The Shift Isn’t Personal. It’s Political.

Every time a neurodivergent person burns out, the story gets told the same way.

They took on too much.
They didn’t manage their time.
They lacked boundaries.
They didn’t ask for help soon enough.

What rarely gets named is that many of us were never given the option to work in ways that were safe for our nervous systems in the first place.

Neurodivergent people are constantly adapting to systems that refuse to adapt to us. We learn to mask, to overperform, to meet expectations that were not designed with our brains in mind. We are praised for being “high functioning” right up until our health collapses.

And then the responsibility is placed back on us.

This is not accidental. Systems that rely on productivity, compliance, and self discipline do not reward people who question the structure itself. They reward people who keep going quietly, even when it costs them everything.

The Big F*cking Shift is not about self improvement. It is a refusal.

It is the refusal to keep internalising systemic failure as personal inadequacy.
It is the refusal to keep overriding your body in order to appear functional.
It is the refusal to accept burnout as the price of participation.

For neurodivergent entrepreneurs, this matters deeply. Business is often framed as freedom, but many people simply recreate the same harmful structures they escaped from. Different boss, same nervous system cost.

The shift is not about doing less for the sake of it. It is about doing it differently. It is about designing work that can change when capacity changes. It is about building systems that bend instead of break people. It is about recognising that regulation is not a luxury, it is foundational.

This is not just personal work. It is political.

When neurodivergent people stop contorting themselves to fit broken systems, those systems lose power. When we name the cost of constant adaptation, the narrative starts to crack. When we prioritise sustainability over output, something real changes.

The Big F*cking Shift is not loud. It does not always look productive. But it is radical in the most important way.

It puts human nervous systems back at the center of how we work and live.

And that should never have been controversial in the first place.

Giarne