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Why Neurodivergent People Think Everyone Hates Them (Neuroscience Secret)

Episode Summary

I sat down for a conversation that originally aired as Why Neurodivergent People Think Everyone Hates Them (Neuroscience Secret). The host described a moment a lot of neurodivergent people will recognize: a friend at a festival told him "everybody loves you," and his brain answered back with "everyone probably hates me." That gap between what people actually feel about you and what your nervous system insists they feel is a circuit problem, and you can train it. Here is what I told him.

Why does my brain assume everyone is mad at me?

You walk into a room and your brain has already decided you missed a social cue, said the wrong thing, and now everyone is quietly annoyed with you. The world contracts. You freeze. Your whole sense of yourself starts to collapse inward.

You are reading the room with too much gain.

The structure doing this work sits in the back of the brain, in the parietal cortex. I call it the Princess and the Pea, because it registers a disturbance that other brains sleep right through. Your sense of where you are in social space and how others are responding to you gets processed back there. When that tissue runs hot, you pick up enormous amounts of social information. You read micro-expressions, shifts in tone, the half-second someone glances away. That is real attunement, and it is a gift.

The problem shows up when the tissue saturates. There is a point where you are taking in so much social signal that the system can no longer process it accurately. Past that threshold the empathy does not sharpen further. It breaks down. You stop reading the room and start filling the gaps with the worst available interpretation. Did I miss a cue? Is everyone messing with me? That is a parietal system that has exceeded its bandwidth, full stop.

There is a fine line between being deeply empathetic and missing the social signal entirely, and you can sit on both sides of it. Plenty of people are profoundly empathetic and also take things literally. The same back-of-brain sensitivity that makes you exquisitely tuned to other people can, when overwhelmed, leave you misreading them completely.

What is rejection sensitivity doing in the brain?

Rejection sensitivity is the felt experience of that parietal system running at high gain combined with a negativity bias up front. The criticism lands harder than the data warrants because your circuits amplify the emotional weight of social information before you ever get to evaluate it consciously.

There is a smaller structure worth naming here too: the inferior frontal gyrus. I call it the Problem Child. It sits near the frontal negativity circuitry but behaves like a younger, more reactive version of it. The Problem Child wants to be oppositional for its own sake. Leave me alone. Push the thing. Be negative. It carries a lot of attachment-flavored reactivity because it is so developmentally young.

This costs you relationships in a specific way. When you get a little uncomfortable, or even just a little bored, the Problem Child can drive you to blow something up. You push a person away because the discomfort itself feels intolerable and oppositionality discharges it. The useful move is noticing the impulse as it arrives. When you feel the pull to push someone away, you can ask whether that is going to serve you. Building that relationship with the impulse, rather than acting on it automatically, is most of the work. You can read more about the amygdala-and-frontal side of this in Biohacking Anxiety: Targeting the Circuits That Won't Shut Up.

Can you change a brain without losing what makes it good?

Most people assume change comes with a tax: get the focus, lose the spark. Quiet the noise, lose the art. That trade is what stimulant medication tends to deliver.

I came to this through my own ADHD. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, before the diagnosis was widely applied, so I spent years just being quirky and impulsive, struggling with laundry and bills and social cues, not finishing what I started, underperforming what I knew I was capable of. I got an ADHD diagnosis after undergrad. I worked acute psychiatric crisis environments, which suit an ADHD nervous system well because the room is always changing and you can walk the patterns and keep things safe. After an injury pulled me out of that work, I landed at an autism center doing neurofeedback, and I started training my own brain after hours.

About a month and a half in, I noticed I was a different person. That experience is why I went and got a PhD studying neurofeedback.

What does SMR neurofeedback feel like the first time it works?

I can date the moment. I was about 18 sessions in, on a camping trip in upstate Massachusetts that I had done every year for a decade. I was walking a familiar path to an annoying corner of camp, and I stopped. Everything around me was quiet. I could attend to all of it at once. Things were crisper and more low-key at the same time.

It was like putting on glasses after years of needing them and not knowing it. Suddenly leaves had edges again. A quietness crept in, the same quietness a person with classic ADHD gets from a stimulant, except my own brain was holding the pattern rather than a molecule holding it for me.

The pattern is sensorimotor rhythm, SMR, a narrow band around 12 to 15 Hz over the sensorimotor cortex. SMR is the field's founding frequency. If you have watched a cat sit on a windowsill, body liquid and still, eyes locked and ready to pounce, you have seen SMR. The body is completely inhibited and the mind is poised. Bring up your SMR and you get more self-control. I cover the mechanism in more depth in SMR Neurofeedback: Train Sleep, Focus, and Self-Control.

