Closer to Hell on Earth and What an Ordinary Office Afternoon Costs a Neurodivergent Mind
Daniele Forni is an executive coach for non-standard and neurodivergent leaders and the founder of The Human Spikes Labs. A former Director at HSBC with fifteen years in banking across Europe and Asia, he is a University of Cambridge alumnus and the author of books on leadership, neurodiversity, strategy, and meditation.
It is mid-afternoon. You forgot to have lunch because you were too busy working on that presentation. You do not eat breakfast, so it has been more than 16 hours since the last time you ate. “Maybe I should do intermittent fasting today,” your mind wonders as you open a new tab on Google.
But you are interrupted by your desk neighbour crunching on some crackers, a sound that goes straight through your bones.
A small notification pops up. It is your manager’s manager, asking when the report will be ready for review.
Outside the window, the sun flickers on your monitor, turning the screen into a patchy, colourful mess you struggle to see through.
This sounds like a bad afternoon for a neurotypical mind. For a neurodivergent one, it is closer to hell on earth.
The distractions, the sounds, the light: they all compound into a very complex reality, where the senses are turned up to the maximum and stress and anxiety rise with them. To fight it, the body works overtime, under constant pressure, while you are still expected to produce the report.
The brain, or the room?
Some might say that this is exactly why neurodiversity is listed as a disability.
I want to look at that sentence more carefully because it hides a choice. Put the same person in a quiet room, with lunch at one o’clock, a blind on the window and notifications switched off until four. The report gets written, and often better than anyone else would write it.
Nothing about the brain changed between the two scenes. The room did.
This is what disability researchers call the social model of disability: a person is disabled less by their own body than by an environment built for someone else. Glasses are the easy example. Nobody calls short sight a workplace performance issue, because the fix is ordinary and expected. Sensory overload rarely gets the same treatment. It gets called being difficult, sensitive or distracted.
The difference matters because the two stories lead to very different conversations. If the problem is the brain, the answer is to fix the person: more resilience, better time management, perhaps a performance plan. If the problem is the room, the answer is to change the room, and that is usually cheaper, faster and kinder.
It also matters for the bottom line. Many of the people this article describes are the analysts who spot the error in the model, the engineers who see the edge case, the risk managers who notice the pattern nobody else did. A room that drains them by three o’clock is not a neutral room. It is a room that throws away its best thinking.
What the afternoon actually costs
Look at the scene again, one detail at a time.
The missed lunch. Many ADHD and autistic adults describe a weaker signal from the body: hunger, thirst and tiredness arrive late, or only once they are urgent. Deep focus on the presentation does the rest. By mid-afternoon, the brain is running on empty and nobody, including its owner, has noticed.
The crackers. For a mind that filters sound less effectively, a crunch two desks away is not background. It arrives at the same volume as the thought you were holding, and the thought is lost.
The notification. It is not one interruption. Many ADHD and autistic adults describe experiences sometimes referred to as rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD): an intense, fast emotional reaction to anything that might signal criticism or failure. To that brain, “When is the report ready?” or “Can we chat?” does not read as a question. It reads as a threat. Adrenaline floods in, and a large share of the afternoon’s energy goes on managing the panic before the document is even open.
The light. Glare on a screen is a small irritation for most people. For a sensitive visual system, it is a constant, low-level alarm.
None of these is dramatic on its own. The cost is that they arrive together, all day, and that managing them is invisible work. By the time the visible work is reviewed, a large share of the day’s energy has already gone on staying upright in the room.
For many people in finance and technology, the room is not even physical. It is Slack or Teams: red dots that never clear, pop-ups over the spreadsheet, an unspoken rule that every message deserves an answer within minutes, and a day of video calls spent performing eye contact with a camera. The digital room is the new open-plan office, and it never closes.
Brain in overtime
When your brain is continuously triggered, keeping focus feels like pushing Sisyphus’s rock: the more you push, the less you are able to control it. It leaves you, at the end of the day, drained.
Here is what happens underneath. A neurodivergent brain often filters less. The crunch, the flicker and the ping do not stay in the background: each one arrives with the same urgency as the task in front of you. So the brain is not processing one thing. It is processing everything, and deciding, again and again, what to ignore.
There is a second cost, and it has a name. The researchers Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser and Wenn Lawson called it monotropism: the tendency of many neurodivergent minds to pull their attention into one deep, focused tunnel at a time. ADHD adults often know a version of it as hyperfocus. Inside the tunnel, the work flows. But a crunch or a ping does not pause it. It derails the train. Putting the train back on the rails takes far more executive function than it would for a mind that spreads its attention more evenly.
I like to put it as an equation, borrowing the shape of the psychologist Piers Steel’s motivation formula:
"Focus = (Interest × Value × PINCH) ÷ (Distractions × Sensitivity)"
The top half is what pulls you into flow: how interesting the task is, how much it matters to you, and the PINCH. The PINCH is the spark that makes you start right now: Passion, Interest, Challenge, Novelty and Hurry. A deadline breathing down your neck, for example, can get a report delivered on time without any further motivation. Many ADHD brains run on exactly that spark, which is why the same person can stall on a routine report for a week and then finish a fascinating one overnight. The bottom half is what pulls you out: the number of distractions in the room, multiplied by how strongly your nervous system reacts to each one.
