Hello, and welcome to today's training where we will be deep diving into Neurodivergence, neurodiversity, what it means, what the factors and parameters of our neurological differences are, and what they mean for us. And you'll be completing a little worksheet at the end to have a look at your own individual profile.
Over the coming weeks, we'll be looking at each of these factors in a lot more detail. So this is just an introductory session today to give you the overview about the different factors of neurodiversity. So let's start and dive right in so let's begin our introduction to neurodiversity.
Now many of you might be familiar with different ways of measuring personality, and you might have come across insights where we look at different colors that people are identified as you might have come across pack types where you have different dog breeds that people are associated with.
But I'm gonna use the metaphor of cake because why not? And we see that people fall into different cake styles. So you might be a Victoria sponge where you are very traditional, made from a. Standard recipe that stays the same every single time. You might like everything to be perfect and just so like to control lots of factors
On the bottom left here, you might be a classic black forest gateaux, and I'm talking frozen, straight from your freezer aisle. It's exactly the same every single time. It's a real crowd, please. It's been a classic for years for a reason because you know exactly what you are getting when you get a Black forest gateaux.
You might be at the top left where you are. A zingy lemon drizzle cake can be served in the round with a lovely lemon curd filling there, or it could be served as a loaf. There's lots of different varieties of icing that you could have, so a lot more flexibility. Or you could be in the top right hand corner, you might be a vegan cream cheese topped, red velvet cupcake.
Used to standing on its own, not part of a wider cake, doing its own thing. Very flexible, very adaptable to change, very able to be updated and changed to meet people's different needs. So we see that there are different types of character that people can have that we can equate to different types of cake.
You might be thinking I'm not individually any one of those and perhaps I'm a bit of a cream tea and I'd like to have a little bit of each one you or you might be feeling. I'm so not like any of the others. In fact, I feel so different. I'm a different type of cake altogether. And when the world sees you and they see this type of cake, they go, aha.
It's obvious that is a carrot cake. It looks like a carrot cake. It's got very obvious carrots on top. It looks exactly like we would expect a typical carrot cake to look like and you might be a carrot cake. Or you might be any different type of cake that there is possible to be underneath all that frosted icing.
In fact, if I was to look at this cake, I think it's trying very hard to look like a carrot cake, and it probably isn't. Maybe it's a date and walnut loaf. Maybe it's a chocolate cake. Maybe it's one of those rainbow sponges with seven layers of sponge in all different colors. Who knows? Because it's got its frosting on.
Very often we are out in the world pretending to be one thing so that we fit in and people like us, but actually underneath we are something completely different. And this really is what our neurodiversity talks about. There are standard expectations of people that we try and fit in with, but actually perhaps we're a little bit more different than we'd have anyone else believe, perhaps underneath that frosting where something completely different. And it's not that often that people will dig off the icing and find out what's really going on underneath, and that's what can lead us to feeling like. We don't completely fit in.
Like we're finding life more difficult than everyone else seems to be 'cause they're not having to dress up and pretend to be somebody that they're not. And we can find it difficult to take our own icing off. Sometimes we don't even know who we are underneath that icing 'cause we've been pretending to be a different way than we actually are for so long.
We don't know who we really are underneath. And if you've ever felt different it may well be because you are so one in five people in humanity is neurodivergent of some description or some flavor. Another, it's not by accident and it is. It's about how we think, how we feel, how we process information, and how we communicate.
Now in across humanity, everybody thinks and feels and processes information slightly differently, but one in five of us will have a significant enough difference that we might meet diagnostic criteria for neurodiversity we might not. And we might not care whether we do or not because all differences are neutral.
So it is not that you are any one way of being or thinking is better or worse than each other. They are simply different. But when we are trying to second guess ourself and see if we can think what other people might think or feel how other people feel about things, then that's when we might know that we have some sort of difference that is going on that's affecting us.
Everybody is neurodiverse in that no two people are exactly the same. When we use the term neurodivergent, we typically talking about the one in five people who has differences that are more significant than would typically be experienced between individual members of the population. But here's the thing, most of those differences are felt and experienced at an individual level, but exist for a societal purpose.
And that's what's really intriguing and really interesting about Neurodivergent Brains, is they are designed to be in community communal brains. So how different do you need to be? Excuse me. You do not need to have a specific diagnosis to have some neurodivergence.
