The Hidden Cost of Passing as Normal

Why Neurodivergent People Burn Out More - and Faster

Anna Katharina Schaffner

A shorter version of this article was originally published on Psychology Today on 9 December 2025.

ADHD is not just Squirrel-Brain Syndrome

I used to be in the ADHD eye-role camp. As a cultural historian, I’m suspicious of any diagnostic trends, and thanks to a growing number of zealous TikTok influencers and activist podcasters, it seems like everyone is rushing to get diagnosed with ADHD. My mental image of ADHDers were impulsive, sugar-rushy boys in a state of permanently restless hyperactivity, and adults who lose everything and work on a million tasks simultaneously, whilst forgetting about important dates and deadlines.

I was quite wrong about all of that. I started to change my mind when I saw that many of my burnout coaching clients keep finding deep solace in their diagnoses, which help them to make more sense of their own patterns and behaviours. I also saw that these diagnoses take away shame and self-blaming, offering more compassionate and helpful self-stories (i.e., you are not a bad, useless or lazy person, but your brain is different). I decided to investigate further.

Here is what I found out. ADHD can manifest not just as inorganization and disruptive, fidgety restlessness, but as a quieter, more inward form of inattention. More precisely, as a combination of intense hyper-focus on things that interest us and an inability to focus our attention on what doesn’t. Inattentive ADHD is not actually an attention deficit disorder, but an inability to direct our attention to unattractive tasks. ADHDers have extremely interest-driven brains and their ability to motivate themselves to initiate low-interest and low-dopamine tasks is impaired – which leads to sometimes extreme procrastination in some areas of their lives. Their motivation-action pathway is just not working for chores they think of as unpleasant. This is often the cause of deep shame.

I also noticed that many of these traits really describe me, and I was extremely surprised by that. Because I can concentrate on what interests me - deeply, intensely, and for long periods of time - the hyperactive squirrel-brain narrative of ADHD just never occurred to me as a fit. I am highly productive in the important areas of my life. But the truth is that I am a terrible procrastinator in many others, and I do waste hours and sometimes days in task avoidance mode when I don’t want to do something. In fact, I redesigned my entire life to minimize the need to do tasks that don’t interest me. Information that doesn't resonate with me doesn't register at all and I forget it immediately, which is often embarrassing. My mind not just wanders, but goes on wild hikes when I am bored. I also tend to become very passionate about specific topics and projects for a while, and then move on to something new.

But perhaps most importantly, I discovered that there is a hugely important link between neurodiversity and burnout. This also put my own burnout story into a completely new context.

The Secret Second Shift

 

The hidden emotional and cognitive labour performed by neurodivergent people simply to appear “normal” is immense. Our competent surface is often the result of a secret and highly cognitively costly second job. It involves decoding opaque social cues, suppressing sensory overwhelm, manually operating executive functions, managing an extreme sensitivity to social rejection cues, and choreographing a performance of neurotypical social fluency.

Recent research on neurodivergent burnout shows that this emotional and cognitive labour is extremely costly – cognitively, emotionally and in terms of time. Neurodivergent burnout is the result of an ecological mismatch – a mismatch between the beautifully idiosyncratic ways some brains function and the rigid norms of environments designed for others. Most burnout research still assumes we’re all running the same cognitive operating system. But we are not. For many people with ADHD and/or autistic traits, the real exhaustion doesn’t come from their official workload – it comes from the hidden one: the emotional labour of masking, an invisible “second shift”.

Imagine that your everyday life demands the cognitive effort of a simultaneous interpreter, an air-traffic controller, and a method actor. For many autistic and ADHD adults, this is their daily lived experience. Some people burn out because they work too hard. Neurodivergent people often burn out because they have been performing too hard – sometimes without even knowing that they are doing that. Years – sometimes decades – of masking, compensating, translating, decoding, and striving to appear effortlessly “competent” eventually push their system beyond its limits. This happens particularly often to those who are undiagnosed, and especially women.

