Understanding Motivation and Burnout in 2e and Neurodivergent Learners with Dr. Megan Anna Neff

Watch the recording now: Understanding Motivation and Burnout in 2e and Neurodivergent Learners with Dr. Megan Anna Neff

This discussion featured Dr. Megan Anna Neff, a licensed clinical psychologist, who explored the complex relationship between motivation, burnout, and neurodivergence in twice-exceptional (2E) learners. The discussion provided a deep dive into how ADHD, autism, and giftedness uniquely impact a student's ability to engage with tasks and move toward their goals.

Key Discussion Highlights from Motivation and Burnout in 2e and Neurodivergent Learners

• Reframing Motivation: Dr. Neff argued that what appears to be a lack of motivation is often the "tip of the iceberg," hiding underlying issues like executive functioning struggles, sensory overwhelm, or burnout.

  
  

• The ADHD Nervous System: The conversation highlighted that ADHD brains are driven by an interest-based nervous system rather than importance or rewards, requiring dopamine-triggering factors like novelty, urgency, or passion to come "online".

  
  

• The "Switchboard" of Arousal: Dr. Neff explained how ADHDers often struggle with hypoarousal (understimulation), leading them to seek out "negative" stimulation—like picking fights—just to feel engaged.

  
  

• Autistic Monotropism: For autistic learners, the discussion focused on monotropism and the need for "flow state," where transitions and routine disruptions act as significant barriers to motivation.

  
  

• The Giftedness Trap: The speakers touched on how gifted students often face perfectionism and a fixed mindset, where their identity is so tied to achievement that they avoid tasks that do not come easily.

  
  

• Neuro-Affirming Strategies: Rather than "hacks" to force compliance, Dr. Neff emphasized creating supportive environments through body doubling, sensory regulation, and validating the child's distress before attempting to problem-solve.

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See the transcript here:

Introduction and REAL Services

Yael Valek, REEL: Welcome, everyone, to tonight's real presentation of Understanding Motivation and Burnout in two neurodivergent Learners with Dr. Megan Ananeth. And this presentation is also available in Spanish on the other channel. So, Kelly, if you can post that in Spanish in the chat, that would be great. In case you're not familiar with REAL, we are a non-profit located in Silicon Valley, and we work to ensure that Silicon Valley twice exceptional students thrive in school by raising parent and educator awareness and understanding of strategies to support their needs successfully.

And in case you're not familiar with 2E, it is a student who has both distinguishing strengths, high abilities. And at the same time, they have complex challenges, such as ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and these two areas, the yellow and blue, overlap to make a green student, so they have distinguishing strengths and complex challenges at the same time, and because these interact in unique ways, they require support, that is different from support for only one of these exceptionalities at a time. And we'll learn more about that tonight.

So, in case you're not familiar with REAL, we offer parent and educator services, including this expert speaker series that you're at tonight. We also have a bi-monthly parent support group, a private Google group with hundreds of parents asking and answering each other's questions. Free downloadable parent toolkits and other online resources, a school guidance guide, and then for small fees, we have a facilitated group and one-on-one consultations. These are all available at real2e.org.

And this is an example of our brand new released parent toolkits that you can download, what happens when I first get a diagnosis, what does twice exceptionality mean, how can I work with my school, and a brand new, you are the first people to see it, the Parent's Guide to Neuropsych Evaluations, which we just published a couple days ago, working with Dr. Jessica Patel. And our big announcement is that our K-12 Strengths Fair is back for its second year on March 8th at the Los Altos Community Center. We have over 40 schools, enrichment providers, and clinicians coming that are all speaking about strengths, meeting with you about your child's strengths.

We are also going to have the amazing Amanda Morin. Who's an award-winning author, nationally known speaker, speaking about why strength language is so important. We have other speakers about AI and about writing, and a lot of hands-on fun for kids to come tinker and figure out what lights them up, as well as ways to connect with other families and meet the real team. So we hope to see you there.

Educator Services and Upcoming Events

And as I mentioned, we also have educator services. We have professional development, such as learning different simulations, and we can customize things for your school. A lot of online resources for educators and recorded talks on subjects like writing and slow processing speed, as well as a bi-monthly educator newsletter. And REAL has an educator model that is available on our website that talks about why developing connection, embracing flexibility, attending to strengths, and reframing behaviors are so important for twice-exceptional and neurodivergent learners, and examples of how to do them across different age ranges.

So you are at our first event of the Winter Spring 2026. Just wanted to let you know that we have a few other things coming up soon. Our Understanding Twice Exceptionality Small Facilitative Group kicks off very soon, February 3rd, and I mentioned our Strengths Fair, which will have 3 speakers. On March 15th, to kick off Neurodiversity Celebration Week, we have Dr. Stacey Greeter talking about After the diagnosis, how to talk about positive neurodivergent identity, and then we are going to have an executive functioning facilitated discussion group, and then talk about, on April 27th, when writing feels hard, how to manage emotions in 2E writers, and we'll round out the year on May 4th.

With another talk related to motivation about how curiosity, connection, and confidence help with TUE students. And we do have our bi-monthly parent support group. There are still two sessions left on March 5th and May 7th, and you can find all of these on REAL's website. Callie's posting some of these links in the chat, but you can join our real Google group, follow us on social, and find all recordings of previous events on YouTube.

Introducing Dr. Megan Anna Neff

And now, without further ado, our amazing speaker for tonight. So, Dr. Megan Ananeth is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and educator who specializes in neurodivergent affirming care. As a late-identified autistic and ADHD psychologist, she blends clinical expertise with lived experience to help families, educators, and clinicians understand neurodivergent inner worlds with nuance and compassion. Through her work at Neurodivergent Insights, she creates widely used tools, courses, and frameworks that translate complex psychology into accessible, empowering resources for everyday life.

And we're so excited to have her here tonight, and she so graciously offered us, discount codes for real only. And I know Kelly's going to be posting some in the chat, so if you'd like to become more familiar with her resources and workbooks, which are amazing. You can do so. So I should probably pin Us? Spotlight us? I won't leave you alone.

I'm coming. Megan Anna Neff: Perfect. Yael Valek, REEL: Callie, can you spotlight me with her so that she's not alone? Are we together? Okay.

The Definition of Motivation and the Curiosity Gap

So, Dr. Neff, I don't know if you wanted to say anything before I ask you… questions, otherwise I can get. Megan Anna Neff: You know, I do well with, structure, so… so feel free to, guide us with some questions. Yael Valek, REEL: Awesome. Okay, so I would love to know why do neurodivergent kids struggle more with motivation? I thought we could talk it through with different, diagnoses, so maybe starting with ADHD?

Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, yeah. So, so many reasons. And so many reasons that we might call motivation, but might… or might look like motivation, but are actually other things. So… this might be a good time to let everyone who's here in the audience in on the backstory of tonight a little bit. Does that work?

So, you reached out to me, I think a couple months ago, about doing this talk, and I was like, oh my goodness, I really want to, I love this topic, but I absolutely do not have bandwidth to create a presentation. Partly because I probably, like a lot of… people… people's children's in here can get very obsessive when I want to do a project or a presentation. So, I knew I didn't have bandwidth for that, so we talked about having it be just conversation-based, and… I needed to make it low enough entry So that I could get engaged.

And that's going to be a theme that we talk about tonight, of how do we take out the pressure, especially for gifted and autistic learners, so that we can get engaged. So, you were very kind, and you lowered the pressure. You said, don't worry about a slide deck or a presentation, we can just have a conversation. But then as I was… preparing my notes, I was like, I really want visual prompts for these. So I kind of have what would be more of a monologue presentation style to answer that question, where I walk through ADHD, autism, and giftedness.

So, I would love it to be conversational-based, though, because when I get monologue, it can feel… I can feel detached from people and the humanness. So… Would it be helpful if I walked through ADHD first with some of the visual guides? Yael Valek, REEL: Yep. Megan Anna Neff: Okay, this one's the longest, because… Adhd is definitely… The most, Kind of what comes to mind the most when we talk about… Motivation.

The Motivation Iceberg

Okay. I'm just getting all of my screens set up. It's nice when I can see some faces. So, I put this together… I think before walking through the three, because one thing that I see happen a lot for our neurodivergent kids, but also the adults, is that this… this phrase, motivation, can get used a lot. It's kind of what we see at the tip of the iceberg.

And what… I actually had a lookup, I was like, what does motivation even mean? And the definition I liked the most was it's the thing that Activates us to do things that move us toward our goals. When we start looking at neurodivergence, a lot of things that make it hard There's a lot of things that make it hard to organize our actions toward our goals, and those often get called motivation struggles, and sometimes it is motivation, because we are human after all, so of course we can struggle with motivation. But often it's not motivation alone.

