Understanding the Emotional Toll of ADHD in Daily Life
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By PAGE Editor
ADHD is often misunderstood. Most people’s conception of someone with ADHD is a hyperactive boy struggling to focus in school, but otherwise thriving.
However, ADHD is a lifelong condition that affects people of all ages, even after they leave school. It doesn’t just affect someone’s ability to hand in schoolwork on time. The condition has far-reaching effects on patients’ daily lives, taking a mental and emotional toll on the people who have it.
Understanding the emotional toll that ADHD can take makes it easier for you to understand the people you know with ADHD or navigate your own battle with the condition. Here are just a few ways that ADHD affects someone emotionally.
Feeling Overwhelmed and Incapable
One of the toughest emotional battles facing people with ADHD is the battle to feel worthy and independent. ADHD impacts executive function, making tasks that seem easy for everyone else feel like insurmountable obstacles for someone with ADHD. The result is often a cycle of self-blame and self-frustration, where the person feels overwhelmed and as if they are incapable of basic tasks.
This emotional struggle is even worse for people who don’t know that they have ADHD. Before visiting ADHD clinics Brisbane for a diagnosis, many patients have spent their whole lives hearing that they just need to try harder and stop being lazy. For some, a diagnosis is a relief that there is something actually wrong with them rather than an inherent lack of capability. The feelings of guilt and self-deprecation often remain after diagnosis.
Overcoming this emotion of inadequacy is a lifelong battle for people with ADHD. With the right coping strategies and medication, people are able to handle tasks that once overwhelmed them, but that old feeling of not being enough still occasionally rears its head.
Strained Relationships with Loved Ones
A strong support system is important to manage ADHD. However, many people with ADHD never find that support because the condition is so misunderstood. Instead of support, they face judgment and anger from people who are close to them.
ADHD affects people’s relationships. People with ADHD may struggle with time blindness, making them chronically late to hangouts. Many struggle with responding to messages or calls due to a lack of focus, which to an outsider seems like a lack of care. Friends can interpret this as a person not wanting to hang out with them or not being a good friend, while the person with ADHD deeply cares about people, but they just don’t know how to show it.
Navigating a friendship or relationship with someone with ADHD doesn’t mean excusing everything they do because of their condition, but giving them a bit of grace reduces the emotional toll the condition takes on their relationships.
Difficulty Regulating Emotions
ADHD has a wider range of symptoms than most people realise. Besides hyperactivity and inattentiveness, the condition also affects a person’s ability to manage their emotions. The American Psychological Association notes that one common symptom of ADHD is emotional dysregulation. Psychologists have only realised this over the past 15 years.
Emotional dysregulation means that someone with ADHD struggles to manage their emotions. What seems like a simple annoyance to anyone else feels overwhelming to a person with ADHD. A person with ADHD will also struggle more with self-soothing.
The new research into emotional dysregulation helps explain why many children with ADHD are prone to “acting up” or labelled as troublemakers in school. Children already struggle with learning how to understand their emotions, and a child with ADHD will struggle even more and channel that emotion into an intense reaction.
Emotional regulation is also an obstacle for adults with ADHD. This is a reason why common comorbidities with this condition include anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders. Adults with ADHD describe their experiences as feeling things more intensely than others. This means that something such as a fight with a partner or a bad day at work feels more devastating.
It is possible to learn how to emotionally regulate with ADHD. Psychologists help patients learn strategies and understand their emotions. It is just a longer, harder journey than for people without it.
Navigating Big Emotions with ADHD
One of the overlooked challenges that comes with ADHD is its effect on people’s emotions. The condition itself counts emotional dysregulation as one of its symptoms, which makes it harder to recover from bad emotions. Living with the condition causes other emotional problems, such as feelings of inadequacy, fear of disappointing others, and distance from loved ones.
A formal diagnosis of ADHD helps with these emotions. People have a name for what is troubling them instead of feeling as if they are failures. An ADHD diagnosis is also the first step towards finding the help you need, including medication.
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