Being Brilliant At Your Job Shouldn’t Cost You Everything
There’s a really uncomfortable problem with talking about neurodivergence when it comes to our work.
Because a lot of the focus is around the things we find difficult: the overwhelm, the executive dysfunction, the sensory stuff, the exhaustion, the communication differences, the fact an unexpected call can make us want to chuck our phone into the sea.
And all of those things matter, so we definitely shouldn’t stop talking about them.
In my last blog, The Performance Never Ends, I wrote about how much energy I can spend monitoring myself during meetings, phone calls, networking and all the other interactions that come with running a business. Understanding that has been massively important for me. But there’s another side to this conversation that I don’t want to lose, because I’m also really bloody good at what I do.
I can read a room. I notice things other people miss. I’m brilliant at joining dots, spotting problems and seeing opportunities. I can become deeply invested in understanding somebody’s business and will happily disappear down whatever rabbit hole is required to find out why something isn’t working. Give me a problem that interests me and I am basically a Labrador who’s just been shown a tennis ball.
None of that disappears because some parts of running a business take more out of me than they might take out of somebody else. And that’s where things get interesting, because what if the question isn’t whether neurodivergent people can thrive in business? Loads of us already are.
What if the better question is: how do we keep all the brilliant bits without sacrificing ourselves in the process?
Being exhausted doesn’t mean you’re bad at this
This is something I wish I’d understood much earlier. For years, I assumed that if something left me exhausted, I must somehow not be very good at it. Surely if I was naturally good with people, meetings wouldn’t tire me out? If I was confident, I wouldn’t need to prepare so much. If I was genuinely capable, work shouldn’t require this much effort.
Except that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.
I’m very good with clients. I’ve spent most of my working life in roles involving people, communication, sales, strategy and relationships. I’ve presented, pitched, negotiated, managed teams and walked into rooms full of people I’d never met before and somehow managed to convince them I knew what I was doing. Most of the time, I did know what I was doing!
But some of the things that made me good at those jobs were also costing me energy. I prepared thoroughly. I watched people closely. I noticed changes in tone and body language. I thought about what somebody might need before they asked for it. I could adapt my communication depending on who was sitting in front of me.
Those are skills, and the fact that they sometimes come with an enormous energy bill doesn’t make them less valuable. That’s been quite a shift for me, because it means I’ve stopped using exhaustion as evidence that I’m somehow failing. Sometimes I’m tired because something was difficult. Sometimes I’m tired because I’ve been doing something incredibly well and my brain has been working its little socks off behind the scenes.
The outcome might look effortless. That doesn’t mean the process was.
When coping becomes your business strategy
The awkward part is that some of the habits that helped me succeed were probably never particularly sustainable.
Over-preparing is a great example. If you’re worried about getting something wrong, one fairly effective solution is to prepare for absolutely every possible eventuality. Research everything. Think through every question. Make notes. Make notes about the notes. Mentally rehearse the conversation several times and, as we’ve already established, prepare the other person’s lines for them too.
Does it work? Often, yes. You walk into the meeting incredibly prepared and do a fantastic job. Everyone is impressed. Lovely. Unfortunately, you’ve already used half a day’s energy preparing for a one-hour conversation.
The same can happen with over-delivering, being incredibly responsive, saying yes because you don’t want to disappoint somebody, working late because you lost several hours earlier trying to get your brain into gear, or taking on more than you really have capacity for and then somehow pulling it off anyway. From the outside, all anyone sees is the result, and when the result is good, it’s remarkably easy to keep doing the thing that produced it.
I think I’ve spent chunks of my career running on a highly sophisticated business system consisting largely of anxiety, adrenaline and sugary snacks. To be fair, it got quite a lot done. But there’s a difference between something being effective and something being sustainable, and I don’t think I understood that distinction for a very long time.
Nobody gives you extra points for making it harder
I think many of us have inherited some fairly peculiar ideas about what being professional is supposed to look like. Professional people are always available. They respond quickly. They don’t need much downtime. They can go from meeting to meeting without needing to stare at a wall for twenty minutes in between. They answer the phone when it rings rather than looking at it suspiciously until it stops. They also apparently enjoy networking breakfasts, although I remain unconvinced by this.
The trouble is that when you’ve spent years trying to fit that model, making things easier for yourself can feel like cheating. If I choose email instead of a phone call, am I avoiding something? If I don’t put meetings back-to-back, am I being less productive? If I decide that a huge networking event isn’t the best way for me to build relationships, am I missing opportunities? If I need time to think before answering a question, does that make me look less competent?
Increasingly, my answer to all of those questions is: who cares, if the end result is good?
My clients don’t benefit from me having three meetings back-to-back if I’m running on fumes by the third one. They don’t get a better strategy because I answered their email within seven minutes. Nobody receives bonus points because I made the process unnecessarily difficult for myself. Professionalism, to me, looks much simpler these days: do good work, communicate clearly, do what you say you’re going to do, and treat people well. Everything else is negotiable.
Keep the brilliance. Lose some of the cost
This is the bit I’ve become much more interested in since understanding my neurodivergence. I don’t want to make myself less ambitious. I don’t want to stop getting ridiculously excited about ideas, caring deeply about my clients or disappearing into a problem until I’ve worked out what’s going on. Those are some of my favourite things about the way my brain works.
I just don’t want to keep borrowing energy from myself to do them.
So I’ve started looking at the bits around the work. I never book days full of meetings anymore. I leave gaps because I know my brain needs them. I work from different rooms when I need a change of environment. I choose written communication when it makes more sense. If somebody asks me something and I need time to think, I’m comfortable saying exactly that rather than producing an answer on the spot because Professional Hannah apparently has all the answers immediately.
I’ve also become much more protective of the conditions in which I do my best work. I know that there are times when my brain is brilliant and times when asking it to produce anything useful is like repeatedly pressing the button on a remote control when you know perfectly well the batteries are dead. Past me would probably have kept pressing the button harder. Current me is much more likely to change the batteries. Or, depending on the day, abandon the television entirely and go and have a cup of tea.
None of these things makes me less serious about my business. If anything, the opposite is true. I’m finally treating my capacity as something the business depends upon rather than an inconvenient obstacle I need to overcome.
What did it cost you?
For years, I think I measured whether work was going well almost entirely by the external result. Was the client happy? Did I deliver what I promised? Did the meeting go well? Did we win the work? Did the business grow? If the answer was yes, then whatever I’d done to get there was obviously working.
