The teacher says James is delightful.
Mum has a different story. She picks him up at 3:30 and within twenty minutes the kitchen is a war zone. The homework refuses to happen. There is screaming about something that seems entirely minor. By dinner, everyone is depleted and nobody can explain exactly how it got there.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about ADHD – what it actually is, what it looks like in high performers, and what organisations are missing when they treat neurodiversity as someone else’s HR problem. I sat down recently with Dr Lindy, a psychologist, ADHD specialist and board director of ADHD Foundation Australia, and the conversation went somewhere I didn’t fully expect. She had a phrase for what James is doing at school all day. She called it intra-psychic containment. The brain girdle.
The ADHD brain spends the entire school day compressing itself. Behave. Fit in. Don’t fidget. Don’t call out. Track the teacher. Do the thing the neurotypical world requires of you, at the pace it requires of you, in the seat it assigns you. Every hour of that compression burns through brain sugars and energy. By 3:30, the girdle comes off. Everything that was held in floods out. The parent sees the explosion and looks for a cause in the last hour. Nobody is looking at the six hours before it.
It doesn’t stop at school.
The Same Mechanism Is Running in Your Office
Here is what a standard corporate workday looks like through an ADHD brain.
The ADHD brain is dopamine-deficient. To compensate, it generates its own supply through stress. It creates high-pressure scenarios, looming deadlines, manufactured urgency – not consciously, but compulsively – because stress triggers adrenaline, and adrenaline functions neurologically like amphetamines. It forces a dopamine uptake. The ADHD brain is not procrastinating. It is self-medicating. The deadline is not the problem. It is the solution.
That adrenaline sprint burns through blood sugars at pace. The brain depletes. Focus drops. What we call brain fog sets in. And this is the moment a leader looks across at a high performer and notices the inconsistency: strong output one week, unreliable the next, sharp under pressure, scattered in routine. The standard interpretation is motivation. The accurate interpretation is physiology.
Dr Lindy put it plainly. The ADHD brain is like an old phone where the battery drains to ten percent by mid-morning because there are three movies playing in the background. All the time.
I knew exactly what she meant. Before I understood this about myself, I just thought I was someone who operated best under pressure. Worked in sprints. Needed urgency to get moving. It turns out that description is quite precise, and it has a neurological basis I had never bothered to examine
The Cost That Doesn’t Show Up in the Output
The brain girdle is not just a children’s school problem. It runs through every open-plan office, every back-to-back meeting schedule, every expectation that a professional will sit at a desk and produce at a consistent rate across eight hours.
The ADHD person in a corporate environment spends enormous energy just being there in the way the environment expects. Sitting still when their thinking happens through movement. Attending sequentially when their brain processes laterally. Staying on one task when hyperfocus is available and routine is not. Every hour of that compression costs something. The bill does not appear in their work output. It appears later – at home, after a high-demand stretch, in the places where the girdle finally comes off.
This is why performance variation in neurodivergent people so often confuses the leaders around them. The output looks inconsistent. But from the inside, the expenditure has been anything but inconsistent. It has been relentless.
What the Body Double Actually Is
I want to be direct about something I have learned mostly through getting it wrong first.
In an earlier business, I was surrounded by people who matched my energy – creative, dynamic, lateral-thinking, exciting to be around. The business had no cash flow and the operations were a disaster. I didn’t know then what I know now: I had built a team of people who thought the way I did, and nobody was holding the structure together.
Dr Lindy’s framework for this is the body double relationship. Every ADHD person who leads a business or a team needs a structured complement: someone who is stable, methodical, consistent, and grounded in process. Not a support role. Not a subordinate. A genuine counterpart. When this relationship is designed consciously and equitably – when both people understand what they’re each contributing and what they’re each getting – it is one of the most effective team configurations in business.
When it forms by accident, the body double gets consumed. They absorb the disorganisation, the missed admin, the shifting priorities, the last-minute pivots. They compensate without naming it. And eventually they leave, or they stay and quietly resent it.
Angela Poon, our COO at Performance Intelligence, is the reason our business works. The relationship we’ve built is intentional and reciprocal. She gets as much from it as I do – a front-row seat to creative energy and vision she wouldn’t generate alone, and the genuine satisfaction of being the person who makes ambitious things actually happen. That’s not a consolation prize. For the right person, it’s exactly what they want. Getting there took self-awareness I didn’t have at the start, and an honest conversation about what we were each bringing and what we were each getting.
The Invisible Weight of Fitting In
Dr Lindy described the women who come to her at 55, post-menopausal, and receive an ADHD diagnosis for the first time. The hormonal buffer, particularly progesterone which regulates anxiety and sleep, has gone. Symptoms that were masked for decades are suddenly visible. And these women sit across from her and say: now I understand why my marriages fell apart. Now I understand why some of my children won’t speak to me.
The grief is real. So is the relief. Both at once.
These women spent decades performing the brain girdle at a level most people around them never saw. They were described as too much, too intense, too scattered. They compensated with extraordinary discipline and energy. They built careers and families and kept it all moving. The cost was invisible to everyone except them.
In your leadership team right now, there are people carrying something similar. Some know what it is. Many don’t. They are performing at a high level because they have learned to compensate. They are also, somewhere in the system, paying a cost that does not appear in the output you review.
What a Leader Can Actually Do
You cannot redesign the school system. You probably cannot rebuild your office environment from scratch. But there are things that cost almost nothing.
Build recovery into the working rhythm as a performance mechanism, not a perk. Five minutes between meetings. A walk at lunch. Unscheduled time that is treated as real time, not empty time. For high-intensity brains, that gap is where capacity is restored. Removing it does not increase output. It accelerates depletion.
Design your team complements deliberately. If you have someone who generates ideas faster than they can execute them, ask honestly: who is the structured counterpart? Have you given them both the language to work with that relationship rather than around it?
And update the interpretive frame you reach for when someone’s performance doesn’t add up. Before you reach for the motivation conversation, ask what it cost them to produce what they produced.
What is the brain girdle they wore to get here?
High performance is rarely about working harder. It’s about understanding how capacity works – and building the environments, rhythms, and team configurations that protect it. If that’s a conversation your organisation is ready to have, explore what Performance Intelligence does with senior leadership teams at performanceintelligence.com/corporate-programs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew May is a performance scientist, author, and keynote speaker. As founder of Performance Intelligence, he works with senior leaders and organisations across Australia to build the systems, culture, and mindset that make high performance sustainable. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
REFERENCES
Volkow, N.D., Wang, G.J., Kollins, S.H., et al. (2009). Evaluating dopamine reward pathway in ADHD: clinical implications. JAMA, 302(10), 1084-1091. Biederman, J., & Faraone, S.V. (2005). Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The Lancet, 366(9481), 237-248.
Cortese, S., Faraone, S.V., Konofal, E., & Lecendreux, M. (2006). Sleep in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: meta-analysis of subjective and objective studies. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 45(7), 787-800. Cortese, S., Brown, T.E., Corkum, P., et al. (2013). Assessment and management of sleep problems in youths with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 52(8), 784-796.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge University Press. Kuo, F.E., & Taylor, A.F. (2004). A potential natural treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: evidence from a national study. American Journal of Public Health, 94(9), 1580-1586.
Willcutt, E.G. (2012). The prevalence of DSM-IV attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analytic review. Neurotherapeutics, 9(3), 490-499.
All other content based on direct transcript observations and Andrew May’s coaching experience.
