Hypervigilance & Neurodivergence

When Your Nervous System Won’t Switch Off.

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How hypervigilance is described in this essay is very much my physical, emotional, and mental experience of it. Until I discovered I was neurodivergent, I assumed this was how life was navigated by everyone.

Recently, I’ve come to see hypervigilance through two lenses. The first is hypervigilance as a trauma-shaped state: threat-detection turned up too high and left there, long after the danger has passed. The second is hypervigilance as something rarely named, “protective attunement.” This is life-preserving vigilance that develops when someone’s safety genuinely depends on us noticing. With its trademark intensity, during an extended period of time – years, even decades – and lacking vital support, this can also result in a nervous system that won’t switch off.

Both can look similar on the outside. Both can be exhausting. Both deserve to be understood with precision so that we can name it and claim it without shame. Because there’s nothing wrong with us.

And if, like me, you’ve experienced the complexities of both forms of hypervigilance – trauma-shaped and heart-shaped – then this essay is especially for you. This kind of multi-layered, compounded hypervigilance is a double – even triple – load that few nervous systems can withstand and still function. Unrecognised, under-resourced, and misunderstood, is it any wonder that burnout, autoimmune illness, and deep exhaustion so often becomes the legacy?

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Hypervigilance can happen when a nervous system learns, through experience, that safety is never guaranteed. Sometimes the symptoms are obvious: jumpy, reactive, braced. Sometimes they’re quiet: highly competent, hyper-attuned, socially “smooth,” but internally clenched. And often it’s misread – especially in neurodivergent adults – as part of our personality. We’re labeled “highly strung,” a “perfectionist” or a “control freak.”

Neurodivergence doesn’t cause hypervigilance, but it can create the perfect conditions for it to take root and become chronic. For many of us, the groundwork is laid early in misattuned environments.

We’ve probably spent years being corrected, misunderstood, teased, punished, or subtly trained to mistrust our own signals. Not necessarily through one dramatic trauma, but through a long drip-feed of “you’re too much / not enough / wrong tone / wrong face / wrong timing / wrong intensity.”

That kind of social weather teaches the nervous system to forecast danger everywhere.

And then there’s masking.

Camouflaging autistic traits, in particular, is increasingly understood as stressful and linked with burnout risk. Masking is physiologically expensive. It taxes the mind and the body. When we’re constantly monitoring ourselves and monitoring everyone else, our brain never gets to power down.

We’re running a translation service and a threat-assessment unit at the same time.

ADHD adds its own layer. Many ADHD adults carry a history of frequent criticism, “why can’t you just…?”, social rejection, and the emotional whiplash of being brilliant one day and “too much” the next. Research on rejection sensitivity shows how social threat cues can hijack attention. Our nervous system prioritises scanning for rejection at the cost of everything else. That scanning can look a lot like hypervigilance, even when the “threat” is subtle, relational, and ambiguous.

Giftedness can intensify this further: higher pattern detection, deeper moral sensitivity, faster inference-making. When we can see ten moves ahead, we don’t just anticipate outcomes, we anticipate the cost of outcomes. Hypervigilance becomes a mental habit: modelling, forecasting, preventing.

So yes: for many of us, hypervigilance is a perfectly logical adaptation to a long history of mismatch.

Here’s why none of this is our fault. Hypervigilance is working wiring, doing what it’s trained to do.

If our nervous system learned that people can turn suddenly, authority can be unpredictable, conflict has consequences, our needs aren’t welcomed, the room is safer when we manage it, and being misunderstood can cost us… then scanning makes sense.

In that light, hypervigilance is a form of loyalty. Our nervous system is staying faithful to the rules that once kept us safe.

The difficulty is that what kept us safe then becomes what keeps us exhausted now.

Hypervigilance steals rest first. Sleep becomes light, broken, easily interrupted. Our body doesn’t fully “drop.” Even leisure has an edge to it, like we’re waiting for the next thing.