Except I was leaving one fairly important question off the list: what did it cost me?
Not financially. Personally.
Did that piece of work require me to push through exhaustion for three days? Did I spend the whole weekend recovering from a week I’d apparently “managed” perfectly well? Was I constantly anxious? Had I agreed to something I knew I didn’t really have capacity for? Was the business succeeding because I’d become the resource it was consuming?
That’s a much less comfortable measure of success, but I think it’s an important one. Because a business can look successful from the outside whilst being completely unsustainable for the person running it. You can have happy clients, money coming in and a diary full of work and still have built yourself a job that requires more of you than you can keep giving. That’s not success I particularly want anymore.
Sustainable doesn’t mean less successful
For me, this is where the conversation about neurodivergent business owners sometimes goes wrong. We talk about adjustments, boundaries, energy management and doing things differently, and somewhere along the way it can start to sound as though we’re designing smaller lives because we can’t cope with the big ones.
That’s not how I see it at all.
I don’t protect my energy because I have less to offer. I protect it because I know how much I can do with it when it’s available, and there’s a huge difference between those two things.
Building a business around the way my brain works doesn’t mean lowering my expectations. It means creating the conditions in which I’m much more likely to meet them without flattening myself in the process. And yes, sometimes that means doing less. It might mean saying no to something, moving a deadline, leaving space between commitments or accepting that there are only so many people I can deal with in one day before my brain puts up the CLOSED sign.
But it also means that when I am working, I have far more of myself available for the things I’m genuinely brilliant at. That feels like a pretty sensible business strategy to me.
Maybe the cost was never the point
I spent a lot of years assuming that being good at something meant being able to keep doing it regardless of what it cost me. I don’t believe that anymore.
I’m still ambitious. I’m still fascinated by business. I still get overexcited about ideas, care far too much about solving problems and occasionally find myself doing considerably more research than any reasonable person could argue was necessary. I’m not trying to remove any of that.
What I’m removing is the belief that exhaustion somehow proves I’ve worked hard enough, that pushing through is evidence of commitment, or that if I make something easier for myself it somehow makes the result less impressive.
Because my business doesn’t need the version of me who can keep going until there’s absolutely nothing left. It needs the version of me who can still be here doing work I love in five, ten or twenty years.
The goal isn’t to become less brilliant at what we do. It’s to stop sacrificing ourselves in order to prove how brilliant we are.
The Performance Never ends
An average working day in the life of a neurospicy business owner (specifically THIS neurospicy business owner!)
10am – I’ve got an online client meeting, which is always a bit of a struggle as I find meetings much easier in person. Without really thinking about it, ‘Client Meeting Hannah’ (CMH) has entered the virtual building.
She’s warm, interested, confident and hopefully making the ‘right amount’ (AKA ‘normal’ amount) of eye contact. Too much and she risks looking overly intense/creepy. Not enough and she looks disengaged. Ironically, my best engaged self is when I am not making any eye contact. That’s when my ears and brain concentrate best.
CMH knows what she’s talking about, but she’s also keeping half an eye on whether she’s talking too much about what she knows. There is, apparently, a very fine line between demonstrating expertise and accidentally delivering an unsolicited TED Talk.
The meeting goes well, but CMH feels wrung out like a sponge and needs to regroup her headspace before the next thing on the workday list. A cup of tea and CMH is ‘back in the room’, ready to make a phone call that she has been putting off. This requires a slightly different version of me, so in comes ‘Phone Hannah’ (PH).
PH likes to know what she’s going to say before she says it, ideally with several possible conversational routes planned in advance. This works beautifully until the other person completely ignores the script that PH has thoughtfully prepared for both of us and asks an unexpected question. Frankly, PH thinks that’s quite rude, as it throws her off her game and invites ‘Tangent Hannah’ (TH) into the mix.
We’ve met TH before, so no need for more intros. But needless to say, TH has inspired comments such as ‘let’s wrap this up’ and ‘I’ve got to jump’ from fellow workday interactors. So we try to keep TH in her box during a workday.
Then perhaps there’s networking, a presentation or a podcast recording. I don’t consciously decide to switch between these modes, and until I understood more about my neurodivergence, I didn’t even realise how much switching I was doing. I just thought this was what everyone did when they went to work.
And to an extent, it is. We all behave differently depending on who we’re with and what we’re doing. I don’t talk to a new client in exactly the same way I talk to my husband on the sofa, and I suspect the client is extremely grateful for that. But I’ve started to realise there’s a difference between adapting naturally to a situation and spending an enormous amount of energy monitoring yourself within it.
Because none of these versions of me are fake. They’re all me. But when you’re constantly checking which version of yourself the room requires, being “professional” can start to feel surprisingly like performing. And some days, it feels as though the performance never ends.
I didn’t even know I was doing it
One of the strangest things about discovering I was neurodivergent later in life was realising how many things I’d been doing for decades without knowing why. I didn’t walk into meetings consciously thinking, Right, time to mask my autism, and yet I was aware that I had different ‘modes’ for different situations. I just assumed everyone was switching.
I’d spent years watching and learning what made interactions go more smoothly and implementing that into my own life. Sometimes that involved mimicking what others did, and other times it was a case of getting it wrong the first time around, licking my wounds and trying again.
I still have an inner monologue reminding me to:
Think what you’re going to say
Try not to interrupt
Don’t talk for too long
Look the ‘right’ amount of interested
Look relaxed, but not too much
Try not to look like you’re concentrating quite so hard on looking relaxed.
Can you imagine a world where you have to think about all this stuff, to this degree? To be fair, if you are reading this then it is more than likely your reality too.
Phone calls are a particularly good example. I’ve always liked knowing roughly what I’m going to say before I make one, and it’s pretty common for me to rehearse the conversation in my head first. Not just my part, obviously, as that would be amateur level. I prepare the other person’s responses too, which makes it particularly irritating when they decide to improvise.
Spoiler: They NEVER say what I had planned for them!
For years, I didn’t think any of this was unusual. I assumed everybody was doing roughly the same amount of preparation and monitoring underneath the surface, and perhaps some people are. The difference was that I couldn’t see what was happening inside anybody else’s head. I could only see how effortless they made it look. So, I learnt to make it look effortless too.
That’s the difficult thing about masking. It doesn’t always feel like putting on a disguise. Sometimes it’s simply a collection of tiny adjustments you’ve made over such a long period of time that you stop noticing you’re making them.
