; it’s information. Irritability, fog, that constant feeling of being behind — those are data points.
When I ask myself, “What is my capacity feeling like today ?” instead of “What do I have to achieve?”, everything shifts. Honesty about capacity is what makes sustainability possible for me. Previously, I would bully myself into thinking I needed to keep pushing, even against my better judgment.
If you’re running on empty, it’s unlikely because you’re weak; it’s more likely you’ve been paying invisible costs for a long time. You’re not defective. You’re processing more than most people realise. The goal isn’t to squeeze more out of yourself; it’s to understand how your energy actually works and build around it.
Pushing through might buy you some time in the moment, but it can end up costing you much more, like your nervous system.
There’s a very specific kind of ‘tired’ that shows up for me, long before burnout does. It’s not dramatic. I’m still functioning. Still replying. Still getting things done. But everything feels… loud. Overwhelming, where nothing is technically wrong, but my brain feels like it’s got too many tabs open. And if one more thing demands my attention, I might just climb into my wardrobe, nestle myself between some comfy jumpers, and wait until the search party find me. Or better still, don’t. (It’s ok, I’ll take snacks!)
When I reluctantly venture back out into civilisation, no doubt for a wee break, it won’t be long before someone has given me the delegation lecture. I say ‘lecture’ because this is not my first delegation rodeo. Oh no. Many people have gone before this latest one, promising me a world where I don’t have to do everything.
“Just hand a few things over”, they say…. in the same overly zealous way that people say, “Have you tried yoga?”, which immediately makes me want to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling!
They think they are being helpful, but all I can hear is my RSD singing “they think you are rubbish” to a creepy nursery rhyme tune. Don’t get me wrong, delegation sounds sensible in theory.
I mean, who wouldn’t want a bit of help once in a while? You’d think. In theory.
In practice, the idea that I can easily hand over a thing to an ‘eager to help’ person without giving them the sense that they might end up having to prise it from my dead hands is unrealistic at best.
Because the ‘after haunting’ that accompanies someone else doing ‘a thing’ (one of my things) on my behalf can be brutal. My brain doesn’t hand over said thing, go get a cuppa and never think about it again. Oh no. It obsesses over the multiple ways that person might well, in fact, most probably will mess it up irreparably.
It might be fair to assume, at this stage, that I’m talking about what gen pop would refer to as important stuff. E.g. keeping my children alive. But no. EVERYTHING in my world is filed under ‘important’, when it comes to how it needs to be done.
Stacking the dishwasher, making the bed, editing a piece of my work……all need to follow the Hannah method ™. I have lived proof that even the smartest of husbands can mess up a spaghetti bolognese if not guided on how big to cut the onions and when to put the tomatoes in. He put ketchup in it, ffs. I know, right!
Don’t get me wrong, I am smart enough to understand the concept of the rest that could be had if someone else lightened the load. But, for me, the overthinking surrounding that process makes it more labour-intensive than just doing it myself. At this point, I want to remind anyone reading this that you have permission to throat punch anyone who says “just don’t think about it” to you. Maybe not an elderly relative, though. Even I have limits!
(Disclaimer – Oddcast, specifically Hannah, takes no responsibility for anyone who gets inspired to throat punch a relative!)
So, let’s assume that someone got you into a semi-nelson, and you’ve agreed to let them do something for you. Although it kinda feels, at this point, like it’s more for them, really….But I digress.
Anyway, you’ve said thank you and made a promise to yourself to hand it over mentally. And you’re busying yourself not overthinking what they’ve done wrong, and what you’ll have to do to put it right. And before you know it, a ‘sneak peek’ at how they have stacked the dishwasher becomes a full ninja-style restack. All the time hoping they won’t notice.
So, I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t been labelled ‘controlling’ over the years. My stepbrothers used to call me ‘Queenie’ when they came to stay, as I liked to boss them around from a young age. But control can get labelled as a quirk or a flaw, when for many of us it’s more of a safety mechanism we built very early in our lives.
