Neurodivergent Burnout and the Hidden Cost of Equestrian Culture

By Iris Walshe | NeuroWave Coaching

There is a phrase every equestrian knows.

“Get back on.”

It is said with the best intentions. The cultural shorthand for resilience, for commitment, for the particular kind of toughness the sport demands. However for a significant number of riders, one of the most damaging instructions they will ever receive.

Not because getting back on is wrong. But because for neurodivergent riders — those whose brains are wired differently, including those with ADHD, autism, or both — “get back on” is not just a physical instruction. It is a neurological one. And the nervous system it lands on is already, quietly, on fire.

 The Culture Nobody Names

Equestrian sport has a culture problem it is only beginning to acknowledge.

The FEI’s Equine Ethics and Wellbeing Commission, established in 2022, has done important work interrogating the norms of performance horse sport — recognising that cultural enculturation (the process by which we absorb a culture’s values as normal without questioning them) can override individual judgment (Cheung, Mills & Ventura, 2025). That conversation has focused, rightly, on horses. But the same cultural forces act on riders. And when those riders are neurodivergent, the impact is compounded in ways the sport has not yet begun to map.

Equestrian culture valorises stoicism. It rewards the rider who stays quiet about pain, who pushes through anxiety, who performs composure on the outside regardless of what is happening internally. Admitting you are struggling is often perceived as weakness — and the phrase “everyone gets nervous”* has closed down more honest conversations than it has ever opened.

A 2024 study on burnout in dual-career equestrians found that 47% of participants were experiencing high levels of burnout — and that one of the most alarming findings was the 

negative perception of burnout within the equestrian industry, which actively reduced help-seeking, for fear of being judged or seen as weak (Lane / Riders Minds, 2025).

That is the neurotypical picture. For neurodivergent riders, the stakes are considerably higher.

What We Mean by Neurodivergent — and Why the Distinctions Matter

Neurodivergent is a broad term that describes people whose brains process the world differently from what is considered typical. It includes ADHD, autism, and AuDHD (the co-occurrence of both autism and ADHD, which is increasingly recognised as its own distinct profile).

While the experience of burnout is shared across these profiles, it is worth understanding how it presents differently:

In ADHD, burnout tends to involve emotional exhaustion and mental fatigue — the nervous system that has been running at high intensity, hyperfocusing (intense, sustained focus on a single thing, often to the exclusion of everything else), and managing rejection sensitivity finally runs dry. It often hits suddenly, after a period of high output.

In autism, burnout develops more slowly — emotions and sensory load accumulating below conscious awareness, like pressure building in a sealed system, until capacity is breached. The person may appear fine right up until they are not.

In AuDHD, both patterns are present simultaneously — and masking traits from both profiles at once radically accelerates the process (AuDHD Psychiatry, 2025).

In all three cases, equestrian sport provides the ideal conditions for burnout to develop invisibly. And in all three cases, the culture makes it harder — not easier — to catch early.

 Double Masking: The Cost Nobody Calculates

Masking — the conscious and unconscious suppression of neurodivergent traits in order to appear neurotypical (non-neurodivergent) — is exhausting under any circumstances. Research consistently finds that camouflaging (another term for masking) is emotionally draining for neurodivergent adults and can result in burnout due to the sheer cognitive load of sustaining it over time (Pearson & Rose, 2021; ScienceDirect, 2025).

In equestrian sport, masking operates on two levels simultaneously.

The first is the masking that happens in any social or professional context — suppressing stimming (self-stimulatory behaviour that helps regulate the nervous system, such as rocking, fidgeting, or repetitive movement), pre-scripting interactions, performing emotional regulation that does not match internal experience.

The second is the masking specific to equestrian culture — performing toughness, minimising difficulty, suppressing the visible signs of a nervous system that is overwhelmed.

Because the equestrian environment is, neurologically speaking, an extremely demanding one. The unpredictability of horses. The noise of a competition warm-up arena. The proprioceptive demands of riding (the body’s sense of its own position and movement in space). The social complexity of yard politics and coaching relationships. For a neurodivergent nervous system, these are not background features. They are significant, ongoing sensory inputs that require constant processing — before the rider has even thought about the technical demands of their sport.

When masking is layered on top of all of that, the energy cost is immense. And it is almost entirely invisible to everyone around the rider — including, often, the rider themselves.

 What Neurodivergent Burnout Actually Looks Like in a Rider

It does not always look like collapse. That is the first thing to understand.

Research confirms that for many neurodivergent individuals, burnout onset can be sudden and without obvious warning signs — in part because difficulties with interoception (the brain’s ability to detect and interpret signals from inside the body, such as heart rate, tension, and fatigue) and alexithymia (difficulty identifying and naming one’s own emotional states) mean the early signals are not being received clearly (Arnold et al., 2023).

In a rider, this can look like:

– Suddenly finding the yard unbearable without being able to explain why
– Losing the ability to problem-solve in the saddle — things that were automatic becoming effortful
– Heightened reactivity to the horse’s movement or unexpected behaviour
– An inability to access the hyperfocus that previously made training feel absorbing and effortless
– Withdrawal from the social fabric of the yard — avoiding other riders, coaches, and competitions
– A creeping sense that something that used to feel like home no longer does

This last one is perhaps the most painful. Horses, for many neurodivergent individuals, have been a primary regulation environment throughout their lives. The relationship with the horse — consistent, non-verbal, non-judgmental — offers something that many human social environments cannot. When burnout begins to contaminate that relationship, it is not just sport that feels inaccessible. It is often the primary coping mechanism.