There's many different flavors of neurodivergence that create neurodiversity and awareness of each of them will help inclusion be more complete in society in general, and it'll also help us to understand how we can make life easier for ourselves by understanding our particular flavor combination. And often we're using the term spectrum for things, autism spectrum conditions.
And it's. Often thought by people out in society, people in the world, that this is some kind of linear spectrum where perhaps you might be mildly autistic on one end of the spectrum and very autistic on the other. You might have some ADHD traits on one side and you might be very ADHD or have lots of traits on the other side.
It might be the same with any of the neurodivergent conditions. So dyslexia, dyspraxia, synesthesias where people's senses overlap. And it may be that people are thinking, oh it's either the spectrum goes from mildly affected to greatly affected. And I'm here to tell you right now.
That's not how it is.
And it's not that everybody is on this spectrum somewhere. They are not.
It's the one in five of us who are. So what areas of differences and preferences are there?
I like to think of it this way, like this wheel where we have all kinds of areas of difference and preference.
Again, neither of these are better or worse. They're simply differences. So if you think about your. Sensory differences. Everybody has sensory differences. Some of them are more pronounced than others. Some of mine include things like, I don't like hot puddings with ice cream because hot and cold sensations in my mouth at the same time feels like too much.
There are certain clothing. Fabrics that I can't stand the touch of. And if I touch 'em, I feel like I have to wipe my hands for ages. I feel like it's on my fingers for a really long time. There might be other sensory differences in terms of our need for movement. We might feel like we have to move if we're sitting still for too long.
We might be very sensitive to sounds different volumes or we might see sounds as colors. We might have specific aversions or sensitivities to sense or fragrances. We might be sensitive to certain light conditions, so we might not like the big light on. We might prefer sidelights on when we're relaxing In the evening, we might tend towards dyslexia or we might find visual distress, which is when there are so many things to look at.
And trying to discern which ones to screen out feels quite stressful. We might be sensitive to different temperatures. We might find it ourselves really struggling to concentrate. If we're too hot or too cold, we might respond to touch that in a different way from other people. So we might feel light touch is quite annoying or painful even.
We may have very specific tastes and texture differences with things inside our mouth. There may be specific tastes that actually you feel like, how could anybody. Eat that, and the smell of it makes you feel unwell, perhaps you might have movement differences, so you might seek movement.
You might. Think better while you are moving. So while you are having a walk or you might display repetitive movement, some people call this stimming. We integrate and process all of this sensory input that is bombarding us all through the day in lots of different ways. Now, for some of us, this takes up quite a lot of processing space and time.
So we need to be aware of this and we need to be allowing ourselves for how much processing is going into managing all the information that's coming into us from the world at any one time. We've also got social differences, so it may include your feelings around social situations and making contact with people.
You might find eye contact difficult. You might find being observed or being around groups of people can feel uncomfortable. You might not wanna eat in front of other people. You might experience social anxiety when you're asked to talk in front of groups, even if they're people that you know well, you might have difficulties in new situations or find unfamiliar places, really difficult to navigate.
You might find that going somewhere you haven't visited before for a social event. Really stressful. It might be that the event that the effects of that social anxiety might not be obvious during the events 'cause you might be masking as well. You might be the life and soul of the party. But after the event, you go home and review every single conversation and be concerned that you said something inappropriate overs shared, or could be judged negatively for something that you said or did in that situation.
You might also find that you are so worn out and fatigued by the effort required to take part in those social events that you need time to decompress after a social event or gathering, and can't be social again for a number of hours, days, or even weeks. We've also got communication differences and preferences around both expressive language and receptive language.
So how we make contact with other people can be different from how we like to receive contact from other people, for example. We might like to talk in person. We might like to use the phone. I know for me, I don't mind answering the phone but I, it I can take a long time to make a phone call. So our receptive and our expressive can be different.
We might struggle being in meetings and speaking up in front of other people. We might prefer to use email rather than voice. To voice sort of communication. We might prefer online meetings rather than in-person meetings. We might prefer our communication to be what we call asynchronous, so not in real time, so leaving each other voice notes and text messages rather than having a real time conversation because it allows us more time to process.
