Why you keep burning out (ADHD and autism)
Why are those of us with ADHD and Autism just so burnt out all of the time?
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
Burnout seems to be a recurring part of life when you are autistic or have ADHD and we regularly experience cycles of burnout that can be incredibly hard for us to work through. Today I’m going to look at some of the existing research in this area about why we burnout and look at some suggestions on how we can make the experience better for neurospicies in the workplace.
Today I’ll be looking primarily at two papers, one focused solely on ADHD and one on both ADHD and autism which we both published in 2022 and are based on real interviews with autistic and ADHD adults to gain an overview of our experience in the workplace. These papers are:
Stress and work-related mental illness among working adults with ADHD: a qualitative study and It’s like it is designed to keep me stressed’—Working sustainably with ADHD or autism.
Interestingly enough both papers were based out of Sweden and I’d like to say great job Sweden for investing in this kind of research because these papers were so well written with such great literature reviews and also are paying attention to the lived experience of actual autistic and ADHD people which is often missing from the academic research.
One of the things they note is that those of us with ADHD and autism do actually want to work! We are highly motivated employees (Adamou et al., 2013), and there are many advantages that our neurodivergence can bring in the workplace (Sedgwick et al., 2019) but often work is set up in a way that is unsustainable to us. (Hogstedt et al., 2022)
And actually through researching this post I had a bit of a realisation. We know that ADHDers tend to change jobs more regularly than people without ADHD (Murphy and Barkley, 2010) and I’d been mentally attributing this to the fact that we get bored easily and therefore get fed up with what we’re doing and need to switch.
We change jobs more frequently, but the un-neurodivergent friendliness of job applications and interviews is a whole separate topic of conversation.
But what the research I’m going to go through today has made me realise is that while this is still likely a reason for some job changes, it’s likely that the unsustainability of the jobs that we’re in and the regularity with which they cause us to burnout is causing many job switches as well. We don’t have a choice not to work, so we switch in the hope that the next place we end up is better.
There’s also a link between ADHD and workaholism, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a similar link between autism and workaholism, with us ADHDers often working later in the day to make up for how distracted we’ve been during the day, or our perceived underperformance or just to make up for how much we’ve struggled during the day.
What’s interesting as well is that we also have more sick days which at first seemed to me like a bit of a contradiction with the workaholism but actually I think it makes sense - we’re workaholics so we burn ourselves out and make ourselves ill, therefore needing more sick days.
I also want to take this moment to contrast with a post I made about a month back about ADHD and personality. In this post I looked at studies to do with how our personality links to our ADHD and one of the recurring outcomes was that those of us with ADHD tend to be significantly less conscientious which is often referred to as being hard-working. In this post I suggested that people with ADHD are hard working, we just don’t appear to be because our executive function challenges make us appear less conscientious. These findings around ADHD and workaholism support that claim.
In fact, in a study “The Burden of ADHD in older adults: a qualitative study.” (Michielsen et al., 2018) they found that older adults who had been later diagnosed actually were hard workers and sometimes worked too hard due to difficulties saying no.
So we’re motivated, hard-working and bring many advantages to the workplace. So why do we struggle so much there? Let’s dive into it.
Something that is helpful in both my reference papers is that they both look at some of the specific ADHD symptoms and how they interact with the workplace so we can start by breaking down these.
Our interest based attention also means we really struggle when work is boring…
Firstly, inattention symptoms can cause us to be perfectionists or struggle with procrastination. This procrastination or the amount of time it takes to complete a task perfectly can lead towards stress, a feeling of not keeping up and overwhelm. I’m again reminded of my previous post on ADHD and personality and the fact that ADHDers were found to have significantly higher neuroticism correlated with their inattention and I can absolutely see this link here.
On the impulsivity there can be a struggle with saying no and agreeing to take on too many tasks, again overwhelming us with too many things to do and causing stress. Impulsivity is also linked to emotional dysregulation. Bad workplace environments or attitudes, critical feedback and rejection can all set off our emotional dysregulation that can lower our wellbeing in the workplace. Being hypersensitive is also exhausting - we’re genuinely feeling the emotions and the big emotions are exhausting.
On the hyperactivity side, we struggle to relax and find it difficult to unwind and release the stress, causing it to build up in us. It also means we have difficulties falling asleep, making us more tired, therefore less effective at our jobs and therefore compounds to even more stress.
This can lead to us feeling not good enough, feeling overwhelmed and stressed and overwork as a way to try and compensate for our inadequacies.
In a cruel twist of fate though, the same situations that are wearing us down also might be helping our ADHD in the short term. Workplace crises and stressful or challenging work can alleviate our boredom and give us dopamine bursts that help our ADHD in the short term but do not help with the long term stress that is gradually wearing us down.
This is something I particularly relate to and the first time I read something that said I was using stressful work for dopamine and needed to find other ways to get dopamine it shook me up. I’m still working on implementing an alternative approach here but it really has made me rethink how I think about my drive for work.
We can contrast this with boring or monotonous work. This kind of work is especially difficult for our brains and significantly impacts our wellbeing. When the task is monotonous or not interesting, it’s really hard for us to get dopamine and we really struggle with the work, reducing our ability to perform. Genuine interest and creative problem solving in contrast are things that allow us to perform at a high level and meaningful activities are so important for us to perform well.