A neurodivergent mind often brings a lot to the top. Give it a problem it cares about and it will go deeper than almost anyone. But it also brings a high sensitivity to the bottom, so the same room that merely annoys a colleague can cut its usable focus in half. Because the two are multiplied, not added, a small change in distractions makes a large difference. Sensitivity is hard to change. Distractions are a choice the room makes.
Each of those decisions about what to ignore is small. But attention runs on a limited budget, and every time you drag it back to the presentation, you spend a little more of it. By mid-afternoon, the budget is gone. The work did not get harder. The room kept charging a fee.
On top of that, most of us are running a second job at the same time: looking calm, looking busy, not wincing at the crackers. That job is often called masking, and it is paid from the same budget.
The room is not only lights and sound. There is a social room too: office politics, unspoken rules, the networking lunch with no agenda, the team meeting where nobody quite says what they mean. For many neurodivergent people, reading those cues is manual work, a live translation of signals other people process without thinking. Masking is not only suppressing a wince at a loud noise. It is that translation, all day, and it draws on the same budget as the flicker on the screen.
So the exhaustion at six o’clock is not laziness, and it is not a lack of resilience. It is the bill for a day spent working two jobs: the one you are paid for, and the one nobody sees.
The bill does not stay at the office. When the whole budget is spent by six, there is nothing left at home: no energy to cook dinner, to listen properly to the people you love, to do anything but lie in a dark, quiet room until the nervous system comes back down. Work gets the best of you. Your personal life gets the scraps.
What it looks like from the outside
From the next desk, none of this is visible. What colleagues see is something else.
They see the person who skipped the team lunch, and read it as aloof. They see headphones, and read them as a closed door. They see a short reply to a message that set off a wave of panic, and read it as rude. They see brilliant work on Monday morning and a blank stare on Thursday afternoon, and call it inconsistent.
Then those readings travel. They end up in performance reviews as “needs to work on communication”, “not a team player” or “great potential, but”. Over a career, the room does not only tax the day. It shapes who gets promoted.
This is why so many neurodivergent professionals in finance and technology describe the same pattern: they are valued for their output and penalised for their delivery. The output came from the brain. The delivery was shaped by the room.
A budget, though, can be protected. If the room is the one charging the fee to your energy, the room is also where most of the savings are: fewer pings, less glare, a rapid but fulfilling lunch. Once the drain is visible, it can be planned for instead of endured, by the person at the desk and by the leader who designs the day around them.
What helps
The good news is that most of the fixes are small, cheap and boring. That is exactly why they work.
If you are the one at the desk:
Put food in the calendar. If your body will not remind you, a recurring 30-minute block will. Treat it like a meeting with your most demanding stakeholder.
Control the sound you can control. Noise-cancelling headphones are not antisocial. They are the cheapest accommodation in the building.
Batch the pings. Turn notifications off for focus blocks and check messages at set times. Tell your manager when those times are, so silence does not read as absence.
Move the screen, not your eyes. A blind, a different desk or a screen turned away from the window removes a whole day of low-level strain.
Build transition buffers. Book ten minutes between meetings with nothing in them. Use them to close one context and open the next, before the train has to leave the station again.
If you are the leader who sets up the room:
Ask one question. “What does a good working day look like for you?” The answer is usually specific and easy to give.
Make quiet normal. A quiet zone, or permission to book a meeting room for focused work, helps everyone, not only the neurodivergent people on your team.
Set the notification norm. If an urgent message can wait an hour, say so. If it cannot, agree how urgent things will arrive.
Take the ambiguity out of your messages. “Call me” can land like a threat. “Call me when you have a minute to discuss the Q3 timeline. Nothing urgent, and you are not in trouble” takes five seconds to write and can save someone an afternoon.
Judge the output, not the setup. Headphones, a hood, a walk at 3pm: if the work is good, the way it got made is not your concern.
If the room is digital:
Default to asynchronous. Not every message needs a meeting, and not every message needs an answer in five minutes. Agree response times by channel, and write them down.
Make cameras optional. A camera-off call is not disengagement. For many people it is the difference between listening and performing.
Clear the red dots on purpose. Mute the channels you do not need, and set two or three windows a day to process the rest.
Send an agenda. A meeting with a clear purpose and a clear end removes half the ambiguity before anyone joins.
The question worth asking
Next time someone on your team seems scattered (or skittish, like a cat) at 3 pm, try a different question. Not “What is wrong with them?” but “What is wrong with the environment?”
Most of the time, the answer is a missed lunch, a noisy neighbour, a notification and the afternoon sun. All four can be fixed before Monday.
If you are the person at the desk reading this at 3 pm, still hungry, with the crackers still crunching: it is not you. It is the room. You are allowed to change it, one small fix at a time.
Read more from Daniele Forni
Daniele Forni, Executive Coach & Tech Founder
Daniele Forni, known as "The Data Shaman," is not your average executive coach. He helps senior professionals leverage their unconventional traits into tangible ROI using rigorous science, AI tools, and strategic wit. As the founder of the SquirrelCoach platform, he champions the "Spiky Profile" concept, exceptional leaders are defined by their peaks. An alumnus of the University of Cambridge and a 6x author on leadership, neurodiversity, and meditation, Daniele previously spent 15 years driving technology and risk management as an Investment Banking Director across Europe and Asia.
