Why Does Wellbeing Advice So Often Miss Neurodivergent Women? – An Interview with Serena K Elizabeth
Serena K. Elizabeth, founder of Calm Healing, supports neurodivergent women navigating perimenopause, burnout, and overwhelm. Her approach grew from years of searching for answers before discovering her own autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (AuDHD), which helped explain why conventional wellbeing routines had often felt so difficult to sustain.
In this interview, Serena reflects on how perimenopause brought unresolved trauma and previously unrecognised neurodivergence into focus. She shares the small, flexible habits that support her everyday life and explores what changes when self-understanding replaces the pressure to constantly “fix” yourself.
Serena K. Elizabeth, Wellbeing Specialist
What led you to create Calm Healing, and who did you most want it to support?
Calm Healing was born from my own many years of feeling broken, long before I understood why. I struggled with health issues from a very young age. I experienced a nervous breakdown at nineteen, which I didn't know at the time was because of earlier trauma.
Then came 2 decades of trying to hold everything together through big life changes, marriage, relocating away from my family, and quietly feeling like I was falling apart.
When perimenopause hit, it triggered something much bigger: childhood trauma unleashed, and eventually the discovery that I'm AuDHD. Once I discovered that my brain is wired differently, so much of my life finally made sense. I tried almost everything to heal- therapies, energy work, endless research- before finding emotional freedom techniques (EFT), neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and the Three Principles, which completely changed how I understood myself.
I created Calm Healing because I don't want other women to spend as many years as I did wondering “what is wrong with me?”
At this stage in my life, I want to support neurodivergent women in midlife, especially those navigating perimenopause and burnout, who feel like everyone else is coping better than they are
What changes when neurodivergence, perimenopause, and unresolved trauma begin to overlap in midlife?
For me, it felt like everything that was barely manageable became really loud and overwhelming all at once.
I have since learned that for many women, low self-worth or suppressed trauma has been sitting in the background for years, never quite loud enough to notice. Perimenopause changes that. It rips the curtain away. Suddenly you're not managing one quiet feeling anymore; you're hit with a multitude of thoughts and emotions at the same time, often without any awareness or understanding of where it is actually coming from.
For neurodivergent women, this can feel even more disorienting, because the coping strategies that worked for years suddenly stop working, and it's so scary because you can feel like you are the only one going through this. More women are talking about this online, but support options are still quite lacking.
For me, it felt like Pandora's box had been unlocked and was leaking into every part of my life. That's what makes this overlap so overwhelming. It isn't one problem to solve. It's everything arriving together, and you're left trying to work out which thread to pull first. Especially as I didn't have much awareness of AuDHD at the time.
How has understanding your own AuDHD changed the way you approach nervous system regulation and emotional wellbeing?
Understanding my own AuDHD brain has been a long and slow process. I felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. Once I began to understand that my brain is wired differently, I stopped trying to force myself into neurotypical generic routines and started learning how to build tiny habits that actually work for me.
That might look like learning how to imagine standing on the riverbank of my thoughts and letting them float by instead of drowning in them. Or using EFT tapping, something I've been teaching for ten years, to connect with my body and find some calm when I feel overwhelmed.
It also means accepting that I'm not a morning person, and building my days around that rather than keep fighting it.
Nervous system regulation, for me, isn't one big fix. It's a collection of small, brain-friendly tools I can reach for depending on how I feel and how much capacity I have, using them with compassion rather than pressure.
Where does conventional wellbeing advice often fall short for neurodivergent women?
For many years I tried wellbeing advice that simply wasn't built for how my brain works, and when it didn't stick, I assumed the problem was me.
So much conventional wellbeing advice assumes every brain works the same way. Things like: Wake up at five am, meditate for twenty minutes, follow this exact morning routine, and you'll feel better.
For a neurodivergent woman, that advice can often feel overwhelming. When it doesn't work, she doesn't understand that the advice wasn't built for her brain; she's left believing that she's the one who failed, again.
I spent years collecting well-meaning advice that never really worked, and each time, it chipped away a little more at my self-worth.
What's missing from most conventional advice is flexibility, and permission. Neurodivergent women don't need one more rigid system to fail at.
We need tools we can adapt and personalize, habits small enough to make real progress, and reassurance that if something doesn't work for our brain, that's information, not failure.
