Is this ADHD or am I just impatient, disorganised and unreasonable?

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I've always been like this and just to preface this by saying that I have largely got it under control; hard experience has taught me I have to deal with it, so I do, but I've always found stuff like this hard and boring to the point of pain, and now wonder if there might be an underlying neurodiversity which makes me find them it unpleasant.

1. I find planning anything ahead unbelievably stressful. For example, booking a holiday. I know the outcome is good, I know it has to be done and I do it. But the planning of it brings me out in a cold sweat. A colleague was telling me he had booked all his holiday out for the next 12 months and it made me feel unwell: both scared of what life like that would be like and also weirdly envious that other people were like that.
2. Checking my diary. If someone asks me to confirm a date with them my heart sinks. This extends to my personal life as well as work: if someone send me an invitation to a wedding in September I would force myself to put it into my diary because if I didn't I would forget about it until the day before. If friends ask me if I'm free on such and such a date I feel weirdly pressured and hassled.
3. Dealing with anything IT related. Let's say IT calls me at work and says they need to install something on my computer. It makes me feel furious at the interuption/distraction and I'll put it off until its absolutely essential to deal with it.
4. Financial planning. Ditto.

I know at a rational level all these things are not only essential but they make life smoother and furthermore failure to do them will get me in trouble. I do them and I largely do them efficiently because I know my failure to do them will inconvenience other people. But I hate them almost to the point of phobia: the thought of doing them makes me want to inwardly scream.

I thought most people were like this until a few years ago when I realised how naturally bad I was at this. Now curious if this could be undiagnosed neurodiversity. I'm 50+ if its relevant.

I have ADHD, diagnosed as an adult. I obviously can't diagnose you, only a professional can, but I can say what I know from my own experience.

Are the things you mention above just some examples of a broader problem, or are they standalone processes which you find tricky? Because my own overwhelming conclusion about ADHD is that it affects absolutely every area of my life. One way or another every single step I take or action I do is influenced by ADHD.

This includes a really wide range of symptoms, including:

• complete time blindness. No ability to 'sense' time passing with any kind of accuracy, no ability to estimate the likely length of a task
• intense sensitivity towards rejection and conflict, manifesting in unwarranted defensiveness and a need to self-justify
• Profoundly inattentive to where objects are, where I have put things etc
• complete inability to remember dates, times, events, birthdays, social plans etc without robust systems in place and help from other people
• paralysing indecision about how to spend time
• task paralysis
• intense perfectionism
• inability to work consistently without the pressure of a deadline
• dangerously impulsive behaviour, particularly around impulse spending. Dopamine chasing behaviour
• zoning out / doom scrolling
• vivid interior life, maladaptive daydreaming
• hyperfixations
• frequent burnout
• feelings of rage and physical anger when stuck in boredom, e.g. in a meeting going on to long or a slow moving conversation

This list is not exhaustive and people with ADHD can exhibit wide ranging symptoms, but if more of it is familiar than not it might be worth speaking to your GP about seeking a diagnosis.

@BeachPossum

Thank you I appreciate your reply. I can relate to a lot of this. The only one on this list which is completely alien to me is the intense feelings of rejection one. I'm really quite thick skinned about rejection. I'm not hugely impulsive, not a big spender etc and reasonably good at controlling finances although I do fantasise about buying things.

Almost everything else on this list is totally me. The one that really resonated is that sense of rage when I'm bored. Unbelievable rage, to the point of feeling like violence. And this manifesting in a compulsion to fill my time with activities and a feeling of overwhelming self-disgust and guilt at being "lazy". (For example I feel appallingly guilty if I watch TV or spend too long on my phone). I feel this compulsion to be productive all the time.

I think it would be worth you exploring things further. Being diagnosed has helped me so much, both in terms of access to resources and in terms of wound me understand that I'm not all of these awful labels - thoughtless / undisciplined / selfish etc. My brain just works differently to those of neurotypical people.

I don’t know if you are or not but I have those feelings about planning. My heart sinks big time and I get the fear when I have to put things in my calendar for months ahead. I feel trapped and miserable. Checking the diary and committing to things also makes me miserable. Funny, like you I only realised a few years ago that not everyone is like this.

