Do You Get More Neurodivergent With Age?

At times it really feels like the neurodivergent experience gets more intense with age. Let’s take a look at why that may be.

While plenty of neurotypical people may still hold on to outdated notions that neurodivergent kids will ‘ougrow’ autism or ADHD as they enter adulthood, neurodivergent adults may actually be scratching their heads and wondering the opposite—“Am I getting more neurodivergent with age?”

This can be a lot to unpack, so I wanted to share my thoughts on the matter. While I don’t believe that we become more or less autistic or ADHD or anything else as we age, I do think there are numerous factors at play that can intensify our experience of neurodivergence, and that some of these factors are cumulative over the course of our lives. So we very well may find ourselves needing more support in areas we did not previously. Let’s break it down.

The first thing that comes to mind relates to masking—a strategy often employed by neurodivergent folks with lower support needs to try to ‘pass’ as neurotypical. It is akin to acting, and you pay a price for it over time, either because you body starts to break down or you get burned out by constantly trying to fit into a world that doesn’t fit you.

This brings to mind when I was younger, and I would frequently take ibuprofen at social events for the headaches I was prone to when overstimulated, or have a drink (or four) to help me get through the evening. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten really amped up by social events and it takes HOURS to unwind, meaning I might be up most of the night even if the event ended at 10:00 PM. By some point in my 30’s, my body couldn’t handle that anymore. I started to get ulcers more frequently from the NSAIDS and my body couldn’t tolerate alcohol—it just led to more headaches. I didn’t bounce back from the sleepless nights like before.

So when I stopped being able to rely on those ‘bandaids’, I was suddenly saying ‘no’ to a lot more events or leaving early or what have you. I did not get more autistic, it’s just that my masking tools were no longer working for me.

And then there’s burnout. Autistic burnout actually has some pretty specific criteria, including 1.) Loss of skills 2.) Fatigue in all areas of life and 3.) Increased sensitivity to sensory input. When you really stop and consider that criteria and what that would look like in a person’s life, it would absolutely look like the person was more autistic than they were before. Every little noise might make them jump, they literally can’t do certain things that they used to be able to manage and there is basically little bandwidth for anything.

Now hopefully that is not a state someone is going to stay in for their entire lives. You absolutely can recover from burnout, although it does tend to require some lifestyle changes that rely less on masking strategies and requires you to be more realistic about living the kind of life that works for your neurotype. When people start making those changes, it can look to others like suddenly this person in their life has really changed. But again, it’s about having to abandon a mask that is no longer serving them. Internally, they have always had that wiring. You just may not have known how hard they were working to conceal it.

Then there’s overwhelm. Anytime we experience overwhelm, whether neurodivergent or not, we all lose some bandwidth in one way or another. I’m remembering this time I was at the Farmer’s Market with my husband and some guy asked if we wanted him to take our picture. I simply said “no,” and kept walking, apparently expressionless, and it didn’t even occur to me in that moment that the guy may have thought I was being rude. My husband asked me about it later, realizing it must have meant I was overwhelmed at the time by something else
(which was true but I can’t remember what was going on). Normally I am aware of general social expectations and I usually go through the motions (I think!), but if I am really ‘full’ then things may start slipping through the cracks. This shows up for all of us in different ways.

I’m also convinced the overwhelm factor  has some connection with why so many women seem to discover their neurodivergence in midlife—that was the case for me as well (my early 40’s). Look at the chart below that shows women’s hormones over the course of her life:

https://www.menopausenaturalsolutions.com/blog/female-hormone-lifecycle

This is one of those times when a picture says it all…am I right?! Those intense squiggly lines dropping off into oblivion that correspond with a woman’s life during perimenopause is a good reminder of how much is going on under the surface at this time in life. Major upheaval! And major upheaval means less bandwidth. We maybe have not even realized we were masking all those years until we hit our 40’s and suddenly…well, suddenly everything feels amplified and some things are gonna have to give.

But this isn’t just for middle aged women. Times are stressful, am I right? While there has always been global injustice and too much pain and suffering in the world, we now have taken things up a few notches. The increasing frequency of climate disasters, for one thing. We are living on a different planet than the one we were born on, and it will continue to change faster than our infrastructure can keep up with.

And even without a ‘disaster’ things are just getting more intense. Can someone really say their allergies are getting worse when the pollen seasons are much longer and more severe than they used to be? How do you know if it’s you getting worse or the pollen going gangbusters?

Add to that the technology that dominates so much of our lives that is so out of sync with our natural rhythms. The algorithms that are getting better and better at manipulating us to maximize profits for a handful of tech giants. Give me a break already.

When I was a kid, school was consistent and orderly and (ok, really boring) but it was actually not a hard thing to know what was expected of me and just get through it without any major ordeals. It was unimaginable that school could just stop for a year or more like it did when COVID hit or that we would have the constant, chaotic distractions of technology and its glitchy software and the constantly shifting curriculum and staff turnover and everything that is in the schools today.

My autism went under the radar in the environment I grew up in, and not just because I was female (I do know some women in my age group that were diagnosed as kids, although not many). It went under the radar because for the most part, the consistent, predictable routine of school did not trigger me. Sure, I had issues and they would wear on me more and more over time, but it was a much better environment for me than today’s schools are. Same kid, same neurotype all along, but it looks different depending on the environment it is in. This is not an easy moment in history to be hypersensitive!

The last point I want to make here is about our neurodivergent elders. Certain neurodivergent traits are also traits that can show up more in seniors generally—things like forgetfulness, having less of a filter and just saying whatever you want, or getting more rigid in certain ways.

If an ADHD person has always been forgetful and late to everything, and this gets worse in their later years, I would argue that that can just be a natural part of aging and does not in any way convince me that their ADHD is getting worse.

Now the rigidity (typically more of an autistic trait) is a little bit different. Neurologically speaking, anything we do over and over becomes like a groove in our wiring that gets more and more entrenched over time. The more often you repeat something, the more it gets reinforced and the harder it becomes to change it. So if you had an autistic person who was very rigid in their habits, and they had some tendency that they were leaning into every day for decades on end (let’s say not feeling the need to pick up the phone when it rings), then I think an argument could be made that their wiring did in fact get more pronounced over time. But that is more about neuroplasticity than anything else. Anyhow…I think I may be getting a bit nitpicky with this example, so why don’t I end this paragraph before I disappear into the weeds…

The point is that some of the natural effects of aging can indeed appear to intensify some aspects of neurodivergence, and make them more obvious. But in reality, we are all impacted by our environment and all the natural fluctuations of life, and that is in turn going to impact our functional capacity at any given moment. While this can make it look like we are more or less autistic or ADHD when we are more or less overwhelmed, the reality is that we have the wiring that we have, and we have it for life. What really matters is that we recognize what kind of support we or someone we love needs at all those various points in their life and meet them where they are at.

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