How to Switch Off a Neurodivergent Mind - Part 3

Imagine you've planned a trip. An important one - the kind you dream about for a lifetime, and it's finally happening. You've thought of everything: the stops, the connections, the places to see, the places to eat. For months, you've poured every free minute into making it perfect, exactly the way you always pictured it. You've sacrificed time, energy, money.

It's the day before departure. You're electric. It's about to happen.

Your phone buzzes. A message from the airline. The flight is cancelled.

No "we're sorry". No alternative offered. No appeal.

The trip is off.

How would you feel?

Welcome to the world of a neurodivergent mind.

I've written about hyperfocus before, but I've always had the impression that for people who don't live with it, it stays abstract - a word, not an experience. In Part 2 of this series, I promised a chapter on starting a task and stopping one. This is it. And the trip metaphor is the closest I've found. Even if it doesn't cover everything.

Because we live that story all the time.

When a project lands on us - or a single, apparently trivial task - and it lights the fuse of our brain, we're gone. It becomes our entire world. Literally. We stop physically feeling our primary needs: drinking, eating, sleeping, even getting up from the chair. We don't need them anymore. We are so deep inside what we're doing that interrupting the flow doesn't just annoy us. It scares us. It angers us. We want to stay inside it, live it, carry it all the way to the end. At any cost.

From the outside, this looks like an asset. A killer asset, even: an employee who cannot let go of a task until it's done. What stays invisible is the bill - and someone always pays it.

Do you know who loves it when a person is so absorbed they forget to eat?

Companies.

Do you know who has no problem telling that same person "thanks, but we don't need it"? Or worse: "you did too much", "that's not what we asked", "this is wrong"?

Companies. Again.

The airline that, in the time it takes to send one message, cancels the dream you built with everything you had.

You could object: "Who told you to lose sleep over it?" And you'd have a point. But then - who told you to plan the trip of your dreams? Nobody. You wanted it.

With one crucial difference: you could choose. Our brain can't.

Now add the frustration of "we've always done it this way" - I wrote about that a few weeks ago - and the very particular pain that many of us feel in front of rejection (we'll get there soon, I promise). What you get is a dangerous mix, and every ingredient of it is poison for a neurodivergent mind.

Exploiting hyperfocus is the third way to switch off a neurodivergent brain.

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that everything we think, build, or imagine in hyperfocus is right, perfect, and beyond discussion. Quite the opposite: we need someone - or something - to set boundaries for us, first and foremost for the sake of our own health. A good manager who says "stop, eat, go home" is not switching us off. They're protecting us.

But belittling or dismissing something we've poured our whole selves into, without discussion and without appeal, is not setting boundaries.

It's using us when it's convenient - and squeezing us dry without even the gratification of a thank you.

This was the third way. One more to go. It's the one that hurts the most.