A list of ADHD symptoms

This isn’t really a blog post in the normal sense. I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was 31, primarily as a result of seeing other people talk about ADHD and realising that their experiences strongly resonated with me. Part of the medical diagnosis process involved me putting together a list of symptoms I experienced. Since then this list has proven useful when talking to other people who think they might have ADHD, as a reference point. It only occurred to me today that I should probably just make the list public.

This list is not exhaustive, nor is it universal; ADHD has quite varied symptoms and no two people are exactly alike. However, if you experience a fair number of these symptoms to a degree that affects your every-day life, then you may wish to investigate further.

• My brain never shuts the hell up. I continuously bounce through topics in my head, 24/7, often in parallel.
• I stim quite a lot. I tap my feet, drum, and make weird noises.
• I talk a lot, and I talk quickly. If you’re familiar with the term “infodumping”, it’s a lot like that, except I’ll also go off on diversions and jump between topics.
• Until I learned to identify and control it, I would often talk over people, talk excessively in inappropriate situations, or take focus away from more important things (I’m still not perfect in this regard).
• Similarly, I can find it hard to identify when someone I’m talking to isn’t really all that interested in what I’m talking about. (note: this is more strongly associated with AuDHD, but there’s a lot of cross-over)
• People talking slowly is excruciating. It is hard to avoid the urge to complete their sentences. I tend to watch video content at faster than 1x speed.
• I typically find small-talk to be awkward and pointless. I just want to get on with the interesting portions of a conversation.
• I am very picky with words when I’m writing. I will often rewrite things a dozen times to get my exact meaning and intent across. Information density is deeply important to me, but I also have a tendency to use a lot of adjectives for emphasis.
• I can’t really pick which task I work on. I get distracted by interesting thoughts very easily.
• I have a pathological lack of ability to engage with uninteresting and unchallenging tasks. There have been many times in my life where I needed to complete a 2 minute task as a prerequisite for getting to do things I want, and I literally sat and stared at a wall in silence for 3 hours instead. This is not a choice; even when I am consciously aware that this is happening, I am unable to force myself to engage with the task.
• I also experience pathological demand avoidance, where I can be in the headspace to engage with a task and then suddenly become unable if someone asks me to do it.
• Every teacher in school used the phrase “intelligent but can’t put pen to paper” to describe me. I was called “gifted”, but had poor academic performance due to a combination of disinterest, lack of challenge, and incomplete or late assignments. I was punished a lot for being “lazy”.
• I constantly pick up new projects and never finish them. As soon as I solve the interesting and challenging problems, my brain loses interest.
• I pick up lots of new hobbies, get deeply invested in them, then my interest wanes. I am impulsive with purchases.
• I have a tendency towards risk taking and potentially dangerous hobbies. I tend to compensate with hypervigilance.
• I procrastinate a lot. Then, when the task has become urgent, I suddenly get a burst of energy to do the task.
• If a task is not urgent, it may go without action for years.
• Deadlines do not motivate me to maintain steady progress on a task, even if the outcome of not meeting the deadline is extremely serious. If the action/reward loop doesn’t fit into a short timeframe, it has no effect on me.
• When I am working on a challenging and interesting problem, I often deeply lose myself in it for many hours. During these episodes of hyperfocus, I have no perception of time (it feels like 20 minutes, it’s been 9 hours), my interoception (internal sense of hunger, thirst, needing the toilet, etc.) is deeply dulled, and I may not even notice that someone has entered the room and spoken to me.
• I find it difficult to wind down. This, along with my tendency to hyperfocus on problems, has previously led to issues with burnout.
• During episodes of hyperfocus I may autopilot conversations without remembering that the conversation occurred.
• Breaking out of hyperfocus is both difficult and unpleasant, especially if it is due to an unwanted interruption.
• I often fully zone out in uninteresting meetings and conversations.
• My memory and recall is strongly associative; when I hear or see something, my brain quickly ties it to other things, in ways that are sometimes unexpected or confusing to neurotypical folks. This also tends to manifest as remembering lots of weird details about stuff.
• When people are talking, my associative recall tends to have jumped several thoughts ahead of the conversation, which plays into the frustration I feel when people are talking slowly.
• I have very little perception of time, and I have very little “feeling” of how long ago events occurred. I can roughly quantise event timings into “today”, “some time in the past week or two”, “probably this year”, and “more than a few years ago”, albeit with only moderate accuracy. If I want to know when something happened, I have to consciously find details within those memories to tie them to key events. This does not tend to affect any forms of short time-keeping, e.g. playing drums at a consistent tempo, which I’m actually rather good at.
• I forget things a lot, even when they’re important to me or to others. This has led to relationship problems in the past.
• I’m terrible at organising. I find it nearly impossible to prioritise tasks.
• I’m frequently late to appointments, both because I forget about them and because I have trouble judging the amount of time that has passed.
• If you tell me your name, I will forget it within seconds. I have hung out with some people daily for months and still never managed to remember their name. However, I do form a near-perfect model of their voice and speech cadence, and can recognise them by it even in a noisy room. (This latter part is not necessarily an ADHD symptom in and of itself, but is better thought of as a coping strategy that I unconsciously developed.)
• I am messy. Clutter does not bother me, and I tend not to even notice it.
• If I put something away in a drawer, I often completely forget it exists. I end up owning duplicates of so many things because I forget I already own them. This happens with everything from USB cables to vegetables. When I moved house I found an expensive logic analyser in the back of a drawer, and I had no recollection of owning it. This symptom is similar to a lack of object permanence, although that isn’t a fully accurate representation.
• I often feel like I haven’t gotten enough done in a day.
• My sleep schedule is deeply inconsistent. I will procrastinate going to bed, wanting to do more things, even if I end up just scrolling social media or watching YouTube. I am tired a lot of the time.
• I have frustration intolerance. This means I get frustrated with things more easily than other people, and the feeling of frustration is extremely strong. I sometimes lash out at people unexpectedly as a result.
• The unconscious coping mechanisms I built in response to these symptoms left me constantly exhausted.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this and you’re thinking “oh shit”, don’t worry, you’re not a lost cause. I spent three frustrating decades not understanding why I had trouble with things others found easy, feeling like I was out of sync with the world’s expectations, and not being able to explain why I couldn’t get anything done. Medication helped alleviate enough of the symptoms that I could stop being constantly exhausted by the coping mechanisms I didn’t even know I was performing on a daily basis. Reading about the condition (I am a fan of the comics created by Dani Donovan and ADHD Alien) and talking with other people who have ADHD helped me build the necessary understanding and vocabulary to be able to communicate more effectively with people who are important in my life, and recognise that I am not the only person who experiences life this way. Support from friends, family, and colleagues helped me feel more comfortable about who I am, and develop more healthy strategies for navigating life. I frequently tell people that getting diagnosed with ADHD was my second biggest life event after getting married, and I truly mean that. My life is immeasurably better for it.