When the Squirrels Win: Intentional Breathing as a Neurodivergent Lifeline

There is a particular kind of afternoon that I imagine many AuDHD people will recognise instantly.

You had a plan. A real one. Written down, possibly colour-coded. You were going to do the thing — file the form, write the email, make the call, start the task that has been sitting at the edge of your awareness like a stone in a shoe. You had everything ready. And then something happened — a noise, a notification, a thought that arrived sideways and took up all the available space — and suddenly it is two hours later and you are not doing the thing. You are thinking about seventeen other things simultaneously, your chest is tight, your thoughts are ricocheting, and the task has somehow become more impossible than it was before, because now there is also the guilt of not having done it, layered on top of everything else.

This is what I call the squirrel spiral. And for a long time — most of my adult life, in fact — I had no idea what was actually happening inside my nervous system when it did.

The Weight of Not Knowing

I was diagnosed as AuDHD as an adult. Not as a child, when the understanding might have changed the shape of my education, my relationships, my entire relationship with my own competence. As an adult, after decades of managing, adapting, pushing through, burning out, and blaming myself for what I now understand were neurological realities rather than character flaws.

This is not unusual. Autism diagnosis rates in large US health systems rose by 175% between 2011 and 2022, with comparable rises documented in adult ADHD diagnoses across the English-speaking world. Most of those newly-diagnosed adults are not children who were missed. They are people who spent years — sometimes entire lifetimes — without the language or framework to understand what was happening in their own minds and bodies.

The cost of that is not small. Among adults with ADHD and autism, the most commonly reported psychiatric comorbidities include anxiety (57%), depression (59%), and burnout (38%). These are not coincidences. They are the accumulated weight of having to navigate a world that was not designed for your nervous system, without knowing that was what you were doing, for years.

There is also the particular burden of masking — the constant, often unconscious performance of neurotypicality that many of us learned as children simply to survive. Masking can be described as the use of conscious and unconscious strategies to suppress one's autistic traits or use performative behaviours to pass as non-autistic — pre-preparing scripts for social interactions, restraining self-stimulatory behaviours, maintaining eye contact. It is exhausting work. It is work that most people around you never see. And over time, it accumulates into something the research has only recently given a name: autistic burnout — a chronic condition consisting of severe exhaustion, loss of skills, and increased sensory sensitivity.

I am telling you this not because I want to dwell in the weight of it, but because I think context matters. When I talk about breathwork as a practice that genuinely helps me — that I reach for in real moments, not just write about in theory — I want you to understand what it is up against. It is not up against mild stress and a busy schedule. It is up against a nervous system that spent decades on high alert, that still flinches at unpredictability, that can go from functional to flooded in the space of one unexpected notification.

What Executive Function Actually Feels Like From the Inside

Executive function is one of those clinical terms that sounds tidy and manageable from the outside — a set of skills involving planning, organisation, initiation, emotional regulation, working memory. What the research confirms is that both ADHD and autism are associated with significant executive function differences, and that these differences interfere with major life activities in adults with ADHD in consistent and well-evidenced ways.

From the inside, it feels less like a skills deficit and more like a conversation between your intentions and your nervous system that keeps breaking down. You know what you need to do. You want to do it. And some part of the process — starting, sustaining, switching, stopping — simply will not comply. Not because of laziness or lack of motivation, but because the neural pathways that connect intention to action are wired differently, and the emotional regulation systems that help other people push through discomfort are running at reduced capacity precisely when you need them most.

And then there is the anxiety. Because executive function difficulties do not exist in isolation. They create shame spirals, avoidance patterns, chronic low-level anticipatory dread. The task becomes associated with the feelings around the task — the times you didn't start, or started and couldn't finish, or finished and somehow still felt like you'd done it wrong. The nervous system starts responding to the task the way it responds to a threat, because functionally, that is what it has learned to do.

This is the loop I am trying to interrupt when I reach for the breath.

Why the Breath Actually Works — and What the Research Says

I have written elsewhere on this blog about the three breathing techniques I use most — the extended exhale, box breathing, and the physiological sigh. What I want to explore here is the deeper reason any of them work at all, because understanding the mechanism changed how consistently I practice, and I think it might do the same for you.

Your autonomic nervous system runs in two primary modes: sympathetic (the alert, activated, fight-or-flight state) and parasympathetic (the rest, digest, regulate, recover state). For many neurodivergent adults — particularly those who have spent years masking, managing, and running at the edge of their capacity — the sympathetic state is the default. The nervous system has learned that this is what the world requires.

