RSD and ADHD: The Hidden Trigger Behind Sudden Classroom Meltdowns

If you're a head teacher or deputy, can I ask you something honestly? How much of your week is spent leading learning and how much is spent putting out fires because SEMH needs are rising? Those increasing levels of need are changing the job of school leadership. Too many leaders tell us that they're stuck in crisis mode, while other parts that are important of school life, like curriculum, culture and pupil outcomes, get pushed to the side. And that's why we're hosting a free in-person support session just for heads and deputies. The venue this time will be in Bradford, and it's all about giving you practical ways to equip your team to handle SEMH challenges with confidence. So you can move as a team from firefighting to a calm, consistent, whole school approach. You'll also meet local leaders facing the same issues and share what's working in real schools right now. Places are limited, but the event itself is completely free. To find out more and reserve your place, visit beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/events. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/events. I'll also put a direct link in the show notes, so you can open the episode description and tap directly through. Some people don't explode because they're being defiant. They explode because even the smallest correction feels like total rejection. Their nervous system goes from zero to meltdown in seconds. My name's Simon Carrigan and I've supported hundreds of schools with SEMH and behaviour observed thousands of pupils in classrooms and help teachers all over the world understand what's really driving their students, emotions, and in today's episode, I'm going to break down what rejection-sensitive dysphoria or RSD actually is, why it's so common in children with ADHD and what it means for the way that you give feedback in class. Plus, a couple of simple changes that you can make today that will prevent those emotional blooms from happening in the first place. If you've ever thought, why did they react like that? This episode is going to give you the answer. [Music] Hi there, my name's Simon Carrigan and welcome to this week's episode of school behaviour secrets. And I'm the kind of man who never won a trophy for anything in his life. Except, right, for the world's best dad trophy the kids gave me when they were six. Which, I'm going to be honest, looks a bit like a plastic Oscar. Now actually, hold on, now I've said that out loud live. I'm starting to think that maybe that award wasn't from a properly accredited organisation, which means I might not be the world's best dad. After all, I mean that can't be right, can it? I feel like I'm falling down a rabbit hole here. I better get out of this intro before I break down and have to call my therapist live on air. But kids, you've got serious questions to answer later, I am telling you. Anyway, welcome, break down aside to school behaviour secrets, the podcast where we poke around into what's really driving behaviour in schools and how you can make a genuine difference for all your pupils, including the ones with social, emotional and mental health needs. And today, we're going to look at something that comes up a lot when working with children with ADHD and still really isn't common knowledge. It's a condition called rejection-sensitive dysphoria or RSD. I'm going to talk about what it is, what it isn't, why it's so common in children with ADHD and what it looks like in the classroom. But before we get stuck in, I'd be really grateful if you could do me one quick favour. If you're finding these episodes helpful, hit subscribe on your podcast app so you never miss a future episode. And if you've got just 20 seconds to spare, leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. It genuinely helps more school leaders and teachers find this kind of content. And it fuels my entirely unhealthy obsession with looking at podcast analytics at midnight. Thank you and also remember to share this podcast on your social media feed or even directly with colleagues who might find this episode useful to hear when you think about the classes and the students that they teach. All right, let's get into the meat of this week's episode. And let's talk about what RSD actually is. I'm going to break this down in really simple terms. RSD stands for rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Now the rejection-sensitive is the easy bit. It means being extremely sensitive to rejection or criticism or even. And this is the important point actually. Even to the possibility or the expectation of disappointing someone. I want to zoom in though on the word dysphoria. Dysphoria basically means intense emotional pain or distress. That's all. It's the opposite of euphoria, which is intense happiness. So dysphoria, spelt with D-Y-S, not D-I-S, dysphoria means intense emotional pain. You don't need a psychology degree to understand that. It comes from the Greek meaning hard to carry or hard to bear, which will make total sense actually as we get further into this. So if we put the whole phrase together. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria means when a student feels rejected or criticised or they anticipate that someone might be disappointed with them. They don't just feel a bit sad or a bit embarrassed. They can feel overwhelmed by intense emotional pain or shame or fear. And that can trigger huge emotional responses or shutdowns. Over things that, to an outsider, might look tiny. Now here's the important bit. RSD isn't yet a formal medical diagnosis. As I record this at the end of 2025, it isn't officially recognised yet. You can't get RSD on a diagnosis certificate. That means for you psychology nerds out there, you won't find it listed in the DSM or the ICD. But, and this is key. It does explain a pattern of emotional reactions that comes up again and again, especially in people with ADHD. And we've got research that backs up the connection between ADHD, emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity. And psychologists are actually looking at including RSD-like symptoms in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD because RSD and ADHD occur together so often. They're often paired. Quick example and some of the evidence base for you because RSD is a new-ish discovery or a condition and the field is developing as more and more research comes in. There's one study from 2023 by Jinap and colleagues. Hopefully I've pronounced that name properly. They spoke to young adults with ADHD about their experiences and the participants themselves describe rejection sensitivity, intense emotional reactions to criticism, and RSD type experiences as major parts of living with ADHD in the real world. Another study from 2019 by Babinsky and colleagues in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology