I have ADHD as an adult and why you might have it too

It all used to be kind of a joke, back then. You know those twitchy, jumpy kids that can’t sit still, can’t focus for more than 2 seconds and start telling you 30 stories at the same time and never come to a conclusion? “Boy that kid sure got some ADHD!”
Well, I think the saying goes: If you point one finger, there are 3 pointing back. Something like that. I forgot to look it up…I got ADHD…as an adult.

Let’s be totally honest, you definitely wouldn’t be searching for this if you didn’t have a teensy tiny suspicion you might have it too.

Here’s a list of the most common symptoms and key giveaways you might have ADHD as an adult, according to NHS UK:

• carelessness and lack of attention to detail
• continually starting new tasks before finishing old ones
• poor organisational skills
• inability to focus or prioritise
• continually losing or misplacing things
• forgetfulness
• restlessness and edginess
• difficulty keeping quiet, and speaking out of turn
• blurting out responses and often interrupting others
• mood swings, irritability and a quick temper
• inability to deal with stress
• extreme impatience
• taking risks in activities, often with little or no regard for personal safety or the safety of others — for example, driving dangerously

A little disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional, I just got diagnosed 2 months ago and once someone explained it all to me, my life kind of made a lot more sense.

From all the symptoms listed above, here are the 7 habits that I see in myself in day to day life, that basically scream ADHD.

1. You can’t seem to get anything done

The mayo clinic defines this as “Disorganization and problems prioritizing” but what it really means is you start something, then you start something else and something else and that goes on and on until you’re so overwhelmed by your scammy To Do list, that you end up watching TV, doom-scrolling on TikTok or Instagram or whatever floats your boat.

I start my workday by sitting down at my laptop at the kitchen table, or tangled up lying on the couch like I have just had a terrible accident, either one is fine. I have to check my emails, I need to send my boss that excel sheet she asked me for yesterday, I need to send out a follow up call from the meeting the previous day….the list goes on.

With a determined look on my face I open my mail, open the excel sheet, open my calendar, close my laptop, get up, get a snack and start putting away the dishes that have been sitting in the dishwasher from the day before. How long until I get back to whatever it is I actually need to do? Oh who knows, could be hours, could be a couple of minutes.
Will I, once I get back to it, finish what I have started? HAHAHA no.

2. You’re impulsive

Impulsiveness baby! One of my favourites.
Do you remember in the first Harry Potter movie, when they learn how to ride a broom? When Draco Malfoy picks up Nevill’s rememberall that fell from his pocket when he plummeted from a 50 foot high wall towards the cold hard pavement and then threatens to “leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find”? Harry could have rolled his eyes, leave him to it, tattle it all to Madam Hootch and watch that white haired snob child get expelled before he can say “Quidditch”. But is that what Harry does? NO. Harry gets on his broom and, against Hermione’s brilliant advice to just fucking NOT, chases after Malfoy. In the movies, he got rewarded with the position as seeker on the Quidditch team (which was probably a big enabler for all of his other dumb ideas). You know what would have happened in real life? Yeah, he’d have gotten expelled. The end. Next part: Harry Potter and the difficult job market without basic school education.

Since I am not a witch (I will talk about this tragedy in another article), these moments look much more basic.

I buy shit.

Yeah…classic, isn’t it? I spend money like I just own infinite amounts of it. My biggest problem is clothes. I buy stuff, I like it for a second, then I buy more stuff. Recently, I cleaned out all my clothes and got them sorted and some still had the tags on.

You know how much money that must’ve cost me over the years? I don’t, because I never cared. I just bought.

3. You finish peoples sentences

Probably didn’t expect that one, right? I do this compulsively and I never thought much of it. Doesn’t this even get romanticised? “We know each other so well, we finish each others sentences.” Chances are, you have just been holding each other hostages in a chronic cycle of emotional abuse. Bummer. Just ruined “the Notebook” for you or whatever other garbage romance movie (yeah I said it, fight me!).

Apparently this is a big one when talking about ADHD in adults. At first I thought this was just something people on TikTok use to self diagnose, but no. It was a major factor when I got myself professionally tested and also falls into the ballpark of impulsiveness.

You can’t wait for the person to finish, because you already know what they’re gonna say? This also comes with an incredible impatience with people who do not immediately understand what you’re talking about? Mmmmhm, there we have it.
People, that one is stressful and it’s neither charming nor a quirk. My brain basically rattles the entire time someone else is talking, because I pretend like I’m the one who’s talking.

For all of you who’s social batteries are immediately drained by conversations — maybe we have a pattern here.

4. You have an absolute incapability to “relax”

Think about this:

• lying on the beach
• visiting in the sauna
• meditation
• going to the museum
• watching a movie

Don’t get me wrong, I love the ocean. I’m a very passionate diver and snorkler. I can go to the beach, get my gear on, go on a dive or go snorkeling, maybe repeating once or twice but then I leave.

But there’s apparently people out there who go to the beach and then they just lie there. Sometimes they go for a short swim, sometimes they read a book, sometimes they snack. Please believe me when I tell you: I get a stinging, tingling sensation in my entire body at the sheer thought of doing that. The fact that someone can just stop and…exist…I don’t know how this is physically possible. This is not an exaggeration to make this article more entertaining (is it working though?).