Doing it ourselves reduced the number of variables. It meant fewer explanations, fewer misunderstandings, fewer moments where we had to decide whether to speak up and risk judgment or swallow the discomfort. And that becomes hardwired in us. So, for me, control isn’t about ego. It’s not that I think I am the only one who knows the best way to do things. It’s about getting through the day without feeling exposed or overwhelmed.
So, when someone suggests delegation, they are actually asking us to loosen a system that’s been keeping things stable for a long time. Even if that system is exhausting, and not always in our best interests.
But we can’t have control without her perfectly manicured sister ‘perfectionism’ rocking up. And perfectionism often gets a tough rap. The villain of the hour, with her precise requirements and “redo it” attitude. But it looks different from where she resides in my brain. She’s not trying to chase excellence. She’s trying to manage consequences.
Because there is so much reassurance to be had in knowing that it’s been done in the way you need it to be done. If something is slightly off, a cascade of decisions can follow. But when I do it myself, follow my own standard/routines, then I avoid worrying about whether I’ll end up having to say something. And will I sound ungrateful if I do? If I can’t cope, and I have to ‘fix’ it, then will that create a thing?
You getting the gist now? Can you see how much easier it feels to do it myself?
But I’m smart enough to know that ‘doing it all myself’ is not a long-term strategy that ends well. Not for myself, or for the chap that messed up my spaghetti!
Because it’s a way of operating that only works whilst my capacity holds. And capacity is a finite resource, even if you’ve got the skills to stretch it to the max! (I wouldn’t recommend that, btw – hello burnout!)
And most of the time, the real weight that we feel is not the tasks themselves, but the cognitive load of remembering and prioritising everything. And the constant low-level vigilance of holding it all together. The remembering. The monitoring. The mental list that never quite switches off.
At that point, burnout can usually be seen standing in the corner looking over at you, like the creepy dude at the school disco!
Delegation is supposed to help, and if I am pretending not to be me for a moment, then I know that it really does. BUT there is still that initial awkward stage where it feels worse before it feels better. It’s like that party you went to as a kid, where you had a Barbie that you really wanted yourself, wrapped up in the prettiest paper for your friend. As you handed it over, there was that weird moment when you weren’t really ready to let it go, and so a slight tug of war ensued before you came to your senses and released your grip. That’s me in the rare moments that I delegate.
Then there is that “ I should be able to do it myself ‘self-doubt’ moment. Because, let’s face it, we’re not strangers to being made to feel like we should be able to do something. And sometimes this stage can make us want to go directly to “I tried this delegation stuff. It was rubbish. The end”. But please, dear reader, do not do this. Spoiler, it gets better!
Remember that delegation isn’t an all-or-nothing thing, and it isn’t dumping either. Handing something over doesn’t mean we’re incapable or we’ve stopped caring. Or worse still, that we’re relinquishing all control. It just means that we don’t have to march round the house like a martyr ranting, “don’t worry, I’ll do it” to ourselves. Or is that just me?
We get to decide which bits really need to be exactly the way we need them to be, and which bits don’t. That distinction can feel uncomfortable, especially when caring deeply has been part of how we have stayed safe and capable in the world. But knowing we have that choice is integral to letting things go.
By the time delegation becomes a work problem, it’s almost certainly already a fully immersed life pattern that we’ve been defending for years. Household decisions, emotional labour, remembering birthdays, managing logistics. If we’re used to being the quiet backbone of everything, then self-employment just amplifies that.
Suddenly, we’re not only the ones who notice things; we’re also the system. Don’t get me wrong, I still truly believe that self-employment is our get-out-of-jail card. Because it is genuinely freeing for neurodivergent people. Or indeed any neurotype, to be fair. But the friction comes when we try to hold every role indefinitely, because that’s what we’ve always done. And that is where we discover that delegation is not the enemy.
Sure, if we’re smart, then we have built ourselves a support network of other like-minded business owners around us. To compare notes with and bounce ideas. Having this network is integral to doing business without spending a lot of time crying into your tea. But we still need to accept that we can’t do everything. Regardless of how our brain is often telling us we need to.
Delegation in business isn’t about growth hacks or scaling. It’s about sustainability. About not being the only thing keeping the wheels on. As I said before, letting go doesn’t have to mean letting everything go. Sometimes it just means noticing when the effort of holding on has become louder than the discomfort of sharing the load.
