Why Adult ADHD Often Leads To Anxiety & Depression
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ADHD’s Knock-On Effects On Mental Health
We’ve written before about ADHD in adult life, often late-diagnosed because it’s not quite what people think it is:
In women in particular, it can get missed and/or misdiagnosed:
Miss Diagnosis: Anxiety, ADHD, & Women
…but what we’re really here to talk about today is:
It’s the comorbidities that get you
When it comes to physical health conditions:
- if you have one serious condition, it will (usually) be taken seriously
- if you have two, they will still be taken seriously, but people (friends and family members, as well as yes, medical professionals) will start to back off, as it starts to get too complicated for comfort
- if you have three, people will think you are making at least one of them up for attention now
- if you have more than three, you are considered a hypochondriac and pathological liar
Yet, the reality is: having one serious condition increases your chances of having others, and this chance-increasing feature compounds with each extra condition.
Illustrative example: you have fibromyalgia (ouch) which makes it difficult for you to exercise much, shop around when grocery shopping, and do much cooking at home. You do your best, but your diet slips and it’s hard to care when you just want the pain to stop; you put on some weight, and get diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, which in time becomes diabetes with high cardiovascular risk factors. Your diabetes is immunocompromising; you get COVID and find it’s now Long COVID, which brings about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, when you barely had the spoons to function in the first place. At this point you’ve lost count of conditions and are just trying to get through the day.
If this is you, by the way, we hope at least something in the following might ease things for you a bit:
- Stop Pain Spreading
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Eat To Beat Chronic Fatigue (While Having The Limitations Of Chronic Fatigue)
- When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
It’s the same for mental health
In the case of ADHD as a common starting point (because it’s quite common, may or may not be diagnosed until later in life, and doesn’t require any external cause to appear), it is very common that it will lead to anxiety and/or depression, to the point that it’s perhaps more common to also have one or more of them than not, if you have ADHD.
(Of course, anxiety and/or depression can both pop up for completely unrelated reasons too, and those reasons may be physiological, environmental, or a combination of the above).
Why?
Because all the good advice that goes for good mental health (and/or life in general), gets harder to actuate when one had ADHD.
- “Strong habits are the core of a good life”, but good luck with that if your brain doesn’t register dopamine in the same way as most people’s do, making intentional habit-forming harder on a physiological level.
- “Plan things carefully and stick to the plan”, but good luck with that if you are neurologically impeded from forming plans.
- “Just do it”, but oops you have the tendency-to-overcommitment disorder and now you are seriously overwhelmed with all the things you tried to do, when each of them alone were already going to be a challenge.
Overwhelm and breakdown are almost inevitable.
And when they happen, chances are you will alienate people, and/or simply alienate yourself. You will hide away, you will avoid inflicting yourself on others, you will brood alone in frustration—or distract yourself with something mind-numbing.
Before you know it, you’re too anxious to try to do things with other people or generally show your face to the world (because how will they react, and won’t you just mess things up anyway?), and/or too depressed to leave your depression-lair (because maybe if you keep playing Kingdom Vegetables 2, you can find a crumb of dopamine somewhere).
What to do about it
How to tackle the many-headed beast? By the heads! With your eyes open. Recognize and acknowledge each of the heads; you can’t beat those heads by sticking your own in the sand.
Also, get help. Those words are often used to mean therapy, but in this case we mean, any help. Enlist your partner or close friend as your support in your mental health journey. Enlist a cleaner as your support in taking that one thing off your plate, if that’s an option and a relevant thing for you. Set low but meaningful goals for deciding what constitutes “good enough” for each life area. Decide in advance what you can safely half-ass, and what things in life truly require your whole ass.
Here’s a good starting point for that kind of thing:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
And this is an excellent way to “get the ball rolling” if you’re already in a bit of a prison of your own making:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
If things are already bad, then you might also consider:
- How To Set Anxiety Aside and
- The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about getting out of depression
And if things are truly at the worst they can possibly be, then:
How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)
Take care!
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How to Think More Effectively – by Alain de Botton
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Our brain is our most powerful organ, and our mind is an astonishing thing. So why do we sometimes go off-piste?
The School of Life‘s Alain de Botton lays out for us a framework of cumulative thinking, directions for effort, and unlikely tools for cognitive improvement.
The book especially highlights the importance of such things as…
- making time for cumulative thinking
- not, however, trying to force it
- working with, rather than in spite of, distractions
- noting and making use of our irrationalities
- taking what we think/do both seriously and lightly, at once
- practising constructive self-doubt
The style is as clear and easy as you may have come to expect from Alain de Botton / The School of Life, and yet, its ideas are still likely to challenge every reader in some (good!) way.
Bottom line: if you would like what you think, say, do to be more meaningful, this book will help you to make the most of your abilities!
Click here to check out How To Think More Effectively, and upgrade your thought processes!
