If a lion* is about to eat you, your brain is not meant to sit there reasoning its way through the situation.

Analysing the lion’s motivations or wondering whether there’s a way to explain that you’re not actually the best meal option is not going to be helpful right now. Under danger, the reasoning circuit shuts down. That’s what any brain is designed to do.

Energy gets redirected into survival and feeling. Those brain circuits are the ones that come online first from birth and they’re largely non-verbal. They don’t care about neat and tidy explanations, they about staying alive.

We know this, even if we don’t talk about it in neuroscience terms – it’s even woven into everyday language. ‘My mind just went blank.’ ‘I froze.’ ‘I don’t know what happened.’ No one hears that and thinks it’s odd. We instinctively understand that under threat, the prefrontal cortex shuts down. That is how a brain works when something feels dangerous.

And yet many neurodivergent people grow up with a very different internal expectation. We tell ourselves that we should be able to push through regardless, think clearly no matter what, stay articulate and rational even when something hits hard. But if you step back from that expectation, a brain working as intended under danger would not be calmly reasoning. It would be redirecting energy into survival.

For a lot of us, though, danger doesn’t arrive occasionally. It’s our base line and why we mostly operate under what I call Meerkat syndrome (yes, there is a whole zoo living in my brain practice). Head up, scanning, always slightly on the lookout for what might hit. It’s also more commonly known as hypervigilance and is becomes our constant elevator musak.

The world often feels to us unpredictable, socially confusing, full of micro-threats that other people don’t even seem to register. So we get triggered more often, not because we are fragile, but because we are constantly scanning. In brain zoo terms, this is the canary in the mine that smells danger when no one else can.

Instead of allowing the reasoning circuit to shut down in those moments, we often override it. I believe that ND peeps are addicted to our reasoning brain. We value logic, efficiency, clarity at a very core level. When things don’t make sense, we don’t feel safe. Certainty starts to look like safety, even though the two are not the same. So when something hits and the system registers danger, we try to make it make sense. We try to get back to clarity.

‘If I can understand this, I’ll be okay.’

It’s one of the reasons so many neurodivergent people are very good in crisis. When the ship goes down, there might be a beat when we do go blank, but then we switch back on. We organise, triage, problem-solve, because that’s something we have also become experts at. Champions in a crisis, right? We’re used to operating under threat.

From the outside, that can look impressive. Almost superhuman. ‘How did you do that?’ is a pretty common comments in our experience.

And yet, this goes directly against the ‘normal’ baseline design of the brain under danger, which is for the reasoning circuit to shut down. And if we repeatedly override that, if we drag the prefrontal cortex back online while the system is braced for impact, we are spending energy the body is trying to conserve. The cost it there, if not immediate.

Burnout, collapse, meltdowns. A wave of exhaustion that feels out of proportion. We tend to judge ourselves hardest at that point. ‘I handled it so well, why am I falling apart now?’ But what if that falling apart is simply the nervous system’s delayed reaction for what it wasn’t allowed to do in the moment? And you are effectively rewiring your brain to be on constant alert – great for survival, exhausting when living life on the daily.

A brain that shuts down its reasoning circuit under danger is functioning exactly as designed. If you are someone who keeps pushing through, keeps thinking harder, keeps chasing certainty because uncertainty feels unsafe, it may be worth noticing how often you are overriding that sequence.

That doesn’t mean abandoning your reasoning strengths. It means recognising what you’re asking of your system when you insist on clarity in the middle of perceived threat. And it means that when you do end up exhausted, flooded, or flat afterwards, you don’t immediately turn that into a moral judgement.

When the lion is in the room, survival comes first. That’s true for every brain.

Some of us have simply become so used to living with lions that we’ve forgotten that shutdown was always part of the design. Time to step away from the cage, and take a break from. A lion chocolate bar perhaps?

*I seem to have a thing for lions at the moment. They are cats, and I am an inveterate cat lady after all!