Unlike occupational burnout – a response to chronic high stress in the workplace – neurodivergent burnout arises from the Herculean effort of trying to behave in ways that feel natural to others but deeply unnatural to ourselves. In other words, our adaptation labour is super hard work – invisible inner work that takes up a lot of our energy.

Masking begins early for most neurodivergent people. They sense that their natural ways of being – their perceptual sensitivities, their bluntness, their hyper-rationality paired with sometimes extreme emotional reactivity, their intensity, their need for clarity, truth-telling, solitude, or repetition – are met with confusion or irritation. And so they learn to soften themselves, to imitate, to study social interactions with the diligence of a foreign-language student. They craft intricate compensatory strategies. They script their conversations. They practise smiling and eye-contact.

The sociologist Erving Goffman famously described social life as a series of performances. For many neurodivergent people, our social life feels like being constantly on stage, wearing different masks. And like any prolonged performance, masking drains vitality. It is emotionally expensive, cognitively demanding, and existentially disorienting. Over time, we may even lose our sense of who we truly are beneath the mask.

The Executive Function Tax

Neurodivergent burnout is not only an emotional phenomenon. It is also neurocognitive. Autism and ADHD both involve differences in executive function: the cognitive suite that allows us to plan, prioritise, organise, and regulate attention. In neurotypical environments – with their back-to-back meetings, unspoken rules, fragmenting notifications, and bureaucratic intricacies – these differences translate into an executive-function tax.

This tax is levied daily, often hourly. It is paid in the form of:

• managing time-blindness while being expected to meet rigid schedules

• prioritising and breaking down tasks that others can intuitively sequence

• translating vague instructions into actionable steps

• recovering from micro-errors — the missed email, the forgotten detail, the double-booked appointment

• fighting the internal static of a racing, recursive, or distractible mind

• overcompensating for all of that by working harder and longer, often at night, to catch up and deliver and not let anybody down.

Research shows that the greater the cognitive load required to maintain organisation, the higher the risk of burnout. Neurodivergent people are not “less resilient”; they are simply running processes manually that others outsource to neural autopilot. It is like doing life on hard mode, without ever having chosen the difficulty setting.

Social Decoding as Cognitive Labour

There is also the emotional cost of social navigation – an underappreciated driver of exhaustion. Most neurotypical people process social cues implicitly: tone of voice, micro-expressions, shifting hierarchies of conversation. For many autistic individuals, these cues must be deciphered consciously and analytically. For those with ADHD, impulsivity, rapid associative thinking, and emotional reactivity complicate this decoding further.

So every meeting, every conversation, every informal “quick chat” requires additional layers of processing:

“What did they mean by that?”“Was that sarcasm? Or did they mean that literally?”“Did I talk too much? Too little?”“Did I sound strange? Did I laugh too late, long, in the wrong place, or not at all?”“Have I offended someone again without knowing it?”

This is not social anxiety – though the two often intertwine – but the lived experience of operating with a different neurocognitive toolkit. We often feel we are a combination of too much and not enough, bound to offend others all the time. In fact, one of the symptoms of ADHD is RSD – rejection sensitive dysphoria. It means that we are hyper-attuned to perceived criticism, and when we do interpret responses to us as critical, we have an extreme emotional reaction to that. We feel social pain more intensely, and because it is so debilitating we also fear it more, constantly scanning our environment in a hyper-vigilant way.

Many autistic and ADHD people have spent years – sometimes whole decades – striving to meet neurotypical expectations in work, relationships, and parenting. Often very successfully. We become the conscientious over-performers, the meticulous professionals, the studied people-pleasers.

But behind the scene, we are working an extremely energy-taxing double-shift. Given all this, it really isn’t surprising that there is such a strong correlation between burnout and neurodiversity.

A final thought: I think there have always been a significant number of neurodivergent people around, and they are often the most creative and innovative and pioneering ones. One of the reasons we now see such a surge in diagnoses is that the working environments we built are simply way more hostile and energetically taxing for neurodivergent people than those of the past.

Image: Milad Fakurian and Kyle Head @Unsplash