ADHD-ers - Rewire your nervous system pattern of overworking (in 2 simple steps)

rewire nervous system — Cycle of stress and overworking

So you want to change your nervous system pattern of compulsive busy-ness and over-doing and calm your neurodivergent brain?

The biggest worry ADHD-ers have when they are thinking about working with me is that I will tell them there is only one way to change their pattern of being constantly 'on', and that is to turn themselves 'off'!

Just the thought of doing that feels like DEATH to them. In fact, death feels more do-able than switching off.

However, there IS a solution beyond switching off the externals – and it’s both simple and not-so simple.

Simple, because you’d think that when you’re shown a new way of doing something, you would just do it, right?

Not-so-simple because your nervous system has been operating the same way for a long time.

So are you ready to know?

You’ve been so busy being busy that you haven’t learned to track consistently what your nervous system is doing. Of course you track it when you feel sick, uncomfortable or bad - or in some way, when you feel something you don't want to feel. That’s the brain’s inbuilt negative bias. It is designed to notice the unpleasant, or negative for survival purposes. But you can update that program. Noticing your body when you feel good, healthy, free, in flow, will almost effortlessly correct your negative bias to its original set-point.

That way, instead of consciously controlling your thoughts and behaviour, we go deep into the unconscious where thoughts, emotions, and beliefs originate (the body implicit), and re-pattern and train your nervous system so it can send signals to your body and brain to respond differently than before.

Why does that work?

It’s by taking an internal approach that you can bypass the rational (left) brain and recruit the part of your brain that craves stillness. This addresses the root cause of your busy-ness so you can re-claim sovereignty over your energy.

This process works best if you can:

1. Be curious about the concepts
2. Be willing to implement nervous system principles
3. Surrender your ego and adopt ‘beginner’s mind’ until you find something that works for YOUR nervous system

I'm not going to drown you with information, because that's how you got busy doing in the first place - through aligning with your thoughts and disconnecting from feeling.

But let me go through a couple of the steps to help you get the idea.

1. You have to increase the capacity in your nervous system.

Unless you increase your nervous system capacity, sustainable change is not possible.

Moving towards greater health and wellbeing is exactly what the nervous system will do when given space to do what it knows how to do. The only thing you need to do, is to train your mind to hang back and to pay attention to some different things than you usually pay attention to.

Nervous system transformation requires the ground to be prepared for change. The nervous system must be flexible, fluid, able to change and shift after expansion and contraction, and to return to its shape without becoming rigid or brittle. Transformation does not need to be forced. We don't need to visualise or demand growth. We need to EMBODY the feeling of living our desired nervous system state of BEING.

Then your nervous system will change its pattern of always driving you to go, go, go and push through.

2. You need to reprogram your stress set point.

In the same way that you have to reprogram your body's set point if you want to change your weight, you have to gradually help your body adjust to your new normal if you want to change an ingrained dysregulated nervous system pattern.

The whole idea of creating lasting change to your habit of overworking is to teach your body to want some downtime and to relish regular rest. That does not mean turning you into a couch potato. Nervous system specialist work is all about working WITH your unique nervous system and finding ways that work FOR you, not against you.

From my perspective, which is a trauma-oriented, trauma-informed lens, telling a person who wants to move that they can't move, is psychologically abusive. I would NEVER tell your body it can't do what it wants to do - unless your life was actually in danger!

So if you have identified change is necessary, I can show you the way.

I've been there. I overworked SO MUCH that I got chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, migraines, and autistic burnout. I COULDN'T WALK or dress/undress myself some days and that was my wake-up call to looking for a way to get more balance and hear what my body was telling me.

If you have been overworking, overachieving or overhelping for YEARS (you were born neurodivergent, so maybe all of your life?), I guarantee that your helpful brain will have switched off the neural networks (it's called 'pruning') that notice the messages from your body telling you to slow down. If you could hear them, those messages would be saying, "You've done enough for today, can we play now please?" or "Can I rest?" "Can I move more slowly?" "Can I move this part of my body, but not that part so much?" etc.

I've spent years reaping from my lived experience as a neurodivergent woman to cultivate and master strategies for helping others free themselves from the intense pressure to perform and do at unsustainable levels. Tools and strategies which switch your baseline set point from adrenaline-fuelled action to a powerful new WAY OF BEING, and enable you to achieve and maintain success without feeling exhausted.