Wired Divergent: Nervous System Regulation & Mental Health for Neurodivergent Brains

In this episode, I guide you through a sensory orientation practice designed to act as a reset when life feels overwhelming. If you are experiencing that disconnected, far-away feeling where the space around you does not seem real, this practice uses your senses one at a time to help bring your attention back into the present room or space. This is an educational self-care episode, not therapy or...

High masking autistic and ADHD burnout can show up like it arrived from nowhere, with no warning that you were heading there. Oof. In this episode I look at why that early signal often goes missing, and what low interoception has to do with it. A lot of us run a constant neuro-normative performance, the masking, for most of our waking hours, often for safety. When your interoception runs low, the...

This is a brief resourcing exercise based on the Community Resilience Model (CRM) concept of a "resource" for nervous system regulation. This educational self-care practice focuses on bringing a positive, steady resource to mind to help you gently refocus and reset your nervous system. What to expect in this episode Introduction to resourcing: A guided exercise to bring a positive person, place, p...

Inertia makes task switching super difficult. You can see the thing you need to do, you actually want to do it, and your body responds like it's completely out of reach. In this episode I get into what's happening underneath autistic inertia, and what helps once you know which kind of stuck you're in making the transition (or task switching) difficult. Plenty of us autistics named this thing in ou...

I cover a guided neurodivergent somatic practice designed specifically for when you cannot read your internal body signals. I offer alternatives to emotional labeling by using external temperature, physical pressure, and neutral feedback. I walk through a short self-care exercise that avoids the demand to identify complex emotions. I explain how to use your hands, jaw, chest, and feet and other me...

I cover why standard somatic advice fails some neurodivergent brains and explain interoceptive confusion, emotions, feelings, and explore how to regulate when you genuinely cannot process emotions using sensations from your body. This can affect nearly half of all autistic, and around 40% of ADHD brains to some extent, and for some of us to a great extent. Many standard therapies, models, and gene...

This is a five-minute nervous system reset you can do at your desk, in a bathroom, in a meeting room you ducked into, outdoors, wherever you happen to be during your workday. Everything here can be done from this regulation practice without anyone around you noticing. About Audio and Video This show is available as a video on YouTube and Spotify. The audio you are hearing in strategy episodes is t...

If you are neurodivergent and you socialize, which you probably do, you probablly get hit with the social tax of social masking (or camouflaging) on an almost daily basis. It can lead to meltdown, shutdown, autistic burnout, and more because it is really hard on our nervous systems and body. Most conversations about autistic masking stay on the psychology, or in that "you shouldn't mask" or "hey,...

This is a grounding practice built for shutdown, the offline and quiet state where everything has become a lot and even small routine things feel impossible. The practice asks for almost nothing from you. You can stay lying down, seated, standing at a desk, or wherever you already are, with your eyes open or closed. Nothing has to change, and you can stay exactly as you are the whole time. KEY TAK...

If you understand your neurodivergent nervous system better than most people you know and still can't make a daily practice or a new habit stick, there are still elements from your life that you can adjust to work with how your brain is wired. This episode breaks down why understanding alone doesn't change neurodivergent nervous system patterns, and some ideas that can lead to a personal system th...

If you've sat through a body scan or regulation practice that didn't seem to work for you or your nervous system, or got asked to find an emotion in your chest and felt only nothing or experienced uncertainty or confusion or something similar to that, there are REASONS! And possible solutions, too. This is the what-to-do follow-up on interoception, and it walks through a body awareness practice th...

This is a five minute guided temperature awareness practice. Standard body scans ask you to find sensations that some neurodivergent people genuinely cannot locate, and that gap can make the whole exercise feel useless. Temperature gives you something concrete to work with. We move through the hands, feet, forehead, chest, and stomach, and at each region we check two things: whether the temperatur...

Book with me! https://jendehaan.com/coaching "Listen to your body" shows up everywhere in wellness advice, and for about half of autistic adults it asks for something the nervous system might not be delivering in a usable format. Elevated in the ADHD community too. This is a look at interoception, alexithymia, and why body awareness instructions can leave some of us feeling kinda left out. I spent...

Your body is already bracing for a conversation that hasn't started yet. This 5-minute guided resourcing practice helps you regulate your nervous system before a meeting, phone call, or any interaction your body is anticipating. Resourcing is a skill from the Community Resilience Model (CRM) that uses a positive memory, person, place, or activity to shift your nervous system toward steadiness befo...

Functional freeze and ADHD paralysis look almost identical from the outside, but they involve completely different biological mechanisms, and fixing one the wrong way can make the other worse. This episode breaks down how to tell which kind of stuck you're actually in and what to try for each. If you've ever googled "why can't I move" while lying in that same spot on the couch, you might already k...

Wired Divergent is a show about nervous system regulation built specifically for neurodivergent brains. If you've ever been told to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and check in with where you feel emotions in your body, and it made you feel worse instead of better, this show is about why that happens and what you might want to try instead. Jen deHaan is autistic and ADHD, and she's spent year...