🔥 Rewiring Out Of Neurodivergent Burnout 🔥
How Internalised Capitalist Ideology Fuels Burnout (and How to Break the Cycle)
Welcome!! We are so excited for you to join us on this conversation on how to rewire and start again when you are in neurodivergent burnout. This series is a collaboration between Dr. Camilla Pang, scientist, author, and neurodivergent advocate, and Nicole Vignola, neuroscientist and researcher. Together, we’re exploring burnout not just as personal exhaustion, but as a systemic and neurological phenomenon—shaped by internalised ideology, self-talk, and the way our brains process uncertainty, pressure, and identity. Each piece in this series blends lived experience, scientific insight, and cultural critique, offering new ways to understand—and hopefully break—the cycles that lead to burnout.
Our focus is especially on neurodivergent minds, and how rewiring in burnout can help us move from survival mode back into creativity, agency, and self-trust.
🔥 Burnout Series: Why We are Writing This
Burnout isn’t always a sudden collapse. For many neurodivergent people, it’s a constant undercurrent 🍃 —a slow erosion caused by data overload, unmet expectations, and the pressure to people-please multiple conflicting ideals.
Burnout is often framed as the inevitable byproduct of working too hard—but as an AuDHD burnout survivor, I’ve come to see it differently. For me, burnout is how an orchestra of self-talk 🎷 becomes a hostile witness 😡, which, when you are neurodivergent is a constant circus act. It is when your inner dialogue is no longer a conversation, but a courtroom with your hands tied. When every feeling, preference, and moment of rest demands evidence - proof that you’ve earned the right to exist exactly as you are, and on bad days to even eat. Being different can make you feel like a mistake. To exist you need cold, hard data to tell you so, to prove your worth. Burnout, much like this data-centric ideology we all live in; internet cookies 🍪 , google predictions, amazon recommendations 📚, KPIs, the whole lot of ‘how to be great at this’, and ‘get ahead in 2025’, gives us nothing other than helplessness and let’s face it, dread.
The VOID. 🙃
The abyss. 🙃🙃🙃
It seems like the very thing that we need to get out of our own heads ends up working against us. Which isn’t ideal.
🔥 Burnout, Brains & the Stories We Tell Ourselves 🔥
The usual tips for getting out of burnout are seem to assume it’s a temporary experience neurotypicals vacate in. 🏝️But for someone who is neurodiverse, burnout becomes part of the furniture. 🪑 When you already feel like you are a risk, every stake and detail is magnified, you find yourself spinning at various speeds of thought that don’t quite land with you not knowing why 🛬.
This series is my attempt to map that terrain: how internalised capitalism shows up in self-talk (inspired by
’s article), how perfectionism and hyper-rationalisation fuel the cycle, and what happens when your brain learns to distrust its own instincts. I am very excited to be collaborating with an incredible neuroscientist, and all round great person, Nicole Vignola, on how to do just this.How can we use her lessons from ‘REWIRE’ in a neurodivergent context.
This piece focuses on ideology in the form of self-talk - how the grind of justification becomes a trap, especially for neurodivergent folks like me. It’s personal, it’s analytical, and it’s an invitation to notice the voice inside your own head—and whose values it’s actually speaking with.
The Maze of Maybe: When Self-Talk Becomes a Capitalist Audit ☑️
So let’s dig into this self talk/running audit ⏳, which tells you every time you feel hope that you are an imposter (when you already got the goods). First off, burnout can trick and fool you into believing it’s true. That’s why it gets quite spicy, because it isn’t just a ‘down patch for the snowflake generation’ (that’s an example of one of the voices, there) but a twisted rewiring of faith in everything. Every thought, action, and preference gets filtered through this internal accountant, measuring your worth not by how you feel, but by how justifiable your feelings are in the language of traditional utility.
This is what Sumit Paul-Choudhury calls the tyranny of hyper-rationalisation in The Bright Side: the demand for logic in places where logic doesn’t belong, a craving for certainty that leaves no room for optimism or for anything to happen. So if hyper-rationality can’t get us out of burnout and in the optimism chair (sorry coders), then what will?
