The Feeling That Ate Tuesday

It’s 2:14pm on a Tuesday and someone called Gareth has sent you a Slack message. It says: “Just to flag - I think the approach on this might need a rethink.” That’s it. Eleven words. Gareth probably typed it between bites of a Pret sandwich and forgot about it before he’d finished chewing.

You have not forgot about it. You will not forget about it for the rest of the afternoon, possibly the rest of the week. Your chest has tightened. Your stomach has done something architectural - shifted downward, rearranged itself. The back of your neck is hot. You are now replaying every interaction you’ve had with Gareth since March, scanning for evidence that he has always thought you were incompetent, that everyone thinks you’re incompetent, that the entire edifice of your professional life is a polite fiction maintained by people who feel sorry for you.

It is still 2:14pm. Possibly 2:15.

What emotional dysregulation actually is (and isn’t)

Emotional dysregulation isn’t about feeling too much. That framing - “you’re just very emotional” - collapses two entirely different things into a single judgement and calls it a personality trait. What’s actually happening is neurological. The brain’s system for modulating emotional intensity - adjusting the volume, essentially - is wired differently. Emotions arrive faster, hit harder, and take longer to clear the system than they do in a neurotypically wired brain.

Think of it as a timing and intensity problem. The feeling itself isn’t wrong. The amygdala fires, as amygdalae do, and the prefrontal cortex - the bit that’s supposed to contextualise the signal, apply the brakes, whisper “it’s just Gareth, he’s like this with everyone” - is slower to respond. In ADHD brains specifically, this braking system appears to be less efficient. The emotional accelerator works fine. The emotional brakes have a lag. And there’s a distinction here that matters enormously but gets missed constantly: experiencing an emotion and regulating your response to that emotion are two separate neurological processes. When someone tells you you’re “too sensitive,” they’re collapsing both into one thing and blaming you for the whole package. But the sensitivity - the speed and depth of the initial emotional hit - isn’t something you’re choosing. The regulation piece, the recovery, the return to baseline - that’s where the neurology diverges. That’s where the difference lives.

What it costs, in practice, is disproportionate. A feeling that lasted four minutes somehow burns through four hours. The Slack message from Gareth takes maybe ninety seconds to feel. The shame spiral that follows - why can’t I just let things go, what is wrong with me, I’m a grown adult and I’m nearly crying about a Slack message - that’s where the afternoon goes. The emotion itself isn’t the problem. The aftermath is.

Is this an ADHD thing, an autism thing, or a both thing

The honest answer is: yes.

Emotional dysregulation shows up across neurodivergent profiles, but it wears different clothes depending on the wiring. In ADHD, it tends to be fast-igniting. The emotion arrives like someone kicking open a door - sudden, intense, and sometimes already fading by the time you’ve registered what it was. Rejection sensitive dysphoria sits here: that specific, visceral response to perceived criticism or exclusion that is wildly out of proportion to the stimulus and does not care about your rational assessment of the situation. RSD, if you haven’t encountered the term before, feels like this: a slightly flat tone in a text message reads as catastrophic rejection. You rewrite an email eleven times before sending it because each draft might somehow reveal that you’re fraudulent. Praise slides off you like water, but criticism - even implied, even imagined - lands like a freight train and stays parked on your chest. If you’re reading this and your eyebrows have gone up in recognition, you’re not alone. Clinically, it’s one of the commonly reported experiences in ADHD adults. It just wasn’t in the diagnostic criteria, because the diagnostic criteria were designed around fidgety seven-year-old boys, but we’ll get to that.

The autistic experience of emotional dysregulation often has a different shape. Slower build-up, sometimes. A gradual accumulation of sensory and emotional input that doesn’t get processed quickly enough, until the system hits capacity and either melts down or shuts down entirely. And then there’s alexithymia - difficulty identifying and naming your own emotions - which affects many autistic adults. Imagine feeling something enormous and not being able to identify what it is. The emotion arrives as a physical sensation first - pressure in the chest, nausea, a buzzing in the hands - and the cognitive label, the “oh, I’m angry” or “oh, I’m grieving,” comes later. Sometimes much later. Sometimes not at all. You just know something is wrong and you can’t name it, which makes it harder to process, which makes it build, which makes the eventual overflow more likely.

And for the growing number of adults now understood to have both ADHD and autism - which is increasingly recognised as more common than previously thought - these patterns layer on top of each other in ways that researchers are still mapping. Fast emotional ignition and slow processing. Intense feelings and difficulty naming them. It’s a lot. It’s genuinely a lot.

