“I’m too busy. I don’t have time. I’ll get to it when I have some free time”
These are things we probably all say without really thinking about it. We use it to explain why we can’t make plans, why we haven’t replied to a message, why the house is a mess, why we haven’t got around to something we wanted to do. Being busy has become almost a badge of honour, something we measure ourselves and other people by. But the more I think about it, the more I realise that busy is actually completely relative.
What feels like an impossibly full day for one person might feel completely manageable for someone else. Something that leaves one person feeling energised can leave another completely drained and I think this is particularly important when we talk about neurodivergence, because our capacity isn’t simply determined by how many things we have in our diary. It’s influenced by our neurotype, our mental health, our environment, our sensory needs, our emotional energy and, quite simply, how much capacity we have on that particular day, hour, minute!
For me, ADHD plays a huge part in this. I have ADHD, with quite a strong hyperactive side, and the funny thing is that I actually LOVE being busy. I thrive on it. My life is, by most people’s standards, incredibly full. I’m a non-profit founder, I run a small business, I’m a wife and a mum of four, and two of my children are neurodivergent. My husband works around 60 hours a week as the norm, so there is always something happening in our house, someone who needs something, something to organise, somewhere to be or another idea bouncing around my head.
And honestly, I love a lot of it.
Give me a busy day, a problem to solve, ten things to organise, a deadline looming and something new to get stuck into, and my ADHD brain can feel completely at home. I can have a ridiculous number of things going on at once and somehow feel more regulated than I would if I had nothing to do. The stimulation, the urgency and the constant movement can actually work with my brain rather than against it. This kind of busy doesn’t necessarily feel overwhelming to me. In many ways, it feels natural.
But then there are things that other people would describe as relaxing that can leave me completely overwhelmed.
Socialising is probably one of the biggest examples.
I love my friends, I genuinely do. This isn’t about not enjoying their company or not wanting to spend time with people I care about. But socialising can require a completely different kind of energy from me. Getting ready, making plans, travelling somewhere, dealing with a different environment, conversation, listening, processing, remembering what someone has said, thinking about what I’m going to say next, following multiple conversations, dealing with background noise and distractions, and constantly switching my attention can all take energy in a way that isn’t always obvious from the outside.
So while someone else might see going out for a coffee with a friend as a lovely, relaxing afternoon, my brain can experience it very differently. I can enjoy myself enormously and still come home feeling completely overloaded. I can love the people I’m with and still need to spend the next few hours in silence. And sometimes that feels strange, because from the outside it can look as though I have just spent a couple of hours doing something “easy” and enjoyable.
Meanwhile, I regularly spend an entire day working, parenting, organising, solving problems and juggling a million different things and somehow feel more comfortable with that.
It doesn’t necessarily make sense if you measure busyness by looking at someone’s calendar.
But perhaps that’s the problem. We often assume that every task has the same emotional and mental cost. It doesn’t!!!
For someone with unsupported ( or someone who doesn’t realise they are neurodivergent) ADHD or autism, everyday life can involve a huge amount of invisible processing. Things that seem small or straightforward to someone else can require enormous amounts of executive functioning, emotional regulation, sensory processing, task switching, planning, remembering and recovering. Sometimes it’s not the task itself that’s difficult. It’s everything that comes with it.
Work can feel like too much. Keeping on top of messages can feel like too much. Going to an appointment can feel like too much. Making a phone call can feel like too much. The school run can feel like too much. The supermarket can feel like too much. Socialising can feel like too much.
And sometimes the things you actually want to do can feel like too much. My son with a PDA profile can attest to this!
That can be incredibly difficult when you don’t understand why you’re struggling. It can leave you thinking, “Why can’t I just do this? Everyone else seems to manage it.” It can make you feel lazy, unreliable, antisocial or as though you’re simply not trying hard enough.
But sometimes the problem isn’t that you don’t want to do something.
Sometimes you just don’t have the capacity for it.
I think that’s an important distinction.
Because when we say, “I’m too busy,” what we often really mean is, “I don’t have the capacity for another demand right now.” And those two things aren’t necessarily the same.
I can be surrounded by things to do and feel completely energised by them. I can have a day packed from morning until night and feel like I’m thriving. But I can also reach a point where one more conversation, one more decision, one more message or one more social commitment feels enormous.
My capacity isn’t fixed and that’s something I’m still learning to accept even now.
There are days when my ADHD brain wants stimulation, noise, ideas and activity. There are days when I can take on far more than I probably should. Then there are days when I need quiet, space and very little demand placed on me. Sometimes the difference isn’t even obvious. I can wake up with a completely different level of capacity than I had the day before and that doesn’t mean I’m inconsistent. It doesn’t mean I’m difficult. It doesn’t mean I don’t care. It means I’m human, and I’m neurodivergent.
I think this is why we need to be careful about judging someone’s capacity based purely on what we can see. We don’t know what is happening inside someone’s head. We don’t know how much energy something is costing them. We don’t know how much masking, processing, regulating or recovering is happening behind the scenes. Being neuroaffirming doesn’t mean pretending that ADHD or autism never makes things difficult. It means being curious about why something is difficult rather than immediately judging the person for struggling with it. It means asking what support might make things more accessible. It means recognising that sometimes the answer isn’t “try harder” or “manage your time better”. Sometimes the answer is, “This is costing you more energy than people realise.”
I’ve had to learn that my version of a full life might not look like someone else’s. I don’t necessarily need to do less. I need to understand what actually fills my cup and what quietly drains it. So perhaps we need to stop using “I’m too busy” as though it’s a simple measurement of how much someone has on their plate because busy isn’t just about time. It’s about capacity. It’s about energy. It’s about how your brain processes the world around you and it’s about what you’re already carrying that nobody else can see.
So yes, I might be busy but “busy” isn’t the whole story! Sometimes it’s not about having too much to do. Sometimes it’s about having too much to process when your neurodivergence or mental health doesn’t give you the capacity to do it.