Energy vampires for neurodivergent women grow more persistent after age 45. Read on for how to spot and stop them so you can experience a simpler, more fulfilling life.
The story.
The hot humidity felt like a giant, invisible basketball pressing down on my head. As I walked, I felt like I was trudging through wet clay. It was just the summer, right? It was the heat and bright sun that made me so tired.
I slogged through the next few months, and suddenly woke up to find it was December. Ugh. Even early in the morning, the time of day I used to be the most motivated to get something done, all I could think about was going back to sleep. It had to be the shorter days. The shorter days, and the angle of the sun.
After being awake for six hours, I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes. It was winter, right? The winter made me so sleepy.
And then spring came, and the rains. It was all the cloudy days, right?
Energy-suckers, be gone!
If you’re a woman over the age of forty-five, you can probably relate to the above scenario, despite your brain type. If your brain is neurodivergent, however, chances are high that for your entire adulthood, you’ve been running on fumes much of the time. And now, with lowering levels of estrogen impacting… everything in your body, those fumes have shrunk into tiny puffs of smoke.
All of which have vanished by noon.
Why? Our brains, lacking efficient filters, try to process everything all at once – sights, sounds, textures, odors, tastes (if we’re eating), conversations, the task in front of us, the task we need to do next (the next ten tasks if we are ADHD-ish).
It’s enough to make Rambo curl up into a ball and cry.
We don’t have control over most of it. But the good news is, we have control over some of it. And if we’re going to have the energy for the things that fulfill us, we need to leverage that control as much as possible.
Let’s look at common energy drains that are within the realm of our control.
Typical energy vampires for neurodivergent women within our control.
There are four main areas that cause us energy drain that are somewhat under our control. I want to take a peek at each one.
Energy drain #1: Obligations.
First come obligations… or what we perceive to be obligations.
What society has told us are obligations.
For example, studies supposedly show that married couples who have sex with each other at least three times a week are more likely to stay together. So this has become an obligation for all married women.
A false obligation.
Listen. Some obligations are real. To try to wiggle out of them will cause hurt to yourself or someone else.
Say, for example, your obligation to take care of your children. Or to show up for a job when you don’t have any savings to live on.
You need to decide for yourself which obligations in your life are real, and which ones are based on somebody else’s bias and perspective about an ideal life. Some of the latter you may be able to drop from your life altogether. With others, you may be able to lessen the energy you put out.
Energy drain #2: Commitments.
Having learned to be people-pleasers in order to be socially accepted, we neurodivergent women tend to over-commit ourselves. Those of us who tend toward ADHD might do it because of the sheer adventure. I’d hazard a guess that most of the time, we’ve been guilt-tripped into doing this, that, or the other.
I remember years ago, a mother of four children persuaded me into watching them one Saturday while she went out to run errands. I’d agreed because I felt guilty for having weekends free, when there she was, a single mother with all those kids.
Seriously. I felt guilty for having chosen not to marry a jerk and have a bunch of kids with him.
It was also a case of false obligation. The two of us had become friends, and I felt like I was being a bad friend if I’d said no.
Unless to do so would be immoral or hurtful to another person, it’s okay to pull out of commitments you’ve made when you realize that you don’t have either the mental or energy bandwidth to go through with them.
Energy drain #3: Relationships.
If a friendship isn’t really a friendship because the other person is constantly draining your energy, break it off. If the only thing good about your romantic partner is the sex, break it off.
If your husband is abusive, leave. I know that’s easier said than done, but there are plenty of resources out there to help victims of domestic abuse. Confide in someone you trust, and ask them to help you go through the first steps.
If you have a family member demanding too much from you, set boundaries. If they don’t respect the boundaries, pull away.
As far as your real friends and family members who love you, be open with them about how often and how much you can engage without getting exhausted. They may not fully understand, but they will respect and support your needs.
Energy drain #4: Household tasks.
By far, this is the easiest energy drain to force your will onto.
Well. Unless you have AuDHD. Then you get to experience that lovely tug-of-war where the autistic side of your brain demands both cleanliness and tidiness, and the ADHD side runs away screaming from the very thought of picking up a dust rag.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of steps you can take to prevent running a household from running you into the ground. They include reducing the frequency of cleaning, handling only the top priority tasks on a daily basis, and maintaining an organization system that works for you.
I talk about this in much greater detail in my post entitled, “The Complete Guide to Frugal Housecleaning for Neurodivergent Women.”
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Other than tackling the usual energy vampire culprits, there are two other issues to look at in order to have more fuel in your tank.
Decision fatigue.
Any Westerner over the age of fifteen has probably encountered decision paralysis. That’s when your brain gets overwhelmed with a plethora of options, and freezes.
Decision fatigue is similar, and extremely common among 45+ neurodivergent women. But instead of freezing up because they can’t figure out which kind of peanut butter to buy, our brains are too muddled by life in general to figure out what to do when they are asked to make a decision.
Even if there are only two options.
The cognitive fatigue that comes along with lowering levels of estrogen and progesterone afflict every woman in midlife and older. But before menopause ever thought of happening to us autistic women and women with ADHD, we were struggling to decide whether to go to this event or not, whether what we are thinking of telling our friend will offend her or not, whether we should mess up our budget to exchange these scratchy-feeling tops for more comfortable ones, etc., etc., etc.
And so decision fatigue knocks on our door more frequently than you see someone promoting essential oils on social media. How do you conquer it?
Get it out of your head and onto paper. Ask yourself:
- Why am I stuck?
- What’s getting in my way?
- What matters most?
- What tiny step can I take right now?
I’ve created a printable that takes you through these steps in a detailed way. You can check it out in my Etsy store, here.
Now, to unleash the final and fatal blow to the Energy Vampire…
Strategic quitting.
If you’re like me, since hitting perimenopause you’ve had many days when you wish you could lie in bed all day and be waited on by silent servants who anticipated your every need and whim. While strategic quitting won’t get you quite that far, it will move you in the right direction.
The direction of having less to do, and therefore less to think about.
The principle is simple, and closely tied to the four areas of energy drain discussed at the beginning of this article. That principle is: if you don’t want to do something, and it’s not necessary, don’t do it.
Fair warning: this may initially cause you more work in having to train your husband and children to pick up after themselves, to fix their own meals, and so on. But believe me, in the end it’s worth it.
You married for better or for worse to live in partnership, not to be someone’s slave. And barring disability, most children over the age of nine are capable of doing much more than modern parents give them credit for.
Of course, if you live alone, quitting is a lot easier. If you decide you’re only going to dust three times a year and eat canned soup and crackers for dinner three nights a week, you’re not going to get any arguments.
You might consider strategic quitting as a way of identifying, and then dropping, all of your false obligations and poorly-chosen commitments (no guilt allowed with that last one!).
At work, you can determine not to do any work or perform any duties beyond what your employer is paying you to do. Stop doing favors for lazy co-workers.
Yes, helping and serving others is a good and grand ambition. But if you’re going to thrive, if you want to simplify your life, you need to take charge of when and how much you do that helping and serving.
Bye-bye, energy vampires!
You’re not weak, lazy, or irresponsible for wanting to back away from the many demands life throws at you. You’re strong, resilient, and wise.
Because it takes strength to say “no,” resilience to deal with the backlash of that “no,” and wisdom to know when it’s truly good and right – for both you and those around you – to say “yes.”`
