Trait Path
The basics
Neurodivergent
Having a brain that works notably differently from the statistical norm — in attention, sensory processing, learning, communication, or emotional regulation. ADHD and autism are the most discussed forms, but the word also covers dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette's, and others. It describes a difference, not a defect, and it is not itself a diagnosis.
Neurotypical
Having a brain whose attention, sensory, and social processing roughly match what schools, workplaces, and social conventions were built around. Useful as a contrast word — most environments assume a neurotypical user, which is why neurodivergent people often experience ordinary settings as more costly than they look.
Neurodiversity
The observation that human brains naturally vary, the way height or handedness varies — and the position that this variation is a normal part of the species, not a set of disorders to erase. The idea took shape in autistic online communities in the late 1990s and reached print in 1998 through sociologist Judy Singer's thesis and journalist Harvey Blume's writing. "Neurodiversity" describes the whole spread of human minds; an individual person is "neurodivergent," not "neurodiverse."
ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder)
A neurodevelopmental difference centered on the brain's regulation systems — attention, effort, time, and impulse. The name misleads: it isn't a deficit of attention so much as inconsistent control over where attention goes. Many adults, especially women, reach midlife before recognizing it because they compensated hard and were labeled "bright but disorganized" instead.
Autism / Autism Spectrum
A neurodevelopmental difference in how a person processes sensory information, communicates, and engages socially — typically involving deep focused interests, a need for predictability, literal processing, and heightened or muted sensory experience. "Spectrum" doesn't mean a line from mild to severe; it means the traits combine differently in every autistic person.
AuDHD
Community shorthand for being both autistic and ADHD. The combination is common and produces its own signature experience: one system craves novelty while the other craves sameness, so a person can be simultaneously chaos-seeking and routine-bound. Many people who never quite matched either profile alone recognize themselves in the combination.
Co-occurrence
The tendency of neurodevelopmental differences to travel together — ADHD with autism, either with dyslexia, dyspraxia, anxiety, or depression. It's one reason self-recognition is confusing: traits overlap, mask each other, and rarely arrive in textbook-clean packages.
Late-identified / Late-diagnosed
Recognizing your neurodivergence in adulthood, often after decades of compensating. Common triggers: a child's diagnosis that reads like your own biography, burnout that strips away coping capacity, or simply encountering an accurate description for the first time. Late identification often brings relief and grief at once — the reframe of a whole life story.
Attention, energy & getting things done
Executive function
The brain's management layer: starting tasks, planning, prioritizing, holding steps in mind, switching between activities, and stopping when it's time to stop. Executive function differences explain the maddening gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it — which observers routinely misread as laziness or not caring.
Task initiation
The specific executive skill of beginning. For many neurodivergent people this is the single hardest step: the task is understood, wanted, even urgent — and there's still an invisible wall in front of starting it. Once started, the same task may be easy. The wall is neurological, not motivational.
Time blindness
Weak internal perception of time passing and of how far away future moments are. In practice: "five more minutes" becomes two hours, deadlines feel unreal until they're emergencies, and estimating how long anything takes is guesswork. It's a perception difference, not carelessness — clocks, timers, and external anchors help because they make time visible.
Hyperfocus
A state of intense, absorbed concentration where hours vanish, bodily needs go unnoticed, and interruption feels physically jarring. Common in both ADHD and autism. It's genuinely a superpower for the right work — and a liability when it locks onto the wrong thing or refuses to release when life needs you elsewhere.
Interest-based nervous system
A way of describing how ADHD motivation actually works: activation follows interest, novelty, challenge, and urgency — not importance. A neurotypical nervous system can run on "this matters"; an interest-based one often can't, no matter how much the person cares. Working with this (making things interesting or urgent on purpose) beats fighting it.
Monotropism
A theory of autistic attention developed by autistic researchers Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser (published in the journal Autism in 2005): the mind naturally channels into a few deep streams of interest rather than spreading across many shallow ones. It elegantly explains intense focus, difficulty switching tasks, distress at interruption, and the restorative power of special interests — framed as a different way of using attention, not a deficit.
Body doubling
Getting things done by having another person simply present — in the room or on a video call — while you work. The double does nothing except exist, and somehow the task becomes startable. A widely used, zero-cost executive-function support that sounds absurd until you try it.
"Object permanence" (colloquial)
Community shorthand for out of sight, out of existence: the leftovers behind the milk, the bill under the pile, the friend you adore but forget to text. The borrowed term is technically inaccurate (actual object permanence develops in infancy) but the experience — memory that needs visual anchors — is real. It's why open shelves, clear containers, and sticky notes work.
Senses, emotions & regulation
Sensory sensitivity
Registering sensory input more intensely (or sometimes less) than typical: fluorescent hum, clothing tags, overlapping conversations, strong smells, unexpected touch. Not pickiness — the volume knob is genuinely set differently, and input others filter out arrives at full strength and accumulates.