Success isn’t measured by ‘doing less’. It’s having enough left to keep going without constantly managing our own nervous systems in the background. That’s not giving up control. It’s about choosing a version that actually lasts.
So, anyone who has listened to even just one of our Podcasts will be fully aware by now that Stu and I are huge fans of self-employment. Especially if your brain is of the spicier variety like ours.
But for those of you who haven’t heard us banging that particular drum (shame on you!), we are advocates for it because it can be hugely freeing, flexible, and often the safest way to build a working life that actually fits a neurodivergent brain.
But… there’s always a but, right? There’s the assumption that if we’ve chosen it, we must be fine. Because somewhere along the way, that freedom that’s afforded us gets tangled up with another expectation. If we’ve designed our own working life, we shouldn’t be struggling in it.
We’ve got to be coping, calm, and capable. On top of things. Definitely not lying awake at 3am replaying that time you finished a call with a client by saying “love you” then hanging up (true story). That’s a whole ton of pressure.
That pressure to be seen as ‘winning’ in our employment choice often turns into masking. Not the dramatic kind, but at least acting like everything is under control—not just to your clients, but also your loved ones. In reality, there are times when you can’t believe anyone ever gave the role of ‘adulting’ freely to you.
Self-employment doesn’t always stay in its cage when you want it to. Because your business is tied to your ideas, your brain, and your sense of self. Which is awesome when things are rocking. But deeply inconvenient when they’re not.
Masking at work, for us, often starts as self-defence. We learn how to say “yes, that’s all in hand” while our internal monologue is screaming. Not because we’re incapable, but because we’re translating chaos into something other people can digest.
We don’t perform fake competence. We buffer real competence. We smooth the edges, downplay the effort, and make difficult things look easier than they feel. Over time, that constant translation can solidify into a persona — the version of us others rely on, even when it costs more than anyone realises. The problem isn’t that the version exists. The problem is when she follows you home, sits on the sofa, and refuses to shut up.
So you keep reassuring. Keep editing. Keep smoothing the edges. You keep saying things like “it’s all fine.” Not because it isn’t, but because you’re translating when you actually need to sit in silence for twenty minutes, scrolling absolutely nothing, while your nervous system whispers kind words to itself.
Home slowly becomes another place where you’re on. And that’s exhausting in a way sleep alone doesn’t fix.
Neurodivergent stress is famously bad at behaving itself. It’s like a cat that is determined to tap all the precious things off the worktops onto the floor below. And it’s also almost always really unpredictable. Often, there’s a delay where we cope beautifully in the moment, lulling those around us into a false sense of security. Then unravel later while loading the dishwasher or standing in the shower, suddenly furious about something that happened last Tuesday.
This is where stress can start leaking out as irritability, withdrawal, or over-talking. Sudden emotional fireworks that seem wildly out of proportion to whatever happened. People around us can often get confused here because, from the outside, it can look like anger, disinterest, or distance. When, really, it’s the nervous system finally processing something it didn’t have time to deal with earlier.
So many of us default to jokes. Or silence. Or insisting everything’s fine until it very much isn’t.
Dropping the mask at home doesn’t mean narrating every anxious thought like an audiobook nobody asked for. There’s a difference between honesty and emotional dumping, and most of us are trying to find the middle ground without traumatising our loved ones or imploding quietly instead.
Being honest can be as simple as translation. “I’m stressed about work” lands very differently from “I am spiralling, and you are now responsible for fixing it.”
“I don’t need fixing — I just need to talk this out” is, frankly, the king of sentences.
Timing matters too. Mid-meltdown is rarely the moment for a nuanced discussion about cash flow or existential dread. Whereas when we wait until we are more regulated, the outcomes are almost always much better. Believe me, I’ve tried the alternative multiple times, and it’s not a winner! And waiting for that regulated moment, when she arrives, isn’t avoidance. It’s the smart choice if you still want to get on with your family, ha ha!
Here’s the deeply irritating truth: people can’t support what they don’t understand. I’ve dreamt of a psychic husband for many years now, but sadly, he has not materialised.