I. We might find that though more stressful because we overthink our response. So we end up maybe forgetting to reply or thinking we've replied and we haven't. There may also be the sort of social differences around this communication, so knowing the degree of eye contact or visual interaction that people expect from us can be difficult.
We can also take more time to process information that we've been given and then to form our response. So this can be a factor within our preferences and differences. So perhaps we need a bit more time. Perhaps we need more information to make a decision and to respond. I. And how we use language can be very complex, so we maybe take common expressions, literally not understanding the use of metaphor, or we would perhaps use a different metaphor.
Having difficulty identifying when someone is joking can be challenges for some of us, for example. We also use terms in our speech called predicates, and these help us to identify whether we are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic thinkers. So phrases like, I see what you mean. For example, would include would indicate that someone is thinking in pictures.
Other people might use terms like, that sounds good to me, or it sounds like a plan. And that may indicate that they're an auditory thinker. Someone who uses expressions describing things as a feeling, so perhaps describing something as an uphill struggle, maybe a kinesthetic person who feels their thoughts.
As a general rule, visual thinkers process information more quickly than the other types, and kinesthetic processing takes more time. So using the same language predicates as someone can help them understand, but that takes an awful lot of processing power and we'd need to do it deliberately as a communication style rather than it coming very naturally for us.
When we go down to the green sections and we look at executive function and emotional regulation, these two are really tied into one another and very important for neurodivergent brains. So executive functioning includes differences and difficulties around things like prioritizing tasks, memory, especially your working memory.
Deciding the steps to take in a complex task and putting them in the right order. Decision making, the transition between tasks and where our focus and attention goes. So we can go from hyperfocus to extreme distractibility, and that's a factor, a function of executive function. So having processes and systems that reduce our decision making, for example, can mean that we are having to do less executive functioning.
So you see people that wear the same clothing every single day or have the same breakfast or lunch every single day because that really helps them to reduce the number of decisions that they're making every day. When we move on to emotional regulation, this is really the crux of where Neurodivergence lies.
So we'll come on to this next week, but emotional regulation is the core of understanding ourselves and making life a lot easier for ourselves. Emotional regulation can involve under or an over responsiveness to emotional stimuli. And we can also notice that we can stay in that stimulated state for longer or shorter than typical recovery time from emotional responses.
So for some people, for example, something happening to you emotionally distressing in the morning, like witnessing something on your way to work, for example, can jar your nervous system all day. It can leave you feeling like dysregulated all day. That's not a typical response. So people who find it difficult to regulate their emotions can be impulsive.
We can be reactive, and we can feel out of control. Then we have the. The outcome from that is we can then be left with embarrassment, shame, regret. Also in this emotional regulation column, we have overwhelm and anxiety. These are our reactions to emotional dysregulation, or depression is also in there.
And some people with neurodivergence. In fact, let's be honest. All of us can be extremely sensitive to rejection. And that's because it's in a on a particular pathway. And we've got a whole section just about that. Rejection sensitivity because it's so important. There are some neurological differences in terms of brain structures here, and some people with neurodivergence have been shown to have larger brain regions responsible for stress responses, the amygdala in our brain, for example.
And so we can have strong reactions to events. This can also be enlarged in people who've had ongoing trauma, such as a traumatic childhood or being in a, in an abusive relationship. And this can also lead to a dysregulated brain. So a brain that struggles to regulate emotional responses to events and takes feedback very personally.
The next section we'll look at is interests and special interests. Some people, everybody has interests, but some people have more intense interests. We can also be limited to one or two very specific interests that we have over the whole of our lives. Or we might be hobby hoppers. So we are fleeting from one thing to another.
We can get very intense about something, buy all the equipment, learn all about it, and then never do it again. So it can be harder to focus on the same topic to gain mastery. But actually the learning phase is the part that interests our brain the most. And once that brain has had that stimulation, then it might want to move on to something else.
For other people, the mastery and the going deep in something is what holds the brain's attention, and that's what they'll choose to do. So intense interests, or very deep interests are quite specific to neurodivergent brains, and these can be really useful for us. As well as being just a difference in preference that we have.
The next section around the wheel is masking. And masking is when people are having to try hard to appear to be neurotypical. And it's quite tiring. It's a source for stress for people who don't feel they can be themselves or make their differences and preferences known at work. So if people don't have a sense of belonging and they feel like they have to change who they are in order to fit in.
