Treadmill of Constant Adaptation!!

[GHA]

The Treadmill of Constant Adaptation and Masking
One thing I’ve learned, living alongside a neurodivergent mind for decades, is that adaptation and masking are not just occasional skills. For many, they can become a permanent state.
It’s like being on a treadmill from the moment you start your day until the moment you shut your eyes at night. Every interaction — whether at work, in public, or even at home — involves scanning, filtering, adjusting, and predicting how others will receive what you say or do. There’s no pause button, no stepping off.
For NTs, adaptation is often selective — you do it for a meeting, a formal event, or a challenging conversation. Then you return to your natural rhythm. But for many neurodivergent people, there is no “return.” It’s continuous.
The problem is that even if the pace feels manageable at first, the constant motion drains you. Slowly, the mental reserves shrink. From the outside, you may look fine — still functioning, still meeting demands — but inside, the exhaustion is real and building. Eventually, it catches up, and burnout sets in.
The only sustainable way forward is to create off-ramps during the day and week — spaces where you can be completely unmasked, where there’s no need to adapt for anyone. Without those breaks, even the strongest high-functioning ND will eventually hit the wall.
I’ve seen this happen, and I’ve also seen the difference it makes when someone learns to step off the treadmill, even briefly. Those moments of genuine rest are not a luxury — they are what make long-term success and stability possible.
I’d be interested to hear from others here: do you recognise this “treadmill” feeling? And if so, how do you find your own off-ramps?

 

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A couple of people in here have commented that I seem more self aware than most and from what I've read I think they might be right. When I was a kid no one even knew the word autism, let alone what it meant, but even way back then I understood my own needs quite well, instinctively.

As a child I wasn't always able to achieve what I needed but I understood all too well. As an adult it was a totally different world. In Australia we get 10 paid sick days a year by law and if you only take a single day off you don't need a doctor's note, you just ring up in the morning and say "I won't be in today, I'm crook.".

And if you quit and change jobs you get another 10 days. We also have a decent welfare system which I did lean on quite a bit over the years, sometimes I'd quit my job and not bother looking for another one for a few months simply because I didn't have the energy for it and needed a proper rest.

We also have a different attitude in Australia regarding welfare and there isn't the stigma associated with that that I hear about in other countries. Here we accept that the world is becoming more automated, in fact we've contributed quite a bit to that automation technology over the years, and we completely understand that there's some people who will never get to experience what it means to work for a living and earn good money.