The AuDHD Psych Podcast

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🎙️ Episode 17: Understanding AuDHD in the Real World - Sensory Processing and Overwhelm in ADHD, Autism & AuDHD
Episode Summary
In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, Aaron Howearth explores how sensory profiles shape daily life for autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD individuals. Why does a flickering light, a chatty colleague, or a tag in your shirt seem to "set you off" — when really, you've been quietly carrying that load all day?
Drawing from clinical psychology and lived experience, Aaron explains how neurodivergent nervous systems often process sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, balance, and body position differently from the average person. He unpacks why these differences are not defects, but a mismatch between our sensory profile and environments built for typical sensory experience.
Aaron introduces the build-up model of overwhelm — how small sensory costs accumulate across the day until what looks like an overreaction is actually a proportionate response to hours of unseen strain. He links sensory load to attention, masking, emotional regulation, and burnout, and explains how sensory gating, hidden coping, and reduced tolerance can spiral into a vicious cycle.
This episode offers validation, language, and practical strategies for identifying high-cost sensory channels, designing neuroaffirming environments, and treating sensory fit as a legitimate accessibility issue rather than special treatment.
Key Themes & Takeaways
Sensory Profiles Explained – How autism, ADHD, and AuDHD involve over- and under-sensitivity across multiple sensory dimensions.

The Build-Up Model of Overwhelm – Why the "last straw" reaction reflects cumulative load, not fragility.

Sensory Gating & Attention – How difficulty filtering input amplifies inattention, frustration, and cognitive fatigue.

Masking the Sensory Cost – How suppressing sensory reactions drains energy and feeds burnout.

Mental Health Impact – Why visual, auditory, and tactile sensitivities strongly link to anxiety, mood, and overwhelm.

Environmental Design – Practical adjustments: lighting, headphones, quiet zones, predictability, exits, and breaks.

Tracking What Works – Why outcomes matter more than assumed-helpful strategies.

Reframing Overreaction – Moving from "too sensitive" to recognising a nervous system doing extra work in a world not built for it.

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Keywords: AuDHD podcast, autism and ADHD, neurodivergent psychologist, neurodiversity affirming, Howearth Psychology, queer psychologist, autism diagnosis, ADHD awareness, lived experience, neurodivergent mental health, clinical psychology podcast

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🎙️ Episode 16: AuDHD in the Real World - Masking, Burnout & Unmasking

Episode Summary
In this episode of the AuDHD Psych Podcast, Aaron Howearth unpacks masking and camouflaging as neurodivergent survival strategies. He explains how autistic and ADHD people learn conscious and unconscious ways of “passing” as typical, such as practised eye contact, softened honesty, and scripted conversations, often long before they have words for their neurodivergence. Aaron explores how this constant self‑monitoring and suppression of stims, emotions, and sensory needs drains cognitive and emotional energy, contributing to exhaustion, low social battery, and executive functioning crashes. He also touches on late diagnosis, identity confusion, and grief around not knowing “where the mask ends and I begin.” Throughout, he reframes “disorder” as a mismatch between neurodivergent needs and environmental demands, normalises collapse after masking‑heavy days, and invites listeners to compare one high‑cost masking context with one low‑mask or safe environment.

Key Themes & Takeaways

What Masking Is – Compensatory behaviours neurodivergent people use to meet typical social, sensory, and behavioural expectations and to “pass” as non‑neurodivergent.
Conscious vs Unconscious Masking – Habits like practised eye contact versus deliberate strategies such as softening blunt corrections or scripting conversations.
Cognitive Load & Exhaustion – Self‑monitoring, impulse suppression, and managing tone, face, and stims consume working memory and lead to exhaustion and executive crashes.
Sensory & Stim Suppression – Hiding stims and enduring uncomfortable environments increase stress and reduce emotional and cognitive capacity.
Identity & Imposter Feelings – Long‑term masking can blur the line between self and performance, fuelling imposter syndrome and grief about “who I could have been.”
Masking as Safety Behaviour – Framed as a survival strategy to avoid stigma and rejection, even while it can worsen mental health over time.
Mismatch, Not Defectiveness – “Disorder” is located in the mismatch between neurodivergent traits and environmental expectations, not in personal failure.
High‑ vs Low‑Cost Contexts – Listeners are invited to notice where masking is most draining versus where they can be more authentic and safe.
Reframing Collapse – Post‑social collapse and burnout are described as the result of prolonged effort in non‑accommodating spaces, not weakness.
Community & Normalisation – Competence collapse, grief, and confusion are positioned as common, shared neurodivergent experiences rather than individual defects.