Then that's an indicator that there is some level of masking going on. And you might recognize this from jobs you've had, careers you've had, even relationships you've been in, how you have to appear when other people are around, we often masking to fit in. And this is really where the difference between fitting in and belonging comes in.
We shared in our community lots of ways that we now feel like we are belonging because we're sharing some of the differences and challenges that we've had, and we are recognizing that we don't need to mask in our community and because we belong in it. And that's a really powerful place for us to have, I.
The next category round is relationship with time. And I don't like the term time management 'cause none of us can manage time itself. And I'm quite literal like that. So some people have different relationships with time. Some people may lose track of time easily struggle to estimate how long a task will take them.
And it can be quite stressful as you can either underestimate or overestimate the amount of time that's required to complete tasks or how much time you've got. So you might be overly optimistic about how much you can fit into an amount of time, how much you can actually achieve, and then be annoyed that you didn't achieve all the things that you can never could have fitted into that time in the first place.
You might struggle with meeting deadlines, you might struggle with planning and scheduling. Budgeting time can have an impact on costing for projects and tasks and things like that if you don't give yourself enough time to complete things. People can sometimes be late frequently or arrive extremely early so that they're not late.
So a common impact for neurodivergent people who have this difference is you get to places really early before anyone else arrives. Then you worry about where everybody else is. And then how are you gonna react when everyone else arrives? What do you do? Do you just pretend you just arrived like just before they did?
Or do you let 'em know you've been sitting there for ages worrying. So you can also get very anxious in that waiting time, either because you are sitting waiting and you're just, you are in that weight mode. So you're just waiting for something to happen or because you're worried about how others are gonna perceive you.
You can also be anxious about how you'll be reus, how you'll be received when you arrive late to events. And that can make you even later because you don't wanna enter a venue late and have to overcome your social anxiety about arriving. So this relationship with time has a lot of overlap with the other areas, but I think we're gonna, it's worth talking about this as a separate element because it affects us so greatly.
Okay. We're gonna hop other differences and go round to routine and structure because routine and structure are things that we can struggle with. We may love a routine and at the same time hate the routine. We might need the routine and really struggle to maintain it for ourselves. It might feel like routine and structure take away all of our freedom.
And at the same time, they give us the freedom to know what we're doing with our time. So this is a real love hate relationship that we have with routine and structure for many of us. Some people like very rigid routine and structure, and it gives them a sense of safety and changes to the routine and structure can be very stressful.
So being aware of your own relationship with routine and structure is really important, and being able to communicate about that is also very important. We may need to have support to carry out the structure. We might need other people around us to remind us about the structure or be running the same kind of structure to us.
We might like to have a more flexible routine, and I like to use processes rather than routines. Doing things the same way, but not necessarily at the same time each day, for example. Some people like a routine that allows for change because your energy level might fluctuate more than typical people's energy levels, and you might prefer novelty to long-term routine.
So a routine may work beautifully for a time and then stop with no discernible reason. But the main reason is that your. Brain has no longer seeing it as a novel way of doing things and gets very bored of it. Things like sticker charts will have the same effect where they're not that exciting after the first few have gone on, perhaps.
So being clear about what your outcomes are and the timeframe, but giving yourself control over how you achieve the outcome can often help you to meet your needs for routine and structure. And as I've said, we've got a whole other section on this in the program. And then we'll go back to the other differences section of the wheel.
There may be lots of other differences, which you think might be specific to you, but actually may well be related to your specific neurobiology. It may be that you have a specific trauma response, like certain triggers or some other mechanisms. You may also have differences in terms of your motor control.
For example, ticks or needing to move in certain ways. You might have behaviors that are repetitive, that some people might describe as obsessive. And you might have other differences that may not be considered typical. They may align with differences and preferences in the other areas, or they may be given a specific diagnosis, for example.
Okay, so when it comes to diagnostic criteria, these differences and preferences are taken into account and measured. What we may find is that for four out of five of the population, they might have really low scores on each of those sections. And when people say, oh, we're all a little bit on the spectrum, I think this is maybe what they mean in that everybody has some sensory differences, some social differences, communication preferences, and this kind of thing.
And they might say everyone loses their keys every once in a while, losing key isn't really a criteria for anything. But it's a lot more complex than that. And these differences and preferences can affect us in quite large ways and take a significant chunk of our time, our energy, and our sort of emotional and mental capacity to manage throughout the day.