Professional Hannah has entered the building
Business gives us an impressive (AKA overwhelming!) number of opportunities to practise this. There are client meetings, sales conversations, networking events, presentations, phone calls and those unexpected encounters where somebody asks what you do for a living and you suddenly forget every job you’ve ever had.
Networking Hannah (NH) needs to be sociable and interested without trapping somebody beside the coffees for forty-five minutes. Presentation Hannah (PH) needs to sound confident even if part of her brain is wondering whether everyone can see that she’s forgotten how arms work. Sales Hannah (SH) needs to talk about what she does without either massively underselling herself or sounding like she’s about to launch a twelve-week mastermind from a Lamborghini. Then there’s Unexpected Phone Call Hannah (UPCH), who has been given absolutely no rehearsal time whatsoever and more often than not just doesn’t answer the phone.
Being able to adapt to different people and situations is useful, particularly when you’ve spent much of your career working with clients. I’m very good at reading people, understanding what they need and changing the way I communicate accordingly. The problem comes when adapting stops being something you’re doing alongside the interaction and starts becoming another entire layer of work underneath it. Because it’s so blooming exhausting!
Imagine the cognitive load of listening to what somebody is saying whilst running some sort of quality control program in the background. Scanning the conversation, monitoring whether the talking has morphed into a rabid squirrel and suddenly becoming acutely aware of where your hands are. And now I’m thinking about where my hands are, I have absolutely no idea what the person just said.
It’s essentially a second job called Managing How Everybody Experiences Me (MHEEM), and annoyingly the overtime is self-funded!
The meeting ends. The performance doesn’t
The really exhausting bit, though, isn’t necessarily what happens while you’re in the room. A meeting might only be an hour long, but the mental work surrounding it can take up considerably more space than the innocent little square in your calendar would suggest.
There can be preparation beforehand, particularly if it’s somebody I haven’t met before or the meeting feels important. I’ll think about what I need to say, what they might ask and how the conversation might go. Sometimes that’s just sensible preparation. Sometimes I’ve mentally attended the meeting three times before the other person has even joined Zoom.
Then there’s the meeting itself, with all the listening, processing, responding and monitoring going on at once. And when it’s finally finished, you’d think my brain might congratulate itself on a job well done and move on with its day. Absolutely not.
Now we begin the post-match analysis. Back to the ‘talking too much’ paranoia. Did I explain that properly? Why did they make that face when I said that thing? Should I have asked another question? Did I promise to send them something? And what exactly did that slightly raised eyebrow at 10.43am mean? Meanwhile, the owner of the eyebrow has probably forgotten the entire interaction and is standing in their kitchen deciding what to have for lunch.
This is the bit I understand much better now. The performance doesn’t necessarily finish when the meeting does. Sometimes you’re still mentally standing on the stage hours later, checking the reviews.
No wonder I came home exhausted
Before I understood any of this, there were plenty of days when I’d get to the end of a working day completely wiped out and wonder what on earth was wrong with me. I’d look back at what I’d done and think, But I haven’t even done that much. A couple of meetings. Some phone calls. Maybe a networking event or presentation. Hardly an expedition up Everest.
What I couldn’t see was all the invisible work happening alongside those things. Understanding that has changed the way I treat myself enormously. These days, if I’ve had a day full of people and my brain has decided it’s finished by 4pm, I’m much less likely to start lecturing myself about resilience, productivity or why I should be able to squeeze another couple of hours out of it. I have a much better understanding of what I’ve been asking it to do.
In fact, it’s fairer to say that these days I try not to have a day full of people or back-to-back work commitments in the first place. I know that doesn’t make for the best use of my brain. It needs room to breathe and decompress, and I know that goes against everything we are taught in the ‘be consistent’ work mantra. But when I work with my brain rather than setting it up for failure, life is much nicer, and my work is both more enjoyable and more productive.
And there’s another thing I’ve had to learn: enjoying something doesn’t mean it isn’t tiring. I love recording the podcast. I enjoy good client meetings. I can have a brilliant time at an event and genuinely love talking to the people there, then come home and want nobody to speak to me for several hours. Both things can be true.
For a long time, I think I assumed exhaustion meant something had gone badly. Now I understand that sometimes it simply means something took a lot of energy.
But which bit is actually me?
Discovering I’d been masking for years made me seriously question myself. If I’d spent so much of my life adjusting myself depending on the people around me, then which version is actually me? The ‘real’ Hannah. And I don’t think there is a definitive answer to that. In fact, I am increasingly suspicious of anyone who claims there is.
Because I don’t believe that there is a real Hannah hidden underneath all of these other versions, peeling away the layers like an emotionally complicated pass-the-parcel and stepping into the light in a ‘dada!’ moment.
Client Meeting Hannah is me. Podcast Hannah is me. Networking Hannah is me. The version of me sitting at home in comfy clothes who would strongly prefer not to answer the phone is also very much me.
We all have different sides to ourselves, and behaving differently in different situations doesn’t automatically mean we’re pretending. I don’t need to speak to a client exactly as I speak to my closest friends in order to prove I’m authentic. There are some conversations that would probably become considerably more interesting if I did, but I’m not sure it would be a sound business strategy.
So I’ve stopped worrying quite so much about which version is the “real” one. I’m more interested in noticing where I have to edit myself the least. Who are the people I don’t rehearse around? Which environments allow me to say I don’t understand something without worrying how it’ll be received? Where can I admit that I need time to think, move around if I need to, or get ridiculously enthusiastic about something without simultaneously monitoring whether I’m being Too Much?
Those are much more useful questions for me than trying to uncover one definitive authentic self.
I’m not about to start turning up to client meetings in my pyjamas
There’s a version of this conversation about unmasking that can make it sound as though the ultimate goal is to stop adapting altogether. Just say whatever you’re thinking! Reject all social expectations! Be completely yourself at all times! But I’m not sure that’s either realistic or particularly desirable.
Understanding masking hasn’t made me want to abandon professionalism, and I’m not about to start turning up to client meetings in my pyjamas in the name of authenticity. Although I work from home, so statistically speaking there’s a reasonable chance I’ve already attended meetings wearing something questionable below the camera line. What happens off Zoom stays off Zoom.
What has changed is that I’m much more interested in noticing where I’m performing unnecessarily. Do I really need to go to networking events that leave me wiped out when I build much better relationships one-to-one? Does that conversation genuinely need to be a phone call, or could we deal with it perfectly well over email? Do I need to produce an immediate answer, or can I just say, “I need to think about that and come back to you”?
