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The Model
Framework · Applies Across All Spokes
These terms describe the framework itself — how it works, what it measures, and the vocabulary that runs across all five spokes.
Five-Spoke Life Integration Model
A systems-based framework mapping adult life functioning across five interconnected domains. The wheel only rolls smoothly when all five are working well enough together. The goal is not perfection — it's sustainable movement.
Life Integration
The hub of the model. When your state, tasks, relationships, logistics, and sense of direction are in some working alignment, that's integration. Not equal effort everywhere — more like a wheel that isn't wobbling so much it's hard to steer.
Baseline Needs
The pre-spoke checkpoint: sleep, nutrition, sensory load, and physical and emotional safety. Spoke-level skills won't stick if the baseline is collapsing. Start there first.
Think of baseline needs as the ground the wheel sits on. If the ground is unstable, tire pressure doesn't matter.
Capacity
The functional bandwidth you actually have right now — not your potential, not your best day. Capacity shifts with sleep, stress, sensory load, and what's already running in the background. This is why something easy last week can feel impossible today.
Load
The total demand on your system at any moment — every task, responsibility, stressor, and unresolved loop you're carrying, whether you're consciously aware of it or not.
Strain
What happens when demand consistently exceeds what your system can sustainably handle. Strain is a signal — not a character verdict. Your assessment results show you where it's building.
Starting Spoke
The spoke you work on first — usually the one showing the most difficulty, or the one most likely to unblock others if stabilized. A starting point, not a permanent label.
Recognition
Noticing what's happening — what patterns show up, when, and under what conditions. The first skill layer across all five spokes. You can't regulate what you haven't noticed yet.
Regulation
Using skills, systems, or tools to respond differently based on what you've recognized. Not controlling your internal state by willpower. Creating more choice between stimulus and response than you had before.
The Life Tax
The invisible cognitive and energetic overhead that neurodivergent adults pay to navigate a world designed for neurotypical processing. It runs constantly and raises the cost of everything. Acknowledging it isn't making excuses — it's accurate accounting.
1
Executive Functioning
Functional Domain: Task Management
Getting started, staying on track, and following through — especially on things that don't come with built-in urgency. The Module 1 tools work with how executive function actually operates in neurodivergent brains.
Executive Functions
The brain's management system — the cognitive processes that help you plan, start, monitor, and complete tasks. When they're inconsistent, the work itself often isn't the problem.
Working Memory
The mental "holding space" that keeps information active while you're using it. When it drops information mid-task, that's a capacity limit — not a reliability character trait. External scaffolding exists because of this.
Task Initiation
The ability to begin a task — especially one without immediate urgency, novelty, or an external deadline. Often the hardest part of executive functioning for neurodivergent adults. The barrier is neurological, not motivational.
Activation Energy
The internal threshold that has to be crossed before a task can begin. Some tasks require a much bigger spark than others. When a task's activation energy exceeds current capacity, it won't start. This is what Micro-Starts address.
Time Blindness
A common feature of ADHD where future time doesn't feel real or tangible enough to guide present behavior. Urgency only registers when a deadline becomes immediate. Time Blocking and Working Backwards make time visible and concrete.
Micro-Start also: Minimal Viable Motion
The absolute smallest action that counts as having started — chosen specifically to bypass the brain's resistance to initiation. Not the first step in the plan. The first movement that clears the threshold. Continuing is much easier than starting from zero.
Hyperfocus
An intense, absorbed state of concentration on something engaging — often to the exclusion of everything else, including time, hunger, and prior commitments. Not always voluntary. Can be a resource or a liability depending on what it's applied to.
External Scaffolding
Physical or digital structures that hold information, reminders, and cues outside your brain — so working memory doesn't have to. Calendars, timers, sticky notes, checklists. Making invisible information visible and persistent.
Body Doubling
Working in the presence of another person — physically or virtually — to sustain focus and task engagement. The other person doesn't need to help. Their presence alone creates enough ambient accountability to reduce avoidance.
Priority Matrix
A sorting framework separating tasks by importance and urgency. Prevents treating everything as equally pressing. Helps distinguish what's actually critical from what's just loudest. Reduces decision drag by making priorities visible.
Working Backwards
A planning approach that starts from a deadline and reverse-engineers backward through every step needed to get there. Makes abstract deadlines concrete by revealing what needs to happen — and when — before the final moment arrives.
Completion Protocol
A defined "finish line" routine that closes a task cleanly — marking it done, transitioning away, preserving context for next time. Prevents the pattern of tasks that are 90% done but never fully closed. Finishing is its own skill.
2
Self-Regulation
Functional Domain: State Management
Managing emotions, energy, and arousal — not by suppression, but by noticing earlier, responding more skillfully, and recovering without shame. Module 2 tools are built around how neurodivergent nervous systems actually work.
Self-Regulation
The capacity to manage your internal states — emotions, energy, arousal, attention — in response to what's happening around you. Not suppression. The ability to notice your state and choose a response. A skill that can be built with the right tools.