Sometimes it's things like executive functioning challenges, or, other reasons that might make it hard for us to organize our behavior to move toward a goal. So I think one of the most powerful things we can do, whether we're a teacher or a therapist or a parent to help our children, is to pause and to get curious. Is this truly a motivation issue, or is there something else in the mix? It's, again, it's just so easy to Call what we see at the tip of the iceberg motivation. Because it's kind of a catch-all term when things aren't working well.

But often for neurodivergent kids. It's not, as much I don't want to, as much as it is I can't, or sometimes a complex mix of both. And then, when the person's both neurodivergent and gifted, it can be really hard to tell the adult, I can't, because that can bring on a lot of shame. So a lot of this can stay invisible.

So I think one of the ways that parents can really help reduce shame for kids, so that they can start talking about the struggles of what makes it hard to move toward their goals, is… is to get curious. I love that your upcoming talk on motivation at the end is, curiosity, connection, confidence. that's a beautiful equation for motivation. So yeah, when our kids seem unmotivated. Can we start wondering what else might be going on?

Are there sensory things? Are there executive functioning things? Are they in burnout? Essentially, we want to become detectives, looking for… Almost assuming that their behavior makes sense, and then looking to understand why. So yes, next I'll walk through the different ADHD, autism, and giftedness, and talk about some of the barriers to motivation.

It's a lot of information. Please, you don't need to absorb it all, especially if you, are neurodivergent yourself, it can be a lot to take in new ideas. It's more about, I think. Developing the ability to think this way, to think about, like, to pause and be like, okay, what else is going on here?

Barriers to ADHD Motivation

Okay, but yes, first we'll walk through ADHD. And there's kind of 5 areas I want to hit on here. Like I mentioned, ADHD is probably where we'll spend most of our time tonight, because this is where we see a lot of struggle with executive functioning and with getting ourselves engaged. And so, first of all, we'll talk about on-demand attention, so that's that ability to pay attention to this specific thing.

Right now, unfortunately, a lot of the school systems and workplaces are built on the brains that do on-demand attention well, and then the struggle with executive functioning, that executive functioning is precisely the skills that help us to organize our behaviors to move toward, our goals. So, when we have struggles here, it can look a lot like motivation struggles. And then sequencing steps, this is related to executive functioning, but deserves its own, space. Emotion regulation, that is also harder for ADHD brains, and we need to be able to regulate some hard emotions to be able to do tasks.

And then the one I'm probably most excited to talk about is this idea of understimulation and how that can connect to difficulty getting engaged. So first of all, on-demand attention. So this is that ability to, you know, focus on the thing right now. And ADHD attention just doesn't really behave this way. We can't muster up our attention in quite the same way that a non-ADHD brain can.

And there's a handful of reasons for this, but one framework that I find incredibly helpful is this idea of the interest-based nervous system. So this comes from Dr. Dodson, who's a psychiatrist who's done a lot of great work in the last 30, 40 years on kind of pushing the conversation forward on ADHD, realizing it's so much more than distractibility and Kind of attention regulation struggles. And so, this idea, what it gets at is that non-ADHD brains, they more easily can run from an important space system. So, if something is personally important to you, or important to someone else, like a teacher or a parent.

or if there's rewards or consequences. That's usually enough to mobilize the person's brain to get engaged and to attend to the task at hand. So, and then again, most of our systems in the world are built for brains that work this way. However, things that are simply important. don't bring the ADHD brain online in the same way.

Rather, what drives us are things that are… that we're passionate about, things that are innately interesting. Things that are new or novel can also Help mobilize our attention, things that are challenging, not too challenging, or that can overwhelm us, but things that are challenging, or things that are urgent. So if you have children who wait till the night before to start an essay, you're seeing that urgency be the thing that finally kicks in. Enough dopamine that their neurons can talk to each other, and they can now get engaged.

So all of these things, what they do is that they're mobilizing enough dopamine that our neurons kind of wake up and are able to get engaged with the task. So, for those of us who have an interest-based nervous system, dopamine plays an important part of this. Dopamine, it's really important for learning, but it's also really important for how it mobilizes us. It helps our neurons to be able to kind of more efficiently talk to one another.

Without dopamine, the brain is more sluggish, and it can just be painful to try to get engaged. And so, it's not a matter of willpower or character, it is neurological. And so, understandably, ADHD brains then crave things that release dopamine, so that, our attention can come online. So it moves towards things that interest us. Our brains follow the dopamine.

That's a big sentence in ADHD culture, follow the dopamine. And it's because that's when our brains are engaged. And so what that can look like, you know, it can look like a teacher or a parent might be requesting on-demand attention for a certain task, but if that task is important but completely uninteresting, you know, the child might look distractible because they're drifting off to follow the dopamine. And again, that's not a willpower thing, it's not a character thing, that's a neurological thing that's happening.

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation

Yael Valek, REEL: So that's why our typical methods of reward and consequence. Megan Anna Neff: Yes. Yes, and it… we… it can, that one I want to nu… I'm so glad you said that, because I want to nuance that a little bit. If it's short-term enough, it actually can work. If it's… and I use it for myself, right?

It's interesting, sometimes we kind of… Can shame… external motivation, and it's true, like, we know internal motivation is ideal. I use external motivation all the time, like, if it's… if I'm needing to, you know, do an afternoon of email, which is my least one of my least favorite tasks, I might make myself a mocha to go pair with it. And I do use extrinsic motivation, and one of my favorite things I've heard an ADHD adult say is releasing the shame of needing external motivation to get going.

And so if the reward is close enough. It can actually help activate that, or if it's, like, connected to novelty. But yeah, if it's really far out there. That's… that's… We need to bring the feedback loop a lot closer.

Yeah. Yael Valek, REEL: I was gonna say that, yeah, because I talk, you know, we talk about, oh, you should take… make it through this boring class with the terrible, you know, experience you're having, because someday he'll help you go to college. Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, that's way too far out there. Yes, yes.

And so… and then I think, yeah, so much of the parenting advice, understandably, is about, like, don't… Take away intrinsic motivation, so then it's hard to find those kind of… Rewards that are close enough that it can mobilize. Yeah. Yeah, should we pause and talk anything else about the interest-based nervous system before I move on to executive functioning?

Yael Valek, REEL: Someone said, if you are in charge of the extrinsic motivation, then it's a reward set by the person and aligned with their interests and needs. Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, that's a good point, yeah, because you'd align it with your interest. And it's… it's also… there's ways of bringing in pinch, which, I have some slides on for later. PINCH stands for passion, I've added play, passion or play, interest, novelty, competition, or challenge, or cooperation. And then hurry. There's… when we're thinking about how do we get an ADHD brain engaged. usha: Idiot. Megan Anna Neff: we want to build scaffoldings to build those in, and that can look like rewards, but it could also be novelty.

It could be, I'm going to go do my homework, you know, in a new location, at a coffee shop, for example, to create some novelty for it. When we don't build in the scaffolding, we tend to all revert to hurry, which can just be hard on our nervous system, because then we're reverting to that fight-or-flight response to get everything done.

Yael Valek, REEL: Makes sense. Megan Anna Neff: I think we can keep going, okay.

Yael Valek, REEL: And come back, yeah, I'm sure questions will pop up. Megan Anna Neff: Okay, okay. So yeah, executive functioning, this is another significant barrier to motivation, or I'm not even sure it's accurate to say to motivation, but to doing the things that move us toward our goals. And as well as cognitive overwhelm. So, you know, the definition that most people use of it for executive function is it's the thing, the skills that help us organize our behavior toward our goals.

Executive Functioning as Intelligence Organization

So that's kind of One of the… probably more common definitions you'll hear, but another way that I like to describe it is that it is the things or the skills that help us to organize our intelligence. I like to describe it that way because executive functioning can sometimes get confused with intelligence, so someone can be highly intelligent. But really struggling to kind of, channel that, or activate that kind of, activate that intelligence because of their executive functioning struggles.

And so that person might even not appear very intelligent if their executive functioning skills is pretty significant. Not because they aren't, but because the skills to organize that are struggling, and the person needs more supports. The flip side can also be true, where especially if someone has a high verbal intelligence, then their executive functioning needs can get missed. And so it's… helpful to differentiate these things, and I like the concept of thinking about executive functioning as the thing that helps organize our intelligence.

It also helps explain why the 2E experience can be so painful, because it's like, they have the horsepower to go really fast, but the structure to help, kind of organize it and channel it is where the struggle is. And that can be more psychologically painful than if, kind of, you've got some executive functioning struggles and it matches your intelligence, like, in the sense of it's a more even profile. Because that gap between the two can create so much shame and distress of, like, I should be able to do this, but I just can't get myself to.