Where do we need to start rewiring if it isn’t more data on where we are now and have done? It starts in the sticky place of ‘shoulds’.
When Character Traits Become Capitalist Ideals
Ages ago, I went on a date with a guy who said that his main green flag in a date’s character was ‘ambition’, to which I replied, ‘ Ambition is not a personality trait. It’s a capitalist ideal, dressed up as a virtue’, whilst sipping my appletiser. 🍸 The same is true for the features of burnout.
Capitalist Ideals
The thing is, capitalist ideals demand ongoing proof. 📊 They turn your inner world into a performance review 🧐, constantly self-surveying yourself in times of joy, which can turn the stomach of any sunny Saturday afternoon into a shame spiral. This isn’t the same as character, but it responding to a lack of room and beyond the traditional language of ‘how are you most useful’. This may sound very linkedIn, but it’s an unhealthy and unproductive voice we have been taught to live by, to punish yourself for feeling joy to coerce yourself into believing you are more ‘productive’ or ‘of value’. Knowing this difference is crucial. That’s the thing about capitalism, it likes to commodify and procure everything it touches 🛍️, as a way of telling you that ‘you are useful and therefore worthy’. Ironically, it isn’t a useful creed to live by.
Character
Whereas character, this actually became less about data and more about giving space for different responses, different ways of measuring value and letting your small but truth based instinct gather momentum when the fly’s on the wall are watching. 🪰
Maybe getting angry when things go wrong doesn’t make you a bad person, but one who is crying for help,
Maybe it’s ok to be unemployed and reset and still enjoy a Saturday,
Maybe it’s that I don’t understand how to break down tasks at work because I learn differently
Maybe, I am not ‘wrong’ if the solution doesn’t exist yet?
Emotions and character are real-time data—messy, inconvenient (because they questioin the traditional metrics of value) but are absolutely essential to how we function and live in an ecosystem of thought. Demonising them doesn’t help. It isn’t about measurement, but about space and permission to bat for another team that is more neuroinclusive and in line with your values as people (not KPI robots). One of my favourite quotes from Rich and Roxanne Pink’s book ‘Dirty Laundry’ summarises this perfectly in that ‘you can’t hate yourself into building a life you love’. We therefore need to dilute, wash and lay those voices in water like we do dishes in the kitchen sink. Just let them soak for a bit.
🧠🧠🧠 Neuroscience moment: Chronic self-monitoring, a byproduct of this internalised performance culture, doesn’t just tax your mental energy; it actively reshapes how your brain functions. The amygdala, the brain’s emotional alarm system, becomes hyper-vigilant under constant self-surveillance.🚨 It starts firing not just at actual threats but at perceived failures to meet internalised standards. For neurodivergent (ND) individuals, who often navigate the world with heightened sensitivity or unique processing styles, this constant scanning can be especially exhausting. The brain's anterior cingulate cortex, responsible for error detection, can end up stuck in a loop ➰, scanning for social missteps or moments where they "didn't perform right." Over time, this erodes emotional resilience and fosters anxiety.
What’s the way out? It’s about shifting from performance to presence and cultivating moments where the brain isn’t on high alert, where instincts can surface without being interrogated.
Character, then, isn’t about relentless striving but about the quiet, grounded responses that emerge when you're not being observed or judged, even by yourself. 🧠🧠🧠
You see, when every decision has to be evidence-based, you lose the muscle memory of simply knowing what you want.
It becomes all about the ‘shoulds’, the fly on the wall voices 🪰🪰🪰🪰—the weight of internalised capitalist narratives that break apart your reality, your ability to rest, to want, to trust your instincts.
It’s glitchy AF ⚡️, and even if it makes you feel absent, it is totally 100% there. 🫵🏽
🧠 🧠 🧠 Neuroscience moment: When you're caught in that loop of over-explaining and justifying, it’s cognitive overload in action. 🤺💥 The prefrontal cortex, the brain’s CEO for decision-making, planning, and emotional regulation, gets maxed out. It’s like running a million tabs in your head, but none of them are fully loading 🪫🪫🪫🪫. And the amygdala, the brain's alarm system, stays on high alert because it’s scanning for potential errors or threats in every decision. 🚨 This creates a feedback loop where emotions are harder to process and decisions feel riskier than they are.