Arousal Regulation
Managing your activation level — how revved up or shut down your nervous system is at any moment. Too high produces overwhelm or meltdown. Too low produces flatness or shutdown. The Module 2 tools help you adjust both directions.
Window of Tolerance
The range of arousal within which you can think clearly, decide, and engage. Too much activation pushes you above it (overwhelm, reactivity). Too little drops you below (numbness, shutdown). Regulation tools help expand this window over time.
Dysregulation
A state in which your nervous system is operating outside its functional range — either too activated or too shut down to respond effectively. Not a character failure. A state that passes, especially with appropriate regulation support.
Sensory Processing
How your nervous system takes in and makes sense of sensory input. Many neurodivergent individuals experience sensory input more intensely, less predictably, or with greater cumulative cost. Sensory load matters as a baseline factor.
Sensory Load
The cumulative effect of sensory input on your nervous system over time. Individually tolerable inputs add up — fluorescent lights, background noise, and physical discomfort across a full day can push the system past its threshold without any obvious single trigger.
Neurodivergent Burnout
A state of profound physical, emotional, and cognitive exhaustion from sustained masking, chronic overload, or prolonged demand-capacity mismatch. Deeper than typical burnout, slower to recover from, and often involving loss of previously held skills or tolerance.
Meltdown
An involuntary response to overwhelm in which emotional or sensory input has exceeded the system's processing capacity. External expression is the system releasing what it can no longer contain. Not a tantrum or manipulation — a neurological overflow event.
Shutdown
The internal equivalent of a meltdown — withdrawal into reduced responsiveness when the system is overwhelmed. Less visible from the outside. Often described as going quiet, going blank, or feeling unreachable.
Energy Accounting
Treating energy like a finite budget — tracking what costs you, what restores you, and planning days so withdrawals don't chronically exceed deposits. Some activities look productive but drain heavily. Some that look like "doing nothing" are genuinely restorative.
Grounding
Short, portable techniques that reconnect you to your immediate physical environment when your nervous system is activated or dissociating. Usually sensory-based. Designed to interrupt escalation before it peaks.
Regulation Menu
A personalized, pre-built list of sensory inputs and actions that reliably adjust your arousal level up or down. Pre-building it when you're regulated means you don't have to generate ideas from scratch when you're not. Removes decision load at the worst moment.
3
Relationships & Communication
Functional Domain: Relational Navigation
Feeling understood, navigating connection honestly, and communicating what you actually need — without over-explaining, shutting down, or erasing yourself. Module 3 addresses the specific relational challenges that show up for neurodivergent adults.
Masking
The act of suppressing, hiding, or camouflaging neurodivergent traits to appear more neurotypical — often unconsciously and at significant energetic cost. Enables social survival in many contexts but is one of the highest contributors to burnout over time.
Unmasking
The gradual process of reducing masking behaviors in contexts where it's safe to do so. Not a single moment but an ongoing navigation. The Masking Audit identifies where it's happening, what it costs, and where it might safely be reduced.
Social Energy
The specific energetic cost of social interaction — which varies significantly by person, context, and degree of masking involved. For many neurodivergent adults, social engagement costs more than it appears from the outside.
Authenticity
The degree to which your external presentation — how you communicate, what you agree to, how you show up — reflects your actual internal experience. High alignment is restorative. High performance is costly.
Boundary
A limit that defines what you will and won't do, accept, or engage with — and what you'll do when that limit is crossed. Not a request for others to behave differently. A boundary is your own action in response to a situation.
Relational Repair
The process of reconnecting after a rupture — conflict, miscommunication, or breakdown in trust. The Repair Protocol provides the sequence: acknowledge what happened, validate the impact, propose a concrete adjustment. Repair is a learnable skill.
Communication Flooding
More words coming out than intended — triggered by anxiety, over-explanation habits, or processing difficulty in real-time conversation. The Communication Prep Sheet helps by identifying key points before a conversation begins.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
An intense, often immediate emotional response to perceived rejection, criticism, or failure — disproportionate in intensity to the actual event. Common in ADHD profiles. The emotional experience is real, even when the perceived rejection isn't accurate.
Support Request Template
A fill-in framework for asking for help clearly: "I need X because Y. What helps most is Z." Reduces the ambiguity and over-explaining that derails neurodivergent support-seeking. Available even when words are hard.
Conflict Navigation
A stepwise approach to difficult conversations that separates issue-clarification from need-statement — before attempting resolution. Many conflicts escalate because the actual issue was never clearly named. The Conflict Navigator builds in the clarification step first.
Feedback Reception
The ability to hear, process, and use feedback without defensive shutdown or dysregulation. The Feedback Reception Guide helps clarify intent, filter for useful signal, and regulate the emotional response — so feedback can be evaluated rather than just survived.