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Smart Hearing – by Katherine Bouton
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The author’s hearing loss began in her 30s, and now she’s in her 70s with even less hearing, and/but much more experience. Having worked at the Hearing Loss Association of America for much of that time, she has a lot to share.
This book is a practical guide to adult-onset hearing loss, and aims to help the reader navigate not just the difficulties inherent to the condition, but also the complexities around it that are largely societal, administrative, financial, and so forth.
She advocates for early intervention where possible, and that most people in the early stages of hearing loss don’t realize what’s happening. They will tend to just blame the noisy environment, or the speaker, for example. And beyond just hearing tests, she recommends specifics that you might not have heard of, such as the speech-in-noise test.
With regard to technology, she covers the various options,and also ways to pay for them (because Medicare won’t)—which latter is specific to the US, so if you’re from somewhere else, then probably a) this advice won’t help, but b) you probably won’t need it, as most places have more comprehensive healthcare coverage.
The style is quite personal while remaining professional; she often uses her own story as an illustration, but covers experiences other than hers just as thoroughly, so that no major variant of hearing loss gets overlooked.
Bottom line: if you and/or a loved one aren’t hearing/understanding auditory things so well as you used to, this book can help guide you into a position of more practical empowerment, without the need for quite so much trial and error as you might otherwise find alone.
Click here to check out Smart Hearing, and live better with hearing loss!
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The Conquest of Happiness – by Bertrand Russell
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When we have all our physical needs taken care of, why are we often still not happy, and what can we do about that?
Mathematician, philosopher, and Nobel prizewinner Bertrand Russell has answers. And, unlike many of “the great philosophers”, his writing style is very clear and accessible.
His ideas are simple and practical, yet practised by few. Rather than taking a “be happy with whatever you have” approach, he does argue that we should strive to find more happiness in some areas and ways—and lays out guidelines for doing so.
Areas to expand, areas to pull back on, areas to walk a “virtuous mean”. Things to be optimistic about; things to not get our hopes up about.
Applying Russell’s model, there’s no more “should I…?” moments of wondering which way to jump.
Bottom line: if you’ve heard enough about “how to be happy” from wishy-washier sources, you might find the work of this famous logician refreshing.
Click here to check out The Conquest of Happiness, and see how much happier you might become!
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How Much Weight Gain Do Antidepressants Cause?
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There’s a lot of talk in the news lately about antidepressants and weight gain, so let’s look at some numbers.
Here’s a study from July 2024 that compared the weight gain of eight popular antidepressants, and pop-science outlets have reported it with such snippets as:
❝Bupropion users were approximately 15–20% less likely to gain a clinically significant amount of weight than those taking the most common medication, sertraline.
The researchers considered weight gain of 5% or more as clinically significant.❞
Read in full: Study compares weight gain across eight common antidepressants
At this point, you might (especially if you or a loved one is on sertraline) be grabbing a calculator and seeing what 5% of your weight is, and might be concerned at the implications.
However, this is a little like if, in our This or That section, we were to report that food A has 17x more potassium than food B, without mentioning that food A has 0.01mg/100g and food A has 0.17mg/100g, and thus that, while technically “17x more”, the difference is trivial.
As a quick aside: we do, by the way, try to note when things like that might skew the stats and either wipe them out by not mentioning that they contain potassium at all (as they barely do), or if it’s a bit more, describing them as being “approximately equal in potassium” or else draw attention to the “but the amounts are trivial in both cases”.
Back to the antidepressants: in fact, for those two antidepressants compared in that snippet, the truth is (when we go looking in the actual research paper and the data within):
- sertraline was associated with an average weight change of +1.5kg (just over 3lb) over the course of 24 months
- bupropion was associated with an average weight change of +0.5kg (just under 1lb) over the course of 24 months
Sertraline being the most weight-gain-inducing of the 8 drugs compared, and bupropion being the least, this means (with them both having fairly even curves):
- sertraline being associated with an average weight change of 0.06kg (about 2oz) per month
- bupropion being associated with an average weight change of 0.02kg (less than 1oz) per month
For all eight, see the chart here in the paper itself:
Medication-Induced Weight Change Across Common Antidepressant Treatments ← we’ve made the link go straight to the chart, for your convenience, but you can also read the whole paper there
While you’re there, you might also see that for some antidepressants, such as duloxetine, fluoxetine, and venlafaxine, there’s an initial weight gain, but then it clearly hits a plateau and weight ceases to change after a certain point, which is worth considering too, since “you’ll gain a little bit of weight and then stay at that weight” is a very different prognosis from “you’ll gain a bit of weight and keep gaining it forever until you die”.
But then again, consider this:
Most adults will gain half a kilo this year – and every year. Here’s how to stop “weight creep”
That’s more weight gain than one gets on sertraline, the most weight-gain-inducing antidepressant tested!
