Mastering Time – AuDHD Time Lords
For this neurodivergent AuDHD brain, time is fungible, and not all measurements of time are equal. A day on my fave projects zips past faster than a bullet train, but a day doing receipts is like wading through an emotionally draining swamp, full of spider webs.
My temporal perspective is often off and not by a little bit, it can be off by a whole universe. So it is time to go travelling in time, and who knows? Even space itself! To a place where nothing is as it seems, and time is both endless and always running out. The ADHD acts like a hall of mirrors, distorting your reflection, enhancing, augmenting, squeezing and outright lying to you about your own morphology.
Let’s take a look at my own specific Spiegelsaal of Temporal Distortion… My Brain.
Time Dilation & Distortion
This particular organic specimen of cognitive compute, eyes a task and thinks, in its best trade’s voice “Yeah, I can probably bang that out in 2 hours, maybe even an hour if I stop thinking about it and actually crack on. So, be a love, pop the kettle on and stand back, things might get a bit messy.“
With the best will in the world that’s magical thinking and downright self-deception at its core. FFW to Stuart 8 hours from now, and the job has gone through a few iterations, several rabbit holes and two unexpected trips to Screwfix. You find a man with a very ruddy complexion, probably tired, almost certainly sweaty, very definitely swearing, depleted in nourishment and with a thirst for the ages and feeling like he’s about to self-combust.
My wife will be nearby, gently chuckling, cheering me up and praising the effort, if not the efficacy and ensuring I am brought back to a baseline by plying me with food and drink, and packing me off to the shower with a cider. Deal with it, Cider Shower, try it, it’s a thing. Obv. only try it if the law allows and you are of legal age, consult an adult, wear PPE, ensure you have done the proper risk assessment and have applied for the correct permits in your jurisdiction, and have the necessary license and training to operate a water powered, domestic cleansing unit, whilst operating a sponge with an open alcoholic beverage in a moving shower spray, whilst wet. Yeah.
EDITOR’S NOTE – yes, I am editing my own blog, this is not the New Yorker – deal with it. (There’s the ADHD right there on the page… The side quest, the double side quest, the over sharing, but the detail though, I mean, c’mon – did it not paint… stobbit Stuart, man get back to the story – Oooh Bakewell tart, and a cuppa, don’t mind if I do! brb)
Lets just say I am not great at getting going, getting to the point or getting past a Bakewell tart and a cuppa. I am also not great at sizing up a task that I have not done before, or one with many variables, or one of those projects which ‘unfurls’ as it goes. They can be tricky. One of my customer’s pays me per piece of artwork. Ten hours or two, same price. There’s a scale too, more complex etc. But the gist is, if it goes over 2 hours, I am on my own time. That does focus you somewhat, but that’s the point.
Somewhat focused.
Not “Completely” focused.
Somewhat – and that is variable depending on which set of circumstances is currently happening…
It’s hard to accurately judge your capacity when your capability is not consistent.
However, if it’s a task I have done before then I am much better at sizing up the time budget and allowing for hiccups one might encounter.
Better… note that. “Better“, not perfect, not consistent, but “better” and that’s better, on some days…
So, lets have a quick review – so far, we have “somewhat capable” and “slightly better”, productivity going great so far in the ADHD Timeline then..
Working knowledge and muscle memory are one of the reasons I like order and routine. The precision of doing something to an agreed cost and hitting your allocated deadline is such a good feeling. But mess up and miss it, and the rage can start to descend, a pitch tar-like substance obscuring your senses, further exacerbating one’s ability to see things as they are, and suddenly the universe is against you and the world needs to shut up and do-one.
Where’s my sonic screw-up driver???
Then lets add in the hyperfocus, it’s a wormhole where hours go to die, you emerge with bladder/thirst/head/posture/cats screaming at you for relief from all their ailments. Side thought – I think first line of defence against Daleks, send in cats. That’ll confuse ‘em…
Anyway… back to the main plot.
It’s disconcerting to awaken from a self-induced miasma to find that the clocks have changed and we have a new Prime Minister but thankfully DFS still has a sale on, phew. I know how a bear feels after hibernating, I too need to eat – a lot.
Hyperfocus may produce a lot of work in short-order but going from 9am to lunch in one task without intermission, distraction or other side-quest is bewildering. I really feel like I “come to” – much like the giddy-fools who give themselves over to stage-hypnosis. I am fine, honka-honka! See? Nothing wrong, honka-honka.
There’s a temporal vertigo to hyperfocus, it can make your schedule as predictable as walking across a bouncy castle, tipsy, in clown shoes, that are, ironically too small. (Honka-honka.)
This means your own sense of time is often off. However, when not strapped into the hyperfocus express, destination; “detailed and done”. I can usually tell the time within 20 mins, sometimes within 5-10mins. Example;Last night, woke, thought It’s about 6am… checked watch 6:10am. Not a useful skill on your CV, but what aspect of neurodivergence is useful on a CV?
But if I am deep into a hyperfocus, or distracted by a myriad of conflicting and context switching tasks? Then, baby, I am more turned around about what time is is than Pete Burns at a hoola-hoop competition, in a maze. (Turned around, right round baby, right round).
The Planning Fallacy
This can create issues when pricing work, as I said, pricing comparable jobs is relatively straightforward (taking out the variable capacity), but sometimes you are quoting based solely on the time you’re putting into a project, and that’s where things get quite elastic.
It’s hard to judge how much time to allocate, but anything you plan can be derailed especially when you know that:
A) ADHD Chaos Raccoon could blow up your plan for a day by refusing to do as asked and instead you fix the three noisiest items in your office because they are driving you nuts (CREAKING FROM THE SHADE ATTACHED TO MY StuDio will end me if I do not sort it, GAH!)
B) Your brain decides that it needs the emotional regulation of not doing anything vaguely related to productive work. Instead it wishes to lie down in a spa and be pampered all day. But, as budgets are tight, a packet of GF choc biscuits will suffice and is 100% necessary before we get going. Guess I am off to the shops then…
Oh and a pot noodle if they have it.
Shut up!
No you shut up!!
anyway…
C) DID YOU SEE THAT “SQUIRREL”… and then we’re off to the dopamine mines, and in we plunge, headlong… again… What is it this time? The plural of Octopus is Octopodes you say? Fascinating, tell me more about Greek grammar, go!… A Scottish octopus is known as a Scotopus you say? Uh-hmm, right, right, right… Learning all sorts today.
And that’s every day, all day, and twice on the weekends (matinee shows from 2pm). It is just exhausting, like a wild unicorn on which you ride, off on a whim and a prayer. Yes, I know, it’s “wing and a prayer”, but such is my want that I thought it suitable in this instance to change it, as a literary flourish. And even that sentence shows I cannot be trusted to stay on course for more than five minutes, or a paragraph
That makes planning tasks a complete nightmare, you sit down, to do list in hand and it may as well have been someone else’s tasks because your brain is currently tidying your email inbox as it’s now the noisiest thing in your head. All whilst planning to alphabetise your paint storage, and, therefore, before you get to the list of “to do”, you have to complete the sidequests of doom! Where deadlines go to wither and die.
Plan all you like but as you skate into the day, ass-backwards and three FANTASTIC new ideas boiling your brain good luck on getting any of the items that must be done, done anytime soon.
