The Dictionary of Neurodivergent Experience

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Understanding the Unique World of Neurodiversity: A Glossary

Language matters, especially when it's the language you finally get to use for yourself. Neurodiversity is the idea that variations in brain function are a normal part of human variation, not a deviation from it, and that they deserve to be understood rather than corrected. Many of the terms below come from clinical research, others from the neurodivergent community itself, coined by autistic and ADHD adults describing their own experience because the clinical language never quite fit. Both kinds of language have a place here.

This glossary isn't a diagnostic tool, and using a word from this list to describe yourself isn't the same as a formal assessment. Think of it the way I think of the free NASI™ Quick Scan: a starting point for self-recognition, not a label handed down from outside.

Core Concepts

  • Neurodiversity: The idea that variations in brain function are normal and should be recognised rather than pathologised.
  • Neurodivergent: A person whose brain functions differently from what is considered typical, or neurotypical.
  • Neurotypical: A person whose brain functions in a way considered typical or normative for their culture and context.



Neurodivergent Conditions

  • Asperger Syndrome: A historical diagnostic term, now folded into the autism spectrum, previously used to describe autistic individuals without a co-occurring intellectual or language delay.
  • Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): A neurodevelopmental condition marked by patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A developmental condition characterised by differences in social communication, alongside restricted or repetitive patterns of behaviour and interest.
  • Developmental Trauma: Trauma experienced in childhood that can affect brain development and emotional regulation. This term is included here for its relevance to trauma-informed, neurodivergent-aware coaching, not because it is a formal diagnostic category in the way the conditions above are.
  • Dyscalculia: A specific learning difficulty that affects a person's ability to understand and work with numbers.
  • Dysgraphia: A specific learning difficulty that affects a person's handwriting and written expression.
  • Dyslexia: A specific learning difficulty that affects a person's reading fluency and decoding.
  • Dyspraxia (Developmental Coordination Disorder): A developmental condition that affects motor skills, coordination, and planning of movement.
  • Hyperlexia: A profile marked by advanced word-reading ability alongside difficulties with comprehension or social communication.
  • Nonverbal Learning Disability (NVLD): A neurodevelopmental profile that primarily affects visual-spatial and nonverbal reasoning skills.
  • Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD): A condition affecting how the brain registers and responds to sensory information.