looked to add a lessons with more significant ADHD symptoms. And they also found these teenagers showed greater rejection sensitivity both in how they reported feeling but also in how their brains reacted to feedback from their friends and their peers. And another study in 2024 by Muller and colleagues looked at university students and they found that ADHD symptoms were associated with higher rejection sensitivity and lower well-being. Meaning this isn't just a childhood thing. It often continues into adulthood. And that's consistent with what many adults with ADHD have told me actually. They'll say it's one of the hardest parts of living with the condition. Not the emotional dysregulation, not the inattention, the rejection sensitivity. Now just think about that for a moment and think about your students with ADHD and how this might be affecting them and how this fits in with your knowledge of interacting with them on a day-by-day basis. Do they present as fragile or overly sensitive to criticism? Well, now we've got a way into understanding that and supporting them with it. So the research points in the same direction. Emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity are very common in ADHD. And when you think about what ADHD actually is, a condition that affects self-regulation, impulse control, working memory, emotional control, that actually makes perfect sense. These kids' nervous systems respond to criticism and rejection as if it's a real threat. So that's the definition. But what does it look like on the ground in the classroom? Well, let's start with externalizing behaviour. So these are the ones that you can see. They're big, they're obvious, they're loud. This is the stuff that you can't miss in the classroom. So imagine you give a child a simple piece of feedback on their work. You say, "Can you change this sentence so it's clearer?" That's fairly neutral, yeah, fairly harmless. But boom, they slam the book shut, they scrunch up the work. They tell you that they're rubbish at everything or they get argumentative. They'll say things like, "You're always picking on me. You never say anything bad to anyone else." Well, they just up and leave the room. Well, they start a confrontation with a peer and blame them for the mistake in their work. The reaction seems totally out of proportion to the trigger. It looks like to use a technical term catastrophizing. To you, you feel like you just gave them a neutral comment, some practical criticism to help improve their work. But in the child's body, well, their nervous system is screaming danger. And then we've got the internalizing behaviour. So the ones you can't see, the ones that slip under the radar. So we're talking here about the quiet child who shuts down every time you correct something. The child who tries not to cry silently at their desk. The perfectionist who is really reluctant to start a piece of work unless they know with 100% certainty that they can do it perfectly. The child who rubs out their writing eight times because it's not good enough. The people who seemed very compliant, are very people-pleasy. But then, at the end of the day, goes home and melts down for their parents because you casually said during the lesson, try not to forget your homework tomorrow, which you meant positively and supportively. Those are all RSD responses to. RSD isn't always loud, sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it's hidden away. And here's something important, because this is where schools often go wrong. RSD behaviours get mislabeled all the time. You might hear it being referred to as overreacting or attention-seeking or manipulative or dramatic. But when you frame it as dysphoria, intense emotional pain that's hard to carry, suddenly, the behaviour makes sense. If every correction feels like humiliation, shame, or failure, the reaction isn't over the top. It's logical. It's actually self-protection. And I'm not saying all of the behaviours that I've just listed that they are always RSD. All those behaviours I've just spoken at can also have different causes. But if they are persistent, and especially if the child has a diagnosis of ADHD, always suspect that they might have ADHD or they're on the pathway to a diagnosis, it's definitely something to consider. So now let's look at what all that means for our classroom practice, because this is the important bit. The solution here is not to lower expectations and you don't need to sugarcoat everything. But you do need to adjust how you deliver feedback and how you respond when the child's RSD gets triggered. The first challenge is obviously feedback. Traditional teaching assumes that kids can receive neutral, critical, direct feedback and then take that away and use it to improve their work without taking that feedback personally. And for most kids, yep, that's absolutely fine. But for a child with RSD, that kind of corrective feedback can feel like a personal failure. It can feel like you are rejecting them personally. So the solution isn't to stop giving feedback or they'll never improve. It's to change how we frame that feedback. So here are some strategies. One simple adjustment is switching from you language to we language. So here's an example. Instead of saying you've done this wrong, try saying we need to tweak this bit so it's even clearer. So you're sharing the burden of the criticism. You're keeping expectations high. You're just removing that sense of personal criticism. So shift from you language to we language. Another strategy is to lead with strengths before pointing out the area to improve. Something like you've written a great opening sentence here. Now let's work on this part here at the end. So your main idea stands out even more. You've reinforced their competence, their skill, their achievements, before asking for a change. And you can combine those two ideas, those two strategies. So instead of saying now let's work on the next part so your main idea stands out more, you can say now we need to work on the next part so your main idea stands out even more. And another option is offering them choices. You can say things like would you like me to talk through the change or would you prefer I write it down and then you have a go based on that? Why does that work? Because choice restores control. Control reduces threat and it reduces anxiety. Threat reduction keeps the nervous system out of meltdown mode, out of survival mode. And choice as a bonus can also make the solution and the change look simple and easy to achieve. It's not a big thing. The second challenge we need to deal with is what happens after the big emotional reaction because when a child with RSD explodes or shuts down, they often experience deep shame afterwards. RSD isn't just about the reaction. It's about the emotional fallout that follows. The self-hate, the damage. Exploding