Adulting with ADHD — The Invisible Struggle

Life didn’t get easier after diagnosis. But it finally made sense.

Most people assume that getting diagnosed with ADHD will make things easier. And sometimes, it does. There’s relief, clarity, even a little celebration. But for many late-diagnosed adults, what follows isn’t ease. It’s exhaustion. Not because the diagnosis is wrong, but because the scaffolding that held everything together was masking, overcompensating, and overfunctioning. And when that scaffolding falls away, what’s left is the raw, unfiltered version of life. One we were never taught how to live.

By adulthood, we’re expected to have it together. To pay bills. Maintain relationships. Manage work, home, health, and everything in between. But executive function doesn’t magically appear with age. In fact, for many adults with ADHD, these demands only highlight what’s always been missing: working memory, task initiation, emotional regulation, sustained attention. The very functions governed by the prefrontal cortex, which is consistently shown to develop differently in people with ADHD (Hoogman et al., 2017).

Before diagnosis, I thought I was just bad at life admin. I forgot appointments. Missed deadlines. I poured myself into every project, working flat out to deliver so I could move on to something new. I worked long hours to make up for the constant side-quests. I drank to take the edge off my racing mind. I said yes to everything to stay liked. And I stayed up late, every night, chasing dopamine in the quiet. None of it felt extreme. It was just life. Until the crash came.

That crash wasn’t my first. I had already burned out years earlier in my consulting career, around five years in. I felt stuck in a role that no longer felt interesting. I lost motivation. I went through the motions. But this most recent burnout was different. It happened just after I was diagnosed as autistic. A year earlier, I’d been diagnosed with ADHD. I thought that understanding would help me prevent another collapse. But apparently not.

I couldn’t function. I wasn’t sad, exactly. I wasn’t depressed. I was hollowed out. It took weeks before I could begin to pull myself back together. Later, the ADHD diagnosis helped me understand what had been true all along. The chaos. The inconsistency. The cycles of shining bright and burnout. The way I could be flying high one moment, and utterly incapable in others. But even that didn’t tell the whole story. Because what I’d started to realise was that I wasn’t just ADHD. I was also autistic. And those two wiring systems had been pulling me in opposite directions for most of my life.

ADHD explained the urgency, the novelty-seeking, the spontaneous side of me that chased stimulation and worked best under pressure. Autism explained the need for calm, for structure, for control. One part of me needed constant movement. Another part needed everything to feel safe. The inner tension between chaos and stillness wasn’t just circumstantial. It was neurological. And it shaped everything from my career to my relationships, my routines, and the way I saw myself.

It's not just me... research shows that adults with ADHD face significant challenges across multiple domains of life. Rates of burnout, underemployment, and emotional exhaustion are all higher than average. Emotional dysregulation, a core feature of ADHD not formally recognised in the DSM, has been linked to anxiety, depression, and reduced wellbeing (Retz et al., 2012). Suicide risk is also significantly higher in ADHD'ers. Meta-analytic research shows that adults with ADHD are more likely to experience suicidal ideation, attempts, and completed suicide compared to the general population (Impey & Heun, 2012). Add to that the demands of adult life, with parenting, finances, work stress, relationships and it becomes clear why so many of us feel like we’re doing life on hard mode.

Since diagnosis, a lot has changed. I’ve stopped drinking. I’ve cut out caffeine. I eat well. I exercise. I sleep. These were things that were never feasible for me before. Not because I didn’t want them, but because I couldn’t sustain them. The couple of glasses of wine in the evening was the reason I managed to get to reach a place of peace, and get to sleep. The four coffees and similar number of diet cokes a day gave me the focus I needed in work.

What I didn’t expect was how disorienting it would feel to be without my old coping strategies. I didn’t like them, but at least I knew how they worked. Once I took them away, I was at a loss. No numbing. No shortcuts. Just me. And I didn’t yet know what I needed or how to give it to myself.

That’s the work now. Not just functioning, but learning how to care for myself. Not because something is wrong, but because for the first time in my life, I’m learning that I need to do things for me.

The hardest part of all this wasn’t learning I was ADHD. It was realising that I had no idea what I wanted. I had masked for so long. People-pleased for so long. Adapted and over-functioned and performed. I became the safe pair of hands. The reliable one. The capable one. And somewhere in all that, I lost track of who I was. After diagnosis, there was a kind of emotional freefall. Without the mask, there was no script. And I didn’t know how to live without one.

Since then, I’ve been learning to do things differently. Not just to function. But to feel. I’ve been learning to do things that make me happy. Not just useful. Not just productive. But joyful. And that’s still a work in progress, but it definitely involves synthesizers and making music.

As I meet more and more late-diagnosed adults, I hear similar stories. People who are bright, experienced, and overwhelmed. People who say, “I don’t know what I want.” And I don’t hear failure in that. I hear someone who has spent a lifetime surviving on other people’s terms. Someone who is just beginning to ask their own questions.

Diagnosis didn’t fix me. It freed me. Not from the struggle. But from the shame. And it gave me something else too - the chance to use what I’ve learned in service of others. Creating Shifted Minds. Learning to reflect. Writing these articles. I started doing those things to help other people. But somewhere along the way, they started helping me. And that, more than anything, has changed my life.

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Hoogman, M., Bralten, J., Hibar, D. P., Mennes, M., Zwiers, M. P., Schweren, L. S. J., ... & Franke, B. (2017). Subcortical brain volume differences in participants with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children and adults: A cross-sectional mega-analysis. The Lancet Psychiatry, 4(4), 310–319. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(17)30049-4

Impey, M., & Heun, R. (2012). Completed suicide, ideation and attempt in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 125(2), 93–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0447.2011.01782.x

Retz, W., Stieglitz, R.-D., Corbisiero, S., Retz-Junginger, P., & Rösler, M. (2012). Emotional dysregulation in adult ADHD: What is the empirical evidence? *Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, 12(10), 1241–1251. https://doi.org/10.1586/ern.12.109