We cannot talk about relatable autistic and ADHD experiences without naming waiting mode.

If there is an appointment later in the day, especially one involving people, the rest of the day can feel unusable. You cannot fully start anything, but you also cannot truly rest. Time feels thick, suspended, and oddly fragile. Your attention keeps snapping back to the future moment, even if you are trying not to think about it.

This is not procrastination, and it’s not poor time management or a lack of motivation.

It is a nervous system in a state of anticipatory vigilance.

Anticipatory stress and time uncertainty significantly reduce executive function. When the brain knows something is coming but does not know exactly how it will unfold, it shifts into monitoring mode. Resources that might otherwise go toward focus, creativity, or rest are diverted toward tracking, prediction, and self-regulation.

The body is bracing.

For many neurodivergent people, this bracing is especially intense when the upcoming event involves social interaction, evaluation, or sensory unpredictability. A meeting. An appointment. A phone call. A visit. Even something neutral or positive can trigger waiting mode if it requires social presence or performance.

From the outside, it can look like nothing is happening. From the inside, a lot is happening.

Autistic nervous systems, in particular, are more likely to stay in heightened arousal when facing uncertainty. ADHD nervous systems are more likely to struggle with time perception and task switching. When you combine these traits, you get a state where the brain cannot settle into another task because it is conserving energy and attention for what is coming next.

This is why the hours before an appointment often feel unusable. Starting something meaningful feels risky because you might have to stop. Starting something small feels unsatisfying because your attention is split. Rest feels incomplete because you are not actually safe to disengage yet.

What makes waiting mode so damaging is not the experience itself, but how it is moralized. Neurodivergent people are often told that they are wasting time, being dramatic, or failing to manage their day. Over time, that message gets internalized. You start blaming yourself for something your nervous system is doing automatically.

When the brain is tracking an upcoming demand, especially one that is ambiguous or socially loaded, cognitive flexibility drops, initiation drops, and working memory drops. This is not a choice, but a state.

The body is preparing even if nothing bad happens.

Waiting mode also explains why people can feel exhausted after an appointment that did not take very long. The cost was not just the event itself, but the hours of vigilance beforehand. The energy was spent before anything “happened.”

This is why advice like “just do something else until then” often misses the point. The nervous system does not experience the time as open. It experiences it as occupied.

From a neurodiversity justice perspective, waiting mode is another example of how environments are designed around a narrow cognitive style. Schedules assume that people can freely switch between tasks, hold future events lightly, and return to baseline easily. Many autistic and ADHD people cannot do that without significant cost.

The solution is structural accommodation, not more discipline.

Clustering appointments instead of spreading them out. Providing exact times instead of broad windows. Reducing unnecessary social uncertainty. Allowing rest before and after events to count as part of participation.

And at the personal level, it means stopping the internal accusation.

If your day feels unusable because there is one thing later that you cannot stop bracing for, that is how your nervous system manages risk, uncertainty, and social demand.

Waiting mode is not laziness or avoidance or wasted time.

It is a body holding itself ready, and that accuracy is the first step toward designing lives that do not constantly ask neurodivergent people to fight their own physiology just to appear functional.