Just sitting down to write this I’ve
- Reglued my StuDio’s acoustic tiles
- Tidied up some cables
- Checked my emails twice
- Responded to several txt messages – various projects
- Done a dive into a customer web issue (90 mins)
- Fixed a CCTV log in issue
- Adjusted my seat
… and made a coffee, which was warm 2 nanoseconds ago, and now is stone cold… why? (ah yes, writing “hyperfocus”, which as we’re discovering is slightly less focused today, the Unicorn is moseying through a pasture, rather than galloping the final furlong in the four-legged cryptid gold cup.) plus answered sundry texts and stared into space contemplating some deals we’re doing right now. NONE of which was on my list of to do.. NONE.
The cognitive load to stay focused is tremendous, even a cluttered desk can add to the overwhelm and I have had a cluttered desk for 5+ years. But no more! I have spent the past three weeks expunging and organising over five years of clutter and chaos in the StuDio. The weight is lifted and all the surfaces are clean and clear. Anything currently residing on my desk is 100% to do with my actions this week. I feel lighter and more focused with a clean and clear workspace, it’s a big accomodation to my own focus & concentration that I needed. And yet.. The above list says otherwise.
How you do one thing, is how you do everything
I’m often heard saying, and it is true of the environment in which you live as much as the work you do. I have struggled with my output for the past few years, several reasons, but mental health has been on a comeback and this is part of the “return to full-strength and focus” plan that I am working on.
But of course all of this can look like being a busy fool, standing still whilst the world spins on, obsessing about the symmetry of your acoustic tiles and adjusting lens stops on your webcam. However it all helps with the emotional regulation if I know my working environment is known, measured, managed and mine to control. From the outside it might seem like folly, but for me it has been about putting out raging fires and ensuring systems are in place to deal with my less regulated moods.
Good luck ignoring it, when the “Do Not Disturb” is on, that’s bad when it’s your own brain!
Running Late and Time-Blindness
The Autist requires hyper-regulation, and now it is all tidy it can settle down and stop feeling quite so out-of-control.
So, what about the ADHD? Well a newly tidied space is a novelty, so we get that dopamine dump. The issue is when it no longer seems new and exciting, what then?
Yes, that is an issue, and one to watch for but the excitement of a clean slate and keeping things in order allows for more creativity to come to the fore. Thus I do hope that, for a while at least, the ADHD beast will be satiated. And it really is Dr. Technical and Mr. Hide-and-Seek. One shows up and keeps things in order until you need the services of an unhinged maniac who can conjure chaos into creative genius.
But yet; you want me to be on time for something? Good luck with that! I am either 30 minutes early or ten minutes late with a great story. For some reason I cannot just get somewhere 5 mins before, park and walk in. I’ve even arrived 30 minutes early and sat outside the venue and somehow still managed to be late into the actual meeting. Combination of distractions, phone, thoughts and a sudden urge to use the facilities, with panicked search for suitable arrangements. Gah.
And sometime the brain just will not budge, I can be sat, staring at the clock, and my brain’s both panicking at how close to the start of the meeting it is and why am I still in my PJs, whilst simultaneously thinking “I am sure I could answer that email, and check that stat, and fill in that form”… It’s like you can see the edge of the cliff approaching fast whilst you keep tuning the radio in the hope you’ll hit the “WBRW – the perfect soundtrack for plunging into the void…”
And ever was it so in my head. Time has not diluted the “gift”.
Teachers regularly reported “he seems bright, if only he would apply himself” or “Stuart is constantly distracted” or “Stuart can be a disruptive influence in the class“, of course I was disruptive, I DEMAND CHAOS, the alchemy of the creative process and then I get to impose ORDER plus I was probably bored, which is like kryptonite to my system.
(I’ll overlook the “seems like a bright boy”, SEEMS? Grrrr… heckled by my junior school teacher! Took years to land… ooof. Thx.)
To drag myself back to the throughline of this blog post, there’s also the energy required to wrangle the entire mess of the process to some tangible timeline. Deadlines are amazing at focusing the effort, and I gave myself to the 21st September to finish the tidying and get back on course and ensure it all was done. Is it ALL done, DONE? Lets go with “mostly” and I can upgrade to “yes” as I tick off a few cosmetic tasks.
Things can get into a terrible mess, but it’s my mess and when I am ready to unmess it then I will do and when I am able to spare the energy, but some messes come with emotional baggage, which really craters your capability. All that weight of expectation, your own scathing review or your current performance, and the anger at having to manage all of that and still be unable to do the thing you HAVE to do, which can make any task more slippery than a greased eel.
So what’s the big takeaway Stu?
Don’t store your eels and grease in the same container? Probably?
No!
That’s a terrible ending…
So, err, here it is…
Help Weeding Your To Do List
This is not going to work for everyone in all situations but I find that in complex tasks, where the outcomes are unclear and variables may change, then I need to have a system to ensure I stay regulated and don’t spin out, chase rabbits down holes and general end up on a side quest or three.
I have this method where everything is broken into two columns – wish lists and deal breakers.
- Wishlist – all the things I would like to have but are not mandatory and should they not happen or be available then I am OK. I will try to get as many of these as possible but even achieving just one item on this list is a win.
- Dealbreakers – critical things which without them renders the entire exercise, project or situation null and void, over and out, done and dusted, no thanks. They make you want to, Meep Meep… and eff off faster than the roadrunner within earshot of a coyote.
But this system allows me to choose and prioritise work according to my energy, time and available resources. It allows me to whittle down any complex project or other such multi-layered problem into “the things that HAVE to happen” and “ the things that, if they were to happen, then bonus!” – get the mandatory tough stuff done first, everything else is a bonus!
This can be adapted to suit a lot of situations – a social meet-up that you are obligated to attend? What are the deal breakers? Going is mandatory but staying, not so much… So, lets say 2 hrs is a deal breaker, 1 hr is a wish list item. Anything in between is going to feel like a win!
For me today’s deal breaker? Dealing with the utility company and their toothless threats… today I am Whatevs Kev, and they can swerve off.
Today’s wish list – get this blog finished, and as you can see, we’re smashing it! Yay! Mostly because I am not dealing with said Utility Company. And have the bandwidth and spoons to write the blog. If I did both then
A) Probably be dysregulated, definitely get wound up… and burn through energy…
2) No blog – or poorly thought through blog at the least due to lack of creative spoons
(note from future Stu – I smashed this out in one hyperfocus and day after I am editing this!)
You can use it for specific tasks, or to pick which tasks, I have used it to choose menu items when you get the “BIG BOOK OF ALL THE MEALS”… usually sticky, and then have to triage what you can eat, what’s allowed with what and all the other rules you unconsciously accommodate at home.
It’s a simple tool to help make sense of the complex, and I hope it helps.
Conclusion and Takeaways
There we are, take all that and do with it what you will; I’ve used this wish list/deal breaker process from buying a house, to deciding meals. It’s not foolproof and relies on gathering all the data for making the right decision. It also helps when things go awry, you can review and see if the “unexpected item in the baggage area” was predictable or was new info, and can help for decision making another time.
