So you think you have ADHD?
So you think you have ADHD?
If people have called you "lazy" because you missed a deadline you genuinely cared about — or because some days, starting the simplest task feels impossible. If you've been called "chaotic" because your phone disappeared three times before breakfast. If you've been called "too sensitive" because one offhand comment at work landed like a truck to the chest.
You're not broken. You're not careless. You're not dramatic.
You might just have an ADHD brain.
I know I know ADHD is on the tips of everyone's tongue at the moment but it's very misunderstood!
Some people treat it like a superpower. Others act like it is not real at all. And somewhere in the middle are people quietly wondering why life feels harder for them than it seems to for everyone else.
So before we jump into hacks, routines, colour-coded planners, and “just focus” advice…
Let’s actually talk about what ADHD is — and what it’s not.
Three words: pattern, persistence, impact
Forget the stereotype of the bouncing-off-the-walls kid for a moment.
The clinical picture of ADHD comes down to three things:
Pattern — symptoms appear consistently across more than one area of life (not just at work, not just at home).
Persistence — they’ve been present for at least six months, and usually for years.
Impact — they make daily life harder than it should be.
Everyone gets distracted. Everyone forgets things. Everyone has days where the energy is either bouncing off the ceiling or flat on the floor. ADHD isn’t about whether these experiences happen….It’s about whether they happen often enough, intensely enough, and persistently enough to genuinely get in the way.
That’s the distinction the public usually misses.
What ADHD isn’t
It isn’t laziness or low intelligence
This is the most damaging myth. In a large study of public attitudes toward adults with ADHD, researchers found that stigma clusters around the belief that people with ADHD are unreliable, careless, self-focused, and lower in social status, and that ADHD itself is caused by an “incapacity for discipline” or a “bad character” (Fuermaier et al., 2012).
Science tells a different story. The trouble isn’t motivation or intelligence!
It’s differences in executive functioning, attention regulation, motivation, emotional regulation, and self-management. The mental processes that help us start tasks, manage time, organise information, hold things in working memory, shift attention, regulate motivation, and stay emotionally steady under pressure. I like to think of this part of the brain as my personal receptionist but that’s a story for another time….
Recent research found that adults with ADHD score significantly higher than non-ADHD peers on every measured executive-function deficit which includes time management, organisation and problem-solving, self-restraint, motivation, and emotion regulation (Turjeman-Levi et al., 2024). What looks like “not trying” is often a brain working extremely hard with a system that wasn’t designed for the task in front of it.
It isn’t just a kids’ thing
Believe it or not…. It’s not just a kids thing!
For decades, ADHD was framed as a childhood disorder. Something boys grew out of by their teens. We now know that’s wrong. ADHD persists into adulthood for a significant proportion of people who had it as children, and many adults are only diagnosed in their thirties, forties, or fifties. Particularly women, who tend to mask their symptoms more effectively…. When ADHD shows up in restlessness, can't-relax, can't-switch-off, my mind is racing or can’t sit still, people notice. They get sent to clinicians. They get diagnosed. But hyperactivity is the part most people learn to manage as they age. The fidgeting goes internal. The restlessness becomes a buzzing in the background. What's left is attention and attention difficulties on their own don't feel like an emergency. They feel like a personal flaw. So people don't seek help. They just quietly assume they're bad at being an adult.
The “ADHD is for kids” myth is one of the most measurable barriers to adult diagnosis. The same stigma research identified “ADHD is a childhood disorder and not seen in adults” as one of the most common public misperceptions (Fuermaier et al., 2012). If you’ve grown up suspecting something was different but never had the language for it, you’re not alone you’re part of a very large quiet generation.
It isn’t made up, and it isn’t caused by screens or bad parenting
Another stigma dimension the same researchers identified was the belief that ADHD is invented by drug companies, simulated for medication, or caused by too much screen time and not enough sport (Fuermaier et al., 2012). None of this holds up to scrutiny. ADHD is one of the most extensively studied neurodevelopmental conditions in psychiatry, with consistent evidence across decades, countries, and methodologies.
