ADHD And Burnout

When is the last time you can recall being full of energy?

I can’t recall a single time in my life where I have ever experienced consistent, reliable, dependable, on-demand energy, except when I walk into a room and flip on a light switch!

Even going back to adolescence and my early 20’s I can remember complaining about feeling tired all of the time!

Every time I complained about feeling fatigued I would often hear unhelpful comments in response like; 

“You’re so young, why are you so tired all the time?” 

“You should be full of energy at your age, what’s your problem?” 

And the ever so helpful;

“You just need to get your shit together!” 

To make a long story short , and bring you up to the present day, the persistent feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm continued throughout the entire course of my adult life. Subsequently, I  attributed it to life and all of it’s external stressors!

In addition to everything that was going on in my external world, my internal world wasn’t looking so great either. I was striving to be as perfect and pleasing as possible across every domain of my life. I was overcompensating and over-giving in spite of feeling completely exhausted all the time, and essentially “pickling” myself in adrenaline and cortisol. 

Oh and let’s not forget the intense guilt trips I would take myself on whenever I dropped a ball (which was frequently) or when I sensed that someone around me wasn’t happy and that somehow it was my fault (because I was such a people pleaser).

Symptoms of ADHD in females often go undetected

Over the years, I went through multiple bouts of burnout (of various degrees), and still, my ADHD went undetected. I now suspect that this was due to my cognitive abilities, and my highly developed masking and compensatory strategies. But, I couldn’t keep it up forever and as I got older (cue the hormones), all of my coping and masking strategies began to fail me. Which culminated in a severe case of burnout riddled with PTSD-like symptoms. 

In the present day, I talk openly about how this experience with burnout completely transformed my life. And it did, because it sparked a massive (and ongoing) healing journey that led me to leave a 20-year career in mental health (that was crushing my soul) and into creating a coaching practice that I love. And so, yes, I am grateful for this experience. But this is not where my story with burnout ends.

As a life coach specializing in burnout management, I had created an evidence-informed and proven coaching system, which I call my 5 VITAL Steps, to transform stress into greater energy, focus, and happiness . I had pioneered it with great results, and the women I coached were also experiencing great success with it. And while I was incredibly proud, joyous, and excited about the transformational community we were building together, this was not the end of my struggles with burnout.

Behind the scenes I was continuing to experience long bouts of exhaustion, struggles with inconsistency in my business, and an inability to get off the couch some days (sometimes stretching into weeks) in spite of having the motivation and a strong will to do so. 

Have you ever experienced this?

It was the end of January 2022 when I experienced what some of my more “esoteric” friends would call “a dark night of the soul”, that lasted three very long and dreary months. It was a period of time where, once again, I retreated to my couch, feeling confused and bewildered while trying to make sense of my inner reality as well as my external reality. During this time I became transfixed on watching the news (something I rarely do) and hyper focussed on the shocking things that were happening in our country and around the world.

My family watched helplessly from the sidelines, challenging me to “practice what I preach”, so that I could get back to being “me”. But somehow, intuitively, I knew that there was something deeper going on within me and I accepted that, whatever it was, I was right where I was supposed to be. It didn’t feel like depression, it felt more like I was searching for something. If I were to compare it to something I would say it felt like my brain was “buffering”.

During that time I let myself sit in the discomfort of the disempowering emotions I was experiencing. It felt uncomfortable, to say the least, but instead of trying to ignore them I let myself feel them all; anger, frustration, sadness, shame, guilt and fear all crept in from time to time. 

Meanwhile, my inner critic was going wild, shaming me with old stories like;

• you’re lazy
• you’re an imposter
• you’re such a procrastinator
• you are sabotaging yourself
• you’re a hypocrite and so on…

Eventually, I reached out to my hypnosis community for support and was guided through some powerful hypnosis sessions to release those limiting beliefs through inner child work (thank you HypnoHeather) and a powerful past life regression (thank you Kori Gordon). These sessions expanded my connection to my higher self and empowered me to love and accept all of the parts of me, even the dark parts and the parts that made me really uncomfortable.

All of this led me to the realization that I had more work to do in healing my relationship with myself and that it was time to get off the couch. So what did I do to finally break free from my couch and this trance I was in?

I hired a Tantra Coach and headed to Mexico!

Just checking to see if you were still paying attention.

But seriously, that is what I did.

I began researching self-love and acceptance practices beyond what I was already familiar with and found a wonderful coach named Dominique D’Vita (of Yes Tantra) who showed me how to tune into the wisdom of my body through the practices of Pink Tantra. These embodiment practices showed me how to connect with my body through feelings and sesnsations and I learned how to love and honour it instead of disconnecting from it, as I had been prone to doing most of my life.

It was Dominique who gently questioned whether or not I thought I might have ADHD and, as a result of this, I pursued my diagnosis and gained an incredible amount of insight into who I am, and how I experience the world. (And then I went off to visit my mother in Mexico and met a Shaman named Anthony but that is a story for another time).

Now that I have a deeper understanding of the root cause of my roller coaster ride with burnout, and my need to cling intensely to my couch from time to time, I recognize that my ADHD will continue to throw me curve balls and keep me humble on this journey to accepting and loving all of the parts that make me uniquely me.

