Rest isn't earned. It's required.
Why hustle culture and "rest is a reward" are especially dangerous for neurodivergent women
You push yourself until you crash. And then wonder how that happened.
It’s not like you weren’t paying attention. You were. But you weren’t getting anything that told you were running on fumes.
That’s what happens when your nervous system doesn’t send loud-enough signals. Oh, and when you’ve been listening too much to hustle culture and patriarchal messages about work ethics.
Like: rest is earned.
Work hard enough, do enough, produce enough. Then, and only then, have you earned the right to stop.
It’s a belief so common it barely registers as a belief.
For most of my working life, I held it without question.
The problem was I had no working definition of “hard enough.”
It was always more than what I’d already done.
When you’re neurodivergent, your interoception (the ability to sense what’s going on inside your body) is likely compromised.
When you register “tired,” you’re probably already well past exhausted.
That’s a problem.
And combined with “rest is earned,” it puts you in danger of overextending yourself forever and always.
Like it did me.
My threshold was always out of reach.
Whatever I’d done was still — somehow — never enough.
Now layer hustle culture on top of that.
Hustle culture doesn’t care about your signals. It promotes one idea: you always need to hustle if you want to achieve anything.
For a neurotypical, pushing past tired is uncomfortable.
For someone with compromised interoception, pushing past tired is invisible.
And so, you just keep going. Until your body ultimately slams on the brakes. That usually isn’t pretty. And recovery takes more than an afternoon off. By that time, you’re talking months if not years. (I know. I’ve been there. Multiple times.)
**You’re not ignoring your body’s discomfort. You’re rocked to sleep by silence.**
Compromised interoception doesn’t mean you’re doomed. While you can’t raise the volume, you can raise your sensitivity.
You do it through deliberate, conscious, slightly tedious practice. I worked hard (ha!) at it for about a decade.
At first, I’d hear nothing. Over time, I started hearing whispers. Discomfort in my belly. Brain fog increasing. Untypical disquiet.
The signals got louder. Or I got better at hearing them. Hard to say which.
The harder part was believing what I heard.
Even now, I crave objective measures and norms.
Is a 5k walk far? No idea. I’ve engaged in 20k walks because that sounded more like an achievement. (Why did I even want that?!)
My self-talk still pushes me. “That’s not hard, [X] is hard.” Just like with my emotions: I’m not angry until I’m rolling on the floor frothing at the mouth.
I’m still re-calibrating. Consciously honoring what I hear even when my inner-critic laughs at me for being a wimp.
Rest because my body whispers it’s done, regardless of whether I’ve finished what I started.
Rest is a prerequisite, not a prize.
You don’t qualify for it by working hard enough, any more than you need to qualify for breathing.
If you’re neurodivergent, take hustle culture with a kilo of salt. At least until you’ve grown your skill in sensing what your body and brain are whispering.
The hardest part? Acting on what you hear. Without questioning it.
Especially when you’re a neurodivergent woman who’s still tied into the “always be in service" conditioning without regard for your own wants, needs, and desires.
Put your own oxygen mask on first.
If that gets you labeled a “difficult woman”, claim it as a badge of honor!