I’ve also started questioning whether some of the things I spent years trying to edit out of myself were ever unprofessional in the first place. Being enthusiastic isn’t unprofessional. Needing time to process something isn’t unprofessional. Communicating clearly about what you need isn’t unprofessional. Neither is working in a way that allows you to do your best work rather than one that looks the way you’ve been taught work is supposed to look.
I still adapt. Of course I do. The difference is that these days I have much more choice about when that adaptation is useful and when I’m only doing it because I’ve spent most of my life believing that’s the price of fitting in.
When the curtain falls
I’ve grown rather fond of all these different versions of me. They’re not characters I’ve invented; they’re different parts of me that help me navigate different situations. And a few probably deserve a BAFTA for services to getting through networking breakfasts while appearing completely comfortable with the concept of making small talk over rubbish coffee and a pastry.
I don’t think the answer to years of masking is another set of rules about how we’re supposed to unmask correctly. That feels suspiciously like replacing one performance with another, and I think we’ve all got enough to be getting on with.
For me, it’s much simpler than that. It’s having more places, more people and more parts of my working life where I don’t have to think quite so hard about how I’m being perceived. Where I can use the energy I once spent managing everybody’s experience of me on actually experiencing my own life.
Perhaps the goal isn’t to work out who you are when the mask comes off. It’s to build a life where you don’t have to wear it quite so often.
Following The Dopamine
Have you ever sat down to answer one specific email, only to discover, forty-five minutes later, that you’ve somehow learnt the mating habits of octopuses, reorganised your desktop, found a podcast you’d forgotten to listen to and become absolutely convinced that now might be the perfect time to start a completely unrelated business?
For me, it always starts with the best of intentions. I’ll realise I need to check one tiny detail before I reply. That tiny detail raises another question, which obviously requires a quick Google search. The Google search throws up an article that looks genuinely fascinating, which reminds me of something else I’ve been meaning to look into, and before I know it I’ve got so many browser tabs open that my laptop looks less like an archaeological dig through every interest I’ve had over the past month. Past Hannah was clearly very optimistic. Every single tab was apparently too important to close because I might need it later. Present-day Hannah has absolutely no idea why seventeen of them are still open, but I’m sure there was a perfectly good reason at the time.
From the outside, it probably looks like distraction. A complete inability to stop chasing the shiny thing and just crack on with the job in hand. It certainly used to look that way to me. I’d sit back at the end of the morning wondering how on earth I’d been so busy without actually doing the thing I’d originally sat down to do, and conclude that I simply wasn’t disciplined enough. Other people seemed perfectly capable of deciding what they were going to work on and then… just working on it. Meanwhile, I’d somehow wandered into a wilderness of possibilities with absolutely no idea where I was heading.
I’ve started thinking about this as following the dopamine. I know dopamine has become one of those words that’s casually thrown into almost every conversation about ADHD these days, and I’m not about to pretend everything we do can be explained by one brain chemical. Brains are wonderfully complicated, and anyone claiming otherwise is usually trying to sell you something.
But as a description of what this feels like, it comes surprisingly close. It’s more like my brain finds a loose thread and simply can’t resist pulling it to see what happens. Before I know it, I’m blinking into the sunlight wondering how I ended up reading about something completely different from where I started. My brain, meanwhile, is full and happy, rubbing its belly as though this had been the plan all along. In reality, I never consciously decided to abandon that first task. My attention just wandered off for a moment… and that moment pulled up a chair.
For years, I assumed I was just a bit ditzy. God knows there were enough school reports suggesting that was the case. But when I look back now, I know that’s not what was happening. Not even close. Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had, the projects I’m proudest of and the biggest pivots in my career all started because I wandered off and followed the shiny thing.
Everything interesting feels like a breadcrumb
My brain seems to experience curiosity very differently from some people. For them, it appears to be a passing thought. They wonder about something, perhaps make a mental note to look it up later, and then carry on with whatever they were doing. A tiny pause before getting back to the task in hand. Yay them!
Mine, on the other hand, treats every fascinating idea like a breadcrumb that absolutely has to be followed because… well… what if the next breadcrumb is even better? Sometimes that works out brilliantly. Sometimes it ends with me knowing far more than any reasonable person should about something that wasn’t remotely connected to what I was supposed to be doing.
I’ve long since accepted that, like Alice, there are certain rabbit holes I’m powerless to resist. Mention an unusual business model, an obscure historical event or a piece of technology I’ve never come across before, and there’s a very good chance I’ll disappear for an hour and emerge with an entirely unnecessary amount of knowledge. My brain seems convinced it’ll all come in useful one day and, after all these years, I’ve learnt it’s usually not worth arguing.
The funny thing is, it never feels like I’m deliberately avoiding work because avoidance has a very different feeling to it. This feels more like my brain has found an itch it simply has to scratch before it can settle again. I suspect that’s one of the reasons so many neurodivergent people become accidental experts in the most wonderfully random subjects. We don’t always choose our interests. Quite often they choose us, and once they’ve got our attention they won’t let go until we’ve reached Mastermind specialist subject levels of knowledge.
For years I saw that as a weakness because we’re taught that focus and consistency are the holy grail. But I’m no longer convinced that’s true. Looking back, I think this relentless curiosity has quietly become one of my greatest strengths.
This is where my best ideas are born
The older I get, the less convinced I am that my brain is actually as random as I’d always assumed.
At the time, it certainly feels random. One interest appears from nowhere, quickly followed by another, and before long I’ve disappeared off on yet another project that nobody saw coming. If you looked at my CV over the years, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether I simply couldn’t make my mind up. Novelty cakes. Bar work. Marketing. Business strategy. Podcasting. On paper, it looks less like a career path and more like somebody repeatedly throwing darts at a noticeboard.
For a long time, that’s exactly how I saw it too. I admired people who seemed to know exactly what they wanted to do from the age of twelve and then spent the next thirty years becoming brilliant at it. Meanwhile, I was enthusiastically wandering through life picking up new interests like I was collecting Pokémon.
But when I look back now, those interests don’t feel disconnected at all. They all have the same thread running through them. I’ve always been fascinated by understanding people, solving problems and making complicated things easier to understand. The subject matter has changed over the years, but the thing driving it really hasn’t.
I don’t think The Business Oddcast exists despite the fact that I followed lots of different interests. I think it exists because I did. My business strategy work didn’t appear because I suddenly woke up one morning with a perfectly formed business idea. It grew out of years of following conversations, asking questions, noticing patterns and joining dots that didn’t seem connected until they eventually were.
