The AuDHD Overlap: When Your Brain is Actively Sabotaging Itself (And What to Actually Do)

You've got the full AuDHD package — the brilliant, deeply analytical autistic brain, plus the chaotic, novelty-seeking ADHD wiring. On paper, it sounds like some kind of superpower, right? Endless curiosity meets intense focus.

Except nobody warns you about the internal civil war that's constantly raging inside your skull.

Your brain is actively trying to do two mutually exclusive things at once. The autism is screaming for routine, predictability, and sensory calm, while the ADHD is banging on the walls demanding stimulation, novelty, and twelve projects to be started simultaneously. You're literally wired to both crave and detest chaos at the exact same time. (And then people wonder why you seem "inconsistent." You're not inconsisent bb. Your brain is a reincarnated adventurer trapped in two opposing isekai worlds — one wants cozy routine, the other wants chaotic side quests.)

📌 Bookmark this, bestie — you’ll need it the next time your autism and ADHD are in a full neurological civil war.

When Your Wiring Fights Itself: The Core Conflicts

This friction depletes your executive function at an alarming rate. It's a constant neurological tug-of-war, not a cute little quirk — it leaves you exhausted before you've even had lunch.

The Sensory Showdown

Your autistic brain needs a quiet, low-input environment to function. It needs the tags cut off, the lights dim, the sounds muted. Your ADHD brain, however, totally different story. She's constantly understimulated. She's bored – craving noise, movement, and maybe a few extra tabs open just to feel a l i v e.

You try to create sensory calm and your ADHD gets antsy. You try to create stimulation and your autism goes into immediate meltdown. It's an actual neurological stalemate where nobody wins and you're just sitting there in the middle like "what the fuck am I supposed to do with this."

Fun fact, this is why you might wake up overstimulated before the day even starts; your internal filters are already maxed out by the conflicting demands of your own wiring.

Routine vs. Novelty

Your autistic self thrives on predictable systems. Knowing what happens next is your brain's comfort blanket. Your ADHD self views routine as a creative prison. It needs newness, spontaneity, and a constant rotation of tasks or it will die of boredom. (Okay not literally. But it feels literal!)

Trying to follow a rigid schedule feels oppressive. Not having a schedule feels like freefall. Good luck planning your Tuesday bestie.

Btw, it's not that you're “lazy” or “undisciplined” — that’s just one of the many executive function myths that ignore the reality of how an AuDHD brain actually processes transitions.

Hyperfocus vs. Task Switching

Your autistic brain can deep-dive into a topic for hours, extracting every single data point. It's beautiful. It's pure flow state. Your ADHD brain on the other hand, bad boy has already moved on to three new shiny objects and forgotten what it was doing fifteen minutes ago.

You get stuck in a hyperfocused loop that derails your entire day (and now it's 9pm and you forgot to eat lunch). Or you're flitting between tasks, feeling productive but accomplishing absolutely nothing. Both feel equally bad.

Pattern Recognition: Strategies for Peace Treaties

Spoiler: you can't "fix" your wiring. But you can build systems that create truce zones for your conflicting needs. The goal is creating frameworks where both parts of your brain get some love without completely blowing up the other.

The "Sensory Buffer" System

Instead of aiming for constant calm (which your ADHD will rebel against) or constant stimulation (which your autism will melt down over), build in scheduled, non-negotiable sensory buffers.

This might be 15 minutes of complete silence in a dark room before you tackle a stimulating task. Or noise-canceling headphones for deep work, followed by a burst of loud, stimulating music for a cleaning sprint. The goal is controlled sensory shifts, not eliminating all input or flooding yourself constantly. You're creating intentional transitions instead of letting your brain ping-pong between extremes.

Flexible Routines with Novelty Pockets

Ditch the minute-by-minute schedule, bb. (It was never going to work anyway.) Instead, create "routine blocks" with wiggle room built in.

Mornings are for quiet tasks. Afternoons are for focused work. Within those blocks, let your ADHD choose the order of tasks or introduce a new "flavor." Maybe you always do dishes after dinner (autism happy!), but you switch up the podcast you listen to (ADHD happy!). Maybe you have a "Tuesday work block" but the specific projects rotate week to week.

The structure stays predictable. The details stay flexible. Your brain gets both the comfort blanket AND the novelty hit.

"Deep Dive" & "Shallow Pool" Task Management

Acknowledge that some tasks require intense focus and some require quick bursts.

Schedule your Deep Dive tasks (autistic hyperfocus) when you know you'll have uninterrupted time. Block out the calendar. Put the phone in another room. Let yourself disappear into the work.

Losing track of time during a deep dive is a hallmark of cognitive overload, where your working memory gets entirely hijacked by one specific interest.

For everything else, embrace the Shallow Pool approach: small, varied tasks you can flit between when your ADHD demands novelty. Use a visual task board where your ADHD can "pick" the next thing based on what feels interesting right now, but your autistic brain can still see the overall structure and know nothing is getting lost.

(Bonus: this also prevents the hyperfocus trap where you spend six hours organizing your digital files and forget to respond to any emails. Don't worry, I'm 26-pages deep in reading the Sakamoto Days wiki and my autistic brain is still not satisfied.)

The Bottom Line

Living with AuDHD is a constant negotiation between two parts of your brain that have VERY different ideas about what "functional" looks like. Once you clock the exact ways your wiring fights itself, you can start building custom frameworks that don't just solve problems — they create a little more internal peace.

And that's on not being a hack bbg, it's just smart strategy.