And I think we see our kids struggling with that a lot of… it can create a lot of self-doubt and confusion. I'm not going to go through all these, and it sounds like you all have an upcoming event on executive functioning, which is perfect, but these are some of the skills that we're talking about when we're thinking about executive functioning, things like organizing, planning, the perception of time. Self-monitoring and, also being able to kind of stop ourselves from impulse and, ability to regulate emotions, all of these are connected to our executive functioning.

Now, the one part of executive functioning I do want to highlight is this idea of task initiation, because this one especially gets confused for unmotivated quite a lot. So that's the act of initiating a new task, especially when the task is not interesting. That is really hard for the ADHD brain. A term that's often used in our community is neurodivergent inertia, that idea… That, you know, from Newton's idea that an object tends to stay in the same state of motion unless something shifts it.

Adhd, and probably autistic people, too, we tend to be very similar to that, and so it can be really hard to make that transition and to start a new task. And then when we don't realize that those difficulties are based in executive functioning, in our neurology, it is so easy, both for ourselves, to slip into character-based narratives, but also for perhaps the narratives we have of our child, or for teachers' narratives of our child, for… to think it's about laziness, or procrastination, or defiance, or avoidance. When it's that… that child is struggling to get engaged and to make that transition.

Redefining "Lazy" and Sequencing Tasks

Yael Valek, REEL: I definitely hear my son calling himself lazy. Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, and I think that's… I mean, that's part of what a neurodivergent affirming framework does, right, is we can give our children language, because people will look for language to describe something, and that's the language that they'll have access to, is lazy. And when we can give our kids the language of, like, oh, okay, yeah, your brain's struggling to transition here, And… or the language of task initiation.

Like, in our family, it's now become really normal. If we ask each other for things, we'll be… we'll be like, okay, my brain's gonna need 5 minutes to, like. transition out of what I'm doing before I can. And so also just normalizing that when we make asks of each other, it's like, are you in a place to transition out? How many minutes do you need for that?

Yeah, so much of parenting is around creating language that we can all use. This one's also connected to executive functioning, just the ability to sequence tasks. And so, ADHD also makes that particularly challenge, the ability to break down a complex task, but also just to know, kind of, what steps come next. And then again, complicating things.

If a child's struggling here, they might simply say, I don't want to. Especially… again, especially if the child's gifted, because saying, I can't, could bring on a lot of shame. But it might be that they have bumped into a skill that they… that is underdeveloped. When we think about sequencing tasks, there's a lot of executive functioning that goes into that, like, Context awareness and working memory to know what's already been done, what's missing, what's changed, the ability to break down the task.

working memory, so that ability to hold information in mind, and that can be incredibly challenging. The cognitive flexibility of being able to shift Especially if one step doesn't go as planned. Time perception, being able to estimate how long parts of it will take. And then distress tolerance, the ability to handle all of the emotions that come up when a step perhaps doesn't go as planned.

So if a child has a large project they're working on, there are often so many steps along the way that require all of the executive functioning skills. And then again, if the child's gifted. we, as parents, might not realize how much help they need to be able to break tasks down and say, okay, let's look at this together and let's break it down. It can be easy to miss those executive functioning skills, and so it can just look like They became unmotivated and dropped the project.

Parenting Support and Emotional Regulation

Yael Valek, REEL: Especially, I've noticed as people transition into middle and high school, and we're told as parents, you should no longer be helping your child. They should be doing this on their own by this age. Megan Anna Neff: I feel like shame comes up a lot around this topic of motivation, both for our kids, but also for us as parents. We can have a lot of shame-based narratives of, like, I shouldn't be sitting here helping my child break this down.

I'm told, yeah, I'm told that my child should be able to do this, this is an important skill. And then again, especially if they're also gifted. And they have a high verbal intelligence, it can bring on shame of. Am I… like, am I over-accommodating my child and making them dependent on me?

I think there's so much… there's so much fear. I mean, I… myself included, and I'm in community with a lot of parents, there's so much fear of, like, am I doing this right? Because there's not… there's not a clear roadmap, there's not… the guidelines that the schools tell us, and the others, the professionals tell us, don't always work for our kids. Yeah, so we also probably have shame in our own parenting that we have to work through, and a ton of doubt.

Yael Valek, REEL: Yes. Megan Anna Neff: And then there's emotional regulation. Again, it's really easy to miss how much our children need support here. So, one of my children She started talking at 7 months, like, her first words. She was speaking full sentences by 11 months.

She, I think, had over 300 words when she was 1, so she was talking like a mini-adult when she was 3 or 4. And because she sounded so sophisticated, one of the deep regrets that I have from parenting her when she was young is I completely missed how much support she needed around emotion regulation, because I kept thinking, she talks like a mini adult, and therefore her emotions should be like a mini-adult. And so, the tricky thing is, for our ADHD gifted students, their verbal intelligence can be way above their age range, but their executive functioning and emotional regulation is often 2 to 3 years lagging behind their peers. And again, that gap between the two can cause So much pain and confusion, both for the person, but also for us as parents, and it can be just so hard to… so easy to miss, how much support they need, and I've certainly been there.

Yael Valek, REEL: Yes. Megan Anna Neff: And whenever we're getting ourselves to do tasks, there's a lot of emotions that come with that. Some emotions that kind of activate the nervous system, so that bring it into that heightened emotional experience. Things like anxiety or perfectionism or urgency or pressure.

And so, being able to regulate the arousal enough that we're able to do the work, but then there's also some emotions, you know, hypoarousal, so dampening emotions that kind of make us foggy, so things like boredom, shame, hopelessness, overwhelm. And so, we also need to be able to regulate those emotions to be able to do the task. And then, again, especially if the person's also gifted, they might naturally tend to gear toward the tasks that are easiest for them, because then they don't have to confront these hard emotions. So then when they… they are confronted with tasks that aren't coming easy for them, that can be particularly challenging.

Nervous System Arousal and Understimulation

Yael Valek, REEL: This one is your favorite, you said. Megan Anna Neff: I just, so I'm writing a book right now on the Audi HD experience, and I'm really excited. I've, I've written… all my books so far have been just on autism. So I just finished the chapter on the nervous system, and so I was reading some… some newer studies, and I just… I find it all very fascinating, and interesting.

Yael Valek, REEL: So many hearts are coming up since you said you're writing that book. Megan Anna Neff: Oh, oh, thank you. So, this thing, I think this is such a helpful framework. And it's the idea that, when a task is understimulating, it is so hard to get ourselves engaged. In general, all of us as humans, we benefit from being in that ideal, like, arousal window for a task at hand.

And by arousal, I'm talking about physiological arousal, so, like, nervous system arousal. So, for example, right now. in my nervous system, I feel pretty well matched for the task at hand. I need to have enough arousal, otherwise you all would be so bored, and I'd be talking so slow, and my face would be flatter than it normally is. But if I was over, if I had too much arousal, I'd be really anxious, I'd be tripping over my words, and it would be hard to do this task.

Ideally, our nervous systems behave in a way that we have enough arousal that we can do the task at hand. Now, both ADHD and autism, we see patterns where our, our nervous system, our specifically our autonomic nervous system, behaves a little bit differently. We have some different arousal patterns, you could say. One way I'm starting to think about ADHD is that it's a difficulty with regulating our arousal levels, that that's really at the heart of the ADHD experience.

And so… here's the part of the emerging research that I find really interesting. So we know that both ADHD and autism show patterns of differences in arousal. And it's not 100% of ADHDers and 100% of autistic people, the research is mixed, I don't want to kind of oversell anything. But this research felt counterintuitive to me, and I think that's why it excites me so much, is what they were finding is the ADHD person tends toward… at rest and during cognitive tasks, especially repetitive ones, their nervous systems tend to go into hypoarousal, so that's that kind of foggy, shut down, low energy.

And my intuitive thinking, I was like, well, I would have thought autism did that, because I associate all my fatigue with autism, and I associate my energy with ADHD. And so that's why it felt counterintuitive to me. But once I… paused, it actually made sense, because I thought about, what do I… what do I do when I'm in a really boring movie… Meeting? Well, I start moving my body more, I start jittering my leg, I maybe start daydreaming.

And so… and one of the studies, what they found is that those who tended more toward hypoarousal as their baseline had more hyperactivity and more impulsivity. And again, we tend to think of hyperactivity and impulsivity as, like, oh, this person has so much excess energy. Well, one of the theories is, this is actually a way of compensating. Like, it… And I think the ADHDers in the room will probably relate to this.

