I know it's unreasonable because you're strangers on the internet, but give me your armchair diagnosis

[Ihaveneedofwaternear]

It's my day off. I can't relax. This is me every day off. Up a height with anxiety. Frozen to the sofa wanting to move. Trying to sort tasks, then feeling overwhelmed by anxiety. On edge that my DH will come down and find me doing nothing and think I'm lazy. Endlessly worried about things I haven't done at work. Yet behind at work because I also have this weird, frozen thing there. Also can't go and buy clothes for myself, not showered today, feel anxious about really simple things like the shopping.

Technically shouldn't be on the edge of my nerves and on the brink of a breakdown, but am because I feel like this all the time.

I know it sounds like an anxiety disorder, but I have nothing to be anxious about - this inability to do things and constant thinking thinking thinking is the main thing that makes life difficult!

Are you like this? What is it? How do you fix it?

Hello there - not unusual for women who are neurodivergent to find that peri brings the ND symptoms - that they may have managed before with hard graft - now find that the executive function deficit really comes to the fore -
we often see peri / menopause age women in mental health services for anxiety / depression, often for the first time in their lives -

therapy for the anxiety / depression can really help -
however - having a GP that gets on with treating the hormonal issue
the ND diagnosis and self compassion around expectations
can really help women see that they are not going mad /
or just not good enough,
that things just inevitably got really out of hand due to the Perfect storm of underlying ND and then meno on top at a time of life where demands are still high and sometimes higher than ever before ….

Sometimes you just have to lean into it. Put on cosy pj's, get into a fresh bed and be an invalid for a day. Sleep, drink tea, watch the good life on your phone and treat it as flu. Please dont start trying to diagnose it, sometimes life is just too much, sometimes its just a visceral response to a bloody shitload of built of stress and suppressed exhaustion. Self care is so important and once you accept you cant function at this moment, it is less scary. And you will gey up again after a rest, it might not be a fun time but it will be ok x

Have a look at Jessica McCabe’s website.

It may be anxiety, burnout, executive function or adhd but there could be some strategies that help there.

I’m in similar boat though some health issues compound it. A meno consultant suggested adhd but I teach send children with adhd and I’m uncomfortable with the diagnosis. However I’ve always been like this to a point and have had to teach myself so many strategies (which I then forget). I can’t prioritise sometimes. Cant tidy. Go off into another world of thinking and get bother done that I need to. Hrt helped a bit but I had tp come off due to breast cancer. (The tamoxifen may be making it worse.)

Very prone to burn out.

I find exercise and sensory stuff helpful. I like the dopamine and the sensory input seems to help my mind. Especially walking, dancing, weights. (Legs supposed to be good for cognition.) I teach send children and we use sensory stimulation to calm, organise and stimulate. I find I need the same.

if I’m honest I went into teaching for the structure 😆

FFS menopause is shit for most people. Why does everything have to be something else?

I’m 57. My therapist suggested I had ADHD a year ago. I was shocked. Then I looked it up. Then I used Right to Choose and had a diagnostic meeting. I have ADHD.

If you can hyperfocus on things so that you forget to eat lunch, but also lose things you just put down and lose your thread in the middle of a sentence, it’s ADHD. Score more points if you have intense emotions, particularly if you feel rejected over something small.

Fortunately there is help and medication. I’m waiting for mine but it explained a lot of my life.

Sounds like ADHD to me.

Might be worth trying anti anxiety meds. Made a massive difference for me.

Really?

I have had points in my life where I have felt like this but very few and not for long.

is this really common?

You sound very similar to me OP. I also looked at ADHD (as in, researched it - never went to the GP or anything) and saw that aside from the symptoms themselves, duration and intensity also factor.

I don’t feel like this all the time so I concluded an ADHD diagnosis probably wasn’t what I needed. What I did do though was use ChatGPT for hacks and asked it to give me ADHD like coping strategies and they have worked for the most part. You’ll have heard them all before I am sure, but having ChatGPT on my phone that would give me an instant answer to my specific issue helped me no end. Sometimes it would suggest small things like ‘just stand up, no pressure to do anything else’ and I’d find that was enough to get me going. I stack certain habits together so I don’t forget to do them (morning time after my coffee is - go upstairs, wash face, brush teeth, make bed, get dressed - for example)
And don’t shame yourself. That burns through too much energy and never helps as it isn’t motivating.

