Ep 23: AuDHD Experience - Joy, Strengths and Quality of Life

🎙 Episode 23: AuDHD Experience - Joy, Strengths and Quality of Life

"Strengths-based framings sit alongside, not instead of, our support needs — so keep both ideas in mind."

In this episode of AuDHD Psych, Aaron explores joy, strengths, and quality of life for AuDHDers — moving past both the deficit-and-disorder framing and the neurodivergent-superpower narrative to find the partial truth in each. Drawing on recent research, he unpacks the strengths autistic and ADHD people endorse (pattern recognition, hyperfocus, humour, creativity), how flow, hyperfocus, and monotropism overlap, and why our strengths are linked to well-being when we name and use them. He also looks at what genuinely lifts quality of life — affirming relationships, good environmental fit, support, and community — while warning against environments that extract our strengths without supporting our needs.

Takeaways:

• Neither the deficit-and-disorder framing nor the superpower narrative is the full truth — strengths-based framings sit alongside, not instead of, our support needs.
• Research backs the strengths neurodivergent people describe: autistic strengths like pattern recognition, detail orientation, systematising, deep expertise, and a justice orientation; ADHD strengths like hyperfocus, humour, and creativity, endorsed well above the typical community.
• Strengths are linked to well-being — first by knowing and naming them, then by using them in your life. ADHD creativity and divergent thinking are also linked to real-world achievement and even deliberate mind-wandering.
• Flow, hyperfocus, and monotropism share much of the same terrain — feeling good in the doing and getting to unmask — but it's a dose-response curve: restorative up to a point, then a driver of burnout.
• Monotropism appears to be transdiagnostic, scoring above the general population in both autistic people and ADHDers, and underpins special interests as a well-being variable.
• Autistic adults score lower across all four WHO well-being domains, with autistic women carrying a disproportionate burden — but employment, support, and relationships are concrete, observable improvers.
• Quality over quantity: a few reciprocal, accepting, affirming relationships support well-being far more than many social contacts. A positive autistic identity, mediated by external acceptance and community, also lifts quality of life.
• Much of the "disorder" we diagnose reflects a mismatch between person and environment, not an inherent flaw — Milton's double empathy problem reframes communication "deficits" as differences that dissolve in affirming spaces.
• Beware extraction: environments that benefit from your strengths without supporting your difficulties are a structural problem requiring a structural fix — environmental, cognitive, sensory, and social accommodations.
• Reflect on three of your own neurodivergent strengths and where you apply them, and seek out environments and community where you can unmask and feel safe — joy and well-being are real, and joy is a variable of well-being.

Keywords:

AuDHD, neurodivergent strengths, joy, quality of life, monotropism, hyperfocus, flow, well-being, special interests, double empathy problem, environmental fit, burnout, affirming community, different not defective