Classic ADHD tends to run high theta, the slow 4 to 7 Hz activity that leaves you fidgety, twitchy, and mentally noisy. When SMR comes up strongly for the first time and holds for a few hours, the contrast is dramatic. Thinking is easier. The mind is quieter. And the part that matters: you lose nothing. You can still drop into the video game, the court, the canvas. A stimulant quiets the system by locking you into one mode, the lip-chewing, appetite-suppressed, narrow-focus mode. SMR training does not put you in a mode. It gives you access to the modes. You reach for the quiet when you want it.

Why does neurofeedback produce a switch you control instead of a state you are stuck in?

A stimulant raises catecholamine signaling for as long as the molecule is in your system, and you live inside that state until it wears off, side effects and all. Neurofeedback is operant conditioning of brain activity. You are rewarding your cortex for producing a pattern, and over repeated sessions the brain learns to produce that pattern on demand. The capacity becomes available rather than imposed.

That is why I describe what I trained as trait regulation rather than trait elimination. I did not delete my ADHD. I knocked it back from something like 200% of average down to roughly 20%, a mild thing I can set aside when I need to grade a stack of papers or give a lecture. The control over executive function matched what Ritalin or Adderall gave me, and in some respects exceeded it, without the cost of being trapped in a single state. For the broader picture of how this works with attention specifically, see Does Neurofeedback Work for ADHD? A Neuroscientist's Guide.

I want to be honest about the evidence. SMR training for self-control and the ADHD response is well supported by decades of clinical work and a solid research base, and the cat-on-the-windowsill description of the response is something I have watched happen in roughly two-thirds of ADHD clients. The specific magnitude of my own change, 200% to 20%, is my clinical history, not a population statistic. Your response depends on your baseline EEG. If you want to see your own starting point, a QEEG brain map shows where your theta, SMR, and parietal activity actually sit.

What do you do with this if you never touch an EEG?

The understanding alone sometimes produces the shift. When you can name the Princess and the Pea saturating, you stop treating "everyone hates me" as a fact about the room and start treating it as a readout from an overloaded sensor. When you can feel the Problem Child reaching for oppositionality out of boredom, you get a half-second to decide whether to act on it.

If you have access to neurofeedback, train your SMR and watch what your self-control does. If you do not, the behavioral scaffolds still work. External structure pulls a distractible brain through hard projects better than willpower does, which is why I leaned on Pomodoro blocks and task systems all through grad school. Meditation trains overlapping circuitry, and I have written about that in Mindfulness: Don't Just Do Something, Sit There. Nootropics and, where appropriate, medication are also real tools.

The starting point is the same regardless of which tool you choose: notice when the sensor is saturating, name what circuit is firing, and stop letting the worst interpretation pass as the truth about the room. That recognition is the first thing you can actually act on today.

