Supporting a quiet neurodivergent person in your family is less about grand gestures and more about everyday choices: believing what they tell you about their limits, keeping plans flexible, and letting them step back without guilt. This gentle guide walks through why family life can feel so heavy for neurodivergent people, and offers practical do’s, don’ts and kinder phrases you can start using right away.

Email and messages are meant to keep us connected, but for many neurodivergent people they mostly arrive as a steady stream of demands and tiny emergencies. This piece looks at why inbox overload is so common, and offers small, realistic ways to use quiet hours, simple triage, templates and clearer expectations so email feels a little less hostile to your already-full brain.

Late diagnosis or self-identifying as autistic or ADHD can be a relief and a shock at the same time. If part of you keeps asking “What if I’m making this up?”, this piece looks at where that doubt comes from and some gentle ways to come back to your own experience.

Some children look like “no problem” at school and then fall apart at home. If your child seems to cope all day and then crashes in the evening, you may not be doing anything wrong at all. This article looks at quietly neurodivergent children who mask through the school day, then melt down or shut down where it finally feels safe. It offers gentle ideas for decompression time, homework, clubs and talking to school, and explains why “rudeness” is often overload, not bad character.

You might have a colleague who is bright and reliable but often quiet, hard to read or exhausted after busy days. Maybe they’ve told you they are autistic or ADHD, or maybe you just have a sense that the world takes more effort for them. This guide offers practical, plain-English ways to be a good colleague: clearer emails, reasonable notice, respecting headphone time, avoiding minimising jokes and gossip, and remembering you don’t have to fix them to make work a little kinder.

Job applications are hard work for most people. When you’re quietly neurodivergent, they can feel like an extra unpaid job. You’re writing forms and preparing for interviews while also deciding whether to mention autism, ADHD or related differences at all. This guide explores the real fear of being filtered out or treated as a box-ticking exercise, and offers gentle, practical ideas on when to disclose, when not to, and how to ask for adjustments in plain English.

If you fidget constantly in meetings and worry it looks unprofessional, you’re not alone. For many autistic and ADHD people, small, quiet fidgets and discreet earplugs are genuine focus tools, not bad habits. This article looks at why they help, how to choose subtle options that work in your environment, and what to say if someone asks, “Are you paying attention?”

If your partner comes home from work exhausted, quiet or shut down while everyone else sees them “coping fine”, it can really hurt. This guide explains what masking is, why home becomes the crash site, and how you can support them with decompression time, low-pressure evenings and kinder language – without ignoring your own needs.

Many managers want to support neurodivergent staff but quietly worry about getting it wrong. This article explains what “quietly neurodivergent” can look like at work, why masking and exhaustion are so common, and how clear expectations, written follow-up and small adjustments can make a big difference. It’s written in plain English so a neurodivergent person can share it with their line manager and say, “This is quite close to my experience.”

Many autistic and ADHD people don’t just “dislike” phone and video calls – they find them genuinely exhausting. Real-time processing, unspoken social cues and the pressure to respond quickly can leave you anxious before the call and wiped out afterwards. This article explores why calls are so hard, why preferring text, IM or email is a valid access need, and offers gentle scripts and small strategies for coping when calls are unavoidable and for asking for alternatives when that’s possible.