Sensory overload
What happens when accumulated sensory input exceeds what the nervous system can process: thinking fragments, irritability spikes, speech gets harder, and the need to escape becomes urgent. A supermarket or open-plan office can produce it. Overload is the pressure state that, unrelieved, tips into meltdown or shutdown.
Stimming
Self-stimulatory movement or sound — rocking, pacing, hand-flapping, humming, fidgeting, repeating a satisfying phrase. Stimming regulates: it discharges overwhelm, aids thinking, and expresses joy. Suppressing it takes real effort that then isn't available for anything else, which is why modern guidance is to let people stim.
Meltdown
An involuntary neurological overflow after overwhelm passes the point of control — it can look like rage, sobbing, or panic, but it isn't a tantrum and isn't manipulative. There's no audience and no goal; the system is discharging. What helps: less input, space, safety, and no demands. What doesn't: reasoning, consequences, or shame.
Shutdown
The inward version of the same overflow: speech reduces or stops, responses slow, the person goes flat, distant, or needs to leave or sleep. Because it's quiet, it's often misread as sulking or rudeness. It's the nervous system cutting non-essential functions to recover.
Autistic burnout
A deep, long-lasting depletion — exhaustion, loss of skills that used to be manageable, heightened sensory sensitivity — after sustained masking and coping beyond capacity, often following major life transitions. Distinct from depression (though they can co-occur and get confused): burnout responds to rest, reduced demands, and unmasking more than to standard depression treatment.
Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD)
An intense, fast, physically felt pain response to perceived rejection, criticism, or falling short — far beyond what the trigger seems to warrant, sometimes leading to people-pleasing or avoiding any arena where failure is possible. Strongly associated with ADHD. Not a formal diagnosis, but one of the most recognized descriptions in the community.
Emotional dysregulation
Emotions that arrive faster, hit harder, and take longer to settle than the situation seems to call for. Not immaturity — the regulation circuitry itself works differently, and the same intensity that makes frustration overwhelming also makes joy and enthusiasm enormous.
Alexithymia
Difficulty identifying and naming what you're feeling — emotions register as vague physical states ("bad," "tight," "off") rather than labeled feelings. Common alongside autism. It complicates both relationships and therapy until it's recognized, because "what are you feeling?" is genuinely an unanswerable question.
See these patterns in yourself?
Definitions name the patterns — a trait profile shows you which ones are yours, how strongly, and how they combine. The TraitPath neurodivergence assessment maps your attention, energy, senses, and social patterns into a personalized, non-diagnostic profile. The preview is free.
Social life & identity
Masking
Effortfully performing neurotypical behavior: forcing eye contact, suppressing stims, mimicking others' social style, rehearsing spontaneity. Masking can be so practiced it's invisible even to the person doing it — and it has a documented cost: exhaustion, anxiety, burnout, and losing track of who you are underneath. High-masking people are the ones most often missed by teachers, employers, and clinicians.
Scripting
Preparing language in advance — rehearsing the phone call, pre-writing the "casual" message, keeping stock phrases ready for small talk. A form of masking and a genuine skill; the cost is the constant background work, and the panic when an interaction leaves the script.
Special interest
An intense, enduring, deeply loved focus — a subject, medium, or system a person can engage with for years and never exhaust. More than a hobby: special interests regulate, restore, build real expertise, and are one of the most reliable sources of autistic joy. The clinical literature historically pathologized them; the community celebrates them.
Pathological demand avoidance (PDA)
A profile (recognized in some countries, debated in others; sometimes reframed as "pervasive drive for autonomy") in which direct demands — even self-imposed ones, even for wanted things — trigger an automatic threat response and resistance. Collaboration, autonomy, and indirect framing work; pressure and ultimatums reliably backfire.
Self-identification
Recognizing yourself as autistic or ADHD without (or before) a formal diagnosis. Widely respected within neurodivergent communities, because formal assessment is expensive, waitlisted, and historically unreliable for adults, women, and people who mask well. Self-identification is a legitimate starting point for self-understanding; a formal diagnosis becomes necessary when you need medication, legal accommodations, or documented support. More on that distinction here.
Accommodation
A change to the environment or the rules — noise-cancelling headphones, written instead of verbal instructions, flexible hours, a quiet workspace — that removes a barrier so a person can do what they're capable of. Accommodations aren't advantages; they're corrections for environments built around one kind of brain.
Spoon theory
A metaphor (from writer Christine Miserandino) for limited daily capacity: you start each day with a set number of "spoons," every task costs some, and when they're gone, they're gone — willpower doesn't mint more. Neurodivergent people spend extra spoons on things neurotypical people get free (filtering noise, masking, initiating tasks), which is why an "easy" day can still end in collapse.