If all our family ever hears is that things are going well, they’ll assume they are. Not because they don’t care, but because they’re working with the information available to them. So when we are more transparent about how we feel about our work, they have a fair chance of understanding better. That’s not to say that we need to unveil our stress in a way that creates panic. It’s just about giving them context, for example, explaining patterns, and letting them know when our stress is a background noise rather than a car alarm.
Without that context, any concern they share with us can quickly morph into pressure. Especially around money and stability. Advice offered kindly can feel like judgment. Reassurance can feel like monitoring. Suddenly, “how’s work?” feels like an interrogation, and you’d rather fake your own disappearance than answer it.
Unmasking doesn’t mean talking about business constantly. In fact, boundaries are usually what sustain honesty. That might mean limiting business talk in the evenings or having a loose container for venting rather than letting it seep into every conversation.
It might also mean choosing one trusted friend (thanks, Stu!) who understands self-employment in its ever-changing landscape of grassy fields and quicksand swamps. And better still, someone who is prepared to hear the gritty details, or at least nod and smile in the right places, without wanting to slap you.
Because, regardless of how much your family love you, and hopefully wants to be supportive, there is a limit to the breadth of their goodwill if you are expecting them to be your accountant, therapist, and crisis-response team all at once.
Now, I appreciate the irony in typing these next words that are basically my spirit animal. But try to avoid oversharing. Yes, yes, I literally overshare on everything. Sorry, not sorry. But just because I do, doesn’t mean you have to. Relationships where everything is shared can be as draining as those where nothing is. The goal is enough openness to feel supported, and enough structure to feel safe.
Remember, boundaries aren’t secrecy. They’re nervous system management.
In healthy, honest relationships, you’re allowed to be uncertain without being fixed. You can admit when you’re tired without being judged. And be honest with those closest to you, without making them feel they need to manage it.
Being able to say “I’m not okay, but I am handling it” and be believed, is life-changing. Especially if you have spent a large portion of your life trying to avoid that at all costs.
It creates emotional safety, a shared language, and a sense that you’re not carrying self-employment entirely alone. Dropping the mask at home doesn’t make you less professional. It makes self-employment survivable.
Because when you stop performing competence everywhere, you get some energy back. Enough to rest. Enough to regulate. Enough to show up again without dragging yesterday’s stress into every room. You’re allowed to be capable, whilst still feeling unsure. Being human doesn’t prevent us from being successful…however we define that. And we can still be professional at work and still be fully ourselves at home.
That balance isn’t indulgent. It’s how you last.
There are two types of people in the world: the ones with colour-coded five-year plans, laminated vision boards, and a spreadsheet that could probably file their taxes — and then there’s me. And if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’re also in the “I’m just trying to get through the next five minutes without accidentally starting a new career as a candle-maker” camp.
The five-year plan is one of those culturally approved things we’re all supposed to have, like a skincare routine, a pension, or a consistent personality. And sure — for some brains, a five-year plan is motivating and grounding, a helpful lighthouse guiding you through the fog. For other brains (hi), it’s a pressure cooker. A shame-generator. A glittery trap disguised as “success”.
So let’s talk about what happens when you don’t have a five-year plan — and how you can still thrive, grow, and build long-term awesomeness without setting fire to your nervous system.
A five-year plan assumes you can reliably do two things: predict the future, and be the same version of yourself every day for five years. If companies packed full of mega brain analysts can’t predict this stuff accurately, then what sort of hope (none… the answer’s none) does a small business owner with a spoon deficit and a squirrel chasing brain have of being able to map out the rest of the month, let alone 5 long years.
If a five-year plan genuinely works for you, I mean this sincerely: I love that for you. But if it fills you with fear, and makes you feel like you’re failing before you’ve even started, you’re not broken. It’s just not a tool that’s built for your brain.
I’d be lying if I said I had ever truly understood the concept of a five-year plan in life or business. I understand direction. I understand having something vaguely on a hill that you’re aiming for — a general “over there”. What I don’t understand is the rigid, milestone-heavy version where by Year Two you’re meant to have achieved X, become Y, and be emotionally stable by Year Four (I’m not emotionally stable by year 51!). That’s not planning. That’s inviting your inner perfectionist to move in permanently and redecorate using paint shade ‘shame’.