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty potty pod podcast, potty potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potcast. We love an audio stim and self-acceptance. It's the Audi HD Psych Podcast. Hello friends, welcome back to the Audi HD Psych Podcast. I'm Aaron Howe with Clinical Psychologist, and we are different, not defective. Have you ever wondered what it takes to live a good neurodivergent life? Well stick around because today we're talking about joy, strengths, and quality of life for Audi HD is. So, as always, this is general information only. It's not personalized advice and it's not personal therapy. So if you are having difficulties, please find an affirming clinician in your area. So a lot of us find ourselves caught between the ideas of deficit and disorder that come with diagnosis and also the notion of autistic or ADHD or neurodivergent superpowers. And let's be honest, neither of these are the truth. They're both partial truths of what our experience is. Strength-based framings sit alongside, not instead of, our support needs. So keep both of those ideas in mind as we progress through the episode. So, what does the science say about the strengths of neurodivergent people? Well, a scoping review in 2025 listed autistic strengths as noted by autistic people, and they included things like pattern recognition, detail orientation, systematizing, deep expertise in certain areas, honesty and justice. And I think many of us can identify with most of these. I often refer to myself as a pattern recognition machine. It's what I apply in my work as a psychologist, and also in my anxiety and relationships. But that deep expertise. We can all have interests where we go down wormholes and deep dives and suddenly have a really solid understanding of a topic that piques our interest. Honesty and justice, the justice orientation that we speak about in neurodivergent people, is so commonly seen, and we see it in a lot of our public figures. Grace Tame, who's an advocate here in Australia, Greta Thunberg. I think these are neurodivergent people who clearly show the justice orientation. And often we see a lot of our community leveraging our own difficulties to apply that justice orientation and protect others. ADHDers, we also have various strengths. In another 2025 study, ADHDers were compared to the typical community in strengths that they endorsed. And ADHDers particularly hyperfocus, humor, and creativity stood out above all of our other strengths more so than in the typical community. What does that mean? Those things that we already talk about in community, the science is bearing them out. We experience them at much higher levels than the average person. Why does this matter? Because our strengths are linked to our well-beings. There's some really good research out there that shows that ADHD strengths, and this is true of the general community also, but our ADHD strengths are linked to our overall well-being by first of all knowing what they are and being able to name them, and then using them in our lives. And this can be applied in so many ways. I know my interest is people. I recognize patterns really, really well, and I apply that in my clinical work, and I hopefully will apply that well in my research work as well. So those inherent strengths that I have as a neurodivergent person play out in my work life and they give me a quality of life that's much higher than it should be for the amount of hours that I choose to work. So just with that the strengths to well-being link, that's true of the entire community, the comparison group, and ADHDs in that particular study. But also, ADHDs endorse creativity and divergent thinking, and they're linked in another recently released study or recently discussed study to real-world achievement, which is elevated in ADHDs. It's early limited research, but it does show this. And it's also been linked to deliberate mind wandering. So that inattention that we talk about as disorder and deficit can actually be actively used by letting my mind wander, and it increases or it's related to my creativity. So next I'm going to talk about flow, hyperfocus, and monotropism. So the science tells us that we experience strengths over and above those of the typical community, and that our strengths are linked to our well-being. And I wonder if you can ask yourself what's the strength that you have associated with your neurodivergent characteristics that you apply somewhere in your life that actually improves your day-to-day life. So now, onto flow, hyperfocus, and monotropism. I think many of us have heard of the state of flow where we get so engrossed and absorbed in something, and it's a very mindful, positive, rejuvenating experience. And it turns out that hyperfocus that we talk about in neurodivergent communities and monotropism, which is the idea that rather than multiple interests that I spread my attention across, I have one or a small number of interests, and I'm deeply focused on those. Monotropism and hyperfocus share a lot of characteristics as an experience to flow. 24 autistic adults were in a study in 2024 about flow, hyperfocus, and monotropism, and the study found that those three things covered much of the same terrain in terms of our experience. Some of the great quotes were flow equals the most amazing feeling, and being ourselves with no pretenses. So it seems that our hyperfocus and our focus on our restricted interests actually allows us, one, to feel good about ourselves just in the doing, but also to not have to mask so much. And there's a secondary layer there, it would seem. Two, I don't have to mask, I can just be myself. And we can see from past conversations, past episodes, that that's likely to carry through into helping manage or downregulate our risk of burnout. So, uh, as discussed monotropism, it's attention in fewer and deeper interests or fewer and deeper tunnels, and explains the depth of our interest and possibly the depth of our understanding in topics. But this study also found that it comes at a cost, so it's really good for our well-being to a certain degree, up until it's not, you know. I really enjoy what I do, my clinical work and my research work is very much aligned, so it's not been unheard of for me to want to finish work at eight o'clock, plan to finish work at eight o'clock in the evening, and then find myself still reading different articles about different topics at 1 a.m. in the morning because I just can't let it go. And that's really what we're talking about with the difficulties here. We get into a state of flow and that monotropic focus on our point of interest, and it's really hard for us to shift away from that, change that routine that we're in, that state of mind that we're in, and it can actually contribute to burnout. So it has a bit of a um, it has a bit of a pattern of being good, good, good, good, good until a point, and then it can actually be quite harmful to our well-being. And that's something that we can monitor with timers, with structured times for doing particular things, and doing this in a way that serves us and doesn't take from us. So, what was my next point? I'm so glad you asked. Um on monotropism, there's a questionnaire called the Monotropism Questionnaire by Murray and Carrie. Um, and it measures autistic and ADHDs, or it's been used to measure autistic and ADHDs on monotropism, and it's found that both autistic people and ADHDers score significantly above the general population. And so, where historically we've talked about monotropism specifically with autistic people, we're starting to see that actually it may be broader than that. It may be a transdiagnostic or a characteristic across neurodivergent uh conditions. I struggled to find that word then, didn't I? Um it may actually not be specific to autism, but be ADHD as well. So as Audi HD is very likely that we experience monotropism. Although I recall there was some research that uh spoke to autistic people, uh, and around two-thirds, I think it was 65%, of them endorsed a special interest or a specific interest, um, which is likely related to or underpinned