ADHD—not just for kids!

Consider the following:

• If a kid has consistent problems paying attention, it’s easy and common to say “Aha, ADHD!”
• If a young adult has consistent problems paying attention, it’s easy and common to say “Aha, a disinterested ne’er-do-well!”
• If an older adult has consistent problems paying attention, it’s easy and common to say “Aha, a senior moment!”

Yet, if we recognize that ADHD is fundamentally a brain difference in children (and we do; there are physiological characteristics that we can test), and we can recognize that as people get older our brains typically have less neuroplasticity (ability to change) than when we are younger rather than less, then… Surely, there are just as many adults with ADHD as kids!

After all, that rather goes with the linear nature of time and the progressive nature of getting older.

So why do kids get diagnoses so much more often than adults?

Parents—and schools—can find children’s ADHD challenging, and it’s their problem, so they look for an explanation, and ADHD isn’t too difficult to find as a diagnosis.

Meanwhile, adults with ADHD have usually developed coping mechanisms, have learned to mask and/or compensate for their symptoms, and we expect adults to manage their own problems, so nobody’s rushing to find an explanation on their behalf.

Additionally, the stigma of neurodivergence—especially something popularly associated with children—isn’t something that many adults will want for themselves.

But, if you have an ADHD brain, then recognizing that (even if just privately to yourself) can open the door to much better management of your symptoms… and your life.

So what does ADHD look like in adults?

ADHD involves a spread of symptoms, and not everyone will have them all, or have them in the same magnitude. However, very commonly most noticeable traits include:

• Lack of focus (ease of distraction)
  • Conversely: high focus (on the wrong things)
    • To illustrate: someone with ADHD might set out to quickly tidy the sock drawer, and end up Marie Kondo-ing their entire wardrobe… when they were supposed to doing something else
• Poor time management (especially: tendency to procrastinate)
• Forgetfulness (of various kinds—for example, forgetting information, and forgetting to do things)

Want To Take A Quick Test? Click Here ← this one is reputable, and free. No sign in required; the test is right there.

Wait, where’s the hyperactivity in this Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder?

It’s often not there. ADHD is simply badly-named. This stems from how a lot of mental health issues are considered by society in terms of how much they affect (and are observable by) other people. Since ADHD was originally noticed in children (in fact being originally called “Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood”), it ended up being something like:

“Oh, your brain has an inconvenient relationship with dopamine and you are driven to try to correct that by shifting attention from boring things to stimulating things? You might have trouble-sitting-still disorder”

Hmm, this sounds like me (or my loved one); what to do now at the age of __?

Some things to consider:

• If you don’t want medication (there are pros and cons, beyond the scope of today’s article), you might consider an official diagnosis not worth pursuing. That’s fine if so, because…
• More important than whether or not you meet certain diagnostic criteria, is whether or not the strategies recommended for it might help you.
• Whether or not you talk to other people about it is entirely up to you. Maybe it’s a stigma you’d rather avoid… Or maybe it’ll help those around you to better understand and support you.
  • Either way, you might want to learn more about ADHD in adults. Today’s article was about recognizing it—we’ll write more about managing it another time!

In the meantime… We recommended a great book about this a couple of weeks ago; you might want to check it out:

Click here to see our review of “The Silent Struggle: Taking Charge of ADHD in Adults”!

Note: the review is at the bottom of that page. You’ll need to scroll past the video (which is also about ADHD) without getting distracted by it and forgetting you were there to see about the book. So:

1. Click the above link
2. Scroll straight to the review!

Answering The Most Difficult Question: How Are You?

Today’s feature is aimed at helping mainly two kinds of people:

• “I have so many emotions that I don’t always know what to do with them”
• “What is an emotion, really? I think I felt one some time ago”

So, if either those describe you and/or a loved one, read on…

Alexithymia

Alexi who? Alexithymia is an umbrella term for various kinds of problems with feeling emotions.

That could be “problems feeling emotions” as in “I am unable to feel emotions” or “problems feeling emotions” as in “feeling these emotions is a problem for me”.

It is most commonly used to refer to “having difficulty identifying and expressing emotions”.