This process allows you to triage the entire task, project or other life event that you need to make some quick decisions about. It’s not perfect but it helps keep me grounded in my own best outcomes when dealing with any situation. I even used it when looking for a suitable candidate as a spouse. Yeah. Not exactly romantic, but my partner is amazing and ensures my best interests are always met, and I do the same for her, you know. Marriage/partnership/love 🙂
I do hope the above ramble will help, just a few thoughts around the challenges of having a brain that will not wear a saddle, won’t be told what to do and can sometimes take all your plans and decide we’re off to the seaside for lollies and chips.
As this winding narrative shows, sometimes the journey is the lesson, and I am hoping reading this has been a worthwhile journey.
What works for me, may not work for you, so do let us know if there’s anything you do to help retain some semblance of balance, control or regulation, always willing to add tools to the toolbox of life.
Listen to the Business Oddcast for more exciting tips and tales of misadventures in the garden of neurodivergence.
Strap in, we’re off for a wild ride
I would like to dedicate this specific blog to my great friend and co-host/co-producer on the Business Oddcast, Hannah, she’s supported me over the past month and allowed me to wander off and get this tidy up done. Thank you for your msgs and listening to my whingy whiny complaining. Lets now go smash it!
Who Are You Trying To Impress
I’ve always been pretty proud of my easy-going personality. I’m helpful, I don’t like making a fuss, and I’m generally pretty good at fitting around other people….generally. All excellent qualities, I feel. Five stars for Hannah. Lovely to work with. Would recommend!
Except recently I’ve started noticing how often “easy-going” Hannah says, “Yep, no problem!” when there is, in fact, a problem. Not a call-the-emergency-services problem, obviously. More a I don’t have time for this, don’t particularly want to do it and am now going to have to rearrange half my week kind of problem.
And the most annoying bit is that nobody has pressured me into anything. There are no guns against heads. Someone has just asked a completely reasonable question and given me every opportunity to say no. But before I’m given my brain the chance to engage, my mouth has already committed, and my head is nodding enthusiastically. Even though at that point my brain is in the corner with its arms crossed looking bemused.
Then, later, I’m annoyed. Partly with the person who asked me, even though I know they’ve not done anything wrong. But mainly with myself. Because I’ve done it again. I’ve prioritised being helpful, doing the right thing, being the good girl, whilst totally ignoring what might actually be best for me.
I’ve had a lifetime of this, but in recent years I’ve started to wonder whether I really am as easy-going as I think I am. Or if, in fact, I’ve just gotten really good at being easy for other people. As that’s a whole different kettle of fish entirely.
When ‘easy-going’ stops being easy
To be clear, I genuinely am pretty chill. Unless you cut me up when my kids are in the car! (That’s a road rage story for another time!)
If I don’t care whether we meet at ten or eleven, then I really don’t care. I’m not secretly sitting at home seething because somebody chose eleven while whispering, “This is fine” through gritted teeth.
But I’ve realised there are plenty of other times when I do have a preference. Or something is inconvenient. Or I’m already stretched. And yet out comes the trusty old “Whatever works for you!” before my own opinion has even had the chance to reach the front of the queue.
I think some of that comes from spending years feeling like certain bits of me needed toning down. Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too direct. Too much. You learn pretty quickly that being accommodating gets a much warmer reception than being the person saying, “Actually, this doesn’t work for me.” So perhaps somewhere along the way I got a little too good at it.
Because there’s a point where being flexible stops being about genuinely not minding and starts becoming a reluctance to risk somebody thinking you’re difficult. And THAT is where I’m starting to question things. I don’t want to stop being easy-going because I quite like that bit of me. I just don’t want “easy-going” to mean everyone else gets to be comfortable at my expense.
The helpful one
Being helpful is another one I’ve started looking at a little more suspiciously. Because I LOVE being helpful. Give me a problem to solve and I’m in. I’ll find you the person you need, send you the link, come up with three ideas you hadn’t thought of and possibly become considerably more invested in sorting it out than you are. Possibly? Who am I kidding?…I will definitely be more invested.
This is particularly true in business. A client can ask me for one thing and suddenly I’m thinking, Ooh, but if we did this as well… And then I’ve spotted something else. And that connects to another thing. Before long, what was supposed to be a fairly contained piece of work has developed several additional limbs and I’m happily giving them all away for free.
And some of that is absolutely one of the reasons I’m good at what I do. I don’t want to stop seeing the extra thing just because it wasn’t technically in the brief. That would be like asking my brain to notice fewer things, and good luck with that. But again, I’ve started noticing the difference between doing more because I’m excited, interested and genuinely think it will help, and doing more because I have that little nagging feeling that what I’ve already done might not be enough.
Enough for what, exactly? Enough for the client to be happy? Enough for them to think I’m good at my job? Enough to justify what they’ve paid me? Enough for them to like me? Because “I always overdeliver” sounds like a fabulous business principle until you realise you’re routinely delivering 150% while only charging for 100%. At which point it becomes less of a business strategy and more of an unpaid internship in your own company.
Perfect is safer
Perfectionism gets tangled up in this too. I’ve always cared about doing things properly, and I’m not planning to start merrily chucking out crap in the name of personal growth. There are standards. But there are also times when I know something is good enough and STILL can’t leave the bloody thing alone.
One more read-through. One tiny tweak. Move that sentence. Put it back again. Change a word. Decide the original word was better. Stare at it for another ten minutes as though the I can summon the correct answer with my eyeballs. At that point, I’m not sure we’re talking about high standards anymore.
If I am honest with myself I know I’m removing every possible opportunity for someone to think I’ve got something wrong. And gaslighting myself into thinking it’s my attention to detail, or perfectionist streak.
Overexplaining is probably part of the same family too. I can turn a perfectly straightforward email into something requiring chapters if I’m worried there’s any chance of being misunderstood. The number of times I have thrown what was meant to be a quick email, and invariably evolved into my life’s work, into ChatGPT with the prompt ‘make it less rambly’.
Here’s my answer. Here’s why that’s my answer. Here’s some context. Here’s a small piece of supporting evidence. And while we’re here, would you like to know what happened in 2007 that explains why I think this way?
I joke about it, but there is something underneath all that explaining. If I give you ALL the information, you’ll understand me properly. If you understand me properly, maybe you won’t think badly of me. And suddenly that six-paragraph email looks a little less like being thorough and a little more like me trying to control an outcome I can’t actually control.
Anything to avoid the awkward conversation
Now’s the part where things get particularly ridiculous, because I am absolutely not someone that actively avoids conflict. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t go out in search of it. Who wants that?
But if someone I care about is being treated unfairly, then I’m hunting down that conflict, Liam Neeson style. I’ve got the skills to ask difficult questions… I can challenge people. I can become an absolute pain in the arse when required.
Give me an injustice and apparently all concerns about being easy-going have left the building. If there’s a wrongdoing afoot, my flag’s in the air and I’m leading the march. Yeah, I’m gonna chain myself to something in the name of fairness if I need to too!
But disappointing somebody personally? Ah, different department. Suddenly I’m explaining. Softening. Apologising. Adding a smiley face so nobody accidentally thinks I’m furious because I’ve said I can’t do Thursday.
Even saying ‘no’ comes with an entire supporting statement for me. I can’t just give you the cold hard facts. I need to set the scene for you, give the full background story of why I can make it, what else I am doing instead, and a hundred other bits of evidence about how I am still indeed a decent human, in spite of letting you down.