That’s the awkward thing about following something that grabs your attention. It rarely gives you the full picture at the beginning. It simply nudges you to take one more step. Sometimes that leads absolutely nowhere. Sometimes it leads to another abandoned notebook, three unopened browser tabs and an Amazon basket full of things that felt essential at the time.
And every now and then…it changes the direction of your life.
The Problem Isn’t Curiosity. It’s Timing.
Much as I’d love to tell you that following every fascinating idea has been the secret to my success, I’d also like to remain on speaking terms with reality.
The truth is, my brain has absolutely dreadful timing. It doesn’t patiently wait until I’ve finished writing the proposal, sent the invoice or replied to the customer who’s now wondering whether I’ve accidentally disappeared. It turns up halfway through all of those things, taps me on the shoulder and whispers, “This probably isn’t important… but what if we just had a really quick look?”
The really clever part is that it always feels completely logical. Future Hannah will apparently never understand this idea as well as Present Hannah, so naturally everything else has to wait. Looking back, it’s remarkable how many “urgent” ideas have turned out not to be urgent at all. Future Hannah usually copes just fine.
I’ve lost count of the number of notebooks – both digital and physical – containing brilliant business ideas that never became businesses. Half-finished online courses abandoned around week two. Browser tabs I’ve kept open for months because I was absolutely certain I’d come back to them. My Notes app is full of cryptic sentences and random numbers that made perfect sense at the time, and a significant proportion of my camera roll is screenshots that now look like they belong to somebody else’s life.
For years, I assumed the answer was to fight it. Ignore the distraction. Stay focused. Be more disciplined. Unsurprisingly, that worked about as well as telling a Labrador to ignore the interesting smell in the hedge. I could manage it for a few minutes, but I’d spend far more energy wrestling with my own brain than I ever saved by resisting it.
The breakthrough wasn’t learning to ignore those thoughts. It was realising they didn’t all need dealing with immediately.
These days, I ask myself a different question. Not “Should I follow this?” but “Does this need following today?” Surprisingly often, the answer is no. The article will still be there after I’ve sent the email. The business idea can survive until tomorrow. If it’s genuinely a good idea, it’ll almost certainly still be a good idea once I’ve finished what I originally sat down to do.
So I leave myself a trail back. A quick voice note. A sentence in my Notes app that I’ll hopefully still be able to decipher later. A reminder in my calendar. It isn’t a productivity system worthy of a bestselling business book, but it works for me because it tells my brain something incredibly important:
“You don’t have to remember this. We’ve already caught it.”
For years, I worried that if I didn’t act on an idea immediately, I’d lose it forever. Every thought seemed to arrive with an expiry date. The irony is that trying to hold onto all of those ideas at once made it almost impossible to concentrate on the one thing I actually wanted to finish. Now I trust myself to come back.
Not every idea deserves my attention today. Some do. Others simply deserve somewhere safe to wait until I have the time and headspace to give them the attention they deserve. That one shift has probably saved me more mental energy than any productivity technique I’ve ever tried. Because I’ve realised the goal was never to silence that part of my brain. Quite the opposite. It’s responsible for some of the best things I’ve ever created.
Maybe following the dopamine was never the problem
I’m still the person who can disappear down an internet rabbit hole because one question led to another. I still start researching one thing and somehow end up learning something completely unrelated. There are still days when I look at my browser and wonder whether anyone else has ever managed to open quite so many tabs whilst technically doing one job.
The difference is that I no longer see those moments as evidence that my brain is broken or that I’m somehow incapable of focusing. They’re simply part of how I explore the world. Some of those detours lead absolutely nowhere. Others have led to conversations, businesses, friendships and opportunities that I’d never have found if I’d forced myself to stay on the straight and narrow.
Looking back, so much of what I value in my life began with a question I couldn’t quite let go of. The Business Oddcast exists because Stuart and I kept following questions that fascinated us. My business strategy work grew because I couldn’t stop asking why some businesses thrive whilst others, often with equally good products or services, quietly struggle. None of it came from sitting down with a perfectly mapped-out plan. It came from paying attention to the things my brain kept coming back to.
So these days, when I find myself halfway through writing an email and suddenly wondering how something completely unrelated works, I don’t immediately assume I’ve failed. I make a note, finish the email and then decide later whether it’s worth following. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. But I’ve stopped seeing every distraction as evidence that I’m doing life wrong.
Because after all…some of the most important things in my life started with a distraction.
Is it me, or is This Room Just Awful?
Have you ever had one of those mornings where you sit down to work, read the same sentence on repeat, and somehow still have absolutely no idea what it says?
So, you make a cup of coffee, come back, read it again and discover that the words have not become any more meaningful since your attempt a few minutes ago. Annoying. At this point, you’re starting to think it’s a ‘you’ problem. Perhaps you’re tired or distracted. Or maybe it’s just another example of your brain refusing to cooperate on demand. You’ve decided to be productive, and it’s decided it’s not getting onboard with that idea. Thanks brain!
After about half an hour, you notice that the neighbour has been pressure washing their patio since they got up, the label in your jumper is sanding off a layer of skin from the back of your neck, and every device you own has apparently formed a small committee dedicated to sending you notifications. Suddenly, the problem looks slightly different. Perhaps you’re not struggling to concentrate.
Perhaps this room is just awful?
For years, this question never would have occurred to me. Like a lot of people, I assumed productivity was mostly about discipline. If I couldn’t focus, I just wasn’t trying hard enough. I needed a better system. A better routine. Maybe buy a nicer notebook. Because obviously this notebook was the issue. (Let’s be honest though… I was probably going to buy the notebook anyway. I do love a nice notebook.)
It never really crossed my mind that my environment might have used up half my brain before I’d even thought about turning on my laptop.
We don’t just work in our environment. We process it.
One of the strange things about productivity advice is that it tends to treat the environment like some sort of irrelevant wallpaper. It’s simply there while you sit at your desk, get your head down and crack on with your day. If you’re distracted, the assumption is usually that your mindset needs adjusting rather than your surroundings.
That has never really been my experience.
For many neurodivergent people, the environment isn’t something that quietly hangs out in the background, minding its own business. It’s often the very first thing our brain notices. Before we’ve even ventured into our inbox, our attention has already wandered around the room taking inventory. The lighting feels a bit harsh. Someone’s having a conversation in another room that we absolutely don’t want to listen to, but our ears have other ideas. There’s a smell we can’t quite identify but now can’t stop noticing. The heating has somehow managed to recreate both summer and winter within the space of ten minutes. The sleeve of our jumper keeps catching on our watch in a way that suddenly feels deeply unreasonable.