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Keywords: AuDHD podcast, autism and ADHD, neurodivergent psychologist, neurodiversity affirming, Howearth Psychology, queer psychologist, autism diagnosis, ADHD awareness, lived experience, neurodivergent mental health, clinical psychology podcast

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🎙️ Episode 14: Rejection Sensitivity & Dysphoria in ADHD, Autism & AuDHD
Episode Summary
In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, Aaron Howearth explores rejection sensitivity, emotional intensity, and rejection sensitive dysphoria through a neurodiversity-affirming lens. He explains why some autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD people experience emotions as suddenly overwhelming, especially when past experiences of rejection, exclusion, or social misunderstanding shape how current situations are interpreted.
Drawing from clinical psychology, Aaron describes emotions as a bodily response to our cognitive appraisal of context, then links that to fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop responses, as well as differences in interoception and alexithymia. He shows how rejection sensitivity can amplify ambiguous social cues, how anticipation of rejection can feel as painful as rejection itself, and why people may move quickly from calm to intense dysphoria without noticing emotion building in the background.
Aaron also discusses how these patterns can contribute to people pleasing, self-sacrifice, masking, burnout, and interpersonal stress, and how they can resemble some features often associated with borderline personality disorder without reducing people to a label. He then offers practical strategies, including using the NICE framework, redirecting attention toward novelty, interest, challenge, or emergency, and replacing “you’re too much” with a more compassionate understanding that people are responding to context, not failing as people.

Key Themes & Takeaways

Emotions as Body + Context – How emotional intensity emerges from the body’s response to our appraisal of current and past context, not from feelings alone.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, Flop – How different threat appraisals map onto distinct survival responses, from fighting and escaping to shutting down or dissociating.
Rejection Sensitivity – How repeated real or perceived rejection can prime people to interpret ambiguity as exclusion and to miss positive social cues.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria – How the lived experience of intense distress around rejection is recognised in community, even though it is not a formal diagnosis.
Alexithymia and Interoception – How difficulty identifying emotions, and differences in sensing internal states, can make emotions feel sudden or hard to regulate.
People Pleasing V Self-Sacrifice – How prioritising others’ needs over one’s own can become a safety strategy shaped by exclusion, masking, and fear of rejection.
Burnout and Interpersonal Stress – How chronic self-suppression and social threat detection can compound stress and contribute to autistic burnout.
NICE Framework in Practice – How novelty, interest, challenge, and emergency can be used to anchor attention and support regulation when emotions become intense.
Self-Compassion and Belonging – How replacing “you’re too much” with “you’re just the right amount” supports a more humane, community-based understanding of neurodivergent experience.

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Keywords: AuDHD podcast, autism and ADHD, neurodivergent psychologist, neurodiversity affirming, Howearth Psychology, queer psychologist, autism diagnosis, ADHD awareness, lived experience, neurodivergent mental health, clinical psychology podcast