What about over longer-term use?
Here’s a more recent study (December 2024) that looked at antidepressant use over 6 years, and found an average 2% weight gain over those 6 years, but it didn’t break it down by antidepressant type, sadly:
…which seems like quite a wasted opportunity, since some of the medications considered are very different, working on completely different systems (for example, SSRIs vs NDRIs, working on serotonin or norepinephrine+dopamine, respectively—see our Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet for more about those) and having often quite different side effects. Nevertheless, the study (despite collecting this information) didn’t then tabulate the data, and instead considered them all to be the same factor, “antidepressants”.
What this study did do that was useful was included a control group not on antidepressants so we know that on average:
- never-users of antidepressants gained an average of 1% of their bodyweight over those 6 years
- users-and-desisters of antidepressants gained an average of 1.8% of their bodyweight over those 6 years*
- continuing users of antidepressants gained an average of 2% of their bodyweight over those 6 years
*for this group, weight gain was a commonly cited reason for stopping taking the antidepressants in question
Writer’s anecdote: I’ve been on mirtazapine (a presynaptic alpha2-adrenoreceptor antagonist which increases central noradrenergic and serotonergic neurotransmission) for some years and can only say that I wish I’d been on it decades previously. I requested mirtazapine specifically, because I’m me and I know my stuff and considered it would most likely be by far the best fit for me out of the options available. Starting at a low dose, the only meaningful side effect was mild sedation (expected, and associated only with low-dose use); increasing after a couple of weeks to a moderate dose, that side effect disappeared and now the only remaining side effect is a slight dryness of the mouth, which is fine, as it ensures I remember to stay hydrated 🙂 anyway, my weight hasn’t changed (beyond very small temporary fluctuations) in the time I’ve been on mirtazapine. Disclaimer: the plural of anecdote is not data, and I can only speak for my own experience, and am not making any particular recommendation here. Your personal physiology will be different from mine, and may respond well or badly to any given treatment according to your own physiology.
Further considerations
This is touched on in the “Discussion” section of the latter paper (so do check that out if you want all the details, more than we can reasonably put here), but there are other factors to consider, for example:
- whether people were underweight/healthy weight/overweight at baseline (sometimes, a weight gain can be a good thing, recovering from an illness, and in the case of the illness that is depression, weight can swing either way)
- antidepressants changing eating and exercise habits (generally speaking: more likely to eat more and exercise more)
- body composition! How did they not cover this (neither paper did)?! Muscle weighs more than fat, and improvements in exercise can result in an increase in muscle and thus an increase in overall weight.
As researchers like to say, “this highlights the need for more high-quality studies to look into…” (and then the various things that went unexamined).
Want to know more?
Check out our previous main feature:
Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!
Take care!
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Burn – by Dr. Herman Pontzer
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We all have reasons to want to focus on our metabolism. Speed it up to burn more fat; slow it down to live longer. Tweak it for more energy in the day. But what actually is it, and how does it work?
Dr. Herman Pontzer presents a very useful overview of not just what our metabolism is and how it works, but also why.
The style of the book is casual, but doesn’t skimp on the science. Whether we are getting campfire stories of Hadza hunter-gatherers, or an explanation of the use of hydrogen isotopes in metabolic research, Dr. Pontzer keeps things easy-reading.
One of the main premises of the book is that our caloric expenditure is not easy to change—if we exercise more, our bodies will cut back somewhere else. After all, the body uses energy for a lot more than just moving. With this in mind, Dr. Pontzer makes the science-based case for focusing more on diet than exercise if weight management is our goal.
In short, if you’d like your metabolism to be a lot less mysterious, this book can help render a lot of science a lot more comprehensible!
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Younger Next Year: The Exercise Program – by Chris Crowley & Dr. Henry Lodge
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We previously reviewed the same authors’ original “Younger Next Year”, and now here’s the more specific book about exercise for increasing healthspan and reversing markers of biological aging, going into much more detail in that regard.
How much more? Well, it’s a very hand-holding book in the sense that it walks the reader through everything step-by-step, tells not only what kind of exercise and how much, but also how to do, what things to do to prepare, how to avoid not erring in various ways, what metrics to keep an eye on to ensure you are making progress, and more.
There are also whole sections on specific common age-related issues including osteoporosis and arthritis, as well as how to train around injuries (especially of the kind that basically aren’t likely to ever fully go away).
As with the previous book, there’s a blend of motivational pep talk and science—this book is heavily weighted towards the former. It has, however, enough science to keep it on the right track throughout. Hence the two authors! Crowley for motivational pep and training tips, and Dr. Lodge for the science.
Bottom line: if you’d like to be biologically younger next year, that exercise will be an important component of that, and this book is really quite comprehensive for its relative brevity (weighing in at 176 pages).
Click here to check out Younger Next Year: The Exercise Program, and make that progress!
Don’t Forget…
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