Why nobody mentioned any of this until you were thirty-seven

Emotional dysregulation has been hiding in plain sight for decades. It wasn’t that clinicians didn’t see it - it’s that the diagnostic frameworks weren’t built to catch it, particularly in anyone who wasn’t a hyperactive boy changing a classroom in 1987. If you were a girl who cried easily, you were “sensitive.” If you were a woman who struggled with emotional intensity, you had anxiety, or depression, or a personality disorder, or you were “just like that.” If you masked well enough - and many neurodivergent people mask extraordinarily well, because the alternative was social annihilation - then the dysregulation was invisible to everyone except you. Your GP saw the depression. Your therapist saw the anxiety. Nobody saw the thing underneath generating both.

There’s a particular quality to late-diagnosis grief that’s hard to describe without sounding melodramatic, which is ironic given the subject matter. It’s not quite anger, though there’s anger in it. It’s more like reading a book you’ve already read, but in a new translation, and realising the plot was different from what you thought.

I keep thinking about someone - a composite, not a specific person, though she could be - sitting with a journal from 2014. An entry about a work conflict. “I don’t know why I can’t just let things go like everyone else. There’s something fundamentally wrong with me.” She wrote that at 11pm after spending the evening unable to eat because a colleague had been short with her in a meeting. She was thirty-one. She wouldn’t have the language for what was happening for another eight years.

The reframe isn’t that the past was wasted. It’s that it can be re-read. The entries still hurt, but they mean something different now.

And here’s what’s worth sitting with: the mask didn’t fix the dysregulation. It never did. It just made the dysregulation invisible to other people. Internally, the volume was exactly the same. The chest still tightened, the stomach still dropped, the afternoon was still gone. You just learned to do it with your face arranged correctly. This is, among other things, why burnout happens. Masking emotional dysregulation is like soundproofing a room - the noise inside is identical, you’ve just made it so the neighbours can’t hear.

What it looks like on an ordinary day (not the clinical version)

Clinical descriptions of emotional dysregulation read like they were written by someone who has observed emotions through a two-way mirror. Accurate, perhaps. But bloodless.

So here’s what it actually looks like, lived.

It looks like a perfectly fine morning that curdles at 10:30 because someone in a meeting used a tone. Not a hostile tone. Just a tone. And now you’re spending the next two hours in a kind of internal forensic investigation, replaying the sentence, adjusting the emphasis, trying to determine whether “that’s an interesting approach” meant “that’s an interesting approach” or “you are an idiot and everyone in this Zoom knows it.”

It looks like Sunday afternoon dread that arrives without invitation or identifiable cause. You were fine at lunch. You were reading. And then something shifted - the light, maybe, or the quality of the silence - and now there’s a weight in your body and the week ahead feels like something you need to survive rather than live through.

It looks like crying in a toilet cubicle at work and not being entirely sure what you’re crying about. Or going completely, disconcertingly numb at a funeral when you expected to feel devastated, and then falling apart days later while unloading the dishwasher.

The gap between how you feel and how you think you’re supposed to feel - that gap is where so much of the exhaustion lives.

If I were drawing rough portraits (and these are rough, not diagnostic, not comprehensive, just recognisable), they might look something like this:

There’s the person who floods - overwhelmed fast, needs to physically leave the room, can feel the emotion arriving like weather and has about forty-five seconds to get somewhere private before it hits.

There’s the person who freezes - shuts down mid-conversation, goes somewhere unreachable behind their own eyes, appears calm while internally experiencing something closer to a system crash.

There’s the delayed reactor - completely fine in the moment, competent and composed, then falls apart hours later in the car park or at 2am when the processing finally catches up.

And there’s the chronic suppressor - never visibly dysregulates, never makes a scene, pays for it in migraines, insomnia, jaw pain, and a burnout that arrives not as a dramatic collapse but as a slow, grey flattening of everything.

Many people I’ve spoken to recognise themselves in more than one of these, and which one shows up depends on the day, the context, how much sleep they got, whether they’ve eaten, and approximately nine hundred other variables that are impossible to fully track.

None of these responses are wrong. They’re adaptive. They made sense once - probably in childhood, probably in an environment that didn’t have room for the full volume of what you were feeling. Some of them still make sense now. The goal, to the extent there is one, isn’t to stop having these responses. It’s to understand them well enough that you occasionally get a few extra seconds of choice about what happens next.

A few extra seconds. That’s it. That’s the realistic version.

It’s 4:47pm on Tuesday. Gareth has sent a follow-up message: “Actually ignore my earlier note, I was looking at the wrong version. Looks great 👍.” You read it. You feel relief, then a flash of irritation, then something tired and unnameable. The afternoon is already gone. You close your laptop and sit there for a minute, in the specific silence of having survived something that nobody else in the conversation even noticed was happening.