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🎙️ Episode 14: AuDHD in the Real World – School, Work, Relationships and Burnout
Episode Summary
In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, clinical psychologist Aaron Howearth moves from talking about AuDHD traits in theory to how they actually show up across school, work, relationships, and daily life. He explores what school can look like for autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD kids behind the report cards: bright, capable students who miss key details because their attention is pulled to everything happening around them, collecting “failure” experiences and perfectionistic self‑criticism even when they’re genuinely trying. Aaron shares a primary‑school story about getting absorbed in playground handball, missing a chance to use the bathroom, then rigidly following a teacher’s “you should have gone at recess” rule and wetting himself in class, illustrating how interest‑based attention and autistic rule‑keeping can collide in inflexible systems.
He then looks at why neurodivergent students so often struggle more consistently than their neurotypical peers: the extra cognitive load of sitting still, suppressing stims, noticing every distraction, and trying to hold and process information in working memory at the same time. Aaron explains how people whose overall abilities are above average can still have relative weaknesses in working memory or processing speed that make standard classrooms and “just keep up with the teacher” delivery especially hard. Rather than framing these differences as laziness or defect, he reframes them as a mismatch between our cognitive profiles and systems designed by and for the statistical middle, and outlines practical accommodations like extra test time, movement breaks, and offering information in multiple formats.
Shifting into adulthood, Aaron discusses how the same patterns re‑emerge at work: fluorescent lights that trigger migraines, noisy open‑plan offices that overload attention, and instructions given in ways that don’t match a person’s processing style. He emphasises that adjustments like quieter rooms, flexible lighting, clear written instructions, and task structures that fit how someone’s brain works are not special treatment but good workplace design.
Key Themes & Takeaways
Executive Functioning & School – How distractibility, missed details, and perfectionism shape self‑esteem and “I’m not good enough” narratives from early on.
Rules, Rigidity & Social Fallout – How autistic rule‑following and ADHD‑style attention can combine to create painful but misunderstood social moments.
Systems and Mismatch – Why education and workplace systems built around the “average” brain leave neurodivergent people overworking just to keep pace.
Working Memory & Processing Speed – How uneven cognitive profiles make standard teaching and instruction styles harder, and why multi‑format information helps.
Workplaces, Sensory Load & EF – The impact of lights, noise, busyness, and unclear instructions on task completion, performance, and wellbeing.
Masking, Burnout & Capacity – What it looks like when masking tips into neurodivergent burnout, and why change needs to happen before full collapse.
Relationships & Assumptions – How an “all the details” brain plus anxiety can generate inaccurate, negatively skewed stories about other people.
Redefining “Disorder” – Viewing diagnosis as a description of mismatch between person and environment, not proof of personal defect.
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Keywords: AuDHD podcast, autism and ADHD, neurodivergent psychologist, neurodiversity affirming, Howearth Psychology, queer psychologist, autism diagnosis, ADHD awareness, lived experience, neurodivergent mental health, clinical psychology podcast

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🎙️ Episode 13: Understanding AuDHD – Executive Functioning and Daily Life (Part 2)
Episode Summary
In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, clinical psychologist Aaron Howearth moves from explaining executive functioning to exploring practical ways autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD people can work with their brains in daily life. He looks at how differences in working memory, processing speed, time perception, self-monitoring, and motivation interact with anxiety and self-esteem, and why our capacity to start, continue, and finish tasks can swing so dramatically from day to day.
Aaron describes how an ADHD-style “problem-solving brain” can flip into a “problem-finding brain” when worry and rumination take over, especially in generalized anxiety. He introduces worry postponement (also called worry time or the worry chair) as a structured way to park worries during the day, revisit them briefly in a time-limited “worry window,” and reclaim attention for the people, tasks, and moments that matter. Read more about worry postponement here: 
https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/~/media/CCI/Mental-Health-Professionals/Generalised-Anxiety/Generalised-Anxiety---Information-Sheets/Generalised-Anxiety-Information-Sheet---05---Postpone-your-Worry.pdf
He also shares neurodivergent-friendly tools for time blindness, task initiation, and follow-through: externalising time with alarms, visual timers, and apps; body doubling and social accountability; reducing visual clutter and sensory load; and building routines gradually through habit stacking rather than overwhelming, all-or-nothing life overhauls. Throughout the episode, Aaron reframes “disorder” not as something inherent to autistic or ADHD traits, but as a mismatch between our brains and inflexible environments and expectations, inviting a more compassionate, neurodiversity-affirming way to understand executive functioning differences.
Key Themes & Takeaways
Executive Functioning & Self-Concept – How repeated struggles with organisation, planning, and follow-through shape self-esteem and internal narratives like “I’m a failure.”
ADHD Problem-Solving vs Problem-Finding – When a fast, creative brain shifts into scanning for everything that might go wrong and filling the gaps with negative assumptions.
Worry Postponement – Using scheduled worry time to note worries during the day, revisit them briefly later, and reduce rumination while still letting the brain feel heard.
Environmental Accommodations – Supports like written instructions, reduced visual clutter, sensory adjustments, and breaking tasks into smaller, more manageable steps.
Time Blindness & Externalising Time – Making time concrete with timers, alarms, visual countdowns, and short, structured work blocks (e.g. Pomodoro-style sprints).
Body Doubling & Accountability – Using co-working, study buddies, supervisors, therapists, or friends as external anchors while respecting strong drives for autonomy.
Habit Stacking & Routine – Attaching new behaviours to existing habits so helpful routines become more automatic and less dependent on motivation in the moment.
Redefining “Disorder” – Viewing diagnosis as a description of mismatch between person and environment rath
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Keywords: AuDHD podcast, autism and ADHD, neurodivergent psychologist, neurodiversity affirming, Howearth Psychology, queer psychologist, autism diagnosis, ADHD awareness, lived experience, neurodivergent mental health, clinical psychology podcast