 The Neuroscience Underneath

Research identifies alexithymia and poor interoception as significant risk factors for burnout in neurodivergent people — both are disproportionately common in this population and directly interfere with the ability to detect stress before it becomes critical (Mantzalas et al., 2024).

For neurodivergent riders, this means that the early warning signs of burnout are frequently not detected until significant depletion has already occurred. The interoceptive signals that would prompt rest and recovery in a neurotypical nervous system are not being received clearly. The rider continues. The culture rewards them for continuing. And the system tips.

A 2025 study on neurodivergent athletes in elite sport found three dominant themes in their experience: **lack of belonging, overwhelmed and overloaded, and a need for plans** (Simons et al., 2025). All three are amplified in equestrian sport by a culture that treats the need for structure as weakness, belonging as conditional on performance, and overwhelm as something to be ridden through rather than responded to.

What Neuroinclusive Equestrian Coaching Actually Looks Like

It starts with asking different questions. And with being willing to name what you observe.

Instead of waiting for a rider to self-report difficulty — which, for the reasons above, may never come — a neuroinclusive coach learns to notice and name:

“I can see you seem tense or quiet today — what is it about today that feels different for you?”

“You ride this really well at home. What changes for you when you get to a show?”

“I’ve noticed you go quiet before you compete. What’s going on for you in that space?”

They are coaching questions — precise, observational, non-judgmental. They give the rider permission to articulate something they may not have had language for. And they open a conversation that the culture has historically closed down.

On the question of falls specifically: the conversation needs updating in light of how competition rules actually work. At affiliated competition level, a fall means elimination. The rider is not going to continue their round. The question of whether to get back on is not a performance question — it is a welfare question. Reframing it accordingly is straightforward:

“You’ve had a fall. Are you okay? Do you able or want to get back on now, take a break, or come back to it tomorrow?”

That is not softness. That is accurate assessment of a situation in which the rider has full agency and the only relevant variable is their wellbeing. Framing it as a choice, made by the rider, in their own time, is not only kinder — it is better coaching.

Neuroinclusive coaching also means understanding that a rider who needs the same warm-up routine every time is not being rigid — they are building the predictability their nervous system requires to perform. That a rider who cannot access their skills in a noisy, unpredictable environment has not lost those skills , they are experiencing sensory and executive overload (difficulty managing, organising, and executing tasks under pressure). And that rest alone will not fix neurodivergent burnout.

Neurodivergent burnout does not originate in neurodivergence itself , unadjusted, high-demand environments cause it by requiring sustained masking and generate sustained sensory overload  (UK Parliamentary Evidence, 2023). Putting a burnt-out neurodivergent rider on a week off and expecting them to return recovered misunderstands the mechanism entirely. Recovering requires environmental adjustment, reduced masking demand, and a coaching relationship that sstops asking  the rider to perform neurotypicality on top of performing athletically.

—

A Note on Who This Affects Most

Late-diagnosed neurodivergent women make up a  disproportionate share in this picture. Coaches and systems have told these riders they are too sensitive, too emotional, too intense. They have masked so effectively for so long that neither they nor their coaches have named what is happening. Who have interpreted their own burnout as lack of talent, lack of commitment, or lack of the mental toughness the sport demands.

They are not lacking toughness. They have been performing two full-time neurological jobs simultaneously — and doing it in a culture that has never acknowledged either one.

The sport is changing. The conversation around athlete welfare, psychological safety, and coaching culture is louder than it has ever been.  Neurodivergent riders are not yet centred in that conversation. They need to be.

## References

– Arnold, S.R.C. et al. (2023). Confirming the nature of autistic burnout. *Autism*, 27(5). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13623613221147410
– AuDHD Psychiatry (2025). AuDHD in Women: Why It’s Often Diagnosed Late. https://www.audhdpsychiatry.co.uk/insights/audhd-in-women/
– Cheung, E., Mills, D. & Ventura, B.A. (2025). Cognitive dissonance and enculturation in equestrian attitudes toward performance horses and their welfare. *Animal Welfare*. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12304784/
– Lane, M. / Riders Minds (2025). Study into equestrian burnout shares its results. https://ridersminds.org/2025/01/23/almost-half-of-equestrians-are-experiencing-a-high-level-of-burnout/
– Mantzalas, J. et al. (2024). Measuring and validating autistic burnout. *Autism Research*. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aur.3129
– Pearson, A. & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking. *Autism in Adulthood*, 3(1).
– Raymaker, D.M. et al. (2020). Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure. *Autism in Adulthood*, 2(2).
– ScienceDirect (2025). The consequences of social camouflaging in autistic adults: A systematic review. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S3050656525000288
– Simons, J. et al. (2025). Navigating neurodiversity in elite sport: lived experiences of neurodivergent athletes. *Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health*. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2159676X.2025.2534896
– UK Parliamentary Written Evidence (2023). Autistic Burnout. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/117253/pdf/