And the crazy thing is that most people aren’t giving any of this a second thought. They’ve read “Sorry, I can’t do Thursday”, thought okay, and moved on with their lives while I’m still mentally preparing my defence for a court case nobody has brought. I think that’s where the fear of disappointing people really shows itself for me. It’s not necessarily that I can’t say no. It’s that I want to make absolutely certain you’re still okay with me afterwards if I do.
When did this become my personality?
This is the bit I find most fascinating. Because when we talk about masking, it can sound like something quite deliberate. You put the mask on for work, networking or a client meeting, do your best impression of a person who definitely knows what they’re doing, then come home and take it off again.
But what if you’ve been doing some of this stuff for most of your life, so you genuinely don’t know where all the lines are anymore. I know I am helpful, and kind. I like making people happy. And I really know how much I care about doing a good job. So, I don’t want to start examining every decent thing I’ve ever done and decide none of it was real and I’ve actually just been one enormous mask in leopard print clothing.
But there are definitely bits I’ve started questioning. Do I actually not mind, or have I just become really good at saying I don’t? Am I making this thing better because I want to, or because I’m scared it isn’t good enough? Am I explaining because the other person needs more information, or because I need them to understand that I am Definitely Not Wrong? And would I still be quite so accommodating if there was absolutely no chance of anyone being disappointed in me?
That last one is a bit of a bugger. Because once you’ve been The Helpful One, The Reliable One, The Easy-Going One and The One Who Will Sort It for long enough, people come to expect it. More importantly, you come to expect it.
So where does the masking stop and my actual personality start? No idea. Helpful, I know. But maybe I don’t need to completely unpick it. Maybe I just need to notice the bits that don’t feel like a choice anymore.
So… who ARE you trying to impress?
I’ve seen enough advice about people pleasing to know I’m now supposed to announce that I no longer care what anybody thinks of me. Unfortunately, that would be bollocks. Of course I care what people think of me. I want my clients to think I’m good at what I do. I want my friends to think I’m a good friend. I want the people I love to know they can rely on me. And, as a general life ambition, I’d quite like most people who encounter me not to leave thinking, “God, she’s an idiot.”
I don’t think caring is the problem. It’s what I sometimes make myself do to guarantee the outcome. Because I can’t actually guarantee that everyone will like me. I can’t make sure nobody is ever disappointed. I can’t explain myself so perfectly that I’m never misunderstood. And I definitely can’t keep giving everyone 150% without eventually wondering why I’m bloody exhausted.
So, I’m trying to notice it sooner. The automatic yes. The unnecessary apology. The extra hour spent making something better that was already absolutely fine. The six paragraphs of explanation when two sentences would probably have done the job. Not so I can become less helpful, less caring or less me. Just so I get a say in it too.
Because maybe the question isn’t really “Who are you trying to impress?” Maybe it’s “How much of yourself are you changing to make sure you do?”
And I think I’m finally ready to stop auditioning quite so hard.
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.
You Don’t Get To Choose What Your Brain Finds Interesting
Apparently my brain has its own agenda when it comes to deadlines. I’ve always been aware that it’s not the sort that toes the line. Does it do what it’s told? Hell no! And I respect it for that… until I don’t.
Because having a rebellious creative brain can be magnificent, some of the time. Picture it steaming down the highway, its head out the sunroof, wind in its hair, screaming, “I’m alive!”
Then other times it’s that uncontrollable toddler that missed its afternoon nap. It’s overtired, trying to poke pointy things into the plug sockets, crying at everything, and howling “Nooooooo” at all attempts to placate it. The stage of parenting that has you thinking, “You know what? I’m good with one child.”
So…back to deadlines. I have learnt over the last 51 years that I can’t just thrust a deadline in front of my brain. Otherwise, it retreats back into its cave and mentally checks out of anything that isn’t watching Netflix (other streaming platforms are available!) I have to make sure I have the time, and all the conditions for productivity have been painstakingly assembled. Only then is there an outside chance that I can manipulate it into believing it’s doing what it wants to.
This can be a little arduous if my brain is in squirrel-chasing mode. As it keeps trying to wriggle free and disappear under the nearest clothing rail. And the particularly annoying bit is that while it may have absolutely no interest in the Important Thing I’m trying to get it to do, it can find an incredible amount of brainpower for something completely unrelated. One innocent Google search leads to an article, which leads to a video, which mentions something I’ve never heard of before and obviously now NEED to know everything about. Two hours later, I’m remarkably well-informed on a subject that has absolutely no practical application to my life, while the Important Thing is still where I left it.
The other option, as a last resort, is to apply enough pressure to back it into a corner where its only choice is to get on with it. This can be effective, but it also comes with a much higher chance that I’ll pay for it afterwards. So, I reserve it for when I can feel the deadline flames licking around my feet.
There’s also the PDA-shaped spanner in the works. The moment something becomes a must, there’s a risk my brain wants nothing to do with it. The task hasn’t changed, but the pressure around it has. Which is super unhelpful when the deadline is real and the work still needs doing.
That’s the irony. Hyperfocus is often talked about as though it’s some sort of neurodivergent superpower we can summon when required. Need to get six hours of work done in three? RELEASE THE HYPERFOCUS! Except nobody appears to have given my brain the controls.
If anything, I have to manufacture enough urgency to jump-start its interest in the thing I need to do. It will focus when it likes, and choose its own subject, thank you very much!
Hyperfocus is not a productivity hack
Hyperfocus gets some very good PR in the neurodivergent world, and to be fair, when it lands on the right thing it can be bloody brilliant. Give me a client problem I really want to solve, a piece of writing I’m completely absorbed in or a business idea that has got its claws into me, and I can get through a ridiculous amount of work without really noticing the time passing.
That’s the bit people see. The output, ideas, and connections. The hours disappearing while you’re completely in the zone. From the outside, it probably looks like the productivity dream. If somebody could package it into a twelve-week online course for £497, there would absolutely be a workbook, a bonus module and some bloke called Brad telling you to “lean into your focus potential” with promises of a 6 figure income.
One thing I’ve learnt about myself is that I can often keep my focus alive by switching concepts before my brain gets bored of one thing completely. So, I might move from writing to strategy, then into something visual, then back again. From the outside it can appear like I’m flitting about, but for me it can be the difference between staying engaged and grinding to a halt. The trick is that I’m still moving between useful things, rather than disappearing off into a completely unrelated rabbit hole.
The slight problem is that hyperfocus is a different beast. It doesn’t care what would actually be useful. It doesn’t look at my to-do list and sensibly choose the thing that most needs doing. It just points at whatever has caught its attention and goes, “That. We’re doing that now.” Sometimes, wonderfully, that happens to be the work I was meant to be doing anyway. When that happens, I try not to interfere. I’ve learnt not to frighten it away.
Other times, I’ve got something genuinely important sitting in front of me while my brain has become deeply invested in something that nobody asked for. A new idea. A bit of research that appears completely unnecessary from the outside, but hugely necessary for my brainium at the time. A problem that absolutely did not need solving today. And the problem is that none of this makes it particularly reliable.
Because the ability to focus that intensely can be brilliant. The ability to choose what gets that level of focus would be even better.
