ADHD and Burnout: How to overcome the expensive burnout cycle

Personally, burnout cost me probably 6-9 months of being productive. As a self-employed person this is not something I want to pay for again. Burnout left me anxious, uncomfortable, depleted and financially poorer.

Burnout and stress-related illness is a huge cost to employers and entrepreneurs (£28billion a year to the UK economy).

ADHD and Burnout

As a person with ADHD, I am more likely to experience burnout than a neurotypical person. 30% of the general population have experienced burnout, whereas 93% of people with ADHD have experienced burnout.

Burnout is one of the biggest drains on ADHD-owned businesses.

Part of the reason is that every day tasks, whether work-related or not, are just more taxing on your brain.

This is a great description I read on why every day things are just harder for people with ADHD (DM me if you want the full article- don't want that brain getting distracted when you should be focussing on getting a handle on burnout).

“with ADHD, you’re not just folding the laundry. You’re folding laundry and actively not stopping midway to look up who invented the washing machine or to go fix the crooked stack of books that caught your eye. You’re folding laundry and resisting the overwhelming need to somehow also be washing the dishes at the same time.

As a result, each task is even more mentally draining than it really needs to be, putting you at risk of burnout even when you feel like you aren’t doing anything more than what neurotypical people do.”

Top tips to combat burnout

1.    Play to your strengths- when you have ADHD, you have a lot of amazing strengths, but you also struggle with a lot of tasks that others deem “easy”. If you spend as much time as possible using your strengths and reduce the amount of time you spend on the things you find challenging (by automating, outsourcing and questioning if they are actually necessary etc) your brain won’t get exhausted anywhere near as quickly. Also, by completing tasks that align with your strengths you will be more productive and so will end up spending less hours working.

2.    Consider your senses- a lot of people with ADHD also have sensory issues, so considering the environment you are working in is absolutely essential. The ADHD brain finds it difficult to filter out unnecessary information and so you can easily go into sensory overload.

Sensory overload is pretty damn debilitating as it triggers the fight or flight response, which releases all sorts of nasty chemicals into your body, reduces creativity, memory, logical thinking etc. Being in fight or flight is a survival state and is exhausting for your brain and body.

3.    Work on tasks that interest you- as an ADHDer you have what is called an ‘interest based nervous system’, which means that your brain is motivated by what interests you, rather than what is important. It is not that you just don’t like doing boring things, it is that unless you are interested in a task (interest in generated by something just being interesting, urgency, novelty and competition) your brain won’t release the necessary brain chemicals to enable you to get the task done in a timely manner.

A lot of the people I work with some to me with the believe that going through burnout cycles is just something that they will always have to deal with. This is not the case and by working on the above they have found ways that work for them to stop burnout for good.