a mistake with their work and turning it into them, personally having an unlikable identity or a failing identity. So the repair conversation here matters just as much as the incident itself. And here's a simple way to repair that RSD sensitive. After things have cooled down, start by reconnecting. Yes, I've said start with connection before correction to quote Kim Golding over and over and over in this podcast. But it's so important and it's important in this case too. So connect with your student. Briefly, warmly and calmly. Say things like that moment earlier look really hard for you. What was your experience of it? I'm interested. Let them tell you their interpretation of the conversation, which is often something like you were angry or you thought my worker was rubbish. And then clarify, look, when I said X, what I meant was and then make it clear that you like them as a person and your comment was to help them become the best they can be. It wasn't to knock them down. It came from a place of care. Now that's different from telling someone their work isn't good enough. That kind of conversation helps them separate the criticism, which they need to improve and develop from their identity. We're saying that moment was tough but it doesn't change what I think of you. I like you. I think you're a really capable student which just needed some corrections with the work and we'll work through it together. It's about the work. It's not about you as an individual. And by the way, that conversation, it's something you're going to have to have over and over and over. It isn't the work of one interaction. It's the work of dozens and dozens. But in time, those 22nd conversations can prevent hours of shame spirals. And the third area to look at is classroom culture. The environment matters. Public comparisons, things like sticker charts, traffic light charts, public warnings, happy and sad cloud dojo points. They can be brutal for kids with RSD. If you call out a child's name for a warning in front of 30 peers, bang up a negative dojo, which comes with the sound of a claxon, you might as well press the big red panic button in their brain. But there's a distinction here. It's not about avoiding accountability. You're letting the child do whatever they want. It's about keeping the accountability, private and discreet as adults in the workplace. We prefer to be praised in public. But if a manager's got a criticism, some negative feedback for us, we prefer it to be done in private, not in front of our peers. So let's follow that approach here. Give quiet prompts, quiet conversations about change in correction and what needs to improve. And if you want to lower the threat of rejection across the whole classroom, start modeling, making mistakes yourself. Get something wrong on the board. Either intentionally or unintentionally, when it happens, laugh it off, correct it calmly. And then talk about how the mistake made you feel and how you as an adult are going to deal with it. When you do that, when you talk that through, you're making your hidden internal thoughts and feelings external. So your students can hear the process. You're showing that errors aren't disastrous, they're normal. And as an adult, this is part of demonstrating the culture that we want our students to buy into. Especially in the modern world, in the social media world, where we're surrounded by perfectionism, where everyone shows off the highlight reels of their lives with beauty filters and Photoshopped pictures and everything's been AI to the nth degree to make our lives like amazing on social media, show your kids in the classroom how real life is actually messy and success involves missteps and mistakes and failure and then narrate how we can cope with that. And one final point, if you think a student is showing strong signs of RSD, talk to your Senko, talk to parents, don't diagnose. Now that is absolutely not your job or the job of this podcast, but do share the kind of behaviors you're seeing and hearing. And then work together between you to plan consistent ways of giving feedback, managing incidents and supporting the child emotionally because when we get consistent to cross adults at home and school, that massively lowers stress for children with RSD. All right, time to wrap things up. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria is real. It's intense emotional pain triggered by criticism or perceived failure and it's incredibly common in students with ADHD. And the research, it backs that up. In class, that might look like explosions, shutdowns, perfectionism, argumentativeness or withdrawal. But when we, as the adults, are just how we give feedback, how we support emotional repair, and how we structure the classroom environment, we can help those people feel safe enough to learn and develop while still keeping expectations high. And before I close, here's a final reflection question for you. Think of one pupil who seems to overreact to feedback. What's one small change that you can make this week, either in how you phrase your feedback, or how you reconnect after a difficult moment? And ask yourself, what difference would it make for them? And also, what difference would it make for you? If you've enjoyed today's episode, remember to subscribe so you get future episodes automatically. And if you can spare a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify or share this podcast on your socials or with colleagues who need to hear about this, it genuinely helps other educators find the show. And if you haven't already, download your free copy of the SCND Behaviour Handbook by heading over to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/sndhyphenhandbook. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/sndhyphenhandbook. It's a practical guide with fact sheets on conditions like ADHD and ACES and trauma, plus a behavior analysis tool that helps you connect behavior you're seeing in the classroom to underlying needs. Again, it's not a diagnostic tool, and it's not meant to be. The point of the guide is to give educators the information they need to be curious and think more deeply about the behavior that they're seeing in the classroom to kickstart early intervention for the kids who need it and to get the right professionals involved to support them. That's it for this week. Keep going, keep supporting your pupils and keep being the role model that your students need to understand mistakes in how we cope in the real world, even if your world's best dad trophy was produced by a questionable manufacturer from Amazon just like mine. But my ego is small. My self-esteem is low. And I'll take that trophy. I'll take that positive feedback wherever I can find it. It's still on my bedside table. Take care, and I'll see you next time on school behavior secrets. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)