But I NEED to know
There’s a very specific feeling that comes with certain interests, and “Oh, that’s quite interesting” doesn’t really cover it. It’s more urgent than that. It’s like my brain has spotted a loose end somewhere and can’t settle until it knows where it goes. Not knowing becomes irritating in its own right, and before I know it that nagging question has turned into something I absolutely HAVE to understand.
The funny thing is, I love this bit too. My brain loves joining dots. It loves understanding how something works, where it came from, what connects to what and why nobody else seems to be nearly as bothered by the missing piece as I am. Every answer just throws up another question, so rather than feeling like I’m done, my brain decides we’re clearly nowhere near finished yet.
If anyone ever got hold of my search history, I’m not sure they’d know whether I was running a business, writing a dissertation or having some sort of very specific breakdown. Business strategy, autism, some obscure medical term, Canva fonts, an actor I vaguely remember from 1997, whether octopuses dream. Good luck making sense of any of that.
And this is where calling hyperfocus “being really focused” doesn’t quite cut it for me. Sometimes getting into it isn’t the problem at all. Getting back out again is. Once my brain has decided there’s still more to know, it really doesn’t want to move on, and if there’s one unanswered question still dangling in front of me, good luck getting me to care about anything else in that moment. Including whether I need to pee!
My body would like a word
By this point, my brain may be having the time of its life, but my body is starting to make its feelings known. Hyperfocus is remarkably good at turning bodily signals into background noise. Hunger becomes something I’ll deal with “in a minute”, the tea I made hours ago is still sitting untouched, and apparently sitting in exactly the same position for several hours is absolutely fine.
I know I should get up; I know I need food, and my body has been trying to get my attention for quite some time. But when the ideas are flowing and my brain is properly engaged, stopping feels much harder than carrying on.
And sometimes the real cost doesn’t arrive until afterwards. I can finish the day feeling pretty pleased with everything I’ve achieved, only to discover the next morning that I’ve completely emptied the tank. Suddenly yesterday’s glorious productivity looks slightly less impressive when today’s brain has put up the shutters and refused to take visitors.
That’s the bit I’m learning to factor in more now. A productive day isn’t automatically a good day just because I got loads done. If I’ve ignored every signal my body sent me and borrowed all of tomorrow’s energy to do it, that probably needs to go somewhere in the calculations too.
Not everything that grabs us is good for us
And this is where hyperfocus gets even more complicated, because it doesn’t only attach itself to things that are useful, creative or fun. My brain doesn’t seem to have any kind of vetting process for this. Something grabs it, and suddenly it’s all in.
Sometimes that’s a new hobby or business idea. Sometimes it’s a TV series, a game, a person, a problem I can’t leave alone or something I’ve already researched far beyond the point where any more information is actually useful. And sometimes it’s a worry. My brain can be every bit as determined to “solve” something upsetting as it is to understand something fascinating, which is much less enjoyable.
I think that’s worth saying because hyperfocus is often talked about as though it’s always attached to enthusiasm. It isn’t. Intense focus can land on things that drain us, upset us or keep us stuck just as easily as it can land on something brilliant.
I don’t want to make hyperfocus the villain either. Some of the things my brain has latched onto over the years have brought me enormous amounts of joy, knowledge and opportunity. But I’m learning that how strongly something has grabbed my attention isn’t the same thing as how much of my time or energy it deserves.
And, annoyingly, that means Adult Hannah occasionally has to step in and ruin everyone’s fun.
Do I follow it or do I drag myself away?
After all of that, you might assume I’ve decided I need to get much better at shutting these things down. Spot the tangent, resist the urge and march myself firmly back towards whatever sensible thing I was supposed to be doing. Except I don’t really want to do that either.
I’ve spent enough of my life trying to make my brain behave itself, and some of the best things I’ve done have come from letting it wander off and seeing where it goes. Businesses, ideas, friendships, opportunities and huge amounts of knowledge have started with a shiny thing catching my attention that wasn’t remotely part of the plan. My career makes more sense if you look at it as a series of things I found interesting rather than anything resembling a carefully thought-out career path.
I wrote about this in Following the Dopamine, because I’m actually learning to trust those instincts more these days. If something lights my brain up, I don’t automatically want to squash it because Outlook says I should be doing something else. Sometimes the squirrel is worth chasing! It might lead absolutely nowhere, obviously, but equally it might lead somewhere I would never have found by sticking to the safety of the path.
So I’m trying to get better at working out when to follow it and when to pull myself away. Do I need to know this now, or could I come back to it? Am I still enjoying myself, or have I reached the point where I don’t actually want to carry on but can’t seem to stop? And perhaps most importantly, what am I not doing while I’m doing this?
I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I write the thing down so I can come back to it later. Sometimes I give myself a bit longer because I’m enjoying myself and frankly the other stuff can wait. And sometimes Adult Hannah has to physically close the laptop and remind everyone involved that we haven’t eaten lunch yet.
It’s less about putting my brain on a lead and more about occasionally reminding it that there are other people on the walk.
Interesting isn’t the same as important
But trusting what interests me doesn’t mean I have to obey every single thing that catches my attention. My brain is perfectly entitled to become fascinated by something without me immediately clearing the rest of Tuesday for it.
And I think that’s the balance I’m getting better at. I’m probably never going to have complete control over what grabs my attention, and actually I’m not sure I’d want it. Part of the joy of my brain is that I genuinely don’t always know where it’s going to take me next.
What I do have a bit more control over is what happens once we get there.
I may not get to choose what my brain finds interesting. But I’m getting much better at choosing how much of myself I give to it.
Procrastination, Flow State and HYPERFOCUS
So… blog on procrastination, flow state and hyperfocus… AND GO!
Just start Stuart…
Yep, it’s not that simple though is it brain?
No but you gotta do it, the deadline and all… Hannah will be disappointed.
Yeah, I know, exactly, so why won’t you just get started then, BRAIN?
Brain will not be told what to do, brain is brain, brain decides what brain does. You shut up ego. Brain in charge.
Arghhh. Just get on with it, I have consumed enough caffeine to power a 90s rave, just get the frig on with wording and typing.
::silence::
::silence continues::
::more silence::
::except it’s not ‘silence’ though is it?::
::It’s the bin lorry reversing, it’s the birds outside the door, it’s the couple screeching their true love vows at ear piercing volume, it’s the twat of a dog that just will not stop asking where the owner is because object permanence is not a thing for it, BARK BARK BARK… BLEEP FUCKING BLEEP. YEELL YELL YELL.::
And breathe….
When your brain decides that leaves rustling in the breeze is reason enough to stop focusing and forget what it was thinking about one minute and then three hours later we arise from our miasma and realise that hyperfocus got us again.
We’re gonna take a look at procrastination, flow and hyperfocus, maybe. If this brain cooperates and gets going. It’s been a hard three weeks recently and the heat has not played well with my productivity.
It’s not an unreasonable ask, one might think, to say to another functional grown adult, “Hey, could you take this task and do it?”
And, that other functional grown adult says “Yeah. I can do it. I will do it tomorrow.”
24hrs later…
“That thing you wanted me to do. I did it. Here.”
“Thank you functional grown adult, I truly appreciate you doing what you said you would do when you said you would do it.”
