Prevent the crash - work out your *actual* capacity (neurodivergent peri women)

Hannah's 6-month progress report from The Unmasked Woman: what's actually working, and what's missing, when coaching neurodivergent women through perimenopause and burnout. In this episode: ✹ Why doing everything "right" for your health doesn't work if you're neurodivergent ✹ The Cell Danger Response ✹ Two types of clients: quick turnarounds vs. deeply established burnout ✹ Why exercise and movement advice often backfires for a depleted ND nervous system ✹The two biggest levers for recovery: blood sugar stabilisation and sensory rest ✹Where to find support if this sounds like you

Dear reader, Last Wednesday I rode home from my writers’ group on my Honda, the heat pressing down on my neck. It was just after noon. The strange, unsettled heat of Cambodia, when the rains have arrived but left again before they were supposed to. Everybody’s waiting. Wishing for rain again. The writers’ group meets fortnightly at a vegetarian café on a quiet road. We sit outside. I love it. The conversations, the pleasure of being with people who care as much about words as I do. There had been a few more of us than usual, which meant more conversation, more ideas flying, more energies entwined. I rode home smiling. Then I had to lay down in the dark and my brain felt like concrete. I could still feel the conversations moving around inside my body. A residual vibration. The voices, the coffee orders, the creative ideas, the chuckles, all still swirling somewhere between my chest and my skull. I wasn’t upset or anxious. I was simply paying the bill. I rest after lunch every day anyway. I call it Medicinal Cellular Repair, horizontal time in the dark that I treat as non-negotiable. But this was different. This time I had absolutely no choice in the matter. My body decided I must. This is the experience nobody names properly for neurodivergent women: the crash that arrives after something good. Not after a hard day or a confrontational meeting or a sensory nightmare. After something you loved, chose, and would choose again tomorrow. The same week I had a thirty-minute swimming lesson at a hotel pool across town. Outdoors, in the shade, the water is just slightly cooler than body temperature. Lovely. And I LOVE swimming. The pool itself I’m less sure about. No plants. Concrete surroundings that feel a little lonely, a little gloomy. And my swim coach, going strong on the chat as always. I came home and went into my dark room again. There was a flicker of resentment on the way home. Not at the lesson, but at the situation. How do I get this man to stop talking so much and so close to my face? Here’s what’s actually happening: our mitochondria — the tiny engines inside every cell that produce our energy — don’t distinguish between good stimulation and bad. They just see load. For a neurodivergent nervous system, any social interaction, however joyful, however chosen, requires enormous processing. The eye contact, the vocal tones, another person’s energy, the sensory landscape of a concrete pool with no plants and continual talking. Every input is being processed at a higher intensity than a neurotypical brain would require. Our mitochondria are running hot the whole time. And when we get home, the debt needs to be paid. What makes this so hard to explain, to ourselves as much as anyone, is the dissonance. We expect to feel bad after hard things. We do not expect to feel wrecked after a writers’ group we’ve been looking forward to all week. And because we can’t explain it, we might reach for shame. I’m too sensitive. I’m weak. Why can’t I just be normal? But there’s no version of this that is weakness. It is cellular. It is biological. Understanding this changes the question. Not: what is wrong with me? But: what do I actually need? What we need is to take the crash seriously rather than pushing through it or marinating in guilt about it. The dark room and horizontal time isn’t indulgence, it’s repair. Medicinal Cellular Repair We also need to plan for it. Not to avoid the things we love but to hold the recovery time afterwards as part of the same decision. The writers’ group is a yes. The dark room after is also a yes. The swimming lesson is a yes. The relieved, necessary collapse afterwards is also a yes. We’re running a more complex operating system than most people around us, on hardware that requires more careful maintenance. The bill will always need paying. But once we know that, we can stop being surprised by it and start budgeting properly instead. What's the last genuinely good thing that took you out for the rest of

If you're an AuDHD woman somewhere in the perimenopause fog, tired of feeling like sh*t and tired of not knowing what's going on with your own body and mind — you're in the right place. The Unmasked Woman is personal essays on daily life as an AuDHD woman in perimenopause — energy, identity, health, all of it — read aloud so you don't have to look at a screen. This first episode introduces the show: why I started it, and the mitochondria connection behind so much of what gets written off as 'just' ADHD or 'just' perimenopause. New episodes weekly. Read, listen and subscribe: hannahanstee.substack.com