Why can the constant pressure to improve or "fix" ourselves sometimes deepen feelings of not being enough?
When we're constantly trying to fix ourselves, we're sending ourselves a quiet, repeated message that who we are right now isn't acceptable.
Over time, that message becomes the loudest voice in the room. I spent years believing I had to change before I could accept myself, when really, it works the other way around. We cannot change what we haven't first accepted.
Trying to “fix yourself” before accepting yourself is like building on quicksand. The more you struggle, the more you sink. It usually leaves you feeling worse, more evidence that something is wrong with you, rather than proof you're simply human.
The constant pressure to improve keeps the “not enough” feeling alive, because it never gives you permission to simply remember you were always whole; you have always been “enough”. Just like a piece of rock, once you remove all the dirty, dusty layers and it's cleaned, it reveals a beautiful diamond; that's your core.
What does working with a neurodivergent brain, rather than against it, look like in everyday life?
In practice, it looks like small, ordinary adjustments rather than big dramatic changes. It's walking my dog when I'm ready, because I know I'm not a morning person, so a rigid routine of time is unachievable.
I also know that gentle movement and being in nature help me earlier in the day when possible. It's listening to audiobooks on the days my brain fog makes reading impossible, instead of feeling guilty for not finishing a book.
It's using a simple digital calendar as an external reminder system, because relying on memory alone creates too much stress and pressure in my brain.
Until perimenopause hit, I was largely able to avoid the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder ADHD tax by making notes in my calendar as soon as I signed up for something.
None of these are complicated. They're tiny, repeatable habits that work with how I actually function, not requiring something of me that is impossible to give.
Working with your brain means noticing what genuinely helps you, even if it looks nothing like what helps everyone else, and trusting that is enough.
When someone feels overwhelmed or depleted, what is one small habit that can genuinely help without adding more pressure?
What has helped me and my clients the most is movement, but not the kind that feels like another task on the list.
Something as simple as singing or dancing to a happy song for 2 minutes can genuinely shift how overwhelmed I feel, because it helps regulate the nervous system in a way that feels joyful rather than effortful.
I know that sounds almost too simple, and when you're deep in overwhelm, it can feel like the most unhelpful advice in the world. It isn't about fixing everything all at once; I tried that and failed many times. It's about giving your nervous system a moment of ease.
If I am feeling sensitive to noise (which happens), then the movement I choose is based in energy medicine. I call it a Zebra Shake, based on how zebras behave in the wild. I have a 2-minute video demonstrating it on my YouTube channel @CalmHealingQuotes.
It doesn't ask you to overhaul your day or find extra energy you don't have. It just helps you find release in one small moment, and practicing regularly is often what an overwhelmed nervous system needs most.
What does "I am enough" mean to you now, after years of questioning whether something was wrong with you?
It means something completely different to me now than it once did. For years, I searched for proof that I was enough, through achievement, through fixing myself, through trying to become someone different from who I actually was.
Now I understand that despite all the life experiences I endured, I was never broken. I was just living with a misunderstanding.
The “not enough” feeling was a story I had been carrying, not a fact about who I am, and stories can change the moment you see them clearly.
“I am enough” now means I no longer need to earn my worth before I'm allowed to feel it. It's already there, underneath everything I once believed was wrong with me.
Some days I still have to remind myself, and that's okay. As Jim Kwik says, “Practice makes progress, not perfection.” I am no longer sceptical about loving myself because I have been practicing it in small ways that grow over time and that impact everything.
What would you most like a woman struggling with perimenopause, neurodivergence, or overwhelm to understand about herself?
I want her to understand that even when she feels broken, she is still whole. The layers just need wiping away, and what she's experiencing has an explanation, even if nobody has offered her one yet.
The exhaustion, the overwhelm, the feeling of suddenly not coping the way she used to – none of that means something is wrong with her as a person.
It usually means her nervous system is meeting a hormonal and neurological reality that deserves real understanding and self-compassion, not more self-criticism.
I want her to know she doesn't have to overhaul her whole life to start feeling better. One small step is enough to begin.
I want her to know that whatever story she's been telling herself about not being “enough”, it is just that, a story, and it can change the moment she's ready to consider the truth. She was whole long before the world tried to convince her otherwise, and she still is.
You can read more of my background and access resources and personalized support here.
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