It is just a soul-sucking experience when we are in that… when we're bored, when we're in that state of shutdown. and low arousal. it feels… like, the way I describe it, I feel like I want to crawl out of my skin. And so we will do anything to create arousal, to bump ourselves up. we will pick a fight with a sibling.

If we're adults, we might… cause drama. Like, it… negative arousal is better Than being in that hypoaroused state. And so, when the task at hand, because it's a boring task, or the environment isn't giving us the arousal we need, an ADHDer will create it. And so what that could look like, let's say you're trying to do homework, and all of a sudden, your child is like, I want a snack, I want music, they're moving, they're fidgeting, maybe they're picking a fight.

it could look like distractibility, but it's actually… they're compensating, they're trying to get their arousal up. When I don't have enough arousal, I'll start checking my email more, and I'll get distractibility, I'll create it. So I have to, like, build it into my environment so that I don't go looking for it. And so this part about getting us into that ideal arousal window so that we don't find it through distraction, I think is a part of the ADHD experience that, I just think is really, really helpful to start thinking through our behavior through this arousal lens.

Sensory Strategies for Regulation

Yael Valek, REEL: I think you're gonna talk about it later, but I don't know, like, what can… what's a healthy… arousal piece we could put in place as parents, let's say when our kid is struggling to do their homework so that they're not picking a fight, and. Megan Anna Neff: Well, I can be non-linear here, especially because I… first of all, I just really appreciate that this is conversational and not just, me talking out of camera for a long time, because I was about to pivot to autism, but what we could do is I could talk about the supports for ADHD. And then we could go back to autism, and just do it a bit differently.

But actually, let me answer your question. Cause I have… I have some slides. Yael Valek, REEL: But if it's too hard to make you go out of sequence, we can… I can hold my questions. Megan Anna Neff: No, it's nice and novel, and it's my taste. I have enough predictability, because I have my slide deck, and then… that I can be a little bit spontaneous.

Yeah, so I… the big thing here is, can we… and this is where I love talking about sensory stuff, I love, like, helping people understand their sensory system, because yes, it's about, you know, knowing our sensory triggers, but it's… it also can become an energy and emotion, management tool, in the sense that the sensory elements around us can be alerting, or they can be soothing. So, for example, right now, I have a weighted blanket on my lap. That's… that's soothing. If in the afternoons, I often get tired, and I might do, like, a carbonated cold drink, because that's an alerting stimulus.

So, learning about our sensory environment is huge for this, because Sensory input is a powerful way of creating arousal in our environment. So this, and this is one I provided, a PDF that you're… you're free to distribute to your community, and one of them is this thing I call the, the stimulus meter. So, it's a simple little exercise of just doing a stimulus check-in, of, okay, am I understimulated right now, or am I overstimulated?

Or perhaps I'm both. As an autistic ADHDer, sometimes I'm both. And then it's considering, okay, what can I add right now That's gonna either upregulate me, so again, cold. like, a cold drink, or music. One of my favorite, I'll listen to a STEM song, when I'm trying to focus, and the fact that it's repetitive means it doesn't distract me too much, but it's enough to increase my arousal.

And so, STEM music, it could be, maybe LED lights if, if, you know, the child's really responsive to, like, kind of visual stimulus. Could be a spicy snack. And then if we're overstimulated, it can be things like dimming the lights, because again, if we're overstimulated, it's also going to be hard to get engaged. Oh yeah, this is the PDF I mentioned that kind of walks you through an exercise of how to think through, okay, what's up-regulating, what's down-regulating.

Another resource, Autism Level Up, has something called the Regulator 2.0, and you walk through each sensory system. And kind of map out what it does to your energy. So that can be another really great resource for helping your, children learn, like. what is stimulating for them. Because, again, if we bake it into the environment, it means they're not needing to create The stimulus, either through, Behavior that's gonna create a response, or through destructibility.

The PINCH Framework for Engagement

Should I talk a little bit about how to use the interest-based nervous system? Because that's actually related, because part of why the interest-based nervous system works is because it's, it's enough stimulus, again, to get us out of that hypoactivity and get our brains engaged. So this is that pinch framework that I mentioned a moment ago. which is, PINCH is just a helpful acronym, because it helps us, kind of. think, remember it, passion or play, or interest, or hurry, novelty and competition.

Really, it's about how do we find an entry point for engagement? Because a lot of it with ADHD is… is the act of getting ourselves engaged, and so that's where we can use a bit more support. I'm gonna kind of skim through these, I won't walk through them in detail, but feel free to pause and we can talk about these or ask questions. But, passion and play…

Yael Valek, REEL: I was accidentally sharing their screen, I don't know how that happened, but .

Megan Anna Neff: Oh, like, am I not sharing my screen?

Yael Valek, REEL: they sort of bumped you somehow, so I think you'll have to repair. I've never seen that. I'm so sorry. There you go, you're back. Megan Anna Neff: Did… was this slide seen?

Yael Valek, REEL: That was the slide you were on, yeah. Megan Anna Neff: Okay.

Yes, so this one… I'm gonna walk through the acronym pretty quickly, but we… we can pause and talk about any of them, but PASSION and… and then I like to add PLAY. I love talking about play, too. PLAY is actually, really serious business, like, from a child development standpoint, it's… it's kind of where we… forge a sense of self and identity.

And play is also so good for co-regulation and emotion regulation. So, you know, especially if your family's, you know, at all like mine, and if, like, mornings are hard, or getting ready for bed, or times that are hard, these are a great time that we can infuse play, and it can also help us, because I know for me. by the, you know, fourth time we're talking about getting ready for bed, I'm… I might start to be feeling grumpy, too. And so that might be a time where I'm like, okay. let's see if you can beat me.

We're both gonna try and get ready for bed. Let's see who can do it fastest. And my son is at a point where he's like, I know what you're doing, but it still works. Or, you know, we can do… we can infuse dancing or teeth brushing. I know that can be hard for sensory reasons for a lot of our children, so can we incorporate, like, music or a dance, some… some way to, again, help regulate the emotions of, like, that's… that's an uncomfortable experience.

Gamifying tasks. So these are all ways that we can infuse, especially friction points, and to make it a bit lighter. I think the thing that we do want to be mindful of is. If we're infusing it with play, we want to be able to access a playful spirit. If we're using it as a tactic.

kids, especially these kids, will, like, pick it up so fast and be like, oh, you're trying to manipulate me. So we have to actually be in the playful spirit as well when we introduce this to our children. Interest? So this is… we can kind of stack or layer, so we can combine tasks that have high interest, or we can link, if, you know, if you go to schools that use project-based learning, or in middle school and high school, in college, it gets a little bit easier.

Novelty and Cooperation

Like, I… in college, I think I made every research paper about my special interest, so the more we can link things to our passions and interests. For a lot of ADHDers, just making it more visual tends to increase the interest, or using multimedia, or having space to explore the side quests. It's not a distraction, it's actually what makes the task interesting. And then I mentioned this, a bit ago, but this is… especially if you have someone who tends to tend toward hypoarousal, novelty is one of those things.

Whenever we're exposed to new stimulus, that's, up-regulating. When we're exposed to predictable stimulus, that's down-regulating. Good for autistic people. And then, you know… When you're audio HD, you want both predictable and novel stimulus. It's really confusing.

But this can be as simple as adding in some new sensory elements, you know, like, smell or taste, or it could be going to a whole new environment. It might even just be changing the furniture. My spouse jokes that my son and I change the furniture of our rooms constantly, and that's part of what we're doing, is we're making the space feel more new and novel. So C can be challenged, and again, we want to make sure it's in that kind of ideal window.

If it's too challenging, that'll be, too much, but if it's… if it's a challenging task, that will get a lot of ADHDers engaged. But the other one is cooperation, so… Many of you might be familiar with this concept of body doubling, but it's that idea that simply doing something with another human, even virtually, that that's something that often helps us get engaged, so maybe it's body doubling homework of, like, sitting there with your child, and that's also helping with co-regulation, and it's helping to mobilize them. They're more easily often able to get engaged when we can body double with them.

My mom, you know, we didn't know I was ADHD, but she was so helpful. I struggled so much with keeping my room clean as a kid. And it was one of those things where… she might have gotten messages of, you know, as a teenager, I should have been able to do it, but she'd come in the room with me and body double it and be like, okay. okay, Anna, I went by Anna as a kid.

We're gonna start with this corner, and then we'll move on to the next. There is so much that she was doing for me. She was helping me sequence the tasks, because my brain couldn't, she was body doubling. And again, we might have narratives of, like, my kid should be able to clean their room, but they actually might need a body double to be able to do it.

Yael Valek, REEL: someone is saying that they use body doubling for laundry, so I guess they fold right next to them, their kid folds next to them.