“That’s OK. Would you like to get coffee sometime? Just two professionals interested in the thing we did…”
“No.”
::awkward silence::
End scene.
Just because you have a deep wellspring of ideas, ready to give you all the good stuff, doesn’t mean it turns up when YOU want it to. We’ve documented this throughout the Oddcast, energy is patchy and can be unreliable, which translates to a lot of panic when deadlines loom. Like this blog!
But what does any of that actually mean Stuart?
Good question, thanks brain!
Well it makes for focusing on a topic quite challenging; when you’re an intellectual omnivore you feast on all the trivia, nommity nom. You want, no sorry, you NEED all of the details and have questions. And this is for EVERYTHING!
Not only is your brain coming up with all its own stuff, it also has millions of questions at any time, it is truly exhausting. So getting started is more like whack-a-mole, where you hope that one of the moles turns out to be the blog you wanted to write.
So you have all that just to get going and then you have to shut all the noise out, quieten it all down, and focus like a “LAY-ZERRR” (10 points if you did the Dr. Evil voice in your head 100 points if you did the little finger too).
Getting started might be a whole load of circling the landing strip before you tentatively try to touch down and get the work started. Procrastination can look like many things, but for ND brains it can be procrastination against your will. Your brain just refuses to settle down and get on with it, a myriad of competing actions, thoughts and demands all crashing in and demanding attention.
If you’re lucky you have a series of cues and triggers which help you forget the world at large and get into the work you want to start.
Ideally, as all the “one size fits all” self-help and business literature holds up the ideal productivity goal is to get into “flow state”, or “flow”, which the dictionary describes as:
A mental condition of complete absorption in an activity, marked by focused attention, diminished self-consciousness, and an altered sense of time,
Flow is often held up as the perfect state for achieving productivity, where you are “in the zone” or “locked in” and you are attuned to the work. First coined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, in his 1975 book ‘Beyond Boredom and Anxiety’
The concept has been widely adopted across a variety of fields and denotes absorption in one’s work. Named because, during Csíkszentmihályi’s interviews with chess players, dancers, artists, and athletes, the metaphor of a water current carrying them along, or flow of thoughts was used by several people to describe a state of function with moderate levels of psychological arousal, where you are unlikely to be overwhelmed by the work, but also not understimulated and bored.
But do not confuse flow with hyperfocus, they are not the same.
To use the water metaphor, flow is like being in a rubber ring, floating down a lazy river, maybe with a cool beverage in one hand and chilled vibes floating on the breeze.
And if that were possible in your ND brain then life would be all cake and candles, kumbiyah at sunset and a never ending hugathon (unlikely!). But here’s the inside skinny…
It’s a raging chaos, fire hydrant of ideas, with thoughts and actions cascading over each other. If flow is a day out to “Float Town”, hyperfocus is a ride down a white water rapids of ideas propelling you towards the waterfall of desperation and deadlines. A mind full of synaptic murmurations, diving and veering off, tangents meeting side quests, which in a Newton’s Cradle of ideas thwacks the next shiny ball into view for you to chase in a dopamine, sensory rush that never wants to end.
All of this is pointed at the object of your obsession, your hobby, or current special interest, a deep dive that seems to be endless, and the deeper you go the more you need to know, do or see. It can span multiple sessions too, where you snap out. Maybe you finally listen to your bladder, or your hunger. You peel your eyes off the object of your desire at that time but the itch is not scratched.
And that’s where flow state stops being flow state and starts to develop into something a little more hard-core-you-know-the-score. Where your flow state focus alights on a sweet spot, something you are really feeling, and then brain bends time and warps space and you are in a hyper-bubble.
You may even sleep, awake and find yourself unable to think about anything other than what it is you are focusing on. Eventually it ends, or diminishes enough for real-life to crash in and the light that burns twice as bright, lasts half as long.
And the neurodivergent brain burns so very, very brightly at times, which comes at a cognitive cost, well, at least for me. And that’s an issue, if your available cognitive bandwidth is an all or nothing full-fibre firehose at the all-you-can-eat data buffet then it can be overwhelming. It can take days to recover from a 2 or 3 day hyperfocus, where you have smashed out 30+ hours of work, often to a very high quality. But with every high, comes the lows…
You also have to live with your focus being fungible, it can be with you and then slip away just when you need it because you notice some small detail on a business card on your desk and your brain decIdes that’s the off ramp and away it is gone. If you’re lucky, it’s a pretty easy detour to navigate and you can get back on the freeway to hyperfocus town.
Literally time stops and others cease to be, you cease to be, you are nothing but the task in hand and the moment you are in, this is what buddhists train for their whole lives, it’s less about achieving and more about sustaining this beautiful feeling of freedom.
Your focus is narrowed to a sharp and very clear point, you’re aware of everything but nothing matters as your hearing, and eyes, brain and self melds into this one creature just doing their thing.
It’s a beautiful thing, right up until it’s not, and then you start to realise that things might be not right in the “body” department, and you snap out of the hyperfocus, like you de-warp and suddenly realise the control bridge is on fire and all the red shirts are dead. Plus if you do not pee like NOW… then… ooops…
Plus, call the Dr. and ask him why is my ankle in a weird position. Also, why are you pressing your foot into the floor so hard? Ouch it hurts, that’s gonna take days to stop aching.
All this because your body decides to ignore the Geneva Convention rules on interrogations and puts you into tortuous stress position for hours whilst your brain folds in on itself over and over like so much dough in an orgiastic release of dopamine and need for more. Forget you body… Brain be braining…. Nawwmmm, nawwnnnn… ahhhh it tastes really dopaminey.
Think of it like itching a particularly compelling scratch over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over until both the patch is red raw and so is your finger from all the scratching.
It’s a FIREHOSE. Absolute ruddy non-stop and you have to wrestle it to point in the right direction and hold it there for however long it is needed. It can be exhausting.
The hyperfocus is not something that can be summoned, it’s a flighty creature, some might call it by the familiar, “muse”, or the more prosaic “inspiration”. But it is attracted by certain rituals and spaces, provokers of state, and suggestors of the possible. Also the hyperfocus may literally have zero to do with the work you HAVE to do. Your brain bolts and you’re on a wild ride until it stops. Destination unknown.
There are definitely factors that will prevent a hyperfocus, tiredness, hunger, illness, cold, distractions, both physical and emotional, but it’s not guaranteed. All of this can mean that simply being hungry and a bit tired, maybe even a bit dehydrated, can prevent you hitting the big red hyper-warp access button. But may also contribute to the after effects, if you go in unrested, out of sorts or mentally already a bit spent, the end result can be very exhausting.
Hyperfocus is a superpower, like King Midas’ golden touch, sounds great until you realise the implications of such abilities, gives a whole new meaning to “polishing your (k)nob”. Two major hyperfocus sessions back to back is brutal, and I want to just lie down all the time.
Do not read this and think you can summon focus at will, you can’t, but you might plant some seeds and see early signs, and then get going and hope it all falls into place. The getting going is the hard bit, like the start of this entire piece. You might find a few sparks and fan them into a roaring flame. Your hope is the flame doesn’t turn into a forest fire that wipes out large swathes of your cognitive landscape.