None of these are particularly dramatic on their own. They’re just little pieces of information. Tiny details. Background noise. Except they aren’t really background at all. They’re all asking our brain to process something before we’ve even started the job we came here to do. I wonder whether this is one of the biggest differences between how neurodivergent and neurotypical people experience exactly the same workspace. We can both walk into the same room, sit at the same desk and technically be doing the same job, yet our brains are processing completely different amounts of information before we’ve even opened the first email.
When you look at it like that, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that one person reaches elevenses feeling ready for another coffee, whilst the other feels like they’ve already done a full day’s work.
The sensory tax
I’ve started thinking about this as a kind of sensory tax. We all understand spending time, and we’re painfully aware of spending money because they’re things we consciously budget for. But I don’t think we spend nearly enough time talking about spending sensory energy.
Every little irritation feels too small to matter. It’s a bit like having a toddler follow you around all morning asking, “Can I just ask you one quick question?” Individually they’re perfectly manageable. By question number forty-three you’re considering moving to a cave.
A flickering light isn’t exactly a crisis. Neither is an uncomfortable chair, a humming projector, someone chewing loudly (actually… that is a crisis), or the air conditioning making that strange rattling noise that apparently nobody else can hear. On their own they’re just mildly annoying. The sort of stuff most of us shrug off.
Collectively though, they feel like a personal attack on our nervous system. Each one withdraws a little more from the same energy account you’re trying to use for concentrating, making decisions, solving problems and remembering why you walked into the kitchen. By lunchtime you’ve spent half your cognitive budget without ever agreeing to it.
It’s a bit like discovering your bank account has been steadily charging you £1.50 every few minutes all morning. You probably wouldn’t notice the first few payments. Or even the tenth. But by lunchtime you’d definitely be wondering where all your money had gone. Our brains can function in much the same way.
The frustrating part is that none of these little things are usually enough to stop us working altogether. They simply make everything trickier. Thinking takes longer. Making decisions become almost impossible. Don’t even get me started on trying to hold a conversation whilst simultaneously pretending the humming light above your head isn’t slowly consuming your last remaining ounce of patience.
By mid-afternoon we’re exhausted, pondering why we’ve achieved so little, when our brain feels like it’s completed an ultra-marathon. It’s just that most of the miles were spent processing everything except the work we sat down to do.
For ages I didn’t see any of this. I simply assumed I needed to become more disciplined. More organised. More resilient. Looking back now, I realise my brain wasn’t refusing to cooperate at all. It had simply been working incredibly hard on things I’d never even counted as work.
It’s not just physical spaces
Of course, it isn’t just physical spaces that do this. When most people think about sensory overload, they picture noisy offices, bright lights or packed trains. And yes, those absolutely can be brutally exhausting. But some of the noisiest environments I spend time in don’t make any noise at all.
They’re on my laptop.
I’ll open it on a mission to do one specific thing, and before I know it my desktop is itching my brain with all the bizarre screenshots I’ll never use, whilst the little red circle of doom on Outlook reminds me I have emails I haven’t opened.
WhatsApp is flashing away in the corner, and there are too many browser tabs open to reasonably justify. I can only assume a younger version of me thought they were all absolutely essential because I certainly can’t explain them now. I’m also fairly sure there are at least three open because I didn’t want to lose something interesting, despite not looking at them since approximately February. Somewhere underneath all of that is the piece of work I intended to do, still waving at me from behind everything else that’s competing for my attention.
Nothing feels particularly urgent on its own, but together it’s like a smoke alarm in my brain. We tend to think of interruptions as big, obvious events. A phone call. Someone walking into the room. A colleague asking a question. In reality, some of the biggest interruptions are tiny. A notification you don’t even open. A quick glance at your inbox. Deciding whether you should just check your calendar before you forget.
Each one only steals a few seconds, but before you know it you’ve spent the entire morning switching between those few seconds. By lunchtime it feels like you’ve been busy all morning yet somehow haven’t actually done anything.
Becoming a detective instead of a critic
One of the biggest changes I’ve made over the last couple of years has been changing the question I ask myself. Not because I’ve finally become brilliantly self-aware. I haven’t. My default setting is still to assume I’m the problem, and I suspect that’s true for quite a few neurodivergent people. We’ve had lots of practice.
But every now and then I catch myself halfway through telling myself I’m distracted, lazy or not concentrating properly and I stop. Instead of asking, “Why can’t I focus today?” I’ve started asking, “What’s competing for my attention?”
the answer genuinely is me. I’ve slept badly or my head is full of other things. But surprisingly often, the answer is sitting all around me. The room’s too hot. My phone won’t stop lighting up. Somebody’s mowing their lawn with the sort of enthusiasm normally reserved for international sporting events. You almost have to admire the commitment. I just wish it wasn’t always at precisely the moment my brain had finally decided to play ball. I’ve been interrupted so many times that my brain has given up trying to remember what it was doing in the first place.
I’m certainly not suggesting the environment is always to blame. Sometimes my brain has simply decided today isn’t going to be its finest performance. But I’d spent years assuming I was always the problem, and that’s a very different thing. Realising there might be other things competing for my attention turned out to be a surprisingly big shift.
I also find it fascinating how guilty we can feel about making tiny adjustments that help us. I’ll happily sit in a chair that’s making my back ache, in a room that’s too warm, whilst trying to ignore a conversation happening three metres away and pretending the constant stream of notifications isn’t bothering me. Suggest I put on some noise-cancelling headphones, though, and it feels like I’m somehow cheating.
It’s such an odd thing when you think about it. As though productivity only counts if it’s achieved under unnecessarily difficult conditions. As though struggling is somehow proof that we’re working hard enough. I have absolutely no idea where we learnt that.
These days I’m much more interested in reducing unnecessary friction than proving I can tolerate it. If moving to another room helps, I move. If softer lighting helps, I change it. If switching notifications off means I can finish what I started, that’s exactly what I do.
My husband can usually tell when I’ve reached my sensory limit because I start wandering around the house looking for somewhere my brain is prepared to cooperate. I’ll work in the office for a bit, then the kitchen, then the dining room, before eventually returning to the office like I’m presenting a particularly underwhelming episode of Location, Location, Location. Sometimes the room really was the problem. Sometimes I just needed a change of scenery. Either way, I’ve learnt to stop feeling guilty about going looking for somewhere my brain feels a little more at home.