What actually helps is a looser kind of vision that gives you direction without demanding you predict every step. For me, my goals tend to sound less like “I will triple my revenue and expand into three new markets” and more like wanting to work less, enjoy my client base, feel calmer about my work, and earn enough that I’m not living ten days from payday in a constant state of dread. That’s not a five-year plan. That’s an anti-meltdown, sustainable lifestyle..
If you want long-term awesome without the five-year straight jacket, the trick is to stop trying to build the whole staircase and just focus on the next step. Short-term goals work well for neurodivergent brains because they’re visible, achievable, motivating, and adjustable. They give you something solid to aim for without locking you into a version of the future you might outgrow
This is why I love working in short sprints. Well, I have since Stu introduced me to the concept. Before that I was just bumbling along with no plans on adulting when it came to business at all. I miss those days! No, focus Hannah, focus!
Ninety days, thirty days, a season, whatever chunk doesn’t make you want to crawl under a table. You pick something specific, give it a defined window of time, and treat it like an experiment. Does it work? Does it pay? Does it drain you? Do you enjoy it? Is it sustainable? Is it moving you vaguely toward the hill? At the end of the sprint, you reassess. No drama, no shame, no “I’ve ruined my entire future”. Just interesting data and a chance to pivot.
One of the biggest lies hustle culture tells us is that success means sticking with one idea forever, even when it’s clearly not working. But self-employment is messy and stop-start. Some months are great; other months you’re wondering if you should become a barista purely for the predictable schedule and the free pastries.
If something isn’t working — financially, emotionally, practically — pivoting isn’t weak. It’s smart. And honestly, who are these imaginary people we’re trying to impress? What committee is meeting weekly to review your career choices and announce that you’ve pivoted again and they disapprove? There isn’t one. And even if there was: fuck em.
This might be the most important part, so I’ll say it slowly: if you don’t plan around your energy, your business will plan your burnout for you. Neurodivergent energy isn’t linear. It doesn’t show up like a tidy nine-to-five battery bar. Some days you’re focused and flying; other days you’re technically present but running on fumes and a slightly haunted vibe.
So instead of demanding consistency from yourself, you build systems that support variability. That might mean time-blocking, protecting recovery time, pushing “urgent” work to next week, or recognising that doing more now usually means borrowing from future-you. As we’ve said repeatedly in past blogs and episodes, rest isn’t a reward for getting everything done — it’s preparation for the work ahead.
I don’t think consistency itself is the enemy. What is unhelpful is the idea that consistency means showing up as the same version of yourself every single day. When we have already established that that is not going to happen for a lot of us! What actually matters, especially in business, is consistency of outcome rather than consistency of energy.
My clients don’t need me to be the same Hannah every day. They need good work, delivered when it’s promised — reliability in results, not access to my internal battery levels. So I do focus-heavy work on days when focus exists, I protect recovery so future-me doesn’t suffer, and I design systems that absorb variability instead of pretending it isn’t happening. From the outside, it looks consistent; from the inside, it’s flexible, responsive, and intentional. That distinction matters, because forcing “perfect consistency” is often what breaks people, whereas systems that expect variability are what keep things moving.
The ideas. The sudden obsessions. The “maybe I should retrain as something wildly unrelated” moments. Curiosity isn’t the enemy, and learning things isn’t wasted. Sometimes finishing isn’t even the point — the learning is. But not every idea needs to hijack the entire business.
Having an idea bank helps. Write it down, capture the dopamine, park it. If it keeps coming back and aligns with the hill, you can revisit it later. Not everything needs to become a full identity.
If you’ve got tasks that have been sitting on your list for months, chatting shit about you, it’s probably time to be honest. Delete them, outsource them, or accept they’re not realistic right now. A to-do list that makes you feel permanently behind isn’t a productivity tool — it’s a stress list.