Full Transcript
I put my world together around my my ADHD-ness or my neurodiversity, right? And then figured out how to do it. But then there are still those suffering pieces and I think that that's something I I really appreciate about the book and about you and this work as a whole is there is the gifted and tortured part, right? And feeling sort of validated in both of those, right? That it is not just a Yeah, there are all these really cool things, but sometimes it's also hard to express. I can feel a lot of pain in a way that's like hard for me to describe or share with somebody. I remember recently at a festival and I was opening up to a friend and he was just like, "Dude, like everybody loves you." But like in my mind, it can be like I feel like everyone probably hates me. Or what if I'm My three things just to kind of let you know of that about them and we can go wherever we want with that. The happy little kid, the lifeguard, and the princess and the pea. Like those three were my three strongest ones. And that ability to you know, really I guess there was like the rejection sensitivity like really resonated with me on one hand and then also that sense of being able to be highly attuned on one hand to people's experiences, but also it I don't know if it's when that gets lost or gets overwhelming, all of a sudden I feel like is everybody messing with me? Did I miss some cue? Did I not see the right thing? And I start to feel frozen and collapse and just like my whole world starts to collapse in on itself in a sense. Yeah, that's your princess and the pea on the back right. The outside world is back of the brain. And you're probably extra sensitive right up until the moment that tissue's saturated and then you can't process all the information. You're probably picking up too much and it's a bit, you know, There's a very fine line between being deeply empathetic and a little bit autistic. Where you're not picking up the social and it's just like a little bit, you know, Yeah. But you can you you don't have to be one or the other, either. Some people are both. Some people are deeply empathetic and they take things literally sometimes, you [laughter] know? Yeah. Yeah. >> saying. Yeah. >> this is you. Uh but but like that's the right tempo of parietal. There's also a little structure that next to the grumpy old man, there's the inferior frontal gyrus uh who I affectionately dubbed the uh problem child. Mhm. And the problem child wants to like be disruptive and oppositional for its own sake in some way. Leave me alone. Like, you know, be disruptive, push the thing, be negative, be oppositional. It's like a like a more vulnerable version in some ways of the negativity bias. It's related to that stuff, but it has a very uh reactive and attachment kind of stuff too because it's so young um that you know, it can it can yield uh behavior, lead to behavior like blowing up your relationship by being a jerk just because you were bored. Right. Or because you're a little uncomfortable, so you're oppositional. You know, like so that kind of stuff can lead to uh some disregulation. But otherwise, you know, we we notice that we want to go and you know, useful to know that stuff happens, so. Mhm. Yeah, being like aware of when you want to push someone away and when that's going to serve you or not, right? And being able to have a level of relationship with that, I think is huge. I'm curious for you even like were there pieces of this that like really resonated with you in some way, shape or form where you're like, oh that that piece really like felt like me once you started kind of even identifying this stuff for yourself in the book? I mean, >> [sighs] >> you know, this is not non-fiction. This is definitely a Sorry, this is not fiction. [clears throat] Definitely a non-fiction, you know, self-help style book. Right. But I think even then, there's something where, you know, all the characters are the artist or all you know, are the author in some ways. So, yes, but no, but sure. Absolutely. All [laughter] of all of these things. Um you you'll discover, I mean, you you read the book, but I talk about these things in a very different way, I think, than many people. Even my other neurofeedback providers, colleagues, you know, friends of mine who are psychologists and neurologists and things will, you know, have said to me things like, "You think about this stuff in an interesting way." And you know, I think that's a compliment for for most of them. >> [laughter] >> So If you're interested, right? Yeah. Right, I think so. I think so. Well, they're all therapists, you can't tell like if they were insulting you, you you might not be able to tell, you know, you might be [laughter] like, "Oh, wow." Um Yeah. But there's a different way of interacting with our brains than just here's the giant label that sticks to us. And I think that's something I've identified with my whole life is not fitting into, I mean, I was born in the '70s and grew up, you know, teen years are most of the '80s. ADHD was a thing, but it was like, you know, not a very big not a very widely applied diagnosis. There wasn't a lot of medication yet. I'm not like the '90s where it became, you know, Duracell and and everyone was on Ritalin and then Adderall a decade later. And that's still happening now. But I ended up sort of, you know, getting through, you know, raw dogging life without any of the diagnostic language, just being quirky, having trouble with, you know, laundry and bills, having trouble with social stuff. Um impulsivity, um you know, not fulfilling my my promise academically uh initially. And it was, you know, quite a challenging, got a diagnosis of ADHD after undergrad. And went, "Okay, great, but I would love to do something different for, you know, more medicine, psychology, something, nursing, I don't know, something." And then I worked in psychiatric hospitals in acute environments, cuz that's a great place to be, dynamic changing environments if you have a lot of ADHD, you know, you can be super chill and walk around and see all the patterns and keep things safe. Perfect. Um but I kept bumping up against this thing about like, well, I can't go back and do low intensity grad school for a bunch of years or intense med school for 3 to 5 years. I can't, you know, like I barely made it through boring undergrad and that last that last year was tough just kind of, you know, getting stuff done. Um, so the the perspective on that was was the perspective on on my own, you know, tortures and and gifts and things was pretty complicated where I knew that I was, you know, creative and quick and intelligent, but also knew that I had a really hard time finishing up undergrad and, you know, the idea of taking on huge projects. Yeah. As somebody in their mid-20s at