At work

RSD at work: a survival protocol

By Kevin Glover · 2026 · Educational, not medical advice

Work concentrates every RSD trigger in one place: ambiguous messages from people with power over you, constant evaluation, and feedback delivered in writing without tone. The survival protocol has three parts: decode before you react (separate what the message says from what your brain added), install a one-hour rule between trigger and reply, and reduce ambiguity at the source by training the people around you to be direct with you.

Why is work the worst place for an RSD brain?

Because the stakes are real and the signals are terrible. Your livelihood sits in the hands of people who communicate in calendar invites titled "sync," emails that start with "quick question," and feedback stripped of tone by text. Add the ADHD tax of past workplaces where criticism was frequent, and every ambiguous ping arrives pre-loaded. The result is a brain running threat detection all day in an environment that generates false positives by design. Naming that is step one: the environment is genuinely ambiguous; your alarm is genuinely oversized; both are true.

What do I do with the vague message from my boss?

The "can we talk Monday?" message is the canonical trigger, and it has a canonical decode: write what it literally says (a request for time, no topic, no complaint) against what your brain added (the firing, the tally, the deliberate timing), then weigh the readings. Routine logistics dominate; firings essentially never arrive as casual availability checks. We wrote the full walkthrough in why "we need to talk" feels like a verdict, and it's the first card in the decoder's instant library. One addition for work specifically: replying "sure, anything I should prep?" is legitimate, calm, and usually gets you the topic, which deletes the weekend of dread at the cost of one sentence.

How do I survive written feedback and reviews?

With a reading protocol, because raw first contact is where the damage happens. Read feedback once, fast, expecting the spiral, and do not respond. Close it. Come back after an hour (the one-hour rule is non-negotiable; calendar it if needed) and read it again as if it were addressed to a colleague you respect. Then count: how many sentences are about the work versus about you as a person? The ratio is nearly always entirely work. Finally, convert every note into a to-do item, because an RSD brain handles "list of concrete tasks" infinitely better than "field of judgment." For reviews, ask beforehand what will be covered: most managers happily preview, and previewed feedback loses most of its ambush power.

Can I actually ask coworkers to communicate differently?

Yes, and the high performers with RSD almost all do a version of it. You don't need to disclose a diagnosis; you need one sentence in your working style: "I do best with direct communication: if something needs fixing, tell me plainly, and if a message like 'need to chat' has a topic, including it saves me real energy." Reasonable colleagues comply because it costs nothing; unreasonable ones just identified themselves usefully. And for the meetings where your idea lands in silence: silence in meetings means processing, distraction, and lunch proximity far more often than disapproval. The room going quiet after you speak is the workplace edition of being left on read, and the same decode applies.

This article is educational, not medical advice, and RSD Decoder is not therapy or diagnosis. Rejection sensitivity can sit alongside heavier things. If any of this touches on thoughts of hurting yourself, that deserves a person, not a webpage: in the US you can call or text 988 any hour, and findahelpline.com lists lines elsewhere.