For neurodivergent brains, especially autistic ones, this overload hits harder. Processing the world already requires more cognitive resources, whether that’s navigating sensory input, social cues, or executive functioning demands. Layer on chronic self-justification, and it’s like throwing fuel on an already burning, dopamine fuelled, fire. ☄️ The brain becomes so busy justifying and proving that it forgets how to simply be. And it can feel safer to stay in that loop of logic because it offers the illusion of control, but ironically, it just deepens the overload. 🕳️ 🧠🧠🧠
OK, so what can I do?
I must admit, I am not the best at taking advice from articles, partly because I am wired differently, and also because I can be stubborn and don’t like to be told what to do or what to think (hello, sweet demand avoidance!).
Traditional burnout advice often assumes you just need better time management or a positive mindset. But for those of us with time blindness 🔕, pre-existing ableist shame and demand avoidance (hi! 👋🏽) - optimism tied to rigid outcomes is a setup for disappointment.
So how do you keep on track and rewire back into your own weird and wonderful instincts? Here are our tips:
1.Voice Notes: Externalising Your Inner Chaos 🗣️
If the average person has six thoughts per minute, then neurodivergent minds often have 60 times that (this is my average) 😳—a relentless storm of ideas, half-formed sentences, and conflicting energies and voices.
Rumination isn’t always in full sentences, as Nicola has pointed out in ‘REWIRE’, and when thoughts pile up unfiltered, they become overwhelming (and also the shame spiral comes in because why aren’t these full sentences? They-need-to-be-useful-otherwise-we-wont-make sense-to-others-whose-minds-we-need-to-please!!Argh-HELP!!). You get me? 🙃
This is where voice notes help.
Much like washing clothes or dishes, you need new water (new voices, new perspectives) 💧 to help clarify what’s important and help comb and stretch these half sentences out to the light. Recording voice notes—whether to yourself, from a trusted friend, or even past recordings of yourself—creates a familiar yet distinct voice that can ground you. You need it to be:
Familiar enough to catch your attention.
Different enough to diffuse the chaos.
Podcasts don’t always help—they can amplify the noise instead of clearing it. 🗣️ I personally use VN’s I’ve sent about 15 times a day. Voices to calm my voices.
2.Use AI to Break Down Tasks & Expectations 🤖
Sometimes, the hardest part of burnout isn’t the task itself—it’s deciphering the expectations around it. When someone (a partner, manager, or friend) gives instructions, there are 10 different ways to interpret it. And if you don’t want to bombard them with 1,000 clarifying questions, AI tools can help.
Breaking down vague instructions into clearer steps. 🧱
Identifying “hidden” expectations (what people assume you already know). 🔎
Generating clarifying questions—so when you do ask, they’re targeted and useful. ❓
This isn’t about not knowing how to do something. It’s about recognising that ambiguity is exhausting when your brain naturally sees all the possible routes at once. 🌿
3.Know Your Anchors (They’re More Reliable Than Time) ⚓️
For someone with time blindness, traditional scheduling doesn’t always work. But what does? Anchors—recurring actions that orient you in time and space. Things that you need to do, my autism demands these almost every day. ⚓️
For me, anchors are:
Movement (exercise classes) for brain to FUNCTION 🏃🏽♀️
Light (sunrise/sunset cues) to make me feel real ☀️
Directing myself to helping something else (seeing a friend, walking my dog, helping someone with a task) 💜
Knowing what grounds you (even if it’s not a clock) can be the difference between barely functioning and feeling somewhat held together. It’s driven not by a clock but an internal need and every other point in time is orientated with respect to this. 🧭
The first part in rewiring isn’t ‘thinking positive’, but quite literally giving yourself permission to see it for what it is. It wont solve the abyss, but it will help position yourself and see you versus everyone else, the first part of peeling away at the shame spiral.
Relate to this article? living in the multiple voices of others? We are happy to hear them so please share your thoughts in the comments and we want to open and make space for these - you aren’t own your own. Stay tunes for more, and thanks again for reading! 🤓
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