I Have a Brain Science Degree and I Wasn’t Listening to My Own Brain
This is a public service announcement, and the person who most needs to hear it is me.
I was just over thirty when my husband sent me an article about ADHD in women, because he’d been reading up on it and thought I might find it interesting. I read it and went, ‘oh, this is describing me’. I have a degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT, and I’d spent all that time without ever thinking that I might be the one with the different brain.
Women tend to get diagnosed years later than men, even though our symptoms show up at the same age, and I’m a pretty good example of why. ADHD looks fundamentally different in women than in men, so a lot of us just don’t get diagnosed. I’ve had ADHD my whole life. I grew up high-performing and high-achieving, I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I didn’t fit in well, but I’d built up enough coping skills to get by. It was after having my son that those coping skills stopped working as well, and it turns out hormonal changes can exacerbate ADHD. As I dug into understanding ADHD and neurodiversity, I finally realized that a lot of what I thought was normal just wasn’t everyone’s experience.
What really diving into it over the last few years has done is make me feel like there isn’t something wrong with me. My brain is my brain, and it’s an awesome brain, and it’s a different brain, and that’s okay.
What Masking Costs
Masking is showing up as who you think people need you to be instead of as yourself, and I did it for a very long time before I knew it had a name. I will forever spend every one-on-one tracking eye contact and figuring out how I need to position my arms and whether I’m making appropriate levels of it, so I’m not claiming I’ve stopped.
But I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable accommodating myself in ways people can see. I’ll wear a blankety sweater that I’m comfortable in and that meets my sensory needs, or clip-on earbuds so I can walk around the office and meet my auditory needs a little less obviously. I’ll put my legs up on my chair, or sometimes sit on the floor in my office, because sitting in an office chair all day doesn’t always work for me and neither does standing at my desk. That’s just how my body works, and having something soft makes me feel safe.
Showing up and being professional is great, but being productive at the level I need to be, and being authentic and vulnerable in a way that establishes psychological safety for the folks I work with, means masking a lot less. You’re going to be more helpful being who you are than trying to be someone you think everyone else wants you to be.
That doesn’t mean throwing out every social norm, and it’s definitely not an excuse to be a jerk. Honestly, this is the boundary I’m still struggling with, because some social niceties are pretty arbitrary, and some folks just don’t have the ability to follow them. Where I’ve landed for now is that it goes both ways. We should all try, and we should also try to assume best intentions in each other. Tone doesn’t translate well in writing, not everyone approaches things the same way, and we don’t know what someone is going through behind the scenes, nor are they required to tell us.
Two Ways I Run Out
There are two different ways I run myself down, and I think they’ll land differently depending on your brain.
The first one could apply to anybody. I’m booked in meetings nine to five and then working after that, and I have medical needs that mean I have to space things out through the day, drink a certain amount of water, and eat on a schedule. When you’re in meetings back to back to back, especially one-on-ones where you’re engaged and going, it is very hard to pause and track and remember any of that. Have I had enough water today? Have I stopped for a bio break in the last few hours, and when exactly am I going to do that?
The other part is the hyper-focus, particularly when I’m passionate about something. What that has looked like for me is getting into it late at night, not being able to turn it off, not realizing how late it is, and then not getting enough sleep. Being a mom adds to that, because the hyper-focus can’t even start until my son is asleep, and sometimes I’m working in the chair in his room while he falls asleep. So the window where my brain finally gets going is the same window I should be winding down in. The hard part is stopping to recognize that, and actually thinking about the trade-offs.
Guardrails for the Human
We talk a lot about setting guardrails on our AI, and we need to apply the same principle to ourselves. That goes double if your brain’s default is, hey, I have this, I’m going to run with it, and I want to get it right. So what habits or tools can you set up to make this work? I have six so far, and they’re all up and running.
