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The Overfunctioning and the Crash:

An AuDHD Survival Pattern

By Michelle Labine, PhD  

May 14, 2025

For most of my life, I thought overachieving was a good thing.

Pushing through. Taking on more. Being the dependable one, the prepared one, the one who just gets it done. I wore my capacity like armour.

However, what looked like excellence on the outside was often overfunctioning on the inside. And what always came next? The crash.

The Pattern

Step one: Go all in.
Hyperfocus. Intensity. High expectations. A drive to do it all—perfectly. I don’t half-show up; I throw myself into things with everything I have. I prepare. I anticipate. I cover for others. I go the extra mile, and then five more, because doing “just enough” never feels enough.

Step two: Hide the overwhelm.
Smile. Stay composed. Power through. People are counting on me, and the idea of disappointing someone (especially myself) is unbearable. So, I keep going. Even when my body’s screaming for rest. Even when I can feel the tension in my jaw, the buzzing behind my eyes.

Step three: Crash.
It doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it’s illness. Sometimes I vanish from inboxes. Sometimes I quietly spiral, lying in bed unable to do anything but scroll or sleep. I stop answering texts. I start to question everything. I wonder: Why can’t I just keep it up? What’s wrong with me?

The AuDHD Link

This cycle is a nervous system response shaped by AuDHD—the co-occurrence of Autism and ADHD.

  • The Autistic part craves control, predictability, and deep investment. It finds safety in certainty and excellence.
  • The ADHD part craves novelty, urgency, and movement. It thrives in bursts, not long-hauls.

Put them together? You get someone who dives in deep, ignores internal limits, and powers through with perfectionist force—until the brain and body simply can’t sustain it anymore.

It’s a pattern of survival.

Especially in women who are socialized to be accommodating, productive, emotionally attuned, and endlessly available. Add masking, people-pleasing, and undiagnosed neurodivergence to the mix? And over functioning becomes a way of being.

Until it doesn’t.

The Cost

  • Our nervous systems—stuck in fight-flight-freeze loops
  • Our relationships—where we carry too much or collapse from resentment
  • Our sense of self—which gets wrapped up in doing, achieving, producing
  • Our joy—because everything becomes a task
  • Our well-being—because we forget we’re not machines

And the crash? That’s the body keeping score.

What Healing Looks Like

Healing from this cycle is about doing things differently.

Pause before you say yes. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.
Notice urgency. Is the drive to fix, finish, or outperform coming from safety or fear?
Build in decompression time. If you know a sprint is coming, plan for the recovery, too.
Let “good enough” be enough. Completion doesn’t have to mean perfection.
Let yourself rest before you earn it. You don’t have to crash to deserve care.

If you’ve been riding the edge of burnout again and again, you’re not failing. You’re surviving a world that never made space for your rhythm.

Let this be the moment you soften.
Let this be the breath between over functioning and the crash.