It steals presence next. We can be with people, but not fully with them, because part of us is always tracking: tone shifts, facial micro-changes, whether we’ve said too much, whether they’re annoyed, whether we’re safe.

Then it steals identity. If we’re always scanning, we can lose the thread of our own wants. We become exquisitely good at reading everyone else, and weirdly foggy about ourselves.

Over time, it becomes a burnout engine because we’re running emergency power non-stop.

So how do we navigate it?

Not by “thinking our way out,” and not by telling ourselves to calm down.

Hypervigilance is a body-led adaptation. It responds best to body-led signals of safety, especially relational ones.

Instead of “I need to stop this,” try: “My nervous system is doing threat-detection. I can thank it and retrain it.”

That tiny shift reduces internal conflict. Our system is already fighting the world; it doesn’t need to fight us as well.

Our nervous system doesn’t respond to inspirational quotes. It responds to cues: light, sound, exits, posture, facial expression, tone, pace. So rather than aiming for some vague “calm,” build micro-safety: choose seating where the body can relax. For example, back supported, clear view, easy exit. Reduce sensory load where possible: noise, harsh lighting, crowded spaces. Use rhythmic regulation like walking, rocking, music, breath that lengthens the exhale. Create decompression rituals that the body learns to trust.

This is nervous-system literacy.

If we’ve grown up being told we’re “too sensitive,” hypervigilance often comes with shame: why am I like this? But shame is fuel for hypervigilance. It keeps us monitoring ourselves even harder.

The most radical thing we can do is remove the moral layer and treat hypervigilance as information. Hypervigilance often formed in relationship so it often softens in relationship, too.

This might look like: fewer people, better people. Slower friendships. Clearer agreements. Less performative socialising. More “I need a minute” without explanation.

And if we’re in a workplace or home where we’re chronically braced, it’s worth being blunt with ourselves: sometimes the problem isn’t our coping skills. Sometimes the problem is the environment.

If hypervigilance is entrenched, therapy can help, but ND-affirming, trauma-informed therapy is the key (not someone trying to train us into “normal”).

Hypervigilance can feel like it’s an integral part of us because it’s been with us for so long. But it’s our adaptation. We’re not “too much” for being alert. We’re not defective for scanning. We’re not failing because rest doesn’t come easily.

Our nervous system learned the world through experience. That’s how learning works. With enough safety – real safety, not performative wellness – our system can learn something new. Not all at once, but gently and genuinely over time.

Here’s another form of hypervigilance that’s rarely discussed in neurodivergent circles, but might be beneficial to explore…

Hypervigilance is often flattened into pathology, but there are states of heightened monitoring that aren’t trauma, not anxiety, not dysregulation. They’re adaptive, relational, and life-preserving.

There’s a difference between hypervigilance as a trauma echo – scanning when no threat is present – and hypervigilance as an evolved caregiving intelligence – scanning because life genuinely depends on it.

Developmental neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists call this protective attunement.

In early human history, this kind of vigilance kept infants alive, partners alive, elders alive. It’s the same nervous-system capacity that allows a mother to wake seconds before her baby stops breathing, or a shepherd to sense a predator before it’s visible, or a clinician to notice subtle deterioration before vital signs crash.

It’s relational surveillance in the service of survival. This is right-brain, limbic, embodied pattern recognition.

It’s the same system infants rely on before language. The same system mammals use to keep one another alive. The same system trauma survivors later repurpose when danger becomes internalised.

Carers of babies live in this state of relational surveillance: listening for the pitch of a cry, the pause in breathing, the sound that signals distress versus discomfort. ICU nurses live in this state. Emergency responders. Midwives. Partners of people with epilepsy, diabetes, cardiac instability, dementia. Parents of children who seize in the night. Children living with volatile or unsafe adults.

In these contexts, vigilance is care plus responsibility plus uncertainty.

What makes it hyper is that the stakes are absolute, ongoing, unpredictable.