My DS is diagnosed with ADHD, I am not- but I do think I have some of the traits, not all.

Sounds like anxeity and menopause to me

On the thick skin thing - I thought I had quite a thick skin but now I realise it is just barriers I’ve put up to protect myself from the fact I am incredibly sensitive to rejection. I just dont let stuff penetrate the outer shell.

That might not be you, but just putting it out there.

This sums it up really well!

I have the opposite to you OP - I HAVE to organise in advance or I can’t relax. If it isn’t written down, with deadlines, it doesn’t get done.

For example I’ve had a personal letter I needed to address fairly urgently - but a week later it’s still on my desk un actioned because I’m blind to it unless it’s in my to do list. And I can’t then motivate myself to do it off the bat - last minute requests and changes to routine stress me out!

When I was younger my school reports always said “really intelligent but needs to apply herself and stop talking and fidgeting” and in secondary I just could not remember to bring the right textbooks, equipment, PE kit etc - I was always in trouble. It only clicked as to why when I was in my 30s, by which time I’d developed a huge amount of coping mechanisms.

I agree with the poster saying it affects more areas of life than just planning. Planning ahead is tricky though because of executive dysfunction. Mostly I find it hard to plan because my sense of time is not very good. I forget things as you said, anything in the future is "mañana", I don't know how long things take so I don't leave the right amount of time for them etc. I used to be late for everything because I was constantly making rounding errors with what needed to get done before I left and assuming I could fit things into this tiny window.

Not everyone has exactly the same set of symptoms. I don't risk seek. I do recognise being conflict avoidant and defensive, interesting to link that with rejection sensitivity. I think people online make too much of rejection sensitivity in general but that might be me being annoyed by a bandwagon.

For me personally a theme has always been that I've been messy and disorganised and struggled to keep my house nice. But some people kind of go the opposite and have to have everything in place or they can't function so it becomes almost an obsessive thing.

I feel exactly the same with you first two points. Other similar things too.

I have no desire to get a diagnosis, but I am acutely aware I am not typical in how I think about things and how stressful I feel about things which 'normal people' don't even register as an issue.

I need to find ways of dealing with my weirdness navigate life, and I do, but sometimes at great psychological cost to myself. But that's just how it is. I don't see how a diagnosis of something would help, as I don't think anyone else should need to do or behave differently to accommodate me.

"I don't see how a diagnosis of something would help, as I don't think anyone else should need to do or behave differently to accommodate me."

I used to feel this way a lot (and often still do!), I can be pretty harsh to myself about how this is 'my problem' and nobody else should have to help. But since diagnoses I do try to give myself more grace and compassion. I would never say that accommodations for any other disabilities were unwarranted or unreasonable, so if I sometimes need accommodations myself that's ok.

This is a very interesting thread. I tick most of the boxes and have long believed I am ADHD. I have always struggled but as my children have come along there’s so much more to juggle and it’s gotten so much harder to manage.
I don’t know where to start with getting a diagnosis and could I even afford it. Even the idea of trying to organise it feels overwhelming. But to not constantly feel like a massive let down to everyone would be amazing. Everyone around me just assumes I have a typical brain. They expect me to be able to do all the things they can do with ease. They have no idea how much mental energy it all takes and how exhausting it all is.

Well around 20% of the population would probably get a diagnosis. If they pay for a diagnosis it’s close to 100% so yes probably.

It’s not like getting a diagnosis of Herpes or something. If you self declare the symptoms you will get the diagnosis. At this point it’s more like a personality type than an affliction.

That’s a bit unkind

Most people who pay for diagnosis get one because who is forking out that amount of money for something they think they don’t have?

No-one is watching a couple of tik-tok videos and thinking “ha yeah I lose my keys sometimes too let’s spend £1000 to see if I can join the ADHD club”.

It's not true that 20% of people would get a diagnosis, where are you getting that from?