And that's the difference. So the neurodivergent, might look much more like this. We've got much wider differences on more of the sections and various different diagnoses may just look at slightly different profiles and actually they're more similar to each other again than you might expect an A DHD profile and an autistic profile actually look quite similar.
And an A DHD profile would look like an A DHD profile and an autistic profile. Combined, then dyspraxic profiles might look slightly different. Dyslexic profiles might look slightly different. If you only had differences in one area. Let's say for example, you only had sensory processing differences, you might only have a diagnosis of sensory processing disorder, but you might also have several of the others as well.
Now think of it like this. If this level here, this top line was the diagnostic criteria measure, and this bottom line was your baseline. Typical people in the population may have one or two scores on some of these criteria. Neurodivergent people will have higher scores on lots of them, for example, so this person will have higher scores on lots of them, but they may only reach the diagnostic criteria on two of them.
Now these two might be sensory processing, the red one, and emotional regulation, the green one, and it depends on which specialist they're seeing as to what diagnosis they might be guided towards. Because emotional regulation differences co-occur with lots of different conditions, as do sensory differences.
So it depends very often on who and how it's coming up for you. So how it's affecting you in your life as to whether you may or may not receive a diagnosis. What's also interesting for me is that at different times in my life when I've been stressed in the background, because I've been, for example having small children and my hormones were all over the place or moving house and having to relocate my whole family, my stress levels have been higher, so I would more likely have met diagnostic criteria when I'm able to regulate myself.
A lot of those sensitivities are not as great. So I likely wouldn't then meet diagnostic criteria in various different areas of the charts. So it can very much depend on who how your differences are showing up for you, the level of difficulty that they are giving you. There are millions of neurodivergent people living very happy lives out in the world without diagnoses.
I. For many people, a diagnosis can make a massive difference. It can help have access to medication. It can provide a window to self-understanding and self-compassion. So we make no judgment about whether somebody has a diagnosis or not, or whether they're seeking a diagnosis or not. There's very personal reasons for both cases, and there's very different reasons for why some people may or may not be seeking a diagnosis and what, why they might not have one.
For those of us that are in our sort of forties and fifties, perhaps we wouldn't have been able to have been diagnosed with some of these conditions as children. For example, A DHD wasn't recognized as a condition that adults could have until 2008, and I was already 32 years old at that point. So I'd had a career, had several careers actually.
I'd had kids and what I thought was postnatal depression. Probably was a reaction to the hormone level shifting in my body as a result of the neurodivergence. It was probably way worse than it might have otherwise been, but I didn't know about that. And it's only since I've been working in this work that I've realized that oh yeah, that maybe that's a thing.
And so lots of people have struggled. A lot of their life managing and coping and masking for things that a diagnosis would really help them to make sense of. For other people, they've been accepting of who they are and it hasn't caused 'em too much of a problem because of the work they've done, for example, or how they've been accepted or their sense of self.
How much trauma they've experienced through their life will also make a massive difference to their diagnostic route, their diagnostic processes and symptoms, for example, of PTSD and symptoms of lots of different other neurodivergent conditions Absolutely overlap and mimic each other. So sometimes people are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed, and so the diagnostic criteria is not where we are going with this program.
We are going to look more at how we make the best of our differences and preferences and manage our lives in ways that make us have more joy, more freedom and be happier with who we are. So your task for this week is to complete the worksheet, which is also attached to your email, looking at your current areas of challenge or difficulty.
You can also do have a look at the things that you currently do that help you if you've got any. And if you are thinking, actually I've got challenges that I really need help and I've got no idea where to go with that's fine too. That's what we are here for. And you are also welcome to share any of your areas of challenge in the group so that we can see our similarities and know how helpful.
It has been to see where we are all running things and thinking things and when we share them and people go, oh yeah, me too. It just makes us feel so valued and seen. So please go in the group and share any areas or any challenges or difficulties that you are having, but also any strengths that you are finding as well.
Because that's also really helpful. And any coping strategies or things that you do that really help you to feel like your. More comfortable, more happy, all the things that bring you great joy in any of these areas. So I really look forward to seeing some of your sharing in the group and finding out what you're currently doing. It's helping you enjoy your