It might look like earning enough to cover your bills without panic, doing work that doesn’t destroy your nervous system, and setting goals that flex as your life changes. It might look like a business that evolves with you instead of demanding you stay the same.
And maybe — just maybe — thriving without a five-year plan isn’t chaotic. Maybe it’s wise. Maybe it’s the most neurodivergent thing in the world to say: “I don’t know exactly where I’ll be in five years, but I know what matters to me. I know what drains me. I know what brings me joy. And I’m going to build from there.”
Short-term wins. Long-term awesome. No pretending to be someone you’re not.
I have a complicated relationship with New Year.
On the one hand, my inner golden-retriever loves the idea of a fresh start. New calendar, new notebook, new chance to believe that this year I’ll drink water like a functional adult and not live on caffeine and Netflix. Especially if the previous year has been a bit of a car crash, there’s something comforting about drawing a line under it and going, “Redo”
But then the rest of me remembers what New Year actually comes with. One of my biggest kryptonites: pressure. “What are your resolutions?” “How are you going to improve?” “What horribly unachievable goals have you set yourself?” Apparently “continuing to exist and not murdering anyone who chews loudly” is not an acceptable answer. Who knew!
There’s this unspoken expectation that we must want to be fitter, more productive, more disciplined, more something. And once you say a resolution out loud, it suddenly feels like the whole world’s watching. “Oh, I thought you were cutting down on biscuits?” “Didn’t you say you were going to the gym?” No, Carol, I said it once in a burst of delusional optimism. That doesn’t mean I consented to being put under lifestyle surveillance for the next twelve months. Get back in your box.
For my neurodivergent brain, New Year’s resolutions tend to go in one of two directions: either I go rogue and make a grand announcement that I am the boss of me and don’t have to conform to such bullshit… or I get boss-level FOMO and make a list long enough to qualify as a cry for help.
This can look something like:
“This year I will drink more water, stop eating biscuits, exercise three times a week, have a weekly rest day, be more organised, reply to messages like a real grown-up, and definitely, definitely not work late every night.”
Cut to mid-January and I’ve already “failed” half of them, promptly launching myself into a shame spiral because apparently I can’t even keep a promise to myself for more than eleven days.
The annoying thing is: it’s never due to laziness. I just… forget I even set the resolution. A few months ago, I bought vitamins after some very predictable blood tests (vitamin D? Low. Shocking). I bought one of those little pill organisers – Monday to Sunday – and for two months I was religious about taking them. Felt better for it too. Then one day I missed them. Then another. And then my brain quietly decided, “We don’t do supplements anymore,” and that was that. The box is still in the cupboard, full, quietly judging me every time I reach for the tea bags.So, it’s not that we can’t be consistent with anything. I’ve been with my husband for 21 years – clearly I can stick at some stuff (yay me!). But standard resolution culture assumes a brain that remembers what it decided, experiences time in a straight line, and doesn’t regularly drop whole habits down the back of the sofa of consciousness. Mine does not.
One line I heard recently really stuck with me: “You didn’t fail the plan. The plan wasn’t designed for you.”
That hit me right in the executive function.
Because even when we design the plan, we’re often doing it based on bad information. We’re designing for the fantasy version of ourselves — the one who always has energy, never gets overwhelmed, and apparently turns into a completely different person the moment Jools Holland starts getting overexcited.
Tangent time: were you aware, dear reader, that Jools Holland’s Hootenanny is not live? It’s pre-recorded. I learned this at the grand old age of 50 and it destroyed the joy completely. And yet I still watch it so I can check how convincing the guests are. That’s how dedicated my tism is.
Right, back to the point.
For a lot of us, real us has things like ADHD time-blindness, autistic sensory overload, rejection sensitivity, chronic fatigue, pain, anxiety, depression, and a nervous system already working overtime just to exist in the world. The care label on a neurodivergent person should probably read something like:
“Before committing to anything, check: current energy budget, sensory load, existing obligations, and the likelihood of forgetting this even exists by February.”
So instead of asking, “What should I do next year?”, I’ve started asking, “What should I do given the life I actually have?” Then I can pass it through the realism filter: where would this shiny new idea fit with work, relationships, downtime, health? What has to be reduced or removed to make space for it? And crucially: what will my actual brain and energy allow me to do? Not fantasy-me who rides around on her unicorn — the real me, who is pretty awesome but has her limits.
