What's the Deal with ADHD?
Krzysztof Więcek on Living with ADHD
At a basic level, ADHD can be understood as a condition in which the front part of the brain is supposed to manage the rest, but struggles to do so. That’s why people with ADHD experience difficulties in directing their thoughts, controlling attention, remembering or recalling information on demand (their memory itself is fine, but managing it isn’t always), regulating emotions and impulses, sitting still (poor control over the motor cortex), and more.
The thing is, different people can struggle with some aspects more than others. Someone might have trouble remembering commitments, while another person finds it hard to regulate emotions but has no issues with memory. This leads to ADHD/ADD presenting a variety of symptoms depending on the individual.
Imagine you have asthma but live in a world where running is the most important thing in life. From childhood, you learn that to succeed as an adult, you must be a good runner. At school, every lesson is some form of physical education.
When you get home, you have more exercises to do. Almost all your responsibilities involve physical activity. You must constantly be in motion – it’s what the world expects. The problem is, you have undiagnosed and untreated asthma. How would you feel about yourself and your performance in such a world? Would you feel fulfilled and confident?
Most likely, you’d feel like you’re never good enough, always behind on tasks, and that everything is generally harder than it should be. This is essentially what it’s like to live with ADD/ADHD. In our world, we’re not required to run constantly, but we are expected to use executive functions and skills that ADHD significantly impairs.
Every day, we are expected to sit still, pay attention, focus, absorb large amounts of complex information, remember basic things like the name of someone we just met, and manage our emotions and behavior. Unfortunately, because of ADHD, we struggle to meet these expectations. No matter which areas are affected, it can feel like we’re constantly failing or “not keeping up with life.”
If I could ask my patients only one question to assess whether they have ADHD, it would be: “Do you feel like you’re losing at life and constantly failing, and if so, how long have you felt this way?” It doesn’t matter in which specific areas they struggle, but how the challenges caused by ADHD make them feel. The answer is invariably: hopeless.
Because people feel terrible about creating so much disorder in their lives, individuals with ADHD develop adaptive strategies / defense mechanisms to try to reduce the mess or at least feel less overwhelmed. Some of the most common are: perfectionism (if I do it perfectly, I won’t mess up), avoidance (if I don’t do it, I won’t mess up), or denial (I don’t care / it doesn’t matter / someone else made the mess).
This means that not only does ADHD affect different areas for different people, but each person also develops unique coping strategies. Some may become extreme perfectionists with hyper-organization, yet their world collapses when things don’t go as planned. Contrary to popular belief, not every person with ADHD is late; many feel a strong need to be early and experience anxiety at the thought of being late.
Social difficulties are another layer: forgetting what we wanted to say, slips of the tongue, difficulty translating thoughts into words, not focusing on what others are telling us, not remembering what was said, slow processing of what we want to express, or fixating on one response even when it doesn’t fit the context. This adds another layer of “life mess,” now in the social domain, leading to overanalyzing relationships, feeling judged or out of place.
And have I mentioned the enthusiastic starting of many different projects in life, often without finishing them, or abandoning them along the way? Another layer where we mess things up and feel left behind.
Of course, there’s much more to it, but if reading the above made you think this could be about you, you might want to consider taking a screening test or contacting our specialist.
In our centre, we have therapists who are sensitive to this aspect and can effectively support neurodivergent individuals.
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