We mask or unmask via the body: Why Neurodivergent Women Need Embodied Practice

You know the feeling. Scanning the room before you've even sat down, monitoring your posture, tone and facial expression. Holding your breath without noticing. Locking your jaw. Ignoring the ache in your lower back and that you needed to go to the toilet twenty minutes ago.

Masking is a survival strategy we learn in childhood, a way of belonging, achieving, staying safe.

As neurodivergent women, we have learnt to chronically mask. We force our nervous system into a perpetual state of high alert. We tolerate the bright lights. We exhaust our social battery to appear friendly. We hold back what we say despite injustice raging inside of us. We edit ourselves for decades, until we've forgotten who we are.

Our nervous system exists to keep us alive. Its autonomic branches, sympathetic (fight-flight-fawn-freeze) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) are meant to move fluidly between activation and rest, returning us to balance after stress. That fluid movement is regulation, a healthy threat radar, paired with the ability to come back to a feeling of safety and sturdiness.

Masking breaks that movement. It keeps the sympathetic system switched on long after the actual threat has passed, because the "threat" for neurodivergent women never really goes away. This becomes chronic dysregulation, which shows up as anxiety, depression, social isolation, overwhelm, difficulty making decisions, disrupted sleep. It's increasingly understood as a root cause behind a wide range of health diagnoses.

Anaïs Nin put it simply: when one is pretending, the entire body revolts. The body registers the gap between how we feel and what we show. That internal conflict, and the need to perform, becomes physical discomfort and, over time, illness.

Embodied practices give us a way back to ourselves. Our breath, for example, is a way we can intervene directly in the complex functioning of our nervous system. Slower breathing, particularly when the exhale runs longer than the inhale stimulates the vagus nerve, increasing vagal tone and quieting the sympathetic system. It also influences the amygdala (emotional processing) and the prefrontal cortex (attention, anxiety reduction). Embodied practice offers a way of listening to the nervous system, rather than overriding it.

A good embodied practice draws on yoga, its philosophy, the asana (physical movement), mudra (hand movements), mantra (sacred words, sounds, or phrases), meditation and pranayama (breathwork) to bring awareness into the body. Yoga offers over thirty distinct breathing patterns, each shifting inhalation, retention, and exhalation differently. It also includes vestibular work that builds the basic sense of stability and safety the body needs. Practices such as guided yoga nidra, used for rest and deep rejuvenation, are among the most well-evidenced tools we have for improving sleep itself foundational to nervous system balance.

Embodied practice also draws on up-to-date neuroscience and psychology. Its primary goal is building a felt sense of safety in the body. This is what makes the difference between a reaction and an action...the ability to pause. For neurodivergent women, that pause is often genuinely harder to find.

Neurodivergent women, for many reasons, have lived in their heads. Many of us find interoception (reading our internal states such as hunger, emotion, need) and proprioception (sometimes called the sixth sense or knowing where our body is in space) more challenging than most people do. This can show up as clumsiness, or a sense of being out of sync with our own body. But it's a myth that we can't improve, it's a matter of practice. With practice, we often find an acute and heightened sensing perception. We feel everything. We see the patterns, sense the energies, perceive the colours that others miss.

Embodied practice is also foundational for unmasking. This isn't just a logical decision, it's a physical release. Masking requires muscular armour such as shallow breath, frozen posture, a locked jaw. Releasing it, slowly, means the body stops being a site of constant management and becomes our refuge. We relax into ourselves, perhaps for the first time! We learn greater inner control. We learn that forcing our body to push through, to toughen it out, is usually not the best option for us. We learn to soften. To rest.

Recent research points to a profound biological link between neurodivergence, particularly ADHD and autism and connective tissue laxity. Adults with ADHD are nearly five times more likely to show generalised joint hypermobility than the general population, rising to almost seven times for symptomatic hypermobility involving additional musculoskeletal or skin symptoms (Kentros et al., 2021). Rather than a coincidence, this overlap suggests neurodivergence is itself an "embodied" condition, connected through a complexity of shared biological pathways.

Both conditions share a strong tie to nervous system variation, where the body releases high levels of norepinephrine, worsening anxiety, fatigue, and brain fog. Both involve reduced proprioception, affecting motor control and the body's feedback loops to the brain. It's also thought that the developmental processes governing collagen synthesis may overlap with genes influencing central nervous system and neurotransmitter development. Chronic musculoskeletal tightness, pain, and exhaustion from unstable joints drain cognitive resources, intensifying inattention and emotional dysregulation. Building embodied awareness helps us notice fatigue, muscle tension, an environment that's too loud or too bright and to understand that there will be a cost, with no need to justify the decision either way.

Embodied practice, in the end, teaches us to read our own responses, including what matters, and what lights us up. When we're able to relax into ourselves, beneath the armour, beneath the stories, what surfaces is what the armour was holding back. Sometimes it's grief for the unlived years. Anger for the decades of self-abandonment. Regret for the years of pretence.

Naming these feelings is only the beginning. An emotion that's been suppressed for decades doesn't dissolve the moment we notice it, it needs to move through the body to complete. This might look like trembling in a regressive state, a long exhale, a monsoon of tears, or sounds leaving the throat for the first time in years. This is the nervous system recognising something it started a long time ago and was never allowed to finish. That, in itself, is the release. It may not produce the aha moment we expect or hope for but the body has it's own natural mechanisms for healing. One of the greatest things we learn in embodied practice is to stop getting in our own way. To trust the wisdom of the body and allow the process to happen in its own time at it's own pace.

Sources

Kentros, M. et al. (2021). Association between adult ADHD and generalised joint hypermobility. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 143, 334–340.

Csecs, J. et al. (2022). Joint hypermobility links neurodivergence to dysautonomia and pain. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12.