Megan Anna Neff: Oh, that's such a good… yeah, yeah. Yeah, body doubling is, and especially if we're also ADHD, like, it can be helpful for us, too. And then the last one's hurry or urgency, and again, this kind of becomes the default one, but that can be hard on our nervous system. So, we want to draw on the other ones as much as possible, but then what we can also do is kind of create, like, faux hurry.

Creating Healthy Pressure

So, like, if we are breaking down the task, into smaller steps, and then we can give, like, we can help Create timelines for each of those, or deadlines, so that there's not, like, a 15-page essay that's due the next day. Or even for younger kids using visual timers, or, like, when my kids were younger, we would use the beat the clock, like, can you get ready before the clock? Goes off in 5 minutes. Also, as a side note, all of these… all of this has been so good for my ADHD-dominant kid.

For my autistic PDA child, I use none of this. So this… this… these practices tend to be really good for ADHDers, but for autistic… Especially PDA, this can… it can create too much pressure. And then whenever we're incorporating any of these. We want to be kind of…having an experiment, or experimental, or, like, I'm gonna infuse the moment with this, not a… I'm gonna trick you into doing the thing. I actually ran a course in the community I run where we went through all of this for the adults, just because we were trying to help ourselves get engaged. And that was the big thing that we all noticed, is when we started using any of these tactics as a way of self-manipulation, it totally backfired. But if it was, like.

Well, I'm, you know… I'm gonna experiment with this, or I'm gonna try this as an engagement. It tended to go a lot better. So, how we approach this matters. Probably even more so than any of these practices.

I think this was the last one for ADHE, is just executive functioning supports. This one, I'm sure your community, already has a sense of how important this is. Body doubling, again, that's a way of supporting executive functioning, using visual supports. Not all of us, but a lot of us are visual thinkers, or can also help with working memory.

And then building out systems that support organization, so there's less the child's holding in mind, or that we're holding in mind. Because of that, that working memory can only hold so much. And then we can also approach it with some almost, like, backward logic or backward reasoning, where we can identify, like, okay, where are they struggling? So maybe they're struggling with task initiation.

So then it's like, okay, let's bring in some engagement support, which would be a lot of the, like, pinch and the interest-based nervous system and the stimulus. Maybe it's really… it's the transitions that are hard for them. It's, okay, how do we do more transition prep? And help prepare that. Or if it's the sequencing, it's okay, how do we sit down together and support breaking down the tasks?

So kind of identifying where they're struggling, and then backward planning. So… kind of the way I'm starting to think of it is, more so than asking, like, what practices or tips or kind of hacks help motivate my ADHD child or my ADHD self, I like to think about it more about what… where does ADHD motivation grow? And I think it grows in environments where, you know, bodies can move, and where interest is sparked, and where…

their needs are really normalized and supported, instead of being shamed or disciplined. I think that then, naturally, that allows ADHD motivation to grow, and to flourish. So, I think it's less about, kind of, finding Ways to motivate our kids, and more about how do we create the environment that allow… allow this motivation to thrive. Yael Valek, REEL: Love that.

Balancing AuDHD Needs: Predictability and Novelty

So, we talked about ADHD, what about autism? And then, of course, what about when you have both? Megan Anna Neff: Yes, I'll try to weave that in a little bit. Yael Valek, REEL: Because I'm just thinking, how do I create predictability and novelty simultaneously?

It sounds like it's having a slide deck, but being able to jump around it. Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, I… I think of, like, sometimes I talk about, if my autism can create, like, a really safe container, then my ADHD feels like it has the freedom to play. So I think a lot of it's about containment, and if we can provide enough Enough secure predictability. then the ADHD doesn't feel as threatening.

Like, one parent in my community, I love it, he does a… I forget what he calls it, he has a clever name for it, but it's like. scheduled spontaneity, or scheduled impulse purchase, and he and his daughter… I can't remember if it's once a week or once a month, I think it's probably once a month, they'll take a Saturday, and they'll go to, you know, like a Target, and they'll do impulse purchasing. And so it's scheduled impulse purchasing, or scheduled spontaneity. And to me, I'm like, that is so autistic ADHD friendly, of like.

We're gonna be spontaneous, but we're also gonna plan it, or we're gonna do some impulse purchasing, but we're gonna plan it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, So motivation can also be tricky for autistic people, but for… often for kind of slightly different reasons.

Autism: Monotropism and the Flow State

I think it tends to be more about the hidden demands that are also being asked of the person, that the people around that person maybe don't realize. So, for example, what I mean is maybe that activity is going to lead to a lot of routine disruption that's going to be dysregulating. Or maybe it's about not under… struggling to understand the instructions and decoding them, or it's about energy, or the fact that it would be a very sensory, overwhelming task. So I'll walk through some of these.

I think the first one, this is similar to the, kind of, ADHD struggle with transitions, but it's slightly different. It's this idea that… so the autistic mind is a deeply monotropic mind, and by that, I mean… our minds do best when we can focus on things that are narrow and deep. And, you know, there's a lot of different theories about what autism is, and I don't think we're gonna come to a nice, agreement anytime soon, but one of the theories I really like is this idea of thinking about autism at its core as kind of this monotropic state, or where we're constantly trying to get back into flow state.

And there's some interesting research that we more easily get into flow state than non-autistic people. And there's an interesting article I read a while back that described how a lot of the quote-unquote symptoms of autism are often a response to the absence of flow state, or a way of trying to get back into it. And so, especially if our kids are doing school, middle school or high school, that is so not monotropic friendly. Your attention is being forced and split into so many different places that they're gonna come home and crave, like, deep monotropic time.

That's where we recharge, it's how many of us regulate our emotions. And so, I think things that can look like resistance or avoidance, it's often a protection, a protection of that monotropic time, and then that desire to get back into that flow state where they're able to recharge and regulate. I really love this word. I'm really not great at pronouncing most words, so I… I… Taekwon…Actually, I'm not even gonna try. I have phonetical dyslexia, which makes pronunciation very hard. Megan Anna Neff: But it's, it's a, more… more… the more people of New Zealand have this word for autism, and I have never resonated with something more… So deeply.

It's this idea of autism as people who are in their own time and space. And I think, again, this captures that flow state of for so many of us, our natural instinct is to be in our own time and space, and when we don't have much of that, we crave it. And so, it might look like our autistic kids are not interested in extracurriculars, and yeah, I mean, school is creating so much monotropic split for them that they need so much time to be able to Come back to their own time and space and recover.

Yael Valek, REEL: That's so interesting. We found… figured that out without knowing this, that, we changed my son's entire school schedule, so he has a lot of time to do his interests between classes. That is how he is able to recharge and have the energy to do the topics he's not interested in. Megan Anna Neff: I love that you first, like, knew that, and then were able to work with your school to do that, because, yeah, interest is really… it's where we recharge, it's where we, regulate our hard emotions.

It's so… it's so soothing. And so, especially when we can kind of break… add that into the day, so it's like moments to regroup before doing a hard thing. That's… I'm so… glad that you all were able to create that. I wish every autistic kid could have that school experience.

Strategic Withdrawal and Routine Protection

Yeah. Yael Valek, REEL: We did switch. We switched to, sort of a homeschooling, self-made model in order to make this work. Megan Anna Neff: I was gonna say, like, that doesn't sound like a. Yael Valek, REEL: I know not everyone can do that, but I have heard of schools that do give kids breaks in between to… There's something else between classes, so…

Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, and if they're able to engage their interests, so that they can get into that kind of restorative place, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And then avoidance or withdrawal can also be an energy management system. So, I feel like… so, autistic people, we just need a lot of rest. Like, the world, masking, it's just all so…

very taxing and costly. It's interesting, because avoidance, especially in the mental health space, this is often kind of tagged as a negative thing, because it's often associated with depression and anxiety, and it can be that, even for autistic people, so we do want to tease it out. But there's this idea of… that autistic people also will sometimes use strategic withdrawal as an adaptive way to manage energy and manage sensory spoons.

And so sometimes avoidance or withdrawal, you know, it might be because there's some mental health things going on that we want to look into, but it might also be strategic for that person. And so one way we can check in here is kind of, you know, the thing that the child might call it, or the other people might call it, is laziness, but okay, is this actually laziness, quote-unquote, or is this kind of a clever energy management tool my child's using when they need to withdraw a lot? And then routine disruptions, you know, if we're putting new activities on or new tasks, that can, disrupt… disrupt routines.

A big part of how our minds work… so in general, like, our minds are prediction machines, kind of all human minds, And then, for autistic people, our prediction maps are more narrow, so many of us, we might learn scripts or templates for what is about to happen, and we rely on those pretty heavily because our prediction processing is more narrow, and so when the world goes off script, so for example, maybe we prepared for a social encounter with two friends, but one person unexpectedly invited someone else. All of a sudden, the world's gone off script, and that completely can throw the autistic person off.

