The Weighted Blanket

My husband said the kitchen was a mess. I went straight into fight mode — not irritated, properly braced, like something was incoming and I needed to get in first. He hadn't said anything about me. I knew that even while it was happening. But the sensible part of me was nowhere near the steering wheel. This episode is about rejection sensitive dysphoria — RSD — and what it's like to be someone who...

Zoe Aspinall spent years in classrooms watching children get blamed for struggling. Then her own son was diagnosed as autistic and ADHD, she started questioning herself, and she realised her family was neurodivergent. So she went and did a neuroscience degree to find out what was actually going on. What she found became the Ecological Inclusion Framework — a way of measuring how much your environm...

UPDATE: Ofcom have now confirmed 10,217 complaints about The Great ADHD Myth? — 9,656 in the first week, plus 561 since. ADHD UK's survey figures quoted in this episode (1,566 respondents) remain the published numbers. Someone very close to me asked if I'd watched the Channel 4 documentary. I said no — I said it makes me too angry. And then I was told I should watch it with an open mind, and that...

Nobody really talks about the days after. There's plenty out there about starting therapy — finding the right person, whether it works, what happens in the room. There's almost nothing about the Wednesday. Or the Thursday. Or, on a bad one, the Friday as well. I'm doing EMDR in the middle of ADHD burnout, which is not an order anyone would have recommended. In this episode I talk about what the da...

When Kate's youngest was five years old, the school removed her fidget toy. She let herself back into the building, climbed on the teacher's desk, and took it back. And somehow — she was the problem. That's where Kate Jennings' story begins. A SEN mum, a neurodivergent woman, and someone who spent years being told her children's needs weren't serious enough — until the day she sat on her sofa whil...

For most of her life, Hannah Wells believed the things she struggled with were caused by anxiety. Then, while researching autistic children for her master’s degree, she began recognising her own experiences on every page. In this episode, Hannah joins me to talk about receiving an autism diagnosis as an adult, the exhaustion of masking and the relief of finally understanding that she was never a f...

I got called a drama queen for years, in a job I was genuinely good at. This week I tell the story of how I earned that reputation — the promotion that vanished, the Beyoncé strut, "you may never see me again" — and what a decade and a diagnosis taught me about what was actually going on. I also dig into the new Neurodiversity in Business × Birkbeck (University of London) 2026 report: why 61% of n...

There are things we think we have filed away. Old experiences. Old shame. Old fear. Old versions of ourselves we thought we had moved on from. But sometimes, through therapy, diagnosis, or a moment of stillness, that drawer opens again — and we realise those things were not really gone. They were just waiting. In this solo episode of The Weighted Blanket, I’m talking honestly about EMDR, ADHD and...

Geoff spent 34 years not knowing why his brain worked the way it did. He was not the stereotypical hyperactive child. He was inattentive, masking, trying to fit in, and quietly carrying the emotional weight of undiagnosed ADHD. In this episode of The Weighted Blanket, I speak to Geoff — a lorry driver, dad of two, and late-diagnosed ADHD adult — about what it felt like to finally understand his br...

Many neurodivergent adults struggle to find words for big, complex feelings. For some of us, questions like “How do you feel?” can feel impossible to answer — not because we do not feel deeply, but because the words are not always there. In this episode of The Weighted Blanket, I’m joined by Claire Palmer, a creative counsellor based in Norwich who specialises in working with neurodivergent adults...

Have you ever been told your child is stubborn , strong-willed , or defiant ? So was mine. In this episode of The Weighted Blanket , I share our family's journey into understanding the PDA Profile (Pervasive Drive for Autonomy) —what it really is, why traditional parenting advice often makes things worse, and the small changes that completely transformed the way we support our son. I'm not a PDA s...

I want to tell you about my birthday. My youngest had just been given a recorder. My middle son wanted one too and wasn't okay about that. My eldest wanted to play battleships. I was cooking dinner, doing the cake, welcoming family — and being hit and pushed by a child who had been completely overwhelmed since that morning. And in the middle of all of it I was trying to hold my own nervous system...

When my son was two years old, I gave him a book about dinosaurs — one of those Usborne lift-the-flap books with really obscure species in it. By the time he was two and three months old, he knew every single one. During COVID, he'd run full pelt down the road on our daily walks. Roaring. Not making noise — roaring. Because he wasn't a two-year-old on a walk. He was a dinosaur. At age five he was...

I was 36 years old when someone finally told me my brain was different. Not broken. Not difficult. Not strange — even though strange was the word I'd quietly carried about myself for as long as I could remember. Just different. And I cried. Not because I was sad. Because I'd spent 36 years working twice as hard as everyone around me just to appear like I was keeping up. And it turned out there had...

I lost fourteen kilograms in six months. Not because I was trying to. Because my body was the only part of me willing to say something was wrong. I was being called Superwoman. And every single time someone said it, I felt the weight of it land. Because that's what compliments do when you're performing. They raise the floor. They tell you that this — this exhausted, crumbling, hollow version of ke...

If you have ADHD and you've ever been called too sensitive, too emotional, too much — this episode is for you. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. RSD. It's one of the most common and least talked about parts of ADHD — and for around 30% of people with ADHD, it's the most impairing symptom of all. Not the focus issues. Not the time blindness. The emotional pain. I've just come back from seeing Alex Par...

I was thirty-six years old when someone finally told me my brain was different. Not broken. Just different. In this first episode I want to tell you who I am and why I built The Weighted Blanket — not the polished version, the real one. Because if we're going to build something honest together, it has to start here. I talk about my ADHD diagnosis at 36, what thirty-six years without knowing actual...

Welcome to The Weighted Blanket. 🤍 This is a podcast and community for neurodivergent people and the families who love them. I'm Claire — a mum of three, diagnosed with ADHD at 36, navigating autism, AuDHD, sensory processing disorder and a PDA profile across my family. I built this because I couldn't find a space that felt warm enough to be honest in — and honest enough to actually help. Here we...