Shelley Wallace

Risk factors causing burnout in women with ADHD;

Now that I understand the causal factors behind my epic battle with exhaustion and burnout, Here are some of the things that I learned along the way.

Now I understand that there are some very unique risk factors for people with ADHD may that can lead to burnout. In my workshops; “Burn Bright, Not Out” and “Break Up With People Pleasing” we explore these factors in greater depth, but here is a quick overview:

• Persistent exhaustion
• Avoiding people (Even the ones you like) 
• Feeling disconnected 
• Lengthy bouts of rumination
• No longer doing things you love
• Feeling ineffective at work/home (presenteeism or increased absenteeism)
• Hypervigilance
• Difficulty regulating emotions
• Numbing out with vices
• Experiencing persistent illness or “dis-ease”
• ADHD paralysis or “couch lock”

It’s important to note that many of these symptoms show up for both neurotypical and neurodivergent brains. However, ADHD comes with additional challenges that lead to us being more susceptible to burnout.

Additional challenges for women with symptoms of ADHD:

I like to call these “The 3 O’s”:

1. Overcompensating: Many ADHD women, especially those who have gone undiagnosed or who were diagnosed late in life (women like me), grew up under the weight of unmet expectations throughout their entire lives. Subsequently, they never had the awareness that some of the challenges they were facing were not due to character flaws but instead were due to the way their brains are wired.
   
   These undetected differences would often lead to feelings of guilt and shame due to unknowing caregivers, educators, and other family members pointing out our shortcomings. By the time we are adults many of us have endured being labeled as; lazy, unmotivated, not living up to our potential (if I had a dollar for every parent-teacher interview my mother came home from quoting that exact line), disruptive, unfocussed, careless, spacey, flakey, or even unintelligent.
   
   And these labels eventually turn into false beliefs which have led many of us into compensating behaviors like excessive people pleasing, perfectionism, over-achieving, and relentless “masking” of our ADHD symptoms, all in an effort to be seen as “neurotypical” and to be accepted by the people around us. These masking behaviors require a “Herculean” effort and over time become exhausting and a very real source of ongoing fatigue for many women with ADHD.

2. Overcommitting: As you know, ADHD brains are wired differently and because of this some “ADHDers” may have trouble with sequencing, organizing, and initiating their tasks. In addition to these challenges, we may also have a “magical sense of time”, as described by Dr. Gabor Maté in his book Scattered Minds. This is a problem with the perception of time and means that we may have difficulty assessing how much time has passed and how much time is required to do a task. Thus, it is very easy for us to overcommit by accident and take on way too many things at once. 
   
   In addtition to this we may also have a strong urge to please others, the desire to avoid rejection due to early childhood conditioning, and something called Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD), all of which become a recipe for overwhelm and burnout in individuals with ADHD.
   
   Women with ADHD may also have permeable boundaries and difficulty saying “no” which result in the accumulation of more and more responsibilities which become unmanageable as we crumble under the constant pressure to perform and complete tasks. The resulting exhaustion from all of these demands then lead us back to our couch and another episode of ADHD paralysis resulting in another cycle of guilt and shame.

3. Over-guilting: Okay yes, this is my very own moniker because I thought it would be catchy to have 3 things starting with the word “over”. But stay with me here, because this guilt tripping is a valid contributor to burnout in some women with ADHD. Since so many ADHD women were called lazy and were accused of being underachievers most of their lives they tend to have an overactive inner critic that guilt trips them for resting. And so, the idea of slowing down, and resting often feels selfish and counterintuitive which can lead us to have a need to be constantly “doing” something, with or without hyperactivity. 
   
   When you add to this, all of our struggles with task initiation and the fear of not being able to get started again if we stop for any reason, we have a tendency to keep propelling ourselves forward.
   
   And then guess what happens when we eventually exhaust all of our inner resources physically, mentally and emotionally? 
   
   “Hello COUCH!” And then take a guess at what many of us do whilst clinging to our couch? That’s right, we continue the cycle of guilting and shaming ourselves.
   
   So right about now, you may be thinking… 
   
   “Well, what can I do about all of this?”

How to manage the risk factors for burnout in women with ADHD:

• Engage in mindfulness practices that teach self-compassion (Tara Brach and Kristen Neff have some excellent resources on YouTube to get you started).
• Practice saying “no” and follow through. “Easier said than done”, did you say? 

Send me an email and ask me for my Just Say “No” mini workbook and I will send it right to your inbox!

• Overestimate the amount of time something will take, double it and then plan accordingly. And set reminder and alarms on your phone. 
• Take time for REST! Sleep, nap, daydream, visualize, practice breathing and meditation or self-hypnosis to soothe your central nervous system.
• Ask for, and accept help when you need it from family, friends, and co-workers.
• Re-connect your head and your body and notice what the feelings and sensations in your body are communicating to you. 
• Find a coach or a therapist who can show you how to tap into your strengths, quiet your inner critic, and let go of the faulty beliefs that are keeping you stuck in patterns that are contributing to your stress and overwhelm.

And if you would like to get to know me and connect with other powerful heart-centered women who are on their own transformational journeys to greater energy, self-love, and happiness then come and join my FREE Facebook community where I share mindset and embodiment practices based on my 5 VITAL steps to rapid and lasting transformation.