Or maybe you're running errands with your child. And you were gonna run two, and then it's like, oh, wait, we're also gonna stop by the bank real quick. And that… adding that third Aaron absolutely, causes a meltdown, because the world's now gone off script. Or an autistic child might Like, avoid school rather than have a sub if they know there's gonna be a sub, because it's just so anxiety-inducing to think about, all the ways that routine's gonna be disrupted.

And so, this is another area where, what can look like resistance or avoidance could be a protection, around routine. So, another check-in here can be something like, you know, are we, Is this… is this resistance, or is this… is this somehow providing prediction and… and protection? Jeannie: Yeah.

Sensory Adversity and Understanding "Why"

Megan Anna Neff: And then, of course, sensory. So, sensory is a big reason that we might avoid things. Children don't always have the language for this, though. They might just know they feel bad, or that they don't like something. But they might not be able… you know, most of us don't have sensory language.

I didn't have it till a few years ago, till I started learning this stuff. I just knew I didn't like certain things. So it might be… like, it might look like your child's unmotivated to eat healthy, but maybe there's something about the sensory texture of fruit or vegetables. And so, again, really being able to do that drill down of What's actually going on here, and are there some sensory adversities here that are getting in the way?

And then just simply understanding instructions, you know, instructions are really confusing, especially some of the academic instructions, like in English, essay instructions can be very abstract. Autistic people, we tend to have what's called bottom-up processing, meaning we take in the details, and we take in the sensory information, and then we kind of build up to the whole picture. And so, decoding the instructions can often be really confusing, and so we might… we might, disengage because we simply don't understand the instructions.

And again, a child might also have shame about the fact that they don't understand the instructions. similar but slightly different. Also, like, connecting to the why, like, why am I being asked to do this? You know, if ADHD's motivation system is driven by interest, I would say the autistic motivation system is driven by meaning. Like, we need to be able to connect to the why.

If, for me, if I don't have the why, I can't orient around the task, and I'm definitely not going to mobilize my limited energy to do something if I don't understand the purpose of it. So it's also about understanding the why and being able to connect with the why. And for most autistic people and children, because I said so is not good enough of a why. And so, kind of being able to understand, especially in some academic spaces where it can feel like busy work.

And then another thing that can happen is we can be extra literal with instructions, and then end up doing a lot of extra work. People don't always realize that being very literal with instructions often means that we end up doing more work than, perhaps the teacher intended. So that's another kind of block that can come up here. I might skip this one just for time.

Giftedness: Distress Tolerance and Perfectionism

This is also about bottom-up processing. I'll come back to it if someone has a question later about it. So maybe I'll… briefly review giftedness, and then we can, we can shift here a little bit. I'm looking at time. I didn't give as much time to giftedness as I did autism and ADHD.

I probably didn't do it justice, but partly that was for timing and pacing, but also partly because it can be hard to tease out the blocks that are specific to giftedness, and what's kind of… maybe even historically been attributed to giftedness, but is actually neurodivergent traits. But a few that I definitely see here that are specific to giftedness are things like, underdeveloped skills around managing stress or distress tolerance, kind of the ability to persist when a task doesn't come easily.

Partly they might have less experience with this, typically because maybe a lot of tasks did come easily for them, so then when they come to a task that doesn't, they haven't had the chance to develop that muscle of, like, what it's like to persist when something's not easy. And then this can also connect in some pretty complex ways. to perfectionism, or a fear of failure. Gifted children, are often quite impressive from a young age, especially if they have high verbal intelligence, and so they can get a lot of positive feedback from the adults around them, and pretty early on can start to kind of forge a sense of.

identity of, like, I matter, because of my achievements. And then what can happen is I can't make a mistake, I can't fail, because my sense of self, my sense of worth is tied into that. And so that can make it hard to then try things that don't come easy, which it can become a sort of feedback loop of if we aren't trying things that don't come easily. We're not given a chance to develop those distress tolerance skills, so this can kind of Become a complex feedback loop of our identities tied to not making mistakes, which makes it hard to develop the distress tolerance skills.

And then also boredom understimulation, just if, you know, if they're kind of cognitively beyond their peers in the classroom, they're also going to be understimulated in ways that are slightly different than ADHD. Yael Valek, REEL: I think it's also super common for gifted kids to have a fixed mindset, especially based on the praise they get. Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, yeah. Yes, absolutely, I've noticed that as well.

Validation and Growth Mindset in Gifted Kids

And I think it's partly because of how threatening it can feel to make a mistake. When your sense of value is connected to being impressive. Yael Valek, REEL: The other thing someone is saying is, isn't orienting to the why also stem from giftedness? Someone… she's saying, there's a lot of similarities between the giftedness and the autism.

Megan Anna Neff: There are, and this is where I, like… I… I mean, I still get confused with this, too. Like, for a long time, what was happening… was, there were a lot of gifted autistic and gifted ADHD people, and the neurodivergence was being missed. And so, I think part of what started happening is… people might not love this… I think giftedness got too big as an umbrella, in that it started saying, oh, this is a gifted thing, but it was a neurodivergent trait, but we didn't know it was autism or ADHD, because only in recent years have we gotten better at identifying, you know, ADHD and autistic girls, or ADHD or autistic people with higher IQs. So it gets really tricky to say, is this… truly a gifted thing, or is this an autistic thing? I think the need to know why can certainly be both. A lot of gifted people tend to be deep existential thinkers, so they absolutely also need to know the why.

But yeah, it can get really… Kind of confusing around what's giftedness and what's neurodivergence. Yael Valek, REEL: 2E profiles, definitely a confusing one. Is that, let me know if you wanted to move on to other questions? Megan Anna Neff: I… so actually, I… what I might try to do… this might be a little more spontaneous than my brain can handle, but what I might want to do, I actually…because I want to leave room for questions, because I see it's 8, so I might just pull up slides if they're relevant, but I actually do want to pull up one… In response to what someone just said around giftedness, and the fixed mindset. And that's… one of the things that I think is really helpful here, and I've learned a lot from Dr. Danica Maddox, I don't know, have you had Dr. Maddox?

Yael Valek, REEL: Since both. Okay. Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, I was like, this feels like… like, her space. So I, I've learned a lot. what… and we had her on our podcast, and it was a great conversation.

I should share the link to that. But she talks about the importance of validation, and I think this makes so much sense to me. Because gifted people do tend to be so existential, so deep, have complex emotions, it is so important to lead with validation. And it's so… tempting, and I say this as someone who… I have fallen into this pitfall, it is so tempting to want to, like, logic or reason

Validating Distress Before Reframing

my child out of their feelings. But the power of taking a beat to first validate before we do any reframing. So… for example, you know, like, it makes sense, you feel that way. That sentence right there, it makes sense, you feel that way, is probably one of the most helpful ways to de-escalate, emotions or experiences, especially if it's a complex, big emotion, or something like.

you weren't expecting that. This is one… this is what Dr. Donica really taught me, and I have… oh, this icon's there, I have a script of validating scripts that we put together. That's also in the PDF I included. We were talking about the growth mindset idea. And I was talking about, oh yeah, how important it is to teach growth mindset to gifted kids.

And she said something that has really helped my parenting of. Sometimes, for gifted kids, if we rush too quickly to say… like, let's say they're working on an art project, and they make a mistake of, like, mistakes happen, befriend the mistakes, or it's beautiful. That we miss their distress, that for them, it is so distressing that they had a picture in their mind of what they wanted it to be, and it's not that. So to first say, like, it didn't turn out the way you wanted it to be.

to first validate the distress before going to the growth mindset. And I think for kids that have big, complex, existential feelings. Having people that can create space for that, to first validate that before… you know, it's so easy for me to want to, yeah, try to get into a logical argument around some of the deep existential worries that my kid has to try and reassure her, but sometimes the most reassuring thing is to, like, validate, yeah, it's scary right now.

It makes sense you feel that way. Yael Valek, REEL: I need to do a better job of this. I was rushed to a solution. Yeah, or to try to, yes, talk them out of it. Yeah.

Bottom-Up Processing: The "School of Fish"

Megan Anna Neff: So yeah, I do have more slides, but should we. Yael Valek, REEL: We do have a few more minutes if you, I didn't know if there's anything else about, supporting autism that you wanted to… that we skipped, or. Megan Anna Neff: We did, we did skits. Abby Kirigin, REEL: asked about that bottom-up slide, if you want to go through that.