The first one is my office. I’ve been turning it into a bit of a sanctuary for myself, somewhere I don’t have to mask as much. It’s still professional, but I’ve turned down the overhead lights and added natural light lamps, put in a rug and a fake tree and a gentle reed diffuser, and a glass vase of fake eucalyptus so it feels green without me having to maintain anything. I’ve put fidgets out on the table for one-on-ones, magnet tiles and Legos, so that if somebody needs to fidget they can just be themselves. Nobody has taken me up on it yet, but they’re there. I also got a clock, though the batteries have totally never made it in. In one-on-ones it is very easy to lose track of time, and once it’s running, having a clock I can see without being rude and looking at my watch means I can engage more in the conversation and worry less about the time, instead of bouncing from meeting to meeting perpetually late for the entire day, which I have definitely done.
Making my office nicer and friendlier has made my one-on-ones better, and it’s made my work better.
The second one I borrowed from my son’s school. They have a box where the kids put conflicts and issues they couldn’t resolve on their own, and they talk through them during community meetings at a set time. I took that pattern and turned it into a wrap-up for the night, where I time-box ten or fifteen minutes to brain dump everything out of my head. Then I book another ten or fifteen minutes the next day to triage it, and maybe do some problem solving, so I can start the day with a little dopamine hit from the low-hanging fruit instead of starting in on it at night and letting it spiral.
The third one is a guardrail in my AI for work. If I’m still going past a certain time, say eleven at night, it checks my work: is this actually due tomorrow, and if it is, what’s the MVP I have to get done? If it isn’t, we pause it, block time on the calendar for tomorrow, and wrap up for the night. It took some tweaking, but on the nights I didn’t absolutely need to get work done, it’s really helped. I ended up doing meditation before bed instead, and got a much better night of sleep.
My AI at work also keeps a microbreak tracker, so the water and the bio breaks and eating on schedule don’t get lost when I’m in meetings back to back to back. And it keeps a wins tracker, which is literally a virtual sticker book. Every win gets a sticker, and it doesn’t have to be a work win. It can be a me win, like taking a quick break to refill my water, actually getting that bio break, or walking for a few minutes. It’s cute and adorable, and on a hard day it’s a great pick-me-up.
The last one is a ripple tracker. Where is my work having an impact? Are the ideas I’m having and communicating breaking through? A lot of my job is the abstract side, trying to change mental frameworks and thought patterns, and it’s really hard to know if that’s working. It’s really easy to self-doubt. Having a ripple tracker means I can see the impact each day, and get some reinforcement that the mindset shifts are actually happening.
And all of them together have made me more productive.
Slow Down to Deliver
We’re coming up on peak and the end of the year, everybody’s in crunch mode, and everybody’s trying to hit their goals. If you’re feeling guilty that you can’t get everything done, remember that more, better, faster is a triangle of trade-offs, and you can’t do everything. If you do more faster, it isn’t going to be better and you’re going to have errors. Taking care of yourself is beneficial to everyone around you, not just you, so slow down and get enough sleep, because that’s how you deliver quality.
A coworker said something to me a couple of weeks ago about folks being overdiagnosed with neurodivergence. I can’t prove that one way or another. What I can say is that even if someone doesn’t outwardly need support, understanding your own brain and how it works and how it compares to others, and what your hidden superpowers might be, is extremely helpful and validating, and it lets you hack your brain to help yourself and your team.
Something brilliant I heard recently is that a diagnosis can classify the what. What behaviors do you show? But the right diagnosis tells us the why, and the why is what lets us turn these into superpowers and figure out what people actually need. I hate when diagnosis gets framed as a crutch. It isn’t one. It’s helping you understand yourself, so you can learn how to best maintain and “debug” yourself when you need to.
I’ve been learning that my brain’s superpower is pattern matching, and at the same time learning how hard it is for me to get out of hyper-focus and fixation. Everyone’s brain has different superpowers and weaknesses, like Superman and his kryptonite, and you don’t get a superpower without a weakness.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Go drink some water.
Obligatory Note: All thoughts, opinions, and experiences are my own, and do not reflect the opinions or stance of my employer.
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