Life or death collapses the margin for error. The nervous system adapts accordingly. The struggle for many neurodivergent adults is that a nervous system shaped by years of life-saving vigilance doesn’t always know when the danger has passed. It keeps the gain turned up. The same exquisite attunement that once kept us alive can also keep others alive, staying alert long after an emergency is over.

The nervous system that learned, “If I relax, someone could die,” doesn’t easily accept, “It’s safe to sleep now.”

Neurobiology backs this up. The caregiving brain – especially in high-risk caregiving – shows sustained activation of the locus coeruleus–noradrenergic system (the brain’s alerting network) and the anterior insula (interoceptive monitoring). Over time, the nervous system becomes exquisitely sensitive to deviation from baseline. It learns to trust micro-signals more than conscious reassurance.

This is why former carers often say: “I can’t switch off.” “My body still listens for breathing.” “I wake at every sound.” “I’m always tracking.”

It’s because their nervous system once carried the weight of someone else’s survival.

Some nervous systems were trained by love in the presence of danger. Some learned to stay awake so others could live. Some became exquisitely good at noticing the almost-invisible moment when a body crosses from safe to not-safe.

That’s an ancient, protective, relational intelligence.

Hypervigilance which emerged from childhood trauma is a self-protective, survival strategy. Hypervigilance born out of care and responsibility for the survival of others is also a protective, survival strategy. And if that weren’t enough, we’re usually “hyper” in other ways, like hyperactive – not just physical movement, but mental, emotional, imaginative, and energetic overdrive. We can be hyperaroused – living close to the sympathetic edge and have difficulty fully downshifting. Hyperattuned - extraordinarily sensitivity to tone, micro-expressions, shifts in mood, subtle context. Hypersensitive - to sound, light, texture, smell, emotion, injustice, nuance, beauty. Hyperempathic - deep emotional resonance with others’ states, often having porous emotional boundaries. Hyperfocused - intense, sustained attention when interest or meaning is engaged. Hyperassociative - rapid linking of ideas, images, memories, patterns across domains. Hyperintellectual - high cognitive intensity, depth, speed, and complexity of thought. Hypercreative - idea generation, symbolic thinking, imaginative synthesis at high volume. Hyperreactive - strong nervous-system responses to stimuli, stress, or relational shifts. Hyperaware - continuous meta-monitoring of self, others, systems, dynamics. Hyperconscientious - heightened sense of responsibility, moral sensitivity, and duty. Hyperresponsible - taking on more than one’s share of emotional, practical, or relational load. Hyperperceptive - noticing what others miss like inconsistencies, patterns, undercurrents, emerging change. Hyperintense - emotions, experiences, and meanings felt at full saturation. Hyperconnected (internally) - many channels active at once (thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, intuitions). Hyperimaginative - vivid inner worlds, symbolic richness, narrative depth. Hyperreflective - constant self-observation, meaning-making, existential inquiry.

In neurodivergent lives, “hyper” usually means: higher resolution, wider bandwidth, faster sampling, deeper signal detection and lower filtering thresholds.

When “hyper” is only seen through the lens of excess, so much of our lives can be misunderstood and pathologised. Our amplified intelligence, amplified perception, or amplified care continue to go unrecognised or invalidated. In the wrong environments, we suffer from exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, overwhelm, self-doubt and chronic overfunctioning.

However, in the right environments, these “hypers” become early warning systems, creative engines, relational anchors, ethical compasses, pattern translators and cultural innovators.

So “hyper” isn’t the problem. Hyper-capacity in the wrong context or container is. Attuned environments become as important as attuned relationships.

The work now is to gently teach our nervous system that the watch is no longer solitary, that safety can be shared, that the body is allowed to stand down in increments.

A nervous system that learned to protect itself and other’s lives can also learn to receive protection. The same sensitivity that once scanned for danger begins to register beauty, ease, and connection with equal precision. The eyes that watched for threat begin to soften into presence. The body that stayed ready begins, slowly, to trust rest.

May your care and duty be witnessed in these words. May your nervous system slowly but surely recover. May you be held, believed, supported, and met.