point, you know, it was like, well, okay, well, I don't know. And so I ended up working in those crisis environments for a while and toward the end of that I may have mentioned this on the on the last show, but toward the end of that time I got injured. I couldn't keep working in the acute psychiatric so I went and did some high-tech work for a couple of years. Missed working in uh with people and since I had a lot of developmental psych, autism, etc. experience, went and got a job at an autism center. Did neurofeedback. Saw amazing things. And would hang out after hours and train my own brain. And after about month and a half of training my brain, I was like, well, wait a minute. I'm feeling very, very different and I think I can do some something more. And that led me to going and getting a PhD studying neurofeedback to figure out how it works. Very meta. You know, that that's how you [snorts and laughter] get through a grad program if you have ADHD. Right? Cuz the joke is uh a PhD is the process of learning more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. So, you know, you have to niche down. You have to be driven, be pulled, be pushed by the thing you care about. And I would say if you have ADHD or something else where you're a little distractible or have some executive function difficulties, you need that even more. You need the structure of the external pulling you through. Or you need other things helping, you know, drive you through it. And that can mean changing your brain with neurofeedback or meditation. That could be supplementing with some nootropics or even medications. There's lots of ways to take control. This this life behavioral scaffolds, you know, there's Pomodoro techniques and at that time getting things done and super useful. And I used them in in grad school. But doing neurofeedback and and knocking my ADHD back from like 200% of average, you know, just ADHD down to like 20% where it became this mild thing that I could, you know, very easily not have to deal with in a lecture or a presentation or something, you know, or having to grade a whole bunch of student papers. I could do that thing if I needed to because it gave me as much control over my executive function as something like Adderall, you know, or Ritalin would have more, actually. I've tried those things. So, for me it was a changing relationship with this stuff, understanding it and gradually getting a sense of it. Uh but it was also changing the ability to change this stuff that started to get out. And so, for the past 25 years a lot of my, you know, speaking from the the mountain top is about shift happens, take yours, get your brain, you can do stuff. And then it's been a very neurofeedback kind of focus process, but this is to take it beyond that for folks who don't necessarily have access to an EEG or who aren't interested in doing neurofeedback and just want to understand their brains because the understanding may yield the change sometimes. >> be enough to to have that that pivot. Yeah. Um I'm curious for just your own experience when you said that when you're, you know, going through the ADHD stuff for yourself before neurofeedback, you had, you know, tried Ritalin or different medications. And then you you eventually find neurofeedback and like this thing is is working and shifting for you. Like what was that experience like? I mean, I know it was a long time ago, I guess at this point, but like what was that experience Oh, no, I remember. No, I remember. Because it's it's not that dissimilar from what happens I would say about 2/3 of the time with ADHD. There's There's one of these quality moments that I'm going to describe and I've been training my brain for about 18 sessions. I was at a camping trip in upstate Massachusetts and um was walking to go somewhere and I was like on a path, you know, in the in the woods. And I be And I remember walking it It's a path I It's a camping trip I've done with friends every year for like 10 years and you know, there's a little annoying part of camp you have to walk to. I was walking there. I just remember being like, "Wait a minute. Why is everything so quiet around me? Why can I pay attention to everything? Things are really clear and, you know, both crisper and more low-key at the same time. It's very, very similar to like putting on a new pair of glasses if somebody has some vision issues. You're like, "Oh. Oh, yeah, edges. That's right. Leaves. They have They have edges." You know, you get this little extra clarity and it's it's kind of like if someone's taking Adderall, taking Ritalin, there is a quietness that creeps in if you're somebody who has classic ADHD, lots of theta. You take a stimulant, it will quiet your your mind generally. And it was it was very much that, but not a drug effect and in the field of neurofeedback, the SMR training, which is the core frequency that the field was built on, sensory motor rhythm. If you've seen a cat on a windowsill, you've seen SMR. It's this liquid body and laser-like focus, completely inhibited in the body and still in the mind, poised. If you bring up your SMR, you will get more self-control. But if you're not used to having lots of SMR, if you have tons of theta taking over for it instead and you're kind of fidgety and twitchy and ADHD. Um the first time your SMR comes up strongly for a few hours, it's like someone cleaned the windshield. You're like, "Hm." Oh. Oh. Okay. Hm. And it's easier to think and it's quieter and you can, you know, and you and here's the fun part. You You don't lose anything. You can still move into the like playing the video game or being the best athlete on the court or being the artist. You don't You're not stuck in a mode the way that a stimulant might quiet the system but like make you chew your lip and not want to eat and put you in one mode. This doesn't put you in a mode. It gives you access to the modes. You can kind of reach for that quietness when you wish and you're suddenly more balanced. That's something that I've heard and even with the neurofeedback that I've done like experienced as well. And I'm curious about that like what is it about what neurofeedback does that makes it more of like an adaptive trait that you can switch on and off versus like a a change, right? Cuz you're to your point like I think most of the time when you think about things it's like, "Oh, I'm going to get this thing but I'm going to lose that." Like everything has its cost, everything has its benefit, but there is something similar where it seems like you're able to keep the core or the pieces that you want with this thing and not but get the benefits of focus without losing the creativity and the insight and the joy and the other parts that come with it.
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