by monotropism. So special interests are a well-being variable, and again, with that monotropic point of view, uh it's a dose response curve. So it's effective up to a point, and then it draws away from our energy beyond that point. So we've just touched on quality of life, and my next point will be quality of life and belonging. And I've touched on this before, but I'll do it again now. So autistic adults score lower across all four of the World Health Organization's domains for well-being. And importantly, biological females, women, uh, carry a disproportionate burden, so even higher quality of life difficulties than autistic men. Uh, what are the things that help contribute positively to our quality of life as neurodivergent people? Well, employment, support, and relationships have been found to be concrete observable improvers of our quality of life. Uh, one study looked at the quality of connections, uh, whether our social relationships are reciprocal relationships, whether they're accepting and affirming, and found that those relationships support well-being, but the quantity of social contacts made little difference. Quality over quantity. So having a couple of relationships or spaces where I can feel safe to be myself is more powerful and has a better impact on our quality of life and our well-being than having many social interactions, many spaces that aren't supporting and affirmative and don't allow me to unmask. Also, having a positive autistic identity identity is linked to our well-being. Understanding ourselves as different, not defective, is a really great example of this. Knowing that I am a person with some differences like many other people, and my differences come with strengths and difficulties, and recognizing that that makes me just as valid as every other person. Being able to see my strengths as we discussed earlier on, being able to apply them in my life in affirming environments and relationships positively improves my well-being and overall quality of life. So external acceptance and support is really the mediator of that positive autistic identity. People around me accepting who I'm what I am, and so community, building neurodivergent community, or DHD community, autistic community, that's going to help us see ourselves reflected back to us and see our own characteristics in a much more positive light. Peer community and environmental fit. You know, I've spoken in the past about the disorder that we diagnose isn't inherent to our characteristics. It's related to the misalignment between the strengths and weaknesses that I bring to an environment and the strengths and weaknesses that the environment expects. So if I go to an environment that expects me to be able to fly and I can't, I'm going to be perceived to be disordered. But that doesn't mean that that's inherent to me. That is a mismatch between myself and my environment. And that's when we talk about environmental fit. We can make environmental accommodations in affirming spaces that help alleviate the difficulties and the disability that we experience. Also, some of the social difficulties that we experience, which probably strongly contribute to us being seen as disordered and deficient, can be drawn to Milton's idea of the double empathy problem. The double empathy problem is the idea that autistic people don't have a communications deficit, or neurodivergent people don't have a communications deficit, I'd argue. However, the mismatch between my communication style as an autistic or a neurodivergent person and a typical person's communication style is where the disturbance arises. The difficulties come out of we all speak English, we just speak a slightly different dialect, so nuance is lost. However, if we put 10 neurotypical people in a room, not usually any communication difficulties if we all speak the same language, put 10 autistic people in a room, and we find that actually the communication difficulties disappear also, because the expectations of the environment that we're in change, and so we no longer have a communications deficit. Why does that matter? Because affirming workplaces, schools, healthcare settings, environments that accept that actually there's not something wrong with you because you're not communicating in the way that I want you to, but actually it is a communications difference. It's much more affirming, and we're not inherently apologizing people for not being like us. So I guess now coming towards the end of today's rather quick session, what are some strengths that you have? I'll ask you to have a think about what are some neurodivergent characteristics that you have that are real strengths and where do you apply them in day-to-day life? Are you a particularly creative artist or a particularly expert in a particular field that happens to be your interest? Are you really good at understanding systems and interactions within systems and fixing problems? Are you an IT engineer who harnesses that details orientation and that systems orientation? Are you an engineer? Are you a mathematician? What are your neurodivergent characteristics? Are you the nose for a perfume company? And so your hypersensitivity to smells is serving you and creating beautiful things for the world? What are three strengths that you have? Where do you use them in life? And if you don't already, is there a way that you can use them in your life? Knowing that we can use them is powerful, and being able to use them is enjoyable. So what are the environments where you can be yourself, where you can unmask and feel safe doing that? When you can feel not like we're too much or not enough, where we can feel like the lights aren't too bright, the sounds aren't too much. Where are they in your world? And just a quick counter-idea: be careful of the idea of extraction. We talk about the strengths that we have, and there's that superpower narrative which I don't subscribe to. It's a part of our story for some of us in certain contexts, and it is context-specific. But if you're in an environment where you're being identified for your autistic superpowers, but it feels like a demand and a cost, then it's likely that that environment is taking from you and your strengths without creating an environment that supports you in your difficulties, and that is an unhealthy environment to be in. And unfortunately, many workplaces don't see humans, we see or see productivity. So your superpower is great for an organization, but maybe not be so great for your well-being when we get past that point of interest and focus, and it becomes harmful to our well-being. So be wary of extraction. If you are in an environment that's benefiting unduly from your difficulty and your strengths, then that is a structural problem and it requires a structural fix. Environmental accommodations that support our neurodivergent needs, cognitive and sensory and social, can help make those environments more balanced for us where we can come closer to thriving. And I've said it before and I'll say it again: find community, find Audi HD community, chat in our Instagram comments, create Facebook pages for neurodivergence in your area. Jump online, join a DD group, do some fan art, things like that where our people hang out. Or if you're more uh into more intellectual pursuits or engineering, find groups of interests like you. So we've got to that time that I'll wind up. But if today's made a bit of sense to you, that tells you that positive neurodivergent identity is a part of your experience as well. And knowing that and knowing what your strengths are, what brings you joy and being able to apply those will bring well-being up, will bring more quality into your life. Our strengths are real. Our joy and well-being are real, and joy is a variable of our well-being. Quality of life may be low, but it can be raised by relationships, a good environmental fit at work, good supports, and community. And none of them require you to perform in that mask of typicality. So that's it for today, friends. Thank you very much for your time and for listening. And again, we are different, not defective. I'll see you next week.