ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, is a psychological condition that can cause people to experience issues with focusing, organisation and time management. People with ADHD are often impulsive or spontaneous, and also are frequently creative thinkers and good problem solvers.
No one knows for sure why certain people have ADHD. But health professionals have noticed that the brains of people with ADHD function a bit differently from those of people without it.
In the brain, there are parts that drive your ability to focus (your anterior cingulate cortex) and parts that impact your ability to stop yourself from acting on your thoughts or impulses (your prefrontal cortex).
For people with ADHD, the brain’s activity is a bit lower in these areas (and in a few others) than in people who don’t have ADHD. However, this doesn’t make them any less intelligent or capable. It simply explains why people with ADHD can have challenges with focusing and with organising their lives, and yet be great at creative thinking and problem solving, as we’ll discuss later.
There are three main symptoms of ADHD:
However, a person who experiences these symptoms might not necessarily have ADHD. Many ADHD symptoms are common, and are experienced regularly by people without ADHD. When health professionals diagnose someone with ADHD, it’s because that person is experiencing these symptoms more than other people their age.
Let’s explore how these main symptoms can affect the everyday lives of people with ADHD.
People with ADHD can find it tricky to focus or concentrate on certain things. For example, they may:
On the bright side: The same factors in the brain that cause people with ADHD to feel distracted can also cause them to be better at ‘divergent thinking tasks’ such as brainstorming.
People with ADHD are less likely to consider the long-term positive or negative results of their actions, like the results of an assignment that’s due in two weeks. Instead, they are more concerned with the immediate or short-term outcomes of their behaviours. Here’s how this can affect the lives of people with ADHD:
On the bright side: People with ADHD may be more likely to do something worthwhile, such as start a new project or a new hobby, because they’ll be less inclined to think far ahead and be discouraged by the work or planning it might involve.
People with ADHD often act on the basis of their thoughts at any given moment. This can result in their:
On the bright side: A person who often acts impulsively might also be able to live more ‘in the moment’ than other people and not worry about the future or things they can’t control.
Health professionals talk about three main types of ADHD: hyperactive/impulsive, inattentive/distractible, and combined.
These types help health professionals and people with ADHD to understand their condition and treat issues that are going on with them. However, people with a certain type of ADHD can still experience symptoms that are common to the other types.
You may have heard about attention deficit disorder, a condition similar to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. However, these days, health professionals use one term, ‘ADHD’, to refer to both of these conditions, and the term ‘ADD’ isn’t used any more. In effect, they mean the same thing.
People with ADHD are aware of how they can be affected by their symptoms at work and school. But they might not be aware of how their condition can affect other parts of their life. Here are a few examples:
To learn more about how ADHD can affect your life outside of work and school, and things you can do to feel better, check out our article here.
These days, young people are gaining a greater awareness and understanding of ADHD, due to the amount of information that’s available on the web and social media. Many of them are curious about whether they might have ADHD, which could explain some of the real challenges they are experiencing in their everyday life. If you are wondering about this, that’s a good thing – it means you’re taking steps to learn more about yourself and your mental health.
However, ADHD can’t be diagnosed through online forms, quizzes or articles. In fact, it’s a condition that GPs and most psychologists can’t diagnose – it’s a job usually left to ADHD specialists. As we’ll discuss in the next section, this process can be helpful, but it can also be a long and expensive one.
If you’re wondering if you have ADHD, check out our article here for more information.
If you haven’t been diagnosed with ADHD, but face challenges like the ones described above, that doesn’t make your experience any less real or important.
If you’ve been struggling with symptoms of ADHD, one of the most helpful things you can do is get help from a psychiatrist, psychologist or other mental health professional.
Psychiatrists are a popular option for people looking to get help with ADHD. This is because they are the only mental health professionals who can prescribe medicines that are specifically designed to help with ADHD. To be prescribed medication, you’ll need to receive an assessment for ADHD, which may take place at a specialist ADHD clinic.
