The Only Thing We Can Control About RSD

Last weekend, I went to a barbecue.

The sun was shining. Dappled shadows fell across a rustic table on a hill. Kind, supportive friends gathered around a wood fire, and horses grazed in the distance. I sent photos to a friend. It was, by any measure, idyllic.

And yet.

Being neurodivergent almost always brings hidden challenges to social situations. After an hour or so — the layered conversations, music bleeding into the sound of water, the vast unstructured afternoon stretching ahead with no clear end point or expectation — my nervous system had quietly started counting. Not the moments of happiness. Not the laughter, or the warmth, or the beauty of it. Something else entirely.

Because here’s what I keep coming back to, and what I want to talk about today: your nervous system doesn’t care if you had a good time. It doesn’t tally up the moments of joy or the bursts of connection. It counts threats. And on that beautiful afternoon on a hill, what my nervous system registered — underneath all of it — was overwhelm. Sensory load. Unstructured time. Nowhere to put my restless, always-spinning brain. A kind of low-level danger it couldn’t name but absolutely felt.

I had a wonderful day. I also paid for it.

When the Cost Shows Up Later

That night, inflammation flared — cortisol will do that — and I was awake for hours with joint pain. The next day I was exhausted, the kind of exhausted that goes bone-deep. And here is where this stops being a story about a barbecue and starts being a story about RSD.

Because what happened next didn’t involve another person. No criticism, no awkward exchange, no imagined slight. Just me, the morning after, and my nervous system deciding it was time for a reckoning.

Me: I need to do nothing today. I genuinely can’t find myself.

My nervous system: You can’t do nothing. That makes you a failure. You shouldn’t be helping people if you can’t work more than this.

Does any of that sound familiar? That internal voice that arrives precisely when you’re at your most depleted — not to offer comfort, but to prosecute?

This is RSD. And there’s no one else in the room.

You Don’t Need Anyone Else to Trigger It

This is something I don’t hear spoken about nearly enough. We talk about RSD in the context of relationships — what someone said, how someone looked at us, the text that didn’t come, the feedback that landed like a punch. And all of that is real and valid and worth talking about.

But we’ve also spent a lifetime absorbing critics. Internalising them. Storing their voices, their standards, their disappointments in our memory, where they sit quietly until the exact moment we’re too tired to fight back. And then they emerge — not as memories, but as our own internal guard dog, absolutely convinced it’s keeping us safe by pushing us back into motion before the danger of stillness can take hold.

The threat my nervous system identified that morning wasn’t laziness. It was rest. And rest, to a system trained on hypervigilance, can feel indistinguishable from failure.

What does your inner critic reach for when you’re running on empty? Is it productivity? Worthiness? The sense that you’re falling behind some invisible standard you never quite agreed to?

What Happened When I Did It Differently

Here’s how it actually played out. And I want to be clear — this hasn’t come from nowhere. This is two years of working with the RSD Free tools, building something that I genuinely sometimes look at with quiet amazement.

I noticed the voices. That’s the first step, and it sounds small until you’ve spent years not noticing them at all — just reacting, spending the whole day chasing relief from a shame spiral you didn’t even know you’d entered. Noticing creates distance. A tiny but crucial gap between the trigger and the response.

And then I spoke to myself differently. Not with relentless positivity or false reassurance — that doesn’t work on a nervous system, and I think we both know it — but with something more like accurate kindness. I work hard, in my own way. It doesn’t look like a 9-5 and it’s not supposed to. I can afford this day. And: recognising what my nervous system needs to recover isn’t weakness. It’s actually a fairly advanced skill, and it’s building something for the future.

So I walked the dog. I watched a terrible (!!) Chris Pratt film and abandoned it halfway through without an ounce of guilt. I rearranged my bedroom. I let the day be what it needed to be, and somewhere in that, something shifted.

What shifted wasn’t just my mood. It was the goalposts. I changed what success looked like for that day, and with it, the voices naturally became quieter. More neutral. Eventually, almost supportive. Bottom line: I regulated myself.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, changed externally. No one did anything to change the ‘situation’, though I did ask for a few hugs.

What Clients Notice (And Why It Matters)

This is the part I find most moving, honestly. When people start working on their internal relationship with themselves — not their relationship with other people, not the external triggers, but this one, the one that happens in the quiet — the changes are often noticed first by the people around them.

Not “I’ve noticed a change.” More like: you seem so much happier lately. Or: I don’t know what you’re doing but something is different about you. They say it as if they’ve stumbled on something. And the person hearing it often genuinely can’t feel the gap, because the shift has been so gradual and so complete that it feels like they’ve always been this way. Which, if you’ve ever been flattened by an RSD spiral and felt like you’d always been that way too, is a kind of quiet miracle.

This is why the internal relationship matters so much. It isn’t just about suffering less in the moment. It rewrites the whole narrative — and other people can see it before we can.

A Question Worth Sitting With

Most of us have spent enormous energy managing our relationships with other people — trying to read them, placate them, preempt them, recover from them. But how much time have we spent on the relationship with ourselves? The one that’s there when we wake up at 3am. The one that commentates on every decision. The one that’s still running the old programming even when we’ve grown far beyond it.

It’s also — and this is the thing I want to leave you with — the only relationship you actually have any control over.

You can’t rewire another person’s nervous system. You can’t control how someone responds to you, or whether they show up, or what they think. But this one? This one, you can work with. And the ripple effects of doing so reach every single relationship in your life.

If you’re ready to start working on this relationship...

The RSD Free course was built exactly for this. Not to help you manage RSD, but to help you genuinely change your relationship with it — and with yourself. It’s self-paced, it works around a neurodivergent brain, and the community around it is unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere.

Find out more HERE

Or if you just want to start a conversation, hit reply. I read everything.

What does your inner critic reach for when you’re exhausted? I’d genuinely love to know — leave a comment below.