4
Life Administration
Functional Domain: Logistics Management
Bills, appointments, meals, paperwork, routines — the constant logistics of adult life. When this spoke is strained, it creates background noise that makes everything harder. Module 4 tools reduce decision load, not add to it.
Decision Fatigue
The degradation in decision quality after making many decisions in sequence. Every choice uses cognitive resources. When depleted, even small decisions become difficult or are avoided entirely. Reducing the number of daily decisions is a legitimate strategy.
Automation / Autopilot
Setting up recurring systems — bill payment, savings transfers, recurring orders — so they happen without requiring a decision each time. Structure it once, then take it off your mental plate entirely.
Habit Stacking
Attaching a new behavior to an existing routine cue so it inherits the existing habit's momentum. Rather than building a new routine from scratch, you anchor the new behavior to something that already reliably happens.
Context Switching
The cognitive cost of shifting between different types of tasks. Each switch has a reloading cost. Batching similar tasks into dedicated blocks reduces total context-switching cost across a day or week.
Admin Batching
Grouping similar administrative tasks into dedicated time blocks rather than handling them as they appear throughout the week. Reduces context-switching, creates predictability, and takes recurring admin off the daily decision queue.
Home Reset
A defined, minimal set of actions that restore a space to functional order — not clean, just workable. A reset is achievable even when energy is low, while "cleaning" often isn't. Defines what "good enough" looks like per area.
Meal Scaffolding
Reducing the daily decision load around meals through defaults, rotation plans, and pre-decided fallbacks. Instead of answering "what's for dinner?" with full executive bandwidth each evening, you have a structure that removes the question most of the time.
Launch Pad
A designated staging area near your home's exit where essential items live permanently and are checked by a simple pre-committed ritual. Eliminates the morning scramble by removing its root cause: things without consistent homes.
Paperwork Triage
A sorting pipeline that processes incoming paper into four categories: Action, Schedule, File, or Trash — applied immediately rather than in piles. Prevents accumulation by making the first decision clear, fast, and automatic.
Urgency Response Protocol
A pre-planned, low-cognitive-load response for when normal systems break down — illness, unexpected events, high-stress periods. Pre-deciding what "good enough" looks like in a disrupted week means you don't have to make hard calls when already depleted.
Routine
A predictable sequence of actions that removes the need for repeated decisions. Routines convert effortful choices into automatic behavior. For neurodivergent adults, routines are not restrictions — they're cognitive relief.
5
Purpose & Direction
Functional Domain: Meaning & Motivation
Knowing what matters, where you're headed, and why any of it is worth the effort. Module 5 is about recalibration, not reinvention — and building the motivational signal that makes present action feel coherent.
Values
Enduring standards for what matters to you — guides for how you spend time, energy, and attention when tradeoffs are unavoidable. Values are direction-setting criteria, not goals. Goals are specific and completable. Values persist and inform the next goal.
Motivation as mechanism
The process that initiates, directs, and sustains action — not simply a feeling. Motivation is a regulatory mechanism that responds to perceived value, anticipated cost, timing, and current capacity. When it's absent, one of those inputs has changed.
Deflation
When a goal or direction loses its felt sense of worth — a downward recalibration of expected value. Often caused by sustained strain elsewhere in the system rather than a genuine values shift. Frequently misread as laziness or depression.
Meaning Decoupling
Separating a practical task from the identity weight it's carrying. Writing an email is just writing an email — it doesn't also have to prove your competence, follow-through, or worth. When a task carries too much identity freight, its activation cost spikes. Decoupling reduces it.
Meaning Bridge
A technique for connecting a boring, aversive, or repetitive task to something that genuinely matters — so the task borrows meaning from a deeper source. Not manufactured motivation. A genuine line traced from "this thing I don't want to do" to "this thing I care about."
Anti-Resume
A strengths-identification approach that works backward from lived experience — failures, pivots, things you've survived, patterns in what you've been drawn to — rather than forward from achievements. Particularly useful when your strengths don't map onto conventional achievement narratives.
Why-Map
A structured exploration of the specific reasons behind a goal — drilling into why it matters. Strengthens commitment by making reasons explicit, and reveals when a goal is disconnected from genuine values (making it easier to release without guilt).
Goal Filter
A decision sieve applied before committing to a new goal — designed to reject misaligned goals and keep only those worth the actual capacity cost. Asks: Does this align with your values? Do you have the capacity? Is the timing right?
Direction Check-In
A periodic structured prompt set to assess whether your current trajectory still aligns with what matters — to detect drift, notice what's changed, and make intentional adjustments. Not a performance review of yourself. A navigation check.
RTAL Recursive Temporal Appraisal Loop
The internal loop through which we evaluate whether future possibilities feel real, motivating, and worth acting on now. When functioning well, future goals produce present motivation. When dysregulated — as it often is in ADHD and related profiles — the future doesn't feel real enough to drive behavior. This is the mechanism underlying time blindness and motivation collapse.
From the theoretical framework underlying this model. For further reading: wdtherapy.com/research ↗