Bad parenting doesn’t cause ADHD either. Family stress can make symptoms harder to manage but that’s not the same as being the source of them.
Of course there are some parents that abuse their kids which results in trauma which then the kids have symptoms of ADHD and but that’s a story for another article…
If you’ve heard me talk before I always say there’s no good or bad but there are some parents out there that abuse and neglect their children in damaging ways which may lead to Trauma for the little one. What we know about trauma now is that it can produce symptoms that look almost identical to ADHD: trouble concentrating, emotional flooding, restlessness, a nervous system that won't switch off. Sometimes trauma and ADHD co-exist. Sometimes what looks like ADHD is actually trauma. Untangling the two is its own conversation, and one we'll come back to in a future article.
Why ADHD can look like something else
This is the part that trips up clinicians, partners, and people with ADHD themselves: many of the visible symptoms such as restlessness, forgetfulness, irritability, scattered focus, exhaustion, overlap heavily with other things going on in a person’s life.
Including:
Burnout. The same executive-function deficits that show up in ADHD (poor time management, disorganised problem-solving, emotional flooding) are exactly what burnt-out brains look like too. In one study, employees with ADHD reported job burnout levels more than a full standard deviation higher than non-ADHD peers, and EF deficits explained much of that gap (Turjeman-Levi et al., 2024).
Chronic stress. Stress narrows attention, shortens fuses, and disrupts sleep — symptoms easy to mistake for ADHD.
Sleep deprivation. A tired brain looks remarkably ADHD-like in scans and behaviour.
Anxiety and depression. Both can produce concentration problems and emotional dysregulation.
Trauma- I’ll give a detailed description in a future article.
This is why context matters so much. The clinical question isn’t “Do you have these symptoms?” ,almost everyone does at times! But “Have you had them for years, across every part of your life, and are they costing you something real?”
It’s also why so many adults with ADHD become unintentional self-medicators. Caffeine is the most socially acceptable option, and one large study found that frequent highly caffeinated drink use clusters significantly with both ADHD symptoms and burnout in young adults (Bae et al., 2019). If you’ve ever wondered why coffee feels less like a treat and more like a survival tool, that’s not a coincidence.
The reframe
ADHD isn’t a defect. It isn’t laziness. It isn’t a moral failing, a parenting outcome, or a marketing campaign. It’s a different way of being wired! One that comes with real challenges and real strengths.
Many adults with ADHD describe their best moments as moments of hyperfocus: hours of effortless concentration on something that genuinely interests them. They’re often quick pattern-recognisers, creative problem-solvers, and effective in a crisis. The same brain that struggles to start an email can write a brilliant proposal in two hours flat once it engages.
Understanding what ADHD actually is…. pattern, persistence, impact … is the start of managing it (and yourself) with the accuracy it deserves. Not laziness. Not character. Just wiring.
A note if any of this sounds familiar
If you’ve read this and recognised yourself, that’s worth taking seriously but it isn’t a diagnosis. An ADHD assessment is something only a trained clinician can do, usually a psychologist or psychiatrist. In Australia, your GP is a good first stop for a referral.
You don’t have to figure this out alone, and you don’t have to wait until things fall apart to ask.
We can face this together!
References
Bae, E. J., Kim, E. B., Choi, B. R., Won, S. H., Kim, J. H., Kim, S. M., Yoo, H. J., Bae, S. M., & Lim, M. H. (2019). The relationships between addiction to highly caffeinated drinks, burnout, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 30(4), 153–160. https://doi.org/10.5765/jkacap.190015
Fuermaier, A. B. M., Tucha, L., Koerts, J., Mueller, A. K., Lange, K. W., & Tucha, O. (2012). Measurement of stigmatization towards adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. PLoS ONE, 7(12), e51755. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051755
Turjeman-Levi, Y., Itzchakov, G., & Engel-Yeger, B. (2024). Executive function deficits mediate the relationship between employees’ ADHD and job burnout. AIMS Public Health, 11(1), 294–314. https://doi.org/10.3934/publichealth.2024015
