Wired Divergent: Nervous System Regulation & Self Trust for Neurodivergent Brains
Wired Divergent is a solo show about nervous system regulation for neurodivergent brains. Hosted by Jen deHaan, an autistic and ADHD Canadian who has spent close to 30 years working across creative technology, performance, fitness instruction, and podcast production. Most nervous system content assumes a neurotypical baseline. This show doesn't. Wired Divergent covers functional freeze, autistic burnout, sensory overload, ADHD paralysis, masking, interoception, and the somatic tools that actually work when your brain is wired differently. Episodes mix long form education with short, repeatable micro-rest and body double sessions you can use in real time for asyncronous support. The show is...
[Regulation Practice] Temperature awareness, an accessible interoception practice
This is a five minute guided temperature awareness practice. Standard body scans ask you to find sensations that some neurodivergent people genuinely cannot locate, and that gap can make the whole exercise feel useless. Temperature gives you something concrete to work with. We move through the hands, feet, forehead, chest, and stomach, and at each region we check two things: whether the temperature is warm, cool, or neutral, and whether it feels pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Neutral counts as a real answer, and noticing nothing counts too. The external regions like your hands and the air on your forehead...
[Regulation Practice] Regulate Before You Engage: 5-Minute Guided Resourcing
Your body is already bracing for a conversation that hasn't started yet. This 5-minute guided resourcing practice helps you regulate your nervous system before a meeting, phone call, or any interaction your body is anticipating. Resourcing is a skill from the Community Resilience Model (CRM) that uses a positive memory, person, place, or activity to shift your nervous system toward steadiness before you need it. In this guided practice, you'll ground yourself by noticing physical contact with surfaces around you, bring a resource to mind, track what happens in your body, and anchor that sensation so it's available to...
Functional Freeze or ADHD Paralysis? How to Tell Which One You're Actually In
Functional freeze and ADHD paralysis look almost identical from the outside, but they involve completely different biological mechanisms, and fixing one the wrong way can make the other worse. This episode breaks down how to tell which kind of stuck you're actually in and what to try for each.
If you've ever googled "why can't I move" while lying in that same spot on the couch, you might already know that the standard advice (make a list, start small, go outside) doesn't seem to help. That's because functional freeze is a nervous system shutdown response driven by...
Regulation That Starts Outside Your Body: Temperature, Sound, Pressure
If you've sat through a body scan or regulation practice that didn't seem to work for you or your nervous system, or got asked to find an emotion in your chest and felt only nothing or experienced uncertainty or confusion or something similar to that, there are REASONS! And possible solutions, too. This is the what-to-do follow-up on interoception, and it walks through a body awareness practice that can start from a signal you can actually detect.
Tuesday's episode (linked below) covered interoception, the nervous system's ability to read internal signals like heartbeat and hunger, along with...
Listen to Your Body? What Interoception Looks Like for Autistic and ADHD Brains
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"Listen to your body" shows up everywhere in wellness advice, and for about half of autistic adults it asks for something the nervous system might not be delivering in a usable format. Elevated in the ADHD community too. This is a look at interoception, alexithymia, and why body awareness instructions can leave some of us feeling kinda left out.
I spent close to twenty years trying to feel what teachers, guides, and books kept describing, through meditation, yoga, mindfulness classes, and somatic workshops, and nothing transferred into a...
Allostatic Load and the Neurodivergent Knowing-Doing Gap
You can explain the biology of your neurodivergent nervous system, or at least you know it really well, and still not build a five minute daily practice. This episode goes through why that gap between knowing and doing exists for ADHD and Autistic humans, and why it has a structural cause for our neurodivergent brains.
A lot of us spend years reading about nervous system regulation and end up carrying a kind of shame when the information never turns into action. The reason has biology in it, because comprehension and habit formation run in different parts of...
Wired Divergent: nervous system regulation for neurodivergent brains (trailer)
Wired Divergent is a show about nervous system regulation built specifically for neurodivergent brains. If you've ever been told to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and check in with where you feel emotions in your body, and it made you feel worse instead of better, this show is about why that happens and what you might want to try instead. Jen deHaan is autistic and ADHD, and she's spent years studying and certifying in nervous system regulation, the Community Resilience Model, and neurodivergent somatics. The thing she kept running into was how many of the tools and...