Im now at a time in my life where I am eating super healthy, doing yoga every day, remembering to brush my teeth and shower, keeping up a decent skincare routine, walking every day, haven’t drank alcohol for a while, managing to read entire books etc etc. I never thought I’d be capable of this a year ago. You can do it, you just need to find the key that best unlocks the door.

Similarly, why does every problem we have need to be reduced to ‘it’s your hormones’

This is me. I have Autism and ADHD and always managed ok until perimenopause hit. I got to 42/43 and my life has been falling apart ever since.

I was going to say ADHD as well. And no, you wouldn't necessarily have known by now that you have it, because the image of ADHD that most people have is completely different to what ADHD actually means. I had no idea that I had it until I came across a description of the predominantly inattentive subtype (on MN actually!) about 10 years ago and nearly fell off my chair because it was a list of everything on my "What is wrong with me?!" list.

It's like I'm the opposite of hyperactive - I have 10000 ideas but what I actually do all day every day is predominantly nothing - I could never get started on anything or make myself do things I knew I should do or even wanted to do. I would waste time instead on completely pointless things (like MN ) but just as likely on something like spending 4 hours making a colour coded spreadsheet for meal planning which I would use about twice.

I say could never because I am a bit better now with understanding myself and medication and some structure which works for me, so I can now do some things, but I am still painfully slow at everything compared with what I feel like other people are like, and it's embarrassing.

But no I still don't form habits. I have stopped trying now and aim for consistency in different ways.

I used to have the looping anxious thoughts, but that is mostly gone now. Most of that all went away when I actually could make sense of what my own actions and behaviour were. I think I was anxious all the time because I felt that I couldn't trust myself; I would do the things that people said were helpful to do, like write lists, and then I would lose the list, or forget to look at the list, or forget to add things to the list. I'd set my clock 5 mins late but I'd just factor it into the calculation and be late anyway. Or I'd have an intention to do something and somehow it would never happen and the person I'd promised it to would be upset and then I'd be upset at myself, and when people would say things like "Well it can't have been very important, because if it was important you'd remember!" ?????? What do you MEAN?? Are people supposed to be able to remember things better if they are important? Because my memory in many ways is fantastic - I can remember in a ridiculous amount of detail facts I read in books when I was a child, or the way that somebody said something on a particular day in 1997, down to what they were wearing at the time. But in many other ways it feels completely random, like I'm not in control of it, some things get saved and some just don't, forgetting is not a conscious action, I can't just choose which things to remember. (I do have workarounds and I think some of an explanation for this now.) I would have all this incongruity, like I can think very fondly of a person, yet it does not occur to me to contact them for months on end, or I like it when things are kept nice, but then I would take terrible care of my stuff and feel depressed about it. It's horrible when you can't trust yourself and feel your behaviour doesn't make sense. I had counselling I think 4 different times and I confused them all because I would end the session with these things I was going to do which were going to solve my problems, and then I'd come back the next week and I wouldn't have done them, and I didn't know why. And this was the story for everything - I would know what to do but I couldn't somehow take the first step and do it. This is very typical of ADHD.

The videos by this professor were highly illuminating - this is a good one to start with:

I think this is the thing, isn't it? Most people have felt like this occasionally. Adults with undiagnosed ADHD tend to have that experience though on a MUCH more frequent level. Sometimes just as intensely as anyone having a bit of a crisis of confidence, but often on a lower level just constantly throughout the week, maybe multiple times a day. I have rarely met another adult who was so distressed as I used to get so frequently just wondering how on earth I could be so hopeless, and TBH in every case where I have come across someone else who felt like that, they have later been diagnosed with ADHD.

It's like everyone has to wee sometimes but if you're weeing 20 times in an hour, something is wrong and you should see a doctor. None of the experiences of ADHD are especially unique but it's the frequency and severity which point to there being a problem.

Have you had your B12 levels checked?

Sounds like ADHD to me too. It's a perfectly "normal" path @Ihaveneedofwaternear that you get symptoms drilled out of you by social pressure and expectations of conformity when you are young (which is why the sexism of expecting better behaviour from girls than boys means way more girls than boys get forced into masking their symptoms instead if getting diagnosed). But by middle age the stress of that masking becomes overwhelming and the wheels come off, which is why there are a large number of middle aged women getting diagnosed. Just because it happens a lot doesn't mean it's a "bandwagon"

@Ihaveneedofwaternear ADHD.Explore it. Then own it. Know what works for you and what doesn’t. Then move on with that knowledge ready to apply it wherever needed.