Yael Valek, REEL: Oh, okay. Thanks, Abby. Megan Anna Neff: Okay, on the bottom-up slide, yeah. So, so bottom-up processing, again, it's that idea that we take in details and then build up to the big picture. And so…

this can make… it means that we're often swimming in a lot of details, and it's also part of what makes instructions, I think, harder to understand or decode, but it also just makes projects more complex. This metaphor comes from Dr. Jonathan Dalton, who does a lot with anxiety and autism. And he uses this metaphor of… so, one of the reasons that fish swim together in a school of fish is because it's protective.

Like, when they're swimming together in a school, the shark doesn't know where to bite. Because it's going too fast. And that that's often the experience for autistic people, is there's so much information that it's like, we don't know where to bite into it, so we don't know where to start the project. But it's a little bit different than ADHD, because it's… there's so many details, I don't know where to start.

The other way I see this show up for myself, and certainly for my children, is… It's like, that idea of, like, everything you touch turns to gold, but it's like, everything you touch turns to complexity, like, just… every single project becomes so much more complex, because instead of starting with some, like, top-down theory that I'm trying to argue, it's starting with all the details. So, let's see, take, for example, if someone's assigned an essay of, like. what's… You know, 3 things from the 20th century that you… that,

that we've learned about technology in society. I don't know, that's probably a bad essay prompt, but if there was an essay like that, top-down thinkers might be like, okay, here's kind of some three… theories I'll go with, maybe I'll go research those and I'll build my paper. Whereas an autistic person's way more likely to be like, I need to go read 50 articles before I can even come up with a hypothesis.

And so, the process of how we come to our our theories just tends to be so much more complex that any homework assignment tends to be more complex for the autistic brain because of how we're going to approach it. It's also why I was like, I don't think I have time to make a presentation, because every time I make a presentation, I make it more complex than it should be, because the, the school of fish. So, it can… that's a different reason why it can get really hard to engage, because we don't know where to start.

Strategic Supports for Autistic Motivation

Yael Valek, REEL: But you do end up in the end with amazing new ideas and connections that others don't come up with, so… Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, and that's the thing I often say, like, starting a new job or learning a new system, an autistic person's not going to be nearly as productive from this jump, but once they learn that system, they know it so well, and know it so deeply, because they've done the bottom-up thing. Or for me, when I prep a presentation. I can then talk off the cuff about a lot of topics, because I know it so deeply from having done a… overly thorough deep dive.

Yael Valek, REEL: Amazing. So I'll give you, the choice if you wanted to go over the two slides that we skipped. Real quick, if you want, and then we can take some questions, or… Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, this is a little bit shorter than the ADHD, so I think, yeah, I'll run through these briefly. So, so these would be some considerations for supporting autistic motivation.

I think often it's about increasing access to safety, meaning predictability and regulation. So, one way that we can support energy and regulation is by reducing cognitive overwhelm. Again, thinking about that school of fish. For example, maybe offering one option at a time, or anything we can do to support autonomy.

Like, I… we call it kind of autonomy buckets of… we almost rarely, we almost always give our children, like, contained choices, or specifically our PDA autistic child. So supporting autonomy is another way of supporting safety and regulation. And then making sure that demands are paced out with breaks and time for interest and sensory breaks. Another way of creating safety is through increasing predictability.

You know, if there's a lot of predictability baked into their rhythms and their environment, they're gonna have more capacity to do things that don't have as much predictability. So as much as we can have predictable routines and rhythms. When they are going to be doing something new, can we create some visual schedules or steps, or, like, can we find it online and show them what it visually looks like? And break it down into steps so they know what to expect when they're doing something new.

Can we support the decoding of instructions so we can body double with them and help them break down the instructions? So that a lot of autistic people might spend, you know, 45 minutes just trying to decode instructions before they ask for help. And then… In general, just anything we can do to help make sure expectations are clear and we're reducing pressure.

Autistic nervous systems tend to be more hyperarousal, so we want to do anything that kind of helps bring the arousal down by creating predictability and reducing sensory load. And then that connecting to meaning and interest, can we weave in their special interests? So for example, let's say, you're hoping your child moves their body more, gets fresh air. Can you pair going on walks with them with talking about their special interest, or pairing using the treadmill with their special interest show?

And then also be, you know, whatever we can do to protect some time for that deep, that deep focus. Being mindful that task switching or just spending time outside of monotropism can be pretty taxing for them. So similar here, I think it's less about, kind of, what trips, like, tricks or hacks we can use to motivate our autistic children, and more about creating environments that allow their natural motivation to thrive by creating, kind of, Meaningful engagement, predictability, safety, support.

Gifted Narratives and Uneven Development

And I think this is literally the only slide that I actually skipped, which is these were just a couple other gifted thoughts around Kind of normalizing that uneven development so that they don't create character-based narratives around it, like using language of, you know, uneven profiles, or being able to talk about and validate the experience of feeling behind your peers in some ways, and ahead of them in other ways, which is a really confusing experience. supporting their depth and their curiosity. And then another way, which I think also helps with growth mindset, is if there's ways to track their growth.

So maybe they're an artist, like, taking a picture of some of their art once a week, and then, like, looking at it together, like, whoa, look at how your art's changed over the year. Because for a lot of gifted people, they can be quite self-critical of themselves, so they might be like, I'm not getting better, but to be able to actually physically visibly see it, like, oh, wow, look, I have… I have grown with this persistence. That can be something we can do.

Thank you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so for gifted people, Environments that create space for Oh my goodness, this matches your talk so well. Curiosity, complexity, I would add that.

Yael Valek, REEL: Yeah, you're fine. Megan Anna Neff: and connection that you have. And then that, that validates, that validates their complexity. Yael Valek, REEL: I noticed a pattern of interests being relevant to all of these, and we try to talk about that a lot. Yes.

Q&A: Identifying Needs and Managing Burnout

Make it interest-based. So, there's a lot of questions, we won't be able to get to them all, and there's a lot of kudos here. I just want you to tell you that, like, half the chat is how much people have enjoyed your books and your podcasts and your support, so… Megan Anna Neff: No, thank you.

Yael Valek, REEL: So one of the big questions we're getting, and you touched on this, but, to talk about ADHD, And how to best identify, and does it matter to identify if certain behaviors are due to, autism or ADHD? And someone else posted this, made me laugh a little. My son always complains about being fed the same foods, but is not open to trying anything new. We have the same thing in our house.

Megan Anna Neff: Oh, that's so… that's so ADHD, yeah. Yup. I don't know, I mean, they've maybe… maybe that's just a funny anecdote, and maybe they've tried this. One thing, and we have a child with ARFID, so…

food, and we call it safe foods and stretch foods. And whenever we introduce anything new, we always… the staple is always a safe food, and then it's, like, a little bit of the stretch food. So… If the child does want to, you know, have experience new, novel foods, that's one way to do it, is,

You're not replacing the safe food, it's additive, and it's a little bit…

Yael Valek, REEL: But in general, at AudHD, how do you know if it's the ADHD or the autism that's preventing them from doing a task, and does it matter, or how… because it sounds Some of the things are contradictory in what they might need, right? Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, and that can be the kind of push-pull of the Audi HD experience of, like, I need predictability, I need novelty, which again, it's then, it's where do we find that paradoxical space where it's… it's predictable novelty?

I think… It might be less important to know, is it the ADHD or is it the autism, and more important to to drill down and say, okay, what's the unmet need here? And it very well might be a complex mix of both. Like, I talk about this experience I had once of where I realized I was both… I was intellectually understimulated, and so I was having that, like, crawl-out-of-your-skin feeling.

I was at a school event for my kids. And I was, at the same time, sensory overstimulated. And it was the most excruciating experience of being understimulated and overstimulated at the same time. And when I had that experience, this was a couple years ago, I was like, oh my gosh, this was my whole childhood.

The AuDHD "Switchboard" and PDA

Like, this was school, this was church, this was a constant feeling of being intellectually understimulated, so under-aroused, but then overstimulated through sensory things. So, even being able to have the language for that has been really helpful for me, and helpful for my children, and then thinking through, okay. How do I reduce stimulus over here? How do I increase stimulus over here?

this is… I think, especially for audio HDers, learning our sensory profile can be really helpful, because a lot of the conflict can be, like, okay, maybe if I bump up some stimulus in this profile and bump down here, it's like a switchboard, and we're often, like, bumping up and bumping down, to get us into a… A place that we feel regulated, and where we can focus, and where we can meaningfully engage. Yael Valek, REEL: It's a lot of experimentation.

Megan Anna Neff: So much experimentation. So much experimentation, yeah. Yael Valek, REEL: Maybe it changes every day, every hour. Megan Anna Neff: Oh, absolutely.