Neurodivergent Experiences & Terminology

  • Accessibility Fatigue: Exhaustion from repeatedly advocating for accommodations or navigating inaccessible spaces.
  • Alexithymia: Difficulty identifying, naming, or describing one's own emotions.
  • Analysis Paralysis: Overanalysing a decision to the point of being unable to act on it.
  • Auditory Hypersensitivity: Heightened sensitivity to certain sounds, volumes, or frequencies.
  • Auditory Processing Disorder: Difficulty processing auditory information, such as understanding speech in noisy environments or following spoken instructions.
  • Autistic Burnout: A distinct state of chronic physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion in autistic individuals, marked by skill loss and reduced tolerance for stimulation (Raymaker et al., 2020).
  • Avoidance Coping: Deliberately avoiding tasks, situations, or feelings to escape stress or overwhelm.
  • Camouflaging / Masking: Consciously or unconsciously suppressing or hiding neurodivergent traits to appear more neurotypical, often at significant emotional cost (Hull et al., 2017).
  • Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD): Difficulty understanding speech despite normal hearing thresholds.
  • Chronic Fatigue: Persistent tiredness that doesn't resolve with rest.
  • Cognitive Dissonance: The mental discomfort of holding two conflicting beliefs or values at once.
  • Cognitive Load: The mental effort required to hold and process information at a given moment.
  • Cognitive Rigidity: Difficulty adapting to changes in routine, plans, or expectations.
  • Decision Paralysis: Inability to choose due to an overwhelming number of options or fear of choosing wrong.
  • Double Empathy Problem: The idea that communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people are mutual and relational, not a one-sided deficit located in the autistic person (Milton, 2012).
  • Dysautonomia: Dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary functions like heart rate and digestion; it co-occurs with neurodivergence more often than chance would predict.
  • Echolalia: Repetition of words or phrases, often for self-soothing, processing, or communication.
  • Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS): A connective tissue disorder that shows elevated co-occurrence with autism and ADHD in emerging research.
  • Emotional Dysregulation: Difficulty managing the intensity or expression of emotional responses.
  • Emotional Flooding: A state of being overwhelmed by emotion to the point that clear thinking becomes difficult.
  • Executive Dysfunction: Difficulty with the cognitive skills that manage planning, organising, prioritising, initiating tasks, and time management.
  • Faux Pas: A social misstep caused by unknowingly breaking an unspoken social rule, such as using the wrong greeting in a formal or unfamiliar cultural setting.
  • Hyperacusis: A heightened, sometimes painful sensitivity to everyday sound levels.
  • Hyperfocus: Intense, sustained absorption in a task, interest, or activity, often to the exclusion of everything else.
  • Hypermobility: Unusually flexible joints, sometimes co-occurring with neurodivergence and EDS.
  • Hyposensitivity: Reduced sensitivity to sensory input, which can lead to under-registering things like pain, temperature, or hunger.
  • Identity-First Language: Language that foregrounds identity, such as "autistic person" rather than "person with autism," reflecting how many in the community describe themselves.
  • Imposter Syndrome: A persistent feeling of inadequacy or fraudulence despite evidence of competence or achievement.
  • Interoception: The sense of the body's internal state, including awareness of hunger, thirst, pain, and heart rate. Many neurodivergent people experience interoception atypically, which can make it harder to notice these signals until they're urgent.
  • Intersectionality: The overlapping, interconnected nature of social categories such as neurodivergence, gender, race, and class, and how they shape a person's experience together rather than separately.
  • Literal Thinking: A tendency to interpret language, idioms, and instructions literally rather than inferring implied or figurative meaning.
  • Meltdown: An intense involuntary response to overwhelm, distinct from a tantrum in that it is not goal-directed or within conscious control.
  • Miscommunication: Breakdown in the accurate sending or receiving of a message, verbal or nonverbal.
  • Misinterpretation of Social Cues: Difficulty accurately reading nonverbal communication such as tone, facial expression, or body language.
  • Misophonia: A strong, often involuntary emotional or physiological reaction to specific trigger sounds.
  • Monotropism: A cognitive style, closely associated with autism, involving deep, singular focus on one interest or task, sometimes at the expense of attention to other things.
  • Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA): A profile within the autism spectrum characterised by an anxiety-driven, extreme need to avoid or resist everyday demands and expectations.
  • Perseveration: Getting "stuck" on a particular thought, topic, or action beyond what the situation calls for, sometimes mistaken for stubbornness.
  • Proprioception: The sense of one's own body position, movement, and spatial orientation.
  • Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD): Intense emotional pain in response to perceived rejection, criticism, or failure, frequently reported by people with ADHD.
  • Rumination: Persistent, repetitive dwelling on a specific worry or past event.
  • Scripting: Rehearsing or preparing conversations and social interactions in advance to reduce uncertainty.
  • Selective Mutism: An anxiety-related inability to speak in specific social situations, despite being able to speak comfortably in others.
  • Sensory Diet: A personalised set of sensory activities designed to help a person regulate their sensory needs throughout the day.
  • Sensory Gating: The brain's capacity to filter out irrelevant sensory information; difficulty with this filtering can contribute to overload.
  • Sensory Overload: A state of overwhelm caused by excessive or inescapable sensory input (Robertson & Baron-Cohen, 2017).
  • Sensory Seeking: A need for specific, often intense sensory input in order to regulate emotion or focus attention.
  • Shutdown: A withdrawal or loss of responsiveness to external stimuli, arising from overwhelming stress or sensory input.
  • Social Burnout: Exhaustion caused by prolonged social interaction or sustained masking.
  • Special Interests: Areas of deep, sustained, often joyful focus, common in autistic experience and closely related to monotropism.
  • Spiky Profile: A pattern of uneven ability, where a person's skills are significantly stronger in some areas and weaker in others, rather than evenly distributed.
  • Stimming: Repetitive movements or behaviours (rocking, hand-flapping, fidgeting) used to self-soothe, regulate, or focus.
  • Tactile Defensiveness: A strong aversion to certain textures or types of physical contact.
  • Task Paralysis: An inability to start or continue a task due to overwhelm, distinct from procrastination in that motivation alone doesn't resolve it.
  • Time Blindness: Difficulty accurately perceiving or estimating the passage of time.

A Note on How I Use This List

None of these words are a diagnosis, and you don't need every entry on this page to describe yourself before your experience is valid. What I've seen, again and again, is that having the right word for something is often the first moment a person stops feeling broken and starts feeling understood. That recognition is Stage 0 of the CRS™, the assessment stage, before any deeper work begins. It's also exactly why NASI™ exists: not to hand you a label from the outside, but to give you language that finally matches what you've been living with from the inside.

If any of this is landing because it sounds like you, the free NASI™ Quick Scan is a gentle, no-pressure place to start. If you're ready for a conversation, a free introductory call is the next step.

Take the free NASI™ Quick Scan · Book your free introductory call

Sources & Further Reading
American Psychiatric Association (2022) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edn, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.
Hull, L., Petrides, K.V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.C. and Mandy, W. (2017) '"Putting on My Best Normal": Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions', Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), pp.2519-2534. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3166-5
Milton, D.E.M. (2012) 'On the ontological status of autism: the "double empathy problem"', Disability & Society, 27(6), pp.883-887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Porges, S.W. (2011) The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Raymaker, D.M., Teo, A.R., Steckler, N.A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S.K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A. and Nicolaidis, C. (2020) '"Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew": Defining autistic burnout', Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), pp.132-143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
Robertson, C.E. and Baron-Cohen, S. (2017) 'Sensory perception in autism', Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18, pp.671-684. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.112
Singer, J. (1998) Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People on the Autism Spectrum. Honours thesis, University of Technology Sydney. Note: Singer's thesis is widely credited with popularising the term "neurodiversity," though a 2024 letter from autistic scholars in the journal Autism has raised the origins as more collectively developed within the autistic online community of the 1990s than a single-author coinage.

This glossary reflects both clinical terminology and language used within the neurodivergent community. It is provided for general educational purposes and is not a diagnostic tool. SIM™ Consciousness Coaching is a non-clinical coaching practice and is not a substitute for a formal clinical assessment, psychotherapy, or medical care.

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