The screeners themselves are positive for about 8% of people apparently. Each individual point on the screener only applies to 3-5% of people, which surprised me because they feel like such common traits, but the kicker is the frequency. Also they feel common/familiar to me because I have ADHD and we (people in general) tend to assume others are having the same experience we are unless it's very obviously different.

Yes a high number of people going to private clinics get diagnosed because you go through the screening process first, which would screen out 92% of the population, and because you wouldn't pay that amount of money if you weren't really struggling, which is the other part of the diagnosis.

I don't dispute that there are issues with private clinics but when NHS waiting lists are years long or closed to new patients I'd really rather there be something to fill the gap than no access to help at all.

For me the diagnosis did help me mentally even though I didn't start taking medication until about 7 years later. I can't really explain this except that I just felt like I had a legitimate place in online support groups, reading books, applying the ideas etc.

A journalist who was quite confident he didn’t have ADHD went to a couple of the private clinics and got a positive diagnosis. Figure came from that article but I can’t remember the source.
There is a massive overlap between ‘normal’ behaviours and ADHD behaviours. Many psychologists are very sceptical about it as a diagnosis of anything useful. Absolutely no harm in a bit of self help and reflection and some people will need more help. Most children with a diagnosis have other issues so it’s a bit too broad as a term.

Thanks all, this has been really interesting.

In general I have always been of the view that a diagnosis might not help much. If I do have ADHD its clearly fairly mild and my executive function isn't bad enough to prevent me from doing the things I need to do: I have a senior role in a good company and have been promoted three times, my child is healthy and happy, my finances are in reasonable shape etc. It's not sabotaging my life.

But I have noticed that my colleagues find my behaviour odd and sometimes frustrating. They consider me to be really disorganised because, for example, I can't tell you the room that a meeting a month ahead is booked in. I don't plan that far ahead, partly for the aforementioned reasons but also I don't understand why its necessary to know what room a meeting a long way ahead is booked for, unless it has ramifications for the number of attendees etc. I'm perfectly capable of managing without this information and would prefer to check a week ahead. But I've been told routinely that this makes me disorganised.

My company prizes organisation almost to the point of being a fetish and I personally find it OTT so I have generally worked within it up to a point but refused to get drawn into the sort of timekeeping I consider anal and unecessary. But I was told in a recent annual review that I give off an "aura of chaos" because of things like this. I learned in this review that a junior colleague had complained about me because I had taken two days to diarise an internal meeting which was a fortnight away (because my assistant had been off that day and I hadn't got around to it). She said it had made her life "unbearably stressful". I was aware that the meeting needed to be diarised and had made a note to do it, but I took the view that it could wait 24 hours because I had more urgent priorities. I'm perfectly capable of working without total visibility of everything in 30 minute blocks over the next month, so I was a bit blindsided that she had been so upset about it and it made me question whether I was the normal one or whether she was more normal and I was being unreasonable.

I guess its always interesting dealing with people who have different thresholds around this kind of thing. I'd always assumed that I was "organised enough": not super organised but sufficiently on top of things not to create chaos, but clearly other people see it differently, and I wonder if my perspective is unusual.

Attitudes like this are why I generally don’t tell people I have ADHD. There’s so much judgment and lack of understanding. Of course there’s overlap with normal behaviours and ADHD behaviours. Everyone loses or forgets something at some point. But a lot is NT people don’t understand that for some people it happens all the time, along with dozens of other symptoms, and impacts all areas of their lives. It’s exhausting and not normal.

I knew it would be that episode of Panorama, it always is.

The purpose of that story was to expose the shameful behaviour of certain private clinics putting profits before patients by diagnosing on the basis of inadequate assessments. If your takeaway is that ADHD is more of a 'personality type' than an affliction and that diagnosis isn't useful, you're speaking from a place of prejudice and misinformation.

This is the article about the Panorama episode and it doesn't mention any 20%.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-65534448

I would say the episode in general was fairly misleading. There's no possible way that the journalist could have got the NHS appointment "blind" - because the waiting lists are years long. The NHS assessor knew that he was doing it for a programme. I don't doubt that they followed the correct procedure, but they are human and bias matters hugely. The assumption going in was that this journalist probably does not have ADHD. Whereas the private clinics have the opposite assumption.

