Getting Started: ADHD Paralysis & Autistic Inertia

You know the thing where you want to do the thing, you need to do the thing, you’ve thought about doing the thing approximately 47 times — and you’re still just… sitting there?

Maybe it was something you wanted to do. Maybe it was something you needed to do. Maybe it was something so small that the fact you couldn’t do it made you want to cry — which is its own special kind of awful.

And you just… couldn’t start.

So you did the very reasonable thing of telling yourself off about it. Which didn’t work. So you told yourself off harder. Which also didn’t work. And now you feel bad about not starting AND bad about the telling-off, and somehow the thing still isn’t done.

Sound familiar?

For a lot of neurodivergent folk, what looks like procrastination often isn’t. It’s not laziness, and it isn’t a lack of discipline, motivation or caring enough. It has names (two of them), and there’s growing research into why it happens. That research also helps explain why the advice you’ve been given your whole life has been so spectacularly unhelpful.

ADHD paralysis and autistic inertia are common in ND folk, and they are not a character flaw.

This workshop is about understanding what’s going on (in your brain, in your nervous system, in the part of you that desperately wants to get started and just… can’t) and what can help.

This is for you if…

• The shame of not being able to start has started to feel heavier than the task itself

• You’ve tried every productivity hack, and most of them either don’t work or work once and then stop

• You know logically that you’re not lazy, but some part of you still wonders

• You freeze on things you want to do as well as things you don’t, and that makes no sense to you

• You find it hard to stop once you start

• You’re trying to work, parent, study or build a business while navigating a nervous system that’s doing its best in conditions it wasn’t designed for

When:

29th October 2026 for 90min

Timezones

QLD 10:30AM

NSW, TAS, VIC and ACT 11:30AM

SA and NT 11AM

WA 8:30AM

NZ 1:30PM

Inside we cover:

What ADHD paralysis and autistic inertia are
How they differ, and why they’re not the same as procrastination (even though they can look similar from the outside).

What’s happening in your brain
What current research suggests is going on, from executive functioning and dopamine differences to how threat and stress responses can get involved. It’s explained in a way that makes sense and doesn’t require a science degree.

Why it shows up
There’s more than one reason. We’ll go through the most common ones: executive function differences, motivation wiring, monotropic processing, nervous system load and more. We’ll also cover why the same wiring can make it just as hard to stop once you’re in.

Why the usual advice often doesn’t fit
“Eat the frog.” “Just break it into smaller steps.” “You just need more discipline.”
We’ll talk about why these approaches so often miss the mark for ND brains, and why that’s not a reflection of your effort.

Strategies that can help
Practical strategies matched to the reason getting started was hard in the first place: body doubling, dopamine loading, working with your motivation wiring rather than against it, and other approaches built around meeting your nervous system where it’s at rather than trying to force it.

Two take-home resources
so you have something to reach for the next time you hit a wall

Walk away with:

• A clearer understanding of what might be happening when you can’t start

• Language for it that isn’t shame-based

• Strategies to try that match your barrier

• Two tools you can pull out the next time you’re stuck

• Access to the recording to watch on Demand right here in the Virtual Hub on Humantix

• And hopefully, a little less of the weight you’ve been carrying about this, because you’ve been hard on yourself about something that was never a personal failing