But in OP’s case, that may treating the symptom, without treating the cause !
I reckon she needs HRT and an ADHD assessment!

I've done some reading about ADHD in woman, especially my age. A lot of it sounds like me. But not all of it. I'm not scattered, I don't lose things, I don't get hyperfocussed on new hobbies. I just feel a bit like to consider it, I would be scraping around looking for an excuse for the way I am

@MyThreeWords

it is not so so fashionable. I cannot begin to detail the pain and sorrow my children and I have been/are being put through as a result of attitudes like yours. Once you’ve lived with or been around someone who’s has ADHD for an extended period, you will see that your saying it is fashionable is simply dismissive.

I watched a grown man(chartered accountant) behave like a 3 years old for a long time until I began to loose my sense of reality. Sadly, even after diagnosis, he maintained your same attitude. So, no. Your comment is not in the least way helpful to the OP.

With ADHDers, sometimes what we perceive to be anxiety is actually hyperactivity. While ADHD men and especially boys tend to externalise hyperactivity into physical action, ADHD girls and women are more likely to internalise it into racing thoughts.

Nobody will have all the symptoms. I am scattered, lose things and get hyperfocused. But I don't struggle with the common signs of impulsivity - impulse spending, binge eating, gambling, risk taking - none of this describes me. I've never been much of a drinker or a drug user, although I did used to love smoking cigarettes, I also didn't find it difficult to quit when I was pregnant or TTC.

The only way impulsivity really affects me is how Russell Barkley describes it in that video I sent - I absolutely get distracted by irrelevant thoughts, ideas, and whatever is happening around me (which is, I think, part of what people mean when they say "it can't have been very important if you forgot it" - because people only usually get derailed by important things) AND I find it difficult to stick to things which don't have immediate feedback, and very difficult not to procrastinate and put things off until the last possible minute.

I am also not loud or thrill seeking, I am almost pathologically conflict-avoidant, I am very risk averse to the point I am overly anxious, I don't struggle with insomnia. So there are a lot of ADHD symptoms which don't describe me. But I struggle hugely with the difficulties self-motivating and organising and with routines, habits and goals. Time management, organisation, emotional dysregulation (I cry easily and can go into anxious/upset spirals), talking too much, difficulty prioritising, massive massive overthinking of everything.

But also, it might not be ADHD. The point of these "armchair diagnosis" threads is really to get some suggestions you haven't considered, isn't it, based on people having experienced similar? So ADHD is one possibility but there will be other things people suggest which might be worth looking into as well.

But I don't know that it's helpful to say I don't want to look into this because it's just an excuse for the way I am. When I went for assessment it was because I was desperate to have an explanation/understand the way that I am because I was so fed up of being that way and wanted to understand how to help myself be different. And it has helped because I do now have much better of an understanding of how my brain works and why I tend to do certain things which never made sense to me before, so I've been able to approach those situations in different ways which has helped. I don't go ah it doesn't matter it's because I've got ADHD. Sometimes I stop trying to do things which I think are unlikely to work at this point of my life, like forming habits, but I don't stop trying to achieve the goal I was trying to use the habit for in the first place - for example I now brush my teeth on about 99% of days, and twice a day about 90% of the time.

Incidentally because the waiting lists are so long and not everyone wants medication anyway there are some therapists now who offer a sort of "pre assessment assessment" aka a set of sessions aimed at exploring this question more of "why am I the way that I am and is there anything I can do about it?" which won't give you any kind of actual diagnosis but might give you more of a signpost as to whether it would be worth looking at. Unfortunately the person I was thinking of specifically doesn't seem to have any mention of this on their website any more, but I am sure they would not be the only person to offer this.

I'm not denying that ADHD exists. In fact, I think the sheer numbers of people claiming ADHD on the basis of quite generic problems are the ones who are truly dismissive of the seriousness of the challenges that ADHD can present. Same as with autism, a diagnostic category has been colonised by people who are determined to medicalise challenges that are within the normal range of experience.

It is resulting in an erosion of awareness and concern for people with significant disabilities and challenges.

Sorry (not really sorry)

but you just don’t get it

do some proper research !!

I’m a bit puzzled about the hyper focussed on new hobbies. Niece has quite severe adhd and has to be medicated. Shes never been like that. And it’s not a feature I see in the kids at school

ADHD and autism are under diagnosed in this country. Women who have been shut out of autism and adhd diagnosis for many many years seeking answers, support and knowledge is not “medicalising challenges”.