Neurodivergent Quiet Quitting: How Burnout Shows Up as Boundary (Copy)

Bridgette Hamstead

Quiet quitting has emerged in recent years as a cultural shorthand for employees who stop going above and beyond at work. Instead, they do what is necessary to meet their job requirements and nothing more. In dominant narratives, this shift is often framed as laziness, entitlement, or a lack of ambition. But for neurodivergent professionals, particularly autistic and ADHD individuals, what looks like quiet quitting from the outside is often something much deeper. It is not a rejection of work ethic or a loss of motivation, but rather a necessary boundary and a survival strategy in environments that have demanded too much for too long.

Autistic and ADHD professionals often enter the workforce already carrying the weight of years of misunderstanding, unmet needs, and exclusion. From early education through adulthood, they are frequently expected to adapt to systems that were never designed with their minds in mind. In the workplace, they encounter environments that reward fast processing, fluent verbal communication, and strict adherence to unspoken social norms. These spaces often fail to recognize the immense cognitive and emotional labor required for neurodivergent individuals to simply exist in them. The result is a kind of double shift, where they are performing their actual job and also translating their behavior, language, and responses to fit neurotypical expectations.

Over time, this leads to burnout. It is not the kind of burnout that can be fixed with a weekend off or a vacation, but the deep, identity-level depletion that comes from years of masking, overextending, and never being able to fully rest as oneself. For autistic and ADHD professionals, burnout can manifest as physical exhaustion, emotional shutdown, sensory overwhelm, and a loss of executive functioning. The very skills that employers praise in neurodivergent employees, such as hyperfocus, creativity, attention to detail, and outside-the-box thinking, often come at the cost of internal regulation. When those internal resources are drained, there is nothing left to give.

At this point, many neurodivergent workers begin to withdraw. They may stop volunteering for extra assignments, pull back from team conversations, avoid social events, or set firm limits on their availability. This is often misinterpreted by employers or colleagues as disengagement. In reality, it is a form of boundary-setting and often the first time these individuals have ever truly asserted their limits in a workplace. It is not a performance problem. It is resistance to systems that exploit labor without offering adequate support or understanding in return.

The decision to pull back is rarely made lightly. Many neurodivergent professionals have internalized the belief that they must overperform to be considered competent. They have spent years trying to meet expectations that were not aligned with how their brains work. Even in the act of quiet quitting, they may still be outperforming their peers, but they carry guilt for not doing more. That guilt is rooted in ableism and in the expectation that neurodivergent people must constantly prove their worth in order to be accepted.

Workplace culture often reinforces this message by rewarding overwork, penalizing rest, and pathologizing difference. Neurodivergent workers are frequently told to seek coaching or accommodations that teach them how to function more like their neurotypical peers, rather than being supported to work in ways that are natural and sustainable for them. They are expected to adjust themselves to fit the system rather than the system adapting to meet a diversity of needs. This imbalance creates a constant state of stress, and eventually, something has to give.

When neurodivergent professionals begin to set boundaries, they are not giving up. They are finally giving themselves permission to stop abandoning their needs. Choosing to no longer overfunction is not a sign of disinterest. It is a sign of self-respect. It means recognizing that being constantly available, endlessly productive, and emotionally accommodating is not healthy or sustainable. It is a refusal to trade one’s well-being for external validation or career advancement.

This kind of quiet quitting is not just about work. It is about reclaiming autonomy after a lifetime of being told that one’s needs are inconvenient, that one’s natural rhythms are disruptive, and that one must always bend to fit in. When a neurodivergent person draws a boundary at work, it is often the culmination of years of invisible labor and internal struggle. It is not about doing less. It is about no longer doing harm to oneself for the sake of appearing agreeable or exceptional.

For organizations that claim to value neurodiversity, understanding this dynamic is crucial. It is not enough to hire neurodivergent professionals and celebrate their unique strengths while ignoring the environments those individuals must navigate. True inclusion means creating spaces where boundaries are honored rather than punished. It means moving away from grind culture and toward models of work that recognize rest, regulation, and authenticity as essential components of sustainable success.

Neurodivergent quiet quitting is not a threat to productivity. It is an invitation to rethink how we define engagement, commitment, and success. It challenges the idea that performance is measured only by going above and beyond and offers a more humane vision of work. This vision makes room for difference, honors capacity, and values people not for what they can produce under pressure but for who they are when they are supported to thrive.

This shift requires a fundamental change in how we view work itself. For neurodivergent professionals, the goal is not to be fixed or managed into compliance. The goal is to be understood, respected, and allowed to participate in ways that do not require the constant erasure of self. Quiet quitting is not a failure. It is a boundary. And for many neurodivergent individuals, it may be the first step toward reclaiming the joy, energy, and sense of self that work has taken from them for too long.