There are a lot of very poor quality pop-science articles out there about it, but here’s a decent one with good examples and minimal sensationalist pathologization:

Alexithymia Might Be the Reason It’s Hard to Label Your Emotions

A somatic start

Because a good level of self-awareness is critical for healthy emotional regulation, let’s start there. We’ll write this in the first person, but you can use it to help a loved one too, just switching to second person:

Simplest level first:

Are my most basic needs met right now? Is this room a good temperature? Am I comfortable dressed the way I am? Am I in good physical health? Am I well-rested? Have I been fed and watered recently? Does my body feel clean? Have I taken any meds I should be taking?

Note: If the answer is “no”, then maybe there’s something you can do to fix that first. If the answer is “no” and also you can’t fix the thing for some reason, then that’s unfortunate, but just recognize it anyway for now. It doesn’t mean the thing in question is necessarily responsible for how you feel, but it’s good to check off this list as a matter of good practice.

Bonus question: it’s cliché, but if applicable… What time of the month is it? Because while hormonal mood swings won’t create moods out of nothing, they sure aren’t irrelevant either and should be listened to too.

Bodyscanning next

What do you feel in each part of your body? Are you clenching your jaw? Are your shoulders tense? Do you have a knot in your stomach? What are your hands doing? How’s your posture? What’s your breathing like? How about your heart? What are your eyes doing?

Your observations at this point should be neutral, by the way. Not “my posture is terrible”, but “my posture is stooped”, etc. Much like in mindfulness meditation, this is a time for observing, not for judging.

Narrowing it down

Now, like a good scientist, you have assembled data. But what does the data mean for your emotions? You may have to conduct some experiments to find out.

Thought experiments: what calls to you? What do you feel like doing? Do you feel like curling up in a ball? Breaking something? Taking a bath? Crying?

Maybe what calls to you, or what you feel like doing, isn’t something that’s possible for you to do. This is often the case with anxiety, for example, and perhaps also guilt. But whatever calls to you, notice it, reflect on it, and if it’s something that your conscious mind considers reasonable and safe for you to do, you can even try doing it.

Your body is trying to help you here, by the way! It will try (and usually succeed) to give you a little dopamine spike when you anticipate doing the thing it wants you to do. Warning: it won’t always be right about what’s best for you, so do still make your own decisions about whether it is a good idea to safely do it.

Practical experiments: whether you have a theory or just a hypothesis (if you have neither make up a hypothesis; that is also what scientists do), you can also test it:

If in the previous step you identified something you’d like to do and are able to safely do it, now is the time to try it. If not…

• Find something that is likely to (safely) tip you into emotional expression, ideally, in a cathartic way. But, whatever you can get is good.
  • Music is great for this. What songs (or even non-lyrical musical works) make you sad, happy, angry, energized? Try them.
  • Literature and film can be good too, albeit they take more time. Grab that tear-jerker or angsty rage-fest, and see if it feels right.
  • Other media, again, can be completely unrelated to the situation at hand, but if it evokes the same emotion, it’ll help you figure out “yes, this is it”.
    • It could be a love letter or a tax letter, it could be an outrage-provoking news piece or some nostalgic thing you own.

Ride it out, wherever it takes you (safely)

Feelings feel better felt. It doesn’t always seem that way! But, really, they are.

Emotions, just like physical sensations, are messengers. And when a feeling/sensation is troublesome, one of the best ways to get past it is to first fully listen to it and respond accordingly.

• If your body tells you something, then it’s good to acknowledge that and give it some reassurance by taking some action to appease it.
• If your emotions are telling you something, then it’s good to acknowledge that and similarly take some action to appease it.

There is a reason people feel better after “having a good cry”, or “pounding it out” against a punchbag. Even stress can be dealt with by physically deliberately tensing up and then relaxing that tension, so the body thinks that you had a fight and won and can relax now.

And when someone is in a certain (not happy) mood and takes (sometimes baffling!) actions to stay in that mood rather than “snap out of it”, it’s probably because there’s more feeling to be done before the body feels heard. Hence the “ride it out if you safely can” idea.

How much feeling is too much?

While this is in large part a subjective matter, clinically speaking the key question is generally: is it adversely affecting daily life to the point of being a problem?

For example, if you have to spend half an hour every day actively managing a certain emotion, that’s probably indicative of something unusual, but “unusual” is not inherently pathological. If you’re managing it safely and in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the rest of your life, then that is generally considered fine, unless you feel otherwise about it.

If you do think “I would like to not think/feel this anymore”, then there are tools at your disposal too:

• How To Manage Chronic Stress
• How To Set Anxiety Aside
• How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories
• How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)

Take care!