And it’s a pattern:
When I wait for the train, I pace. There is no way in absolute hell that I stand still during that time. I can’t. Instead I restlessly walk up and down the station for however long it has to take.

When I stand in line at the register, I shift from one leg to the other. I fidget with my phone. Man, I don’t even doom-scroll, I just unlock the screen and swipe the home screen back and forth. I tug my fingers, I rub my hands. I drift off into a fantasy world, reliving conversations, imagining different lives, different people, a different worlds. Shift, pace, tug, drift. Shift, pace, tug, drift. Forever.

5. You’re always late or way waaaay too early

One of the most difficult traits to deal with, when you have the pleasure of having ADHD as an adult. I don’t know why and how, but I am notoriously late and even worse: When someone points it out to me, I get incredibly offended. My best friend once said to me, when I told her I would be a couple of minutes late: “hahaha, well, as usual.” That hurt, because it wasn’t for a lack of trying. It wasn’t like I didn’t give a shit and just wasted time doing something else, like I intentionally deprioritised our plans and had no real respect for her time.
What’s funny (and not funny haha, funny weird): I usually find myself ready to leave much too early. Like it would take me 40 minutes to drive to her place, but I’m ready 1,5 hours before. So what do I do now? I wait. Starting do so something else in the meantime would stress me out way too much, so I mostly just sit there and wait. Since I can’t do that for a long period of time, as discussed in the point above, I start playing on my phone, switch on the TV or make any form of noise to keep me entertained. I look at the clock every 5 minutes. No too early, no too early…maybe still a bit too early. Ok maybe now, but maybe I’m still too early. But then I realise half way that I am NOT early, but that I am, in fact, LATE!

6. You forget

Yeah you just…forget. Everything. Immediately after being told. Names, places, birthdays, dates in general, tasks, to dos, whether or not I have turned off the stove, unplugged the hair straightener….

Once I sat up in my bed in horror when I thought I had forgotten to unplug the car (it’s electric FYI). The charger in the garage costs a fortune if you make the mistake to leave it plugged in over night. So at 5 a.m. I got up, got dressed and when I was about to unlock the door, I remembered: The car isn’t plugged in…I had forgotten to plug it in the day before. I forgot that I had forgotten. It was infuriating and I knew this had to stop. Not only, because I don’t fancy jerking awake in the middle of the night like in some cheap horror flick. It makes me incredibly unreliable.

People who forget are not a good source of trust. I am not just saying that to sound dramatic. This I have been told. By my boss, my friends and family…everyone.

7. You have the constant urge to snack

Ok, there can be a million reasons why someone struggles with their weight, noted. But looking at it in addition to everything else, you might as well see it as another indicator you have — drummroll please — ADHD as an adult.

I’ve always struggled with my weight and back then, the possibility of having ADHD was never on the table. Even today, before my diagnosis, overeating was always attributed, by myself and others, to a lack of willpower. A weakness of the mind and the body, as I’m sure Bruce Lee would have put it.
In short: I always just thought I was an inconsequent fat pig with a lack of self control. But since I’m a big girl I brought this up in therapy. That was much after my therapist uttered the suspicion I might have ADHD and he said that this is basically all part of it.

The thing is when I eat or feel the need to eat anything, I feel like I have virtually no control over how much I’ll eat, when to stop, how many times I eat and so on. When I say no control, I mean it seems like I’m watching myself do it and am unable to interfere. I’ll be honest, it makes me feel incredibly ashamed. It’s one of the symptoms I struggle with the most, because it cannot be laughed away as an annoying but kinda charming quirk.

“Haha you’re late as usual.”

“Haha you cannot sit still.”

“Haha you’re so forgetful.”

It’s never “haha you have no control over yourself and demonstrate a pathological eating behaviour”. Never.

Conclusion and final thoughts

Look, ADHD as an adult has to be diagnosed by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about aka definitely not me.

Here’s how my therapist explained it to me, which I didn’t fact check, because I’m paying him to be right about this anyway:

“Simply put, ADHD in adults as well as children is an understimulation of the brain. It’s basically a lack of dopamine, that results in chronic boredom. That’s why you constantly need to start something in order to stimulate it. Food is a great dopamine boost for instance. Every time you start a new task, your brain gets a little rush but it wears off quickly and then falls below a certain level that’s considered normal. Medication is usually able to fix that and most symptoms vanish after you start taking it.”

You know, when he said that, two things happened. The first was an immediate sense of relief. The feeling that I, in fact, wasn’t just chaotic, unreliable, messy and what other label words you got for people like me. It’s not because I don’t give a shit and have no respect for the feelings and time of others. It’s a disorder and you can fix it.
Secondly, I immediately started expecting borderline miracles from the medication I was about to get. So if I do not turn into a skinny snatched bitch and basically found a company equivalent to Apple 2.0 it’s a sham and I declare all of psychology a heap of barking gibberish.

I guess my message is: Having ADHD as an adult can not just greatly impact your daily life, but turns you into someone you will have a hard time having respect for. That’s dangerous. It’s very attractive to blame yourself and to fall into traps like “I just need these 10 tipps to get more organized” or “how to keep track of your tasks”, or, even worse “buy my 6 step course to become incredibly organised”.
Unfortunately for you and me, it’s not that easy. You cannot rely on random people on the internet banging out “life hack” content to fix it. You need a licensed professional and maybe even those funny tic tacs that make the monkeys in your brain go silent.

Consider it…