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Hot Takes From The Trash Panda

The Attention Economy Is Exploiting Neurodivergent Minds: A Call for Awareness and Advocacy

March 10, 2025

In recent years, awareness of ADHD and autism has skyrocketed. Social media feeds are flooded with hashtags like #neurodivergent and #ADHDlife, and discussions about executive dysfunction and sensory processing are becoming mainstream. At first glance, this seems like progress—greater awareness, more resources, and communities forming around shared experiences. But beneath the surface, a troubling trend is emerging. The attention economy—a system designed to monetize focus—is increasingly exploiting neurodivergent individuals, preying on their attention, finances, and wellbeing.

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ADHD-Friendly Goal Setting with the PACT Framework

Edidiong Umoh

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January 6, 2025

PACT is a goal-setting framework, created by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, that focuses on your output and efforts rather than the outcome. Instead of fixating on a big, distant end result, PACT emphasizes building habits, routines, and continual progress. It encourages regular reassessment and small, incremental changes to ensure your goals stay adaptable and achievable.

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Why Self-Compassion Is Revolutionary for BIPOC Neurodivergent People

Edidiong Umoh

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November 26, 2024

How often do you feel the weight of needing to be everything for everyone? Or have the impulse to prioritize someone else’s comfort above your own, even if it means hiding parts of who you are? For BIPOC neurodivergent folks, these struggles are more than fleeting feelings- they are daily realties, shaped, in part, by the intersecting systems of ablism, racism, cultural expectations, and other societal systems of oppression. From an early age, many of us begin to believe that safety is created when we learn to fit in, endure, and adapt, even if the tradeoff means we must erase ourselves.

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Houseplants, Routines, and Learning to Tend to My ADHD Brain

Dylan Alter

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February 4, 2022

Cards on the table? I hate routines—well, hated them. I’ve rebelled against them my entire life. Part of why I struggled for so long to use routines was because I was trying to use them as though I was neurotypical. The experience of having ADHD can be both isolating and gaslighting. I never understood why using the same steps that worked effortlessly for other people was counterproductive for me. The routines others found supportive and healthy, I found restrictive and toxic. I wasn’t treating myself like the specific type of houseplant I am. I was trying to feed myself the wrong nutrients. I had to re-engineer routines, as though I was an unknown plant I’d found and had to puzzle out its needs. Once I did that, with the help of my therapist and my ADHD community, I began to thrive and grow.