It is a balancing act, can be dictated by circumstances beyond your control and when it hits you can be all consuming, but it is certainly not delivered at will. You have no control over it, or at least I have no control over it, when it lands, like an unwelcome visitor you have no idea when that will be or what time, including the 3am waking and need to write down the ideas.
However, there’s been lots of thinky on this piece, which means I have to go eaty/drinky and brain has to go rest.
If any of this has felt familiar then why not listen to an episode?
Or take our NeuroInclusive Workplace audit, to see how neuroinclusive your workplace is. You can then see how to make your environment more productive whether you are a solo-preneur or multi person team.
If you have any questions get in touch!
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.
Handbook for the Recently Diagnosed
We’re currently writing a “Handbook for the Recently Diagnosed” – a sort of primer, provided day one, that explains the practical, lived realities of neurodivergence.
A lot of commentary, narrative thrust and general focus in neurodivergence and particularly autism circles, is to define, delineate and describe what‘s going on, we do like definitives after all. But, and I must admit my research is probably flawed, but, there’s little I have read, seen or gleaned online that looks at the practical realities of living, learning, earning and, well, life in general getting by with a brain that is a wild stallion at a petting zoo on good days. On bad ones, that beast has broken out the paddock and is doing doughnuts in an Asda car park at 2am… Story for another time perhaps.
There’s various testimonies and lived experiences but mostly it’s a lot of frustrations, venting, self-therapising, and lived experience, but not a comprehensive “if this, try this” a kinda Sam Costa’s top tips for living day-to-day with a recalcitrant and magnificent brain.
The thing is, that however you arrive at “Destination Diagnosis”, either self-realisation or formal assessment, the lived reality of what your brain and nervous system IS, allows you to start building a better life. HOW you arrive is of no importance, THAT you realise who and what you are, that’s massive.
And yet…
Once you’re dropped off at “Destination Diagnosis” that’s it, there’s no one to meet you at the pick up point, yer on yer own, make us proud kid! There’s no courtesy bus, no welcome wagon, no taxi. There’s not even a signal, wifi or vandalised phone box to sob in.
The support post diagnosis is, at best, woeful. You may get some links and a leaflet, I share exactly what I got later in this post. Whatever your thoughts on support, just think about the lived experience of the person living for 30+ years and then getting told; yeah, all those “things”, yeah, you’re Autistic. That part in the movie where the plot twist gets revealed and just like that, ::insert wind blowing noise:: Keyser Söze has left the building, and you no longer know who you are.
Is Anything Real?
Once passed the initial head trip “If I am not who I thought I am, then is anything real?”
You then turn to “What’s me? What’s the autism?” Erm… So if you are not who you thought you are why continue doing all the things you do? Are those things things YOU really like, or were they performative and for show, just to “fit in”? You do this high wire act alone, thankfully I had a very supportive partner and family, mostly because I HAD built a life the way that worked for “me”, and in fact “US”!
So, you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile thinking, this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife. HOW DID I GET HERE? And suddenly those lyrics take on a whole new dimension. Hat-Tip to awesome autist David Byrne and further extended hat tip to Tina Weymouth bass boss, and the rest of Talking Heads for that matter.
As Hughie Green might say, “and I mean that most sincerely folks!”
Who’s Hughie Green? Then you have clearly never seen the magnificent TV series Opportunity Knocks, a proto BGT where Hughie held court and I thrilled at the chance to one day be on the tellybox with my impersonations.
It Was There – Day One
The child who would mimic everyone, spend hours walking round the garden having conversations, making up all the voices from the faces on the telly. A rich inner world that span on an axis that I controlled, much better than the world I saw outside my head.
That world proved to me over and over, from school, clubs, training and workplaces that if you do not fit the model of human they expect, you’re instantly the issue, the weirdo, the “difficult one”. Or the medical establishment tries to “fix” you, or at the very least ensure you’re not a problem for the rest of gen. pop.
This is why, now more than ever, we need to build a neuroinclusive workplace, in fact we need a neuroinclusive society. The benefits would be to EVERYONE not just the NDs suffering daily to be heard, seen and taken seriously. Ease of communication, understanding of different styles and approaches would help all of us, whatever our neurotype.
::Stuart steps off ADHD Tangent Soapbox::
Back to the plot…
When we last check in our hero was raging at the lack of support post-diagnosis…
Let me share with you the full extent of the support that you get once you have a formal diagnosis.
At the point of formal diagnosis, a process which, for many people is both frustratingly long, offering you a lengthy wait or a big bill as your choice, before sitting in front of assessors and finally getting granted a certificate to put on your wall. (Spoiler Alert: there’s no certificate!)
Before you get that “prize” there’s a tortuous and exhausting process to go through, with questionnaires, appointment chasing and interviews all whilst hoping your executive function does all the right things at the right time – I nearly blew it because I missed a crucial step in one email and failed to fill one part of a form.
This process comes after many months/years of research into every aspect of neurodivergence as you wait, the doubt gnawing at you. The entire process is not built with ND brains in mind. The energy required, the executive functioning required, the focus and the FORMS! DAMN YOU FORMS!!! ::runs outside, shakes fist at sky::
The endless, frustrating questions, where you mostly want to answer “IT FRICKIN’ DEPENDS!”… Can I wear socks, well, yes, I CAN wear them. Do I want to wear them? IT DEPENDS? Also, what sort of socks are we talking about? My socks, socks that I have been handed that are warm/wet/white? A lengthy woollen hose or a short sports sock? C’MON PEOPLE, I NEED DETAILS!
Whilst you wait for this process to reach destination diagnosis, you deep dive into the entire back history of, and any topic associated or tangentially related to, neurodiversity and consider possibly doing a PHD in it. (deep breath)
Finally…
after doubting yourself and thinking you will be charged with wasting the NHS’s time, you get formally diagnosed. Apparently no, it is not normal for people who are not “on the spectrum” to spend 2 years and countless hours and money on trying to disprove that you are indeed “a bit special”. But at age 56 I was running out of things that it might be!
I once even considered the notion I was a psychopath – just because it might then offer me some respite to this one question “WHY AM I SO DIFFERENT?”
But whatever your pathway to finding out the reality of the situation, as a late diagnosed adult I want to share everything you get given and all of the facilities, funding and general underlying support you get at the point of diagnosis.
So… Are you Ready? Are you Steady? Is your name Eddie? (My Mum said this all the time… Hello if you ARE indeed an Eddie, welcome!)
Here’s the full package of support that you get…
DRUM ROLL…. brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr
You get an email with your full written report, which contains an assessment of every dimension in which your brain is broken, different and generally odd, all couched in medical terms that make you sound unhinged.
BUT WAIT… YOU ALSO GET…
A link to a page of resources!
AND THE CROWD GOES WILD…
“I’d like to thank my wife, my children, my good friend Hannah Logan…”
That’s it. You get a list of all the ways you are broken, deficient, and different, and some “Post-assessment resources“. The biggest of big woops.
“We’ve prepared some helpful guides to support you following your assessment.” enthuses the email…
NOTE - Hi - Editor Stu here it's 10 July 2026, just checked the diagnosis notification email received Sept 2025, 312 days and the link to those resources is broken, not even a full year. No post-diagnosis follow up, no counselling, or trauma support, pushed in the deep end, good luck. Well, I guess up to now I’ve survived, oh well keep treading water Stu.
