The Invisible Workload: What Nonprofit Leaders Need to Know About Neurodivergent Burnout
By: The Charity CFO
Burnout in the nonprofit sector is not a new conversation. It shows up in surveys, exit interviews, leadership forums, and the quiet resignation of talented people who simply ran out of runway.
But there is a layer to this conversation that most organizations are still missing.
Not all burnout looks the same. And for a significant subset of nonprofit leaders, what looks like high performance from the outside is actually a finely constructed system that is running on borrowed time.
In a recent episode of A Modern Nonprofit Podcast, Tosha sat down with Brittan Stockert, Certified Fundraising Executive and fundraising coach at Donorbox, to talk about neurodivergence, masking, and the invisible workload that comes with leading while your brain works differently than the systems around you were built to accommodate.
It is one of the most honest conversations the show has ever had.
When “Thriving” Is Actually a Performance
Brittan grew up in Stockton, California in the 80s and 90s, a time when the only cultural references for neurodivergence were fictional extremes. Sheldon Cooper. Rain Man. Characters that felt nothing like her.
Without a framework to understand her own experience, she did what many high-functioning neurodivergent people do: she overcompensated. She learned every skill. She took every meeting. She wrote grants at 2am and launched websites and became the kind of leader that organizations rely on completely.
From the outside, she was extraordinary. On the inside, she was exhausted in ways she could not yet name.
“I just knew that most of life was hard,” she told Tosha. “Everything that came naturally for my peers, I had to work ten times harder to do.”
This is what Brittan calls superhero mode. It is not sustainable. It is not a personality type. It is a coping mechanism masquerading as capability, and the nonprofit sector rewards it without question.
The Secondary Operating System
One of the most clarifying moments in this episode comes when Brittan describes what is actually happening in the brain of a neurodivergent leader during a normal workday.
“We’re not just trying to observe and model behaviors,” she says. “We’re also trying to regulate our own, processing conversations and sensory outputs at intense levels. There is work before the work. There is work after the work. Our brains never shut off.”
Tosha builds on this from her own experience. As a leader, she describes spending roughly half her energy on actual problems, and the other half managing how she responds to those problems, because people are watching.
For neurodivergent leaders, this management layer is not a choice. It is constant, it is invisible, and it has a physiological cost. Brittan describes medical consequences: complex migraines, gut issues, heart irregularities, inflammation visible in photos from a decade ago.
“A mediocre stressful event could put me on short-term medical leave,” she says. “The recovery is very different.”
This is not a personal weakness. It is a structural reality of navigating systems that were not built with neurodivergent brains in mind.
The Burnout That No One Sees Coming
What makes neurodivergent burnout particularly dangerous in organizations is how invisible it is.
In her coaching practice, Brittan works with roughly 18 nonprofits at any given time. She has noticed a pattern. A neurodivergent team member is burning out quietly, completely below the surface. The rest of the team sees someone who is overdelivering and masking effectively. So they keep adding to that person’s plate.
There is no visible struggle. No flag goes up. And the neurodivergent person, often because of a phenomenon called alexithymia, a difficulty in identifying or describing internal states, may not even be able to name what is happening to them until it is too late.
“By the time we identify this, it could be too late,” Brittan says. “There are serious consequences.”
Tosha and Brittan both share that their own realizations came in their early 40s, when the coping mechanisms that had worked for decades suddenly stopped being enough. Life had layered on too much: leadership responsibilities, parenting, aging parents, complex relationships, and the weight of missions they genuinely cared about.
This is not coincidence. Mental health professionals have noted that mid-life is often when neurodivergent patterns finally surface in high-functioning individuals, precisely because the scaffolding collapses under accumulated pressure.
What the Sector Is Getting Wrong
Brittan does not mince words when she names the systemic piece.
“The nonprofit sector thrives on neurodivergent people,” she says. “We have a high moral compass, a drive for social justice, a tendency to be people pleasers. We will work 60 hours a week out of passion and commitment. Boards love that. They love the generalist who does everything.”
The problem is that this pattern is not sustainable, and the sector has historically not been willing to look at the long-term cost.
Nonprofit turnover is high. The workforce is roughly 70% women, a group disproportionately underdiagnosed and undersupported when it comes to neurodivergence. And the diagnostic criteria for conditions like ADHD and autism were largely built on research conducted with a narrow subset of white boys in the 1990s, leaving an entire generation of women, women of color, and military veterans like Brittan without frameworks that fit their actual experience.
“We are going to lose them,” Brittan says, “if we don’t get our act together.”
What Actually Helps
The good news is that small changes make a real difference. Neither Tosha nor Brittan are prescribing sweeping organizational transformation. They are describing practical, low-cost shifts that leaders can make right now.
For individuals:
Tosha keeps her daily core task list to 3 or 4 priorities. No more. It protects her energy and prevents the emotional hangover that comes from constant overwhelm. She also protects quiet time, particularly mornings before the house wakes up, as a way to give her brain space to settle.
Brittan emphasizes self-validation. She does not yet have a formal diagnosis, and for much of her nonprofit career she could not have afforded one. But she has given herself permission to understand her own experience without waiting for an official document to confirm it.
“I don’t need a diagnosis on paper,” she says. “And I don’t need validation from family and friends who’ve only ever seen the external version of me.”
For leaders and organizations:
Brittan points to her own current workplace as a model. Her supervisor sends agendas before one-on-ones. He shows up authentically, imperfect and unguarded. He does not send surprise Slack video requests. He creates psychological safety that allows Brittan to unmask, and in that environment, she thrives.
“Flexibility, buffers, modeling authentic leadership. That’s what helps me excel.”
Tosha echoes this, noting that she had probably been avoiding impromptu calls for her team without realizing it was because she does not like them herself.
Understanding how people actually work is not a soft leadership concept. It is a retention strategy, a performance strategy, and a mission strategy.
The Bigger Cost
The organizational cost of missing this is not just about one employee burning out. It is about losing the people who are often most deeply committed to the mission.
When a neurodivergent leader hits a wall and leaves, the organization loses institutional knowledge, fundraising relationships, operational systems, and years of accumulated expertise. Often, the departure looks like a performance issue or a values mismatch. Rarely does anyone recognize it as a failure of the environment to support the person.
“This is such an important reminder,” Tosha says in the closing, “that burnout is not one-size-fits-all. And leadership is not either.”
If your organization wants high-performing teams, this conversation is worth having. Not as a compliance exercise. Not as a DEI checkbox. As a genuine investment in understanding the people who are holding your mission together.
Many of them are working harder than you know. The least you can do is learn why.
Connect with Brittan Stockert
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