Bringing in more of the autism side now, sensory sensitivities can also be a real struggle in the workplace. Bright lights, loud noises, uncomfortable clothing all can impact our ability to concentrate at work and require a large amount of energy for us to regulate in these environments that are uncomfortable to us.
Bright and harsh office lights can be really painful if you have light sensitivity.
There’s also lots of concern about how we’re perceived at work. People expressed concern about being called “lazy, dysexecutive, ignorant or incompetent” and I’m sure these are messages that people have received in the past.
There’s also stress and anxiety around workplace relationships, accidental faux pas that we’ve made or are afraid of making. Oversharing that gets us into trouble. Unwritten workplace social rules that can hurt us when we don’t play along and exhaust us in trying to perform them.
This stress actually compounds over time and gets worse and might explain why so many of us get diagnosed as adults - our symptoms start out not so bad but deteriorate overtime as the stress adds up. I found this concept super validating because while I can look back at my early career and see my neurodivergence there, I’d often questioned why I’d only been struggling in recent years and wondering why I couldn’t cope as well from a wellbeing perspective with the challenges I was overcoming to maintain my high performance.
In the second paper I’ve been referencing, “Working Sustainably with ADHD or autism” I read that it’s not that we have poor self-esteem, it’s that we are broken down by always being at the end of our tether and had one of those moments where I had to put everything down and reflect. I’m typically a very confident person but around my diagnosis went through a period of uncharacteristically low self-esteem. The fact I can look back on that now and reframe it as being at the end of my tether is actually really comforting and allows me to give more compassion to my past self for this difficult time period.
We struggle to compartmentalise this stress. We take work stress home and equivalently, stress from life seeps into our jobs. This is particularly hard for neurodivergent parents. ADHD, autism and other forms of neurodivergence are highly genetic, so neurodivergent parents are likely raising neurodivergent kids in a world that is not built for them and therefore are facing extra stress from this challenge.
Raising any kid is enough to make you want to hide behind the kitchen counter with a glass of wine, let alone a kid who is struggling with a world that is not designed for them.
When asked how the participants of the second study viewed their ability to work, they answered with context about their whole life because our work situation is impacted by our whole life. And as a side note, this is another reason why I love individual coaching for neurodivergent careers because there’s not a set syllabus you need to follow and it’s not focused entirely on work; when I coach I am here for you as a whole person, so if something difficult at home is affecting your job, let’s go there and let’s resolve that problem so that you can move forward at work, instead of just trying to ignore it and letting the stress build up.
One of the most difficult things for ADHD and autism both is unstructured and disorganised workplaces. The lack of structure and organisation is of course a problem for all employees but it particularly hits ADHDers and autistics harder. We need and benefit from this structure and the lack of it is particularly stressful.
However, this structure can’t be micro-managey. Flexibility is also important. We like structure, deadlines and help prioritising but when it comes to actually getting the work done, we need to work in a way that works for our brains. Particularly when it comes to both when and where we work. It was found that overly strict and rigid work hours were particularly unhelpful - which can be a huge problem for certain industries and especially first and entry-level jobs, making it harder for us neurospicies to get our feet on the first rungs of the ladder.
While I focus on people within employment, as this is the space I work in, I do want to also acknowledge the points the papers make about gaining employment and how support for entering the job market tends to be overly rigid and does not take into account their unique needs, meaning that support that has failed previously is given again and again without achieving different outcomes and the person can become stuck in unemployment.
Inflexibility around work in general is also a recurring theme. We are expected to prioritise work above all else, to work certain hours and devote a disproportionate amount of our time to our jobs. This can lead to us needing to prioritise our time outside of work to ensure we have enough energy left for our jobs, meaning that we have a strict prioritisation of tasks at home, or a strict routine around meal times and exercise in order to cope with work and maintain their health and energy. This leads to the title quote of one of the papers:
“It is like it’s designed to keep me stressed and tired, and then it continues when I pick up the kids, and when I get home, and then I go to bed and feel that I am still stressed, and then I know that there’s a new day and it just keeps going like that”
We end up caught in a vicious cycle that keeps burning us out more and more.
As a result of this workplace stress, many of us neurospicies actually turn to entrepreneurship. Some of the participants in this second study mentioned being or wanting to become self-employed to avoid the stress of their workplace experience and build a job that works better for them. I don’t know if it’s just the circles I move in but I’ve never met as many neurodivergent people as I have since moving into entrepreneurship.
But ditching the career and becoming self-employed isn’t the only way out, and entrepreneurship comes with its own stress and challenges. So next week we’re going to deep dive into some of the ways that workplaces can approach these challenges to make workplaces more neurodivergent friendly, and discuss how support structures can be improved. In the meantime, if you haven’t seen my previous post on working with your brain to tackle burnout, I’d recommend going back to look at that now.
References:
Occupational issues of adults with ADHD (Adamou et al., 2013)
The Burden of ADHD in older adults: a qualitative study, (Michielsen et al., 2018)
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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