Some days weight feels good, some days it feels terrible. Some days, you know, a child might be sensory-seeking, other days more avoidant. Yael Valek, REEL: And then we had some questions, too, about, PDA. You touched on that before how does PDA play into this motivation, and…

Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, so PDA, and if that's a new term for folks, it has historically stood for pathological demand avoidance, the more affirming term, pervasive drive for autonomy, and it's where the nervous system perceives a loss of autonomy as an incredible threat, and demands, everyday demands, like, get your shoes on, grab water, can activate that fight-or-flight response. So this… kind of has its whole… its own… its own whole school of, like, how do we… you know, how do we reduce demands?

How do we… Communicate in a way that doesn't invoke that fight-flight response. And there's some really good resources out there. There's the PDA Society, there's PDA Northwest, there's someone named Amanda Dyckman who has a low-demand parenting, book and framework.

There's also some really good thinkers who are talking about PDA and intersectionality, like, so a lot of the… historically, we've talked about how do we lower demands when our children are PDA, but that, is not always… accessible or safe for Black and Brown children, and so there's also an element of how do we create distress tolerance for demands? So, it's… it's complex. I'm not sure how much into PDA you want me to go, but…

I did just see in the chat differentiated PDA from ODD. I actually have a whole article… er, I have a… I'm not sure how… I have an article on ODD, but ODD is Oppositional Defiant Disorder. And that… all of that disorder does is it… you can get it if you have the behaviors.

It doesn't explain the behaviors. It's a diagnosis I wish didn't exist. It's, I think, a really unhelpful diagnosis in the sense of all you're doing is explaining behavior, so a lot of PDA kids will meet criteria for ODD, but the root cause is not understood when that diagnosis is given. Pda is not yet diagnosed in the States, it is in the UK, but more and more people are becoming aware of it.

Disclosing Diagnosis and Preventing Shame

So, yeah. Yael Valek, REEL: Thank you. Okay. In your view, what is the right age to start talking to your kids about how their brain is different?

How do you work with them to prevent feeling shame that there is something wrong with their brain? And that also ties in really well with another question that Teresa and I had brainstormed, which is, you know, especially, we live in Silicon Valley, everything here is about this legacy of achievement and drive, so there was definitely this feeling of, I'm lazy and I'm not achieving. Megan Anna Neff: I mean, it's tricky in that, like, you're probably starting to think about how to introduce it, maybe after a child's been diagnosed. Ideally, like.

I'm not sure how this comparison, will do in this community. But, as comparison, when my kids were babies, I just always talked to them as adults, and I remember, like, changing my daughter's diaper and being like, you can date a boy, you can date a girl. Like, I never parented her in a way that assumed Heteronormativity.

And I'm really… and… and I'm really glad I did, because that is very relevant for my family. And it just… I, I guess… most of us can't go backwards in time.

I didn't know about neurodiversity when my kids were young, but I think ideally, like. it would just be baked in from the start of, like, all brains are different. Or… So, I think we can normalize it… in the same way that we might choose to normalize, like, gender expansiveness or sexual expansiveness, where we're not defaulting to the assumptions that society gives us.

I… I… parents are often… it can feel uncomfortable, it can feel like I need to, like, disclose this to my children, but it can be a gradual conversation around, like. brains are different. Donna Henderson had… she wrote an article that's up on my website that I can find the link for, but it's about how to disclose diagnosis to your children, and also about the benefits of it, because I think it can feel scary, but there are a lot of benefits of disclosing it to our children, but again, it can be really gradual.

It doesn't have to, like, be a sit-down, and I'm going to tell you that you have this diagnosis. Because our kids will be making narratives about themselves. If they don't have access to that knowledge, but it'll often be more shame-based narratives, like I'm lazy, or I'm… or I'm awkward, versus, I'm autistic, or I'm ADHD. Yael Valek, REEL: Yeah, definitely the case.

Dyslexia, Understimulation, and Burnout

So, I don't know if this is in your area. Somebody brought up dyslexia, and I don't know if this is in your area of, you know, research or not, but someone said, what about these topics as they relate to dyslexia? Are the experiences and approaches more like ADHD or autism, or completely different?

Megan Anna Neff: I mean, I think there's similarities in that going to what's the unmet need, where's the block, what are the accommodations and the supports, that… so… So I think there'd be a similar approach around identifying the unmet need and the access point, and reducing shame, like… being called upon to read, right? And how scary that is when the child has dyslexia.

Or even, like, how text-based is an activity. And there can be so many assumptions. and the ways things are built that aren't accessible for dyslexic people. So, a lot of it's similar around finding the barriers and then… and thinking through accommodations.

Yael Valek, REEL: Love that. And then someone said, how do you help kids who are young and don't fully yet have the awareness, help them distinguish between over and under stimulation? And I may then tie that into burnout, and how do you… Megan Anna Neff: Hmm.

Yael Valek, REEL: know when you're experiencing burnout, how does that tie into motivation? But I'm making a big question, so… Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's also… it's about kind of guessing, like, I remember… walking into my child's room a couple years ago, and it just seemed kind of sad, and they were like, I don't know why I'm sad, maybe I'm bored.

And I kind of looked at him, and I was like, are you understimulated? And, like, his eyes just lit up, and he's like, oh my gosh, yes, that's what it is. And so. we won't necessarily know, and our kids won't necessarily know, but sometimes we can make educated guesses, and when we do that, we're helping them develop language, too.

Understimulation, you know, if they are, like. Fidgeting, or rustly, or bored, or slow, or… Or, like, foggy, or… getting into fights with their siblings, like, those are all tells that they're probably looking for more stimulation. So it is the kind of slow, steady work of building language with our kids, and then just having so much curiosity about what their experience is, and exploring that together.

Yael Valek, REEL: And then, I'd love to also just touch on, burnout, since that was in the title of our talk, and I… I forgot to mention it, but is, how do you… how does burnout tie into all these… this conversation about motivation? Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, I mean, and that's really where it's an energy issue, right? It's not a motivation issue, it's a… person is completely depleted, and we're seeing more burnout in kids, and I would think in Silicon Valley, there'd probably be a lot of that.

Puberty is a time that can also trigger burnout. I think just how much the body's going through hormonally. It's so much, and it's also the time where then kids are often expected to do more, like, more extracurriculars. And I think the more we can release,

The Myth of Independence and Procrastination

You know, the expectation that our kids are gonna have this. very linear developmental trajectory. We were talking about this before we kind of all got on this myth of independence and this kind of hyper-independence we live in. there… you know, our kids might need deeper breaks.

They might… school might not work for all of our kids, like, it's just… and then… It's really messy as parents to try to figure out How to get our kids the education and the… kind of the learning that they deserve, and to protect their nervous systems.

It's just… it's just really hard. Yael Valek, REEL: That's really hard. So, I'm gonna end us on the last question. There are tons of questions left, but I want to be respectful of your time.

So someone asked, so how can you tell if your ADHD kid is truly procrastinating, or if they're lazy? So, does laziness exist? Megan Anna Neff: Yeah, I mean, I… Dr. Devon's Price book, I'm not sure if it was the… oh, because… Yael Valek, REEL: Oh, they also…

Megan Anna Neff: I also have a book about laziness Doesn't Exist, which, it's been a… I wonder… I haven't actually read it yet, but, I mean, yeah, I think… I mean, ADHD, we do procrastinate, and we procrastinate until the urgency kicks in, and then we get stressed out. So, procrastination is a real thing, and it's… it's then also, like, especially if that procrastination pattern's causing the child a lot of stress, you know, do they have interest in trying a few things to see if they can make their life a little bit less stressful, so that they don't have to wait for that urgency to kick in before they're able to get mobilized. But yeah, we definitely do procrastinate as ADHDers. Because we're waiting for the dopamine to kick in.

Conclusion

Yael Valek, REEL: Well, thank you so much. I mean, I learned a ton and took a bunch of notes to try with my kiddos, my two Audi HDers. I especially loved, and I'm not going to try to pronounce it either, but the word from New Zealand. And I love the neurodiversity-affirming way that you look at these, as… you know.

ways to find the skills that are missing, rather than assuming a negative intent. Thank you so much for bringing that to us. And for everything, and I hope everyone saw, that Dr. Neff, gave us not only resources for tonight that you can, just get from our website, there's a feedback form, in the chat.

But also a lot of discounts on, all kinds of workbooks on her website, and she created a bundle just for real, so we're so appreciative of everything. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom tonight. Megan Anna Neff: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for… for accommodating me in… in how we approach this.

It's a great example of, kind of. how we can be neuroaffirming. So, yeah, thank you so much for having me. Yael Valek, REEL: Thank you so much. I'll stop the recording.