Neuro News
Updated: Oct 8
Neuro News
Week of 5 October 2026 | Neuroinclusion for workplaces and individuals
Happy Tuesday!
Last week the Australian Institute of Health & Safety put out a media release to announce mental health claims are Australia's fastest growing workplace injury. The release stated, "Australian Psychological Services (APS) Chief Psychologist, Dr Laura Kirby, said psychological harm at work is often the result of how work is designed and managed." and I couldn't agree more.
100 years ago, Henry Ford introduced the 9-5 model many workplaces still operate. Read that again, 100 years! Since then, so much has changed so why doesn't the way we work change too?
There's an opportunity to co-design workplaces for productivity and psychosocial safety. What would your ideal workplace look like?
Cass
Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
0419 423 746
Neuro at Work
Restructure Season: Poorly Managed Change Is a Psychosocial Hazard, Not a Comms Problem
Q4 is when next year gets decided. Budgets are set, structures are redrawn, new systems are scoped and office moves get pencilled in. Most of that change will be announced to staff before it has been worked out. Poor organisational change management is one of the named psychosocial hazards in Queensland's Code of Practice. WorkSafe Queensland defines it as change that is "poorly planned, communicated, supported or managed". Its examples include implementing changes without sufficient consultation, failing to communicate the reasons for change to the people affected, and providing inadequate support during the transition. None of these are unusual. They describe most restructures. For neurodivergent employees, the damage happens in the gap between "something is changing" and "here is what it means for you". Autistic adults score higher on intolerance of uncertainty than non-autistic adults, and a 2020 meta-analysis in Autism found a strong link between intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety in autistic people (r = 0.62). An open-ended announcement does more than unsettle people. For a predictable part of your workforce it acts as a sustained stressor, and it lasts as long as the uncertainty does. The usual control makes this worse. A live all-staff town hall, delivered verbally with questions taken on the spot, is the default way change gets announced. It is also high-load, hard to process in real time and leaves no record. Whatever didn't get absorbed in the room gets filled in by the rumour mill. WorkSafe's controls are practical: consult the people affected, give timely information and explain why, adjust performance targets while people learn new roles, and keep reporting lines clear. To make them work for neurodivergent staff, add three things. Put every announcement in writing as well as verbally. Name the date of the next update, even if the update is "no news yet". And tell people what is not changing, not just what is. The audit question: in your last restructure, how many days passed between the first announcement and each affected person knowing, in writing, what it meant for their role?
Neuro Hacks
Schedule Your Breaks. Don't Wait Until You Feel You Need One.
"I'll take a break when I need one" sounds sensible. It relies on noticing fatigue at the point it starts. If your interoception runs late, or you're in hyperfocus, that signal turns up an hour after it would have been useful. Or it doesn't turn up at all until you're wrecked. A 2023 study from Maastricht University tested this directly. Biwer and colleagues split 87 university students into three groups: breaks whenever they chose, a 6-minute break after every 24 minutes, or a 3-minute break after every 12 minutes. The self-regulated group reported more fatigue and distraction, and less concentration and motivation. All three groups got through the same amount of work, but the scheduled-break groups did it in less time. A caveat: this was a general student sample, not a neurodivergent one. The mechanism is still worth noting. A timer takes the decision about when to stop away from the same brain that is already worn out. The practical version: pick a work block and break length you can actually live with (25/5 and 50/10 are common starting points), set a timer, and treat the alarm as non-negotiable. Spend the break away from the screen. Scrolling isn't rest for an overloaded system. If one block length doesn't suit you after a week, change it. What matters is that the timer decides when you stop, not how tired you feel.
Neuro and Cass
The ADHD Body Clock Runs Late. Your 8am Meeting Doesn't Know That.
It's still ADHD Awareness Month, so here's one of the least-discussed parts of adult ADHD: the body clock. "Not a morning person" usually gets treated as a discipline problem. For many adults with ADHD it is circadian. In a 2010 Dutch study by Van Veen and colleagues, 78% of adults with ADHD had sleep-onset insomnia tied to a delayed rise in evening melatonin. On average, melatonin onset came about 1.5 hours later than in people without ADHD, and later studies have replicated that delay. A 2024 study of 3,691 adults with ADHD found that 35.8% screened positive for delayed sleep phase syndrome. Studies using questionnaires rather than biological measures tend to give lower figures, but the pattern holds across both. In practice, if your internal clock runs 90 minutes behind, an 8am start feels like 6:30am. Research on "social jetlag", the mismatch between your body clock and the clock your job runs on, links it to worse attention and impulsivity outcomes. So the person who looks disorganised before 10am may be working well outside their biological window. For late-diagnosed adults, this reframes years of being called lazy, slow to start or "not committed". If your evenings run late no matter how early you go to bed, that is worth raising with your GP or a sleep physician. Melatonin timing and light exposure are clinical conversations, not something to guess at. For employers, this is one of the cheapest adjustments available. A flexible start time, or keeping critical meetings out of the first hour of the day, costs nothing to set up. You'll probably get better work from those hours too.
Cheers,
Cass Nicholson | Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
Brisbane QLD, Australia +61 0419 423 746
Comments