None of those things miraculously make me brilliant at concentrating. They don’t magically transform me into one of those people who answers every email before breakfast and has a colour-coded to-do list. What they do is stop my brain wasting energy on battles it never needed to be fighting in the first place. And that’s a very different thing.
Maybe it isn’t you
If you’d asked me a few years ago why I was struggling to concentrate, I’d almost certainly have come up with a list of things I needed to fix about myself. I needed to be more disciplined. More organised. Better at managing distractions. More resilient. There was always another way I thought I ought to improve.
What never crossed my mind was that my brain might already be doing an extraordinary amount of work before I’d even started.
One of the biggest gifts of understanding my neurodivergence hasn’t been discovering some magical productivity system or becoming one of those effortlessly organised people whose desk always looks immaculate and whose inbox contains fewer than ten emails. (I’m fairly convinced those people only exist in stationery catalogues.)
Instead, it’s changed the relationship I have with my own brain.
I still have days where I can’t concentrate. I still get overwhelmed. I still read the same sentence six times and somehow retain absolutely none of it. None of that has changed. What has changed is that I don’t immediately assume it’s because I’m failing.
These days I pause for a moment and look around instead.
Have I accidentally recreated Piccadilly Circus on my laptop? Has the pressure washer returned? Is my jumper slowly trying to remove the skin from the back of my neck? Has my brain simply been filtering and adapting for so long that it’s run out of steam?
Sometimes the answer really is that I’m tired. That I just need a break. But surprisingly often, the answer is wonderfully ordinary. Turn off the notifications. Close a few tabs. Move to another room. Put the headphones on. Take the jumper off.
They’re hardly revolutionary. They don’t magically transform me into someone who colour-codes everything and always knows where they’ve left their phone. What they do is leave my brain with a little more breathing space for the things that truly matter.
It isn’t about creating the perfect environment. I don’t think such a thing exists. Life will always be noisy, unpredictable and occasionally accompanied by somebody pressure washing a patio with Olympic-level commitment. But I’ve stopped believing there’s some sort of prize for making life harder than it needs to be.
These days, whenever I find myself reading the same sentence for the sixth time, I still ask myself the question that never used to occur to me. Is it me… or is this room just awful?
More often than not, the answer is a little bit of both. The difference is that I don’t automatically assume I’m the problem anymore. Instead of trying to become tougher, I’ve become kinder. And if understanding my neurodivergence has taught me one thing, it’s this:
making life easier for yourself isn’t giving in. Sometimes it’s simply understanding yourself well enough to stop making life harder than it needs to be.
PDA in Business: A User’s Guide to Autonomy
There is a very specific way to make me not want to do something.
Tell me I have to. That’s it. That’s the kryptonite!
It doesn’t matter whether it was already on my to-do list. It doesn’t matter if it was my idea. It doesn’t even matter if it’s something I genuinely want to do. The moment it starts feeling compulsory, some deeply stubborn part of my brain folds its arms, narrows its eyes and mutters “NOPE”.
I’ve had entire conversations with myself that go something like this:
“Right, today we’re finally going to finish that blog.”
“No, we’re not.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“We just aren’t.”
“But it was literally our idea.”
“Still no.”
At this point, I’m essentially arguing with myself like both parts of me are not, in fact, on the same team! If this sounds familiar, then welcome. Pull up a chair. This one’s for you.
Instead, I found myself in a bizarre stand-off with perfectly reasonable activities. The strange thing is that the task itself often wasn’t the problem. In fact, I was frequently interested in the task. I’d chosen it. Planned it. Sometimes I’d even been excited about it. Then I’d write it on a list. And suddenly it felt completely different.
The day my to-do list became my enemy
For years, I thought there was something wrong with me. Surely if I wanted to do something, I should just be able to do it? It seemed logical enough. If I needed to send an email, send the email. If I wanted to write a blog, write the blog. If there was a task on my to-do list, complete the task and move on with my life like a sensible adult. (although, I have always felt that ‘sensible’ was overrated. But I digress)
The blog that had seemed exciting now felt oppressive. The email that would take three minutes somehow became a major life event. The phone call I’d intended to make all week was a weighted chain around my neck. It’s a weird experience trying to explain to people, particularly when the person creating the pressure is also you.
I once spent three hours avoiding a task that would have taken ten minutes. During those three hours, I managed to reorganise my desktop, research something completely unrelated, make two cups of tea, and stare out of the window. The original task remained exactly where I’d left it. Waiting patiently…mocking me with its judgy face.
The problem with “should”
I’ve come to realise that one of the most dangerous words in my vocabulary is “should”. I should post more consistently. I should be further ahead. I should have finished this by now. I should really sort that out.
The funny thing is that “should” sounds incredibly responsible. Like the sort of word used by people who always know where their car keys are and have a bottle of water on them at all times.
But for me, “should” always comes with some creepy companions. Like guilt, pressure, unrealistic expectations and a small suitcase full of shame. Before I know it, a perfectly manageable task has transformed into a judgement on my entire character.
And then the resistance arrives. The more pressure I apply, the more resistance I create. The more resistance I create, the more guilty I feel. Which makes me apply more pressure. It’s an impressively terrible system.
Why self-employment felt like freedom
One of the reasons self-employment suited me so well was the autonomy. No manager. No clocking in. No annual appraisal where someone asks where I see myself in five years’ time. (Surviving. Ideally in stretchy trousers.)
For many neurodivergent people, self-employment can be genuinely life-changing. It gives us the freedom to work around our energy, our focus and our lives, rather than trying to squeeze ourselves into systems that were never really designed for us in the first place.
The autonomy is glorious. There is, however, one slight complication.
Whilst we’ve escaped other people telling us what to do, we’re now responsible for setting our own deadlines, creating our own structure and deciding what happens next. And if your brain is demand-sensitive, it turns out it doesn’t particularly care who created the demand.
The number of productivity systems I’ve lovingly created and then immediately rebelled against is frankly embarrassing. I’ve colour-coded calendars. Built project plans. Created beautifully organised task lists. Then looked at them the next day and thought, “Hell no.”
It’s a very strange experience setting your own rules and then immediately looking for loopholes.
Negotiating with yourself
At some point I realised that I spend a surprising amount of time negotiating with myself. Not motivating myself. Not inspiring myself. Negotiating.