Probably there ARE issues with some private clinics and certainly some of the bits of the appointments shown on the programme were concerning but the overall message of the programme seems to be (as you have taken) that ADHD is massively overdiagnosed and is a scam and not a real condition.

BBC said in their response to the many complaints about the programme that this was not the story they were intending to tell. They are merely questioning the efficacy of private clinics. They also explained here that the doctor assessing the journalist was fully aware of the angle of the programme, which makes him even more biased, compared with a doctor who perhaps knew this was a journalist but did not know that they were reporting with the angle of "private clinics diagnose too easily".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaint/panoramaprivateadhdclinicsexposed

The thing is that the impression this programme gave is that these private clinics are handing out excess diagnoses. Whether or not that is true, it doesn't seem like there is a significant effect on the diagnosis or prevalence rate, so the idea that ADHD rates are being inflated doesn't seem to be true. Since that episode of Panorama was released, there has been this very detailed investigation/report (Independent ADHD Task Force) commissioned by NHS England. They also point out a problem with private clinics, BTW. Under "Executive Summary", the point about whether there is under or over diagnosis currently are point 5 and the point about clinics is point 6.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/report-of-the-independent-adhd-taskforce-part-1/

Quotes from report:

5. ADHD under or over-diagnosis in the UK?
England and the rest of the UK have much lower service recognition and treatment rates of ADHD diagnosis compared with other European countries (e.g. Norway, Denmark, Spain). Recent data show a very high level of under-recognition and under-treatment of strictly diagnosed ADHD, with significant inequalities in access to care (e.g. minority groups). For example, for those who meet strict diagnostic criteria for ADHD, fewer than one-third of children have contact with any type of mental health service, and only 15–25% of adults and children obtain pharmacological treatment. This means that demand on services is very likely to continue to rise.

There is also concern by some about potential over-medicalisation and over-diagnosis and a lack of regulation of ADHD service providers as this has been reported in some parts of the world.

Some also raise concerns about ADHD self-diagnosis based on information from social media. However, currently there is no good evidence on what percentage of those waiting to see a clinician have self-diagnosed ADHD using social media and eventually meet or do not meet ADHD diagnostic criteria after a high-quality assessment.

We only know currently that in England, recognised rates of ADHD are lower than the expected prevalence of ADHD.

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[From Appendix 2: Evidence Summary]

1. What is the prevalence of ADHD and is it increasing?
In an English population sample of 2 to 19 year olds the ADHD prevalence was 3%; there is no evidence that the prevalence has increased since 1999.

Meta-analysis of global studies suggest an ADHD prevalence in children of around 3–5%. Geographical location does not influence prevalence significantly so these estimates can reasonably be applied to a UK population. There is no evidence of an increase in the number of children in the population meeting criteria for ADHD diagnosis over time.

For adults, meta-analyses suggest a global population prevalence for ADHD of 2–3%, which could be reasonably applied to a UK population.

2. What is the current level of access to clinical support and is there over or under-diagnosis of ADHD in England/UK?

While English health service records have shown increased recognition of ADHD in both children and adults from 2000 to 2018, the administrative prevalence is reported as 2.55% in boys and 0.67% in girls. In adults it was 0.74% in men and 0.20% in women. As the actual population prevalence in children is 5% and in adults is 2–3%, under-recognition of ADHD remains a problem in England.

Medication rates: English health service records also show that prescription rates of medications to treat ADHD have risen from 2000 to 2018. However, only 0.2% of the 7,655,931 [NHS patients included in a research database] received ADHD medication prescriptions.

Furthermore, the latest data from prescribing studies show that only 25% of children and 15% of adults with ADHD received pharmacological treatment, with regional rates across the UK varying up to 12-fold. The evidence from randomised controlled trials is that 70–90% will benefit from drug treatment so we are under-prescribing ADHD medication in England.

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My comment is long enough but feel free to read the report if you want to know more about the impacts and why it is considered a useful diagnosis by the vast majority of specialists, whatever a handful of psychologists think.