If you’re under 18, you may get help from a paediatrician who is qualified to diagnose ADHD and prescribe medication to help manage it.
This path can be immensely rewarding for some, but it can also be expensive and take a long time. In Australia, ADHD diagnostic clinics are rare and so it can take months or more to be assessed.
Medication can be an effective way to manage ADHD symptoms, if it is used alongside help from a mental health professional and practical methods such as those listed in this article below.
There are two main types of medications used to treat ADHD:
Many people who use these medications have found them helpful, but not a ‘cure’ to the challenges they face. Some spend months or years trying different medications. Others experience too many side effects or don’t get enough benefit and stop taking them entirely.
For many people who successfully manage their ADHD symptoms, the best solution is some combination of help from medicine, mental health professionals and practical self-directed management techniques, which we talk about below.
Other mental health professionals such as psychologists, social workers, peer workers and counsellors can’t prescribe ADHD medications, but they can be a helpful resource for managing ADHD symptoms. They can:
Whether you’ve been diagnosed with ADHD or have noticed that you’re experiencing some of the symptoms, there are lots of practical strategies to help you gain a greater amount of control in life.
As we’ve discussed, if you feel distracted often, it’s not your fault. It’s not something you’re choosing to experience.
In fact, some psychological research shows us that attaching a feeling of negative judgement gives ‘power’ to these distracting thoughts and makes it harder to break away from them.
Instead of saying something like ‘I need to stop getting distracted’, tell yourself something along the lines of: ‘That’s okay. I’ll just get back to what I was doing.’
If you’re having trouble focusing on one particular activity or task, try different ways of going about it.
Timers can be a really helpful way to stay on track if you’re feeling distracted. A good way to use timers is the ‘pomodoro method’, where you set a 25-minute timer to focus on your task, and after that’s done you set a 5-minute timer to relax and do whatever you want.
According to health professionals, people with ADHD are less responsive to positive or negative outcomes that are far in the future. One way to get around this is to break down big tasks into smaller ones that will provide that sense of short-term validation.
This can work in a large-scale sense, such as breaking up a 2,000-word assignment into five 400-word parts. But it can also work on a smaller scale, such as by breaking up that 400-word section you’d like to write into ten 40-word parts.
This strategy works because you can get a feeling of accomplishment or validation once you achieve any goal, even a small one. That positive feeling can snowball into a sense of ‘momentum’, which can then help to keep you going.
By now, you might be aware of all kinds of digital tools that can help you organise your life, such as Notion, Google Calendar or Any.do. These tools can be helpful, but like any tool, it depends on how you use them. You might have used one of these tools for a few weeks, felt great, and then stopped using it, after which you became disorganised again.
Instead of thinking about what you’ve done wrong (i.e. ‘This stuff never works. I can never stay organised’), think about why you weren’t able to stick with that tool. If it felt too time-consuming or cumbersome, try a more lightweight solution, such as writing your tasks down in a notebook or daily planner.
One helpful free tool for organising your life is Habitica. It works like a video game by giving you rewards such as coins and XP for getting tasks done and organised. This can help to reward your brain for completing short-term tasks (e.g. writing an introduction for an assignment), which can help you to achieve a longer term goal (e.g. completing an essay that’s due in two weeks).
Some studies have reported that men are diagnosed with ADHD at higher rates than women are. However, research like this only tells us the rates of people who are diagnosed – if you’re not a man, it doesn’t mean that you’re less likely to have ADHD.
As we mentioned earlier, professionals refer to three types of ADHD: hyperactive (characterised by restlessness and high energy levels), inattentive (characterised by distractedness and forgetfulness) and combined (with features of both). All genders experience these different types of ADHD.
However, women, and people who were ‘assigned as female at birth’ (AFAB) are more likely than men to experience the ‘inattentive’ type. This type is less visible to teachers and parents because it doesn’t impact as much on families and classrooms as the ‘hyperactive’ type. This may explain why in the past, men have been diagnosed with ADHD at higher rates.
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ADHDSpeaking to someone about your problems can be the first steps to a solution.