“What if we just do ten minutes?”
“You don’t have to finish it.”
“Let’s just open the document.”
“Would a biscuit help?” (FYI – they ALWAYS help)
The thing is, choice changes everything. There is a huge difference between telling myself “You have to finish this today” and “It would be useful to make some progress on this today.” The task hasn’t changed. The outcome hasn’t changed. But the emotional response is completely different. One feels like being backed into a corner. The other feels like an invitation.
Over time, I’ve realised that my nervous system cares far less about the task than it does about how trapped it feels. The more choice I have, the easier things become. Which is deeply inconvenient for all the productivity gurus trying to convince me that discipline is the answer to everything.
Why motivation was never the answer
For years I bought into the lie that I needed more motivation. More discipline. More grit. What even is grit!?! The internet certainly seemed convinced that was the solution. If you couldn’t do the thing, you simply needed to try harder. Push harder. Want it more. Whatever the latest advice happened to be.
The trouble is that pressure can absolutely produce results. For a while. Many of us become experts in last-minute heroics. We pull things together at the final hour. We work ridiculous hours. We create miracles under pressure and then wonder why we’re exhausted afterwards.
For years I thought this meant I worked well under pressure. I don’t. I work well under urgency. There’s a difference. One feels energising. The other feels like being chased by an angry badger. Or rather, what I imagine that would feel like. I’ve not actually lived that badger experience, thank god.
Eventually, constantly relying on urgency becomes exhausting. It’s like powering your business with emergency generators. It works, but it’s noisy, stressful and not particularly sustainable.
Curiosity works better than self-bullying
One of the biggest shifts for me has been replacing judgement with curiosity. Instead of asking, “Why can’t I just do the thing?” I’ve started asking, “What is making this feel difficult?” The answers are often surprisingly useful. Sometimes the task is too big. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed. Sometimes I’m exhausted. Sometimes I’ve accidentally convinced myself that a perfectly ordinary piece of work will determine the entire course of my future.
Sometimes the resistance is trying to tell me that I’ve taken on too much. Sometimes it’s warning me that I’m running on empty. And sometimes it’s simply because I’ve turned a minor admin task into a dramatic theatrical production inside my own head.
The point is that resistance usually contains information. Not always accurate information, admittedly. But information nonetheless. And understanding what’s underneath the resistance is almost always more helpful than shouting at myself for having it.
Autonomy isn’t a luxury
I think this is the bit that often gets missed. For some people, autonomy is a nice bonus. For others, it’s regulation. It’s the difference between feeling trapped and feeling capable. The difference between pressure and choice. The difference between fighting your nervous system and working alongside it.
Which is why so many neurodivergent people thrive when they can build flexibility into their lives and businesses. Flexible schedules. Choice-based planning. Working with their energy instead of constantly battling against it. Designing systems that support them rather than punish them.
Not because they’re lazy. Not because they lack discipline. But because autonomy changes how the whole system responds. Once you understand that, a lot of things suddenly start making sense.
One more time for those at the back…
For a long time, I thought the answer was becoming stricter with myself. More disciplined. More productive. More organised. Because I was the one to blame… I was letting the side down.
What I’ve slowly realised is that my nervous system was never asking for more pressure. It was asking for more autonomy.
The goal isn’t becoming somebody who never experiences resistance. The goal is building a life where you’re not constantly having to fight yourself.
Because if your brain experiences pressure as threat, then pushing harder isn’t always the solution. Sometimes the solution is creating enough choice, flexibility and autonomy that moving forwards feels safe again.
That’s why self-employment works so well for so many neurodivergent people. Not because we’re incapable of working hard, but because we’re finally able to build environments that work with our brains instead of constantly fighting against them.
And that’s a much better use of your energy than spending your life arguing with your own to-do list.
Working With Your Brain, Not Against It
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.
Most business advice is not for us
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.
Force it…I dare Yyou (really don’t)
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.
These patterns aren’t random
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.
When it’s interesting it works
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.
When it feels like your idea, your brain chills out
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.
It was never about trying harder
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.
You’re not the problem
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.
So… what now?
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.
Protecting Your Energy When the World Won’t Slow Down
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!
The world isn’t built for you. Accept it…and move on
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.)
Urgency will eat your energy if you let it
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.
Energy boundaries are different from emotional ones
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.
Saying no without it being a 3-part drama
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.
Not everything is worth the cost anymore
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.
Recovery doesn’t protect itself
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.
When boundaries feel like a scratchy jumper (and they will)
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!
You don’t have to live at the pace of everything around you
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.
After Burnout: What Real Recovery Looks like for NDs
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…
- Work – I gave up having a job, seemed the same shit whatever building I went to.
- Energy hoovers – people or situations that zap your mood and cost time & energy.
- Worrying what other people think/say about me – I’m odd, deal with it.
- Meeting other’s expectations – you do you, I’ll continue being my sweet awesome self.
- Quid-pro-quo relationships – yeah, that’s not how the universe works, karma is paid forward and I am not one to argue with the universe.
- No longer policing the world – adding to the karmic flow is the notion that some problems are going to be solved by the universe and I do not have to keep score. See someone weaving in and out of traffic? That’s a situation where the universe will come a-calling sooner or later… Someone being an a-hole? Knock. Knock. Muthafuqur… UNIVERSE CALLING.
- Red rope – the red-rope around my time is sacrosanct, I choose where I spend it, you do not get to jump the queue by waiving money at me. Take a ticket, sit down, be patient. I will get to you in due course.
- Firebreaks – whether I am due a break, or not, I will take days off after an intense project or working for a deadline. Allows my brain the time to transition from the project to new stuff and gives me energy recharge and prep time. I try to take Fridays off, definitely in the afternoon, and if I put in a firebreak then it’ll usually be a Monday and Tuesday, giving a longer weekend, and less impact to any ongoing projects.
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.
Running on Empty: How ND Energy Actually Works
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.
The burnout that didn’t look like burnout
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.
The lie about energy
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 adrenaline trap
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.
Why rest felt unsafe
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.
The early warnings I ignored
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.
What I know now
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.
Delegation for Control Freaks (and the Overwhelmed)
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.
But in practice
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!)
The redoing-it-quietly bit
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.
Control isn’t a personality trait
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.
Perfectionism as volume control
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?
The cost of holding everything
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 isn’t abdication
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.
Why this shows up so strongly in self-employment
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.
A quieter measure of success
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.