The point is
…there’s absolutely no support directly after diagnosis. You’re just left to figure it out, and as someone very late diagnosed, I kinda been doing that since I was born, so, well I guess I just push on with the “cope and hope” strategy, seems to have worked (mostly) thus far.
“WHAT ABOUT ACCESS TO WORK THEN?”
You are right Sandra*, there is Access to Work – https://www.gov.uk/access-to-work – this is what the Gov. says about eligibility, “You must have a disability, illness or health condition that means you need support to do your job.” – Which is helpful, and genuinely could be of use if you need it, but I was not told about this and found out whilst doing some additional research for an Oddcast. But that’s the point, no one told me about it, I stumbled on it when looking for something else entirely!
*humble apologies to anyone with that moniker, including the lovely people I actually know, but it made me laff, I always hear it in a Birmingham, Midland, Black Country accent…
“WHAT ABOUT PIP?”
Yes, thank you Sandra, (you heard it in that accent then too, right?) you could also apply for a “Personal Independence Payment” (PIP) https://www.gov.uk/pip – but after two years waiting for diagnosis and having every part of your life poked and reviewed to see if, yes, he’s an “odd ‘un“, last thing you want is to dive into a whole other world of form filling and further means tested scrutiny.
And the horror stories I have heard first hand from friends who’ve applied and have been through, and still enduring, the process. It doesn’t sound like a fun time. I am not good with this type of bureaucracy, so best for them I do not go anywhere near it.
But that got me thinking… and one thing my brain does do well is solve problems, often at 3am, but timing is not my strong suit.
I’ve always loved Beetlejuice,
The movie with Michael Keaton, a young Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davies, Catherine O’Hara – loved it since I saw it back in the eighties. My kids introduced me to the musical, which has recently landed in London and a family trip is planned. My daughter’s already seen it 4 times, it’s only been open for about a month! SPECIAL INTEREST much?
If you have yet to witness this marvellous film/musical, there’s a guide given to the newly-dead titled “Handbook for the Recently Deceased“, and so we arrive at the “Handbook for the Recently Diagnosed“, a not altogether original title as a quick Google will reveal, and it’s just the working title – more a sub-header, title page kinda thing.
Because, quite frankly, there needs to be something more concrete than “here’s a few links and some government support, that we won’t tell you about”, because quite frankly it’s disorientating to be told you’re not who you think you are. I spent so much time at odds with the world, out of step, misunderstood and struggling and now you tell me why!
It’s all a bit of a confusing time, and you have to start to reconsider so, so much about every aspect of your life. Having lived my own life since my mid twenties, and just got on with ploughing my own furrow, I had fewer barriers to employment than most, but it is still a disorientating time.
Waaaay before diagnosis
Aged 25 suffering a major burnout/breakdown/life flatline I just decided that I was going to stop listening to everyone else, they just seemed to not get, understand or otherwise process that my experience of the world was not the same as theirs. Their advice and guidance, may have been well meaning, and with a genuine interest in my best interest and good outcomes, but that didn’t make it any less wrong.
I’d spent 2.5 decades on the planet without knowing the reason, or having a “label” to help shape my perception and give me language to help me gain a full understanding of why I seemed to be out of step with everyone around me.
So I just opted out and started to forgive myself for being “odd” and not really being able to explain it. Various Dr’s attempted, psychotherapist, sleep experts, cognitive assessments and diagnosis from bipolar, and hypermania, via insomnia, and OCD and a whole cast and crew of ideas, symptoms and pharmacology all with added migraines! Which keeps you eternally hopeful that at some point you might find some semblance of “nOrMaL“. Whatever that might look like, but like most things in life you’d know what works for you when you see it.
Three decades-plus later
and I have realised that the decision I made aged 25 was the start of it all. The self-acceptance that I was not broken, just different, magnificently fanatabulously awesome. I often thought I was an alien on a mission to gather as much knowledge as I could about humans, and studied them intently, fascinating creatures.
Hence my childhood mimicry mentioned at the start, which led to a career in stand-up and lookalike/impersonations because I followed my own intuition and backed myself. Everyone else’s feedback was along the lines of “REALLY? An Ali G lookalike? Nah.“, but I just knew I could do it, it wasn’t something scary to run away from, but something big and shiny to run towards.
I remember one specific gig, where I was a surprise guest, to give my wife a toast for her birthday, as Ali. The host/main act was sceptical, and openly so, when I told him what I was going to do. Anyway, afterwards he stated “you were amazing” and enthused that I was so much better than he’d thought I might be. And that’s the whole point, that you get underestimated, second-guessed and otherwise diminished. Yet, here we are 32 yrs later and I am still pursuing my shiny, sparkly, rainbow interests, dancing like everyone’s looking and knowing I make a positive difference to my community.
The one decision that changed everything
Deciding that rather than going to beg, like Oliver for a second bowl of gruel to fill me up, that I’d just start building a life that required nothing from anyone and I could make all the accommodations myself.
Why wait for permission to be magnificent?
Remarkable and extraordinary doesn’t look at the clock and wait until 9am on Monday to turn up in a suit. If my energy and passion arrive in a shipping container at 3am, then you betcha bippy I am going to be working, living and loving the project whenever my energy arrives.
In some regards it was a selfish decision (Insert Hannah – “a Necessary one!“), but I decided to put on my own oxygen mask first, you cannot do your best if you do not give yourself the best.
Nothing from anyone
As a policy it only gets you so far, but I needed to withdraw from the toxic people around me to gain some perspective. I saw that actually, you need a community around you, you need others to help you see things you can’t and help you with the things you need help with. A family (whoever you call family!) is the first layer, then good friends who really understand you and have your best interests at heart also adds further protection. Expect false starts, and family members it’s best not to mingle with. Then you find your “community” or “tribe”, which adds strength in numbers, and validation.
This gives you space to figure out who you are and be accepted, and that’s all any of us are trying to do, get through a day, be understood, accepted for who we are and be valued for our whole self, not just the convenient bits, or the socially acceptable bits, but the whole of you.
It’ll share a lot of what we’re delivering with the Neuroinclusive Workplace giving practical steps you can take at work, home and everywhere you go, once you know what is actually going on in that amazing brain and nervous system of yours, an Owners Manual. It’s some thoughts, ideas and suggestions, allowing you to kind to yourself. Not a proscriptive list of tasks or must-dos, frankly that kind of book gives me the right itch.
This is more a pick it up and flick to the section that you most need to read at that time. Bit like a car maintenance manual, it’s the engineer in me, I do like a manual, the oilier the better!
There’s a long way to go, and we have yet to complete the first draft, or collate the research, but the plan is in place and like any worthwhile journey it’s going to take some time to get it completed.
But once it is ready – we’ll share it!
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
If you have any specific topic or other question that arose once you found out or were diagnosed as being neurodivergent, get in touch.
We would love to hear any insights or thoughts you had, or areas that you still are not sure about. We would love to hear from you and include your questions, or suggestions in the book.
Get in touch hosts@businessoddcast.com and keep your eye out for Neuroinclusive Workplace resources being added to the site. Sign up using the form below and join the mailing list for notification of everything Oddcast!
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.