Neurotypical hustle culture loves consistency. “Show up every day.” “Discipline over motivation.” “You just have to want it enough.” My ADHD brain hears that and laughs in 17 open browser tabs.
For a lot of us, consistency in the traditional sense is a myth. Our capacity fluctuates. Our focus fluctuates. Our executive function fluctuates. Sleep, hormones, sensory input, other people’s drama — it all messes with what we can realistically do on any given day.
So if we latch onto “New Year, new me” and set ambitious (read: unrealistic) resolutions that rely on perfect consistency, we are setting ourselves up to fail. Why would we want to do that?
Stuart introduced me to a fabulous term: minimum viable progress — asking “What’s the smallest version of this that still counts?” What would “good enough” look like, not “ideal Hannah on a TED stage”? If everything went sideways, what’s the baseline I’d still be proud of?
And this really works. I urge you to try it yourself — if you’re silly enough to welcome New Year’s resolutions into your life.
The more I think about it, the more I realise I don’t actually want more goals next year. I want fewer.
Neurodivergent life already comes with a ridiculous amount of invisible work: managing sensory input, masking, unmasking, scripting social interactions, tracking everyone’s emotional state, battling executive dysfunction and decision fatigue before we’ve even opened our laptops. Slapping ten extra “improvement projects” on top of that isn’t self-development. It’s self-sabotage on roids!
So my New Year’s resolutions for 2026 are looking less like, “I will become a totally upgraded, sleek, consistent, disciplined version of myself,” and more like, “I will stop doing things that drain my energy for no good reason.”
That might look like saying yes to fewer things I already know I’ll resent, taking on fewer “little favours” that come with large emotional price tags, and stopping agreeing to projects that require a personality I simply do not have. It absolutely looks like treating rest as something I’m entitled to and need, not as a reward I have to earn by grinding myself into the floor first.
It’s less “What will you add?” and more “What will you gently but firmly remove?” Consider it an anti-resolution resolution — a boundary-setting exercise in disguise.
Stuart taught me (think Karate Kid but with less waxing) that rest isn’t a reward you get for being productive enough. It’s preparation for everything that’s coming. That’s true whether you’re training for a marathon, running a business, raising kids, or simply surviving late-stage capitalism with a frazzled brain.
So for 2026, I’m far more interested in building in rest on purpose, not only when I’m already in pieces. I’m more interested in choosing tiny habits that work with my rhythms, not against them. I’m much keener on letting go of goals that only exist because they sound good on LinkedIn, and treating my energy like the finite resource it is — not like some infinite well I can plunder because I’ve bought a fancy planner.
Here’s where I’ve landed with New Year, resolutions and goal setting: You don’t need a “new you”. You need more support for the you that already exists.
The you who loses track of supplements but shows up for friends.
The you who forgets resolutions but remembers everyone’s emotional temperature at a party.
The you who can’t stick to habit trackers but can hyperfocus for 14 hours on something you care about.
The you who gets overwhelmed by change but has probably survived more of it than most people will ever understand.
That version of you doesn’t need to be replaced. She needs to be listened to, accommodated, and designed around. So if you’re staring down another January thinking, “I cannot face another round of ‘New Year, new me’ nonsense,” consider this your official permission slip to opt out.
You are allowed to have no resolutions at all.
You are allowed to pick one tiny, kind goal and let that be enough.
You are allowed to focus on what you’ll stop doing, not what you’ll cram in.
You are absolutely allowed to decide that your main achievement next year will be: “stayed vaguely functional and didn’t combust.”
You’re not behind. You’re not broken. You’re not failing because you can’t reinvent yourself every January. You are a neurodivergent human doing your best with a brain that was never invited to the planning meeting for “how life is supposed to work.” Designing your year around that reality isn’t failure. It’s self-respect.
And if anyone asks you what your New Year’s resolution is, you can smile and say:
“Supporting the current me a bit better, thanks. As I’m already doing enough.”