The breath is the only part of the autonomic nervous system that you can consciously control. And because breath and nervous state are bidirectionally linked — your state affects your breath, but your breath also affects your state — intentional breathing is a direct line into the regulation system that usually runs without your input. Effective breathing interventions support greater parasympathetic tone, which can counterbalance the high sympathetic activity intrinsic to stress and anxiety.

The evidence for this is no longer anecdotal. A 2023 meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials found that breathwork was associated with significantly lower levels of self-reported stress compared to non-breathwork controls, with similar significant effect sizes for anxiety and depressive symptoms. Across twenty studies on anxiety specifically, the effect held: deliberately controlled breathing moves the needle, repeatedly and measurably, on how the nervous system regulates itself.

For executive function specifically, the pathway is indirect but real. When anxiety is lower, working memory is more accessible. When the nervous system is less flooded, the prefrontal cortex — the part that handles planning, sequencing, and emotional regulation — comes back online. Of 58 clinical trials evaluating isolated breathing-based interventions for stress and anxiety, 54 of the 72 interventions studied were effective. That is not a marginal result. That is a tool that works.

What It Actually Looks Like in My Life

I want to be honest here, because wellness writing has a tendency to present practices in their ideal form — the morning routine, the dedicated time, the peaceful environment. My relationship with intentional breathing looks nothing like that on most days, and I suspect yours might not either.

Sometimes it is three deliberate breaths in the kitchen before I open my laptop, because I have learned that starting the day without them means the squirrels are already running the show before I've written a single word.

Sometimes it is the physiological sigh — a double inhale through the nose followed by a long, slow exhale — taken in the middle of a task that has suddenly become overwhelming, because something shifted and the thread I was holding snapped. I do this and then I continue. Not because the task has become easier, but because I have bought myself thirty seconds of clarity in which starting again is possible.

Sometimes it is five minutes of box breathing before a phone call that my nervous system has been dreading all week — one of those conversations that neurotypical people seem to make without any particular preparation, but that for me requires a kind of pre-regulation that I used to do unconsciously through elaborate avoidance and now do deliberately through breath.

And sometimes, on the days when the squirrel spiral has fully won and I am sitting in the wreckage of an afternoon I had planned completely differently, it is just the extended exhale. Breathe in for four. Breathe out for eight. Again. Again. Not fixing the day. Not solving the executive function. Just lowering the temperature enough that I can be kind to myself about it, and begin again tomorrow.

On Choosing This Practice When You Are Late-Diagnosed

There is something particular about coming to tools like breathwork after a late diagnosis that I think deserves its own acknowledgement. Because for many of us, the diagnosis itself — the moment we finally understood why the world had felt so effortful, for so long — was both a relief and a grief. Relief at having a framework. Grief at the years spent without one.

And there can be a kind of ambivalence about wellness practices that comes from that place. A voice that says: this is something I should have had access to thirty years ago, when I was struggling without language for what was happening. A voice that says: why does this have to be my work, when the world could simply be built differently? Both of those voices are right. Both of them deserve space.

And also: the breath is here now. The nervous system is here now. The squirrels are, as ever, very much here now.

Breathwork is not a cure for being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. It will not change the structural barriers, the inaccessible systems, the exhaustion of having to explain yourself to people who were never designed to understand. What it does — and this is not a small thing — is give your nervous system a moment of genuine rest in the middle of all of that. A pause in which you are not performing, not managing, not masking. Just breathing. Just here.

After a lifetime of holding everything together with the energy of managing alone, I find that pause to be quietly revolutionary.

A Starting Point, If You Need One

If you are new to intentional breathing, or if you have tried it before and found it didn't stick, I want to offer you something that has made it more accessible for me: start impossibly small.

Not five minutes. Not a dedicated practice. Just one breath, taken deliberately, at a moment when you notice the squirrels gathering. One breath in which you make the exhale longer than the inhale. That is the whole practice, to begin with. The nervous system does not need a perfect environment or a minimum session length. It needs repetition — enough encounters with the parasympathetic state to begin to trust that the state is available.

One breath at a time, you are building that trust.

The squirrels will still show up. They are part of how my brain works, and probably part of how yours does too — the hyperfocus, the pattern-recognition, the lateral thinking that makes neurodivergent minds genuinely brilliant at certain things and genuinely difficult to live in at others. I am not trying to silence them. I am just learning, slowly and consistently, to breathe before I let them drive.

— India