Can someone give me some examples of what struggling with executive functions looks like for an adult with adhd?

[Coldwetlettuce]

Not really an AIBU but would like replies! I understand executive functions to be stuff like driving, doing laundry, having a shower, making the bed. Am I right? People keep telling me I have ADHD and people with adhd struggle with executive functions (I find all this language around it annoying). Anyway, can anyone give examples of how an adult with ADHD would struggle with these ‘executive functions’?

I also cracked out my best school/uni work on all-nighters - even if I tried to start early. If anyone has any tips for that, I’d love to know how to support my son (he’s the same - best feedback for last minute stuff).

It's like I know what needs doing, I can see it, maybe it's something that would only take a minute. But I can't. It's like I'm frozen. I feel a lot of guilt but still can't do it.

I can relate to this more than I can put into words. Seems to be getting worse as I get older, too. 😔

I'm honestly not sure, tbh. I used to think so, but when other people talk about their day-to-day lives it often sounds like they find getting everyday tasks done a lot more straightforward than I ever have...

My sister is diagnosed ADHD and struggles with

• Keeping up with tidying, cleaning, laundry, etc.. She has best intentions but a general tidy is often derailed by a box of mystery stuff that she then spends 2 hours sorting and no general tidy gets done. Laundry may get started but she'll forget it was there and then end up having to rewash it multiple times because she keeps forgetting to dry it.
• Finding anything. Keys, shoes, kids stuff, wallet. She can't find anything ever (despite having places for stuff). Airtags are great!
• Putting things down and then having them immediately vanish from her memory. Last night we went out and she took her cardigan off and then left without it. Once is normal but she does this EVERY time. She once left her kid in a shop in a buggy because she took her hands off the handlebars and forgot said kid existed.
• Opening post. Finding the post to open.
• Remembering to pay bills, order oil, etc..

She is on time but many ADHD folks struggle with timekeeping. So basically she looks permenantly messy, disorganised, forgetful, scatterbrained, late paying bills, late ordering things, the only parent whose kid is in uniform on non-uniform day (although she had kind friends who'd remind her for that one). We have some great stories of the time she left for a holiday 4 hours late because she popped back into the house leaving the family in the packed car to pick up one thing and lost her car keys in the process.

@ItsABatFaceThingyou sound like me.

Our son has ADHD and for ages I was like “he’s inherited that from his father”.

But actually I think both of us have it. 🤣

@Urrrrmlik3okayI am interested to hear you say this. The forgetting really did bring me up short. I was shocked she was just like “Oh I totally forgot and I’m away on a camping trip - my stupid brain!”

I didn’t respond at that moment because I was busy preparing things for the party but later I did wonder “why didn’t she just add a reminder to her calendar at the time she accepted the invitation 8 weeks before? Has she learned no coping mechanisms to deal with her condition?” But I didn’t want to be an unsympathetic prick.

There are other examples, too.

I have calendar reminders too but in order to work they require me to 1) remember to put the reminder in my calendar if it's not something I can do on the spot for whatever reason, 2) open and review my calendar regularly and/ or 3) see and take notice of the calendar reminder when it pops up on my phone, which is something I am particularly bad at doing because the sheer number of reminders I have gives me notification blindness and a general sense of dread/ overwhelm which makes me less likely to look at them.

I get by because any time I get invited to anything I forward the message to my husband and he is the keeper of our calendar. He tells me about upcoming events etc and lets me know when we're double booked. If he couldn't or wouldn't do this for me I'm genuinely not sure what would happen, because in the years before I met him I never had a workable system for myself.

I have similar scaffolding at work because my secretary has access to my inbox, and she adds everything to my work calendar and reminds me when deadlines or events are looming.

Without outsourcing this aspect of my administrative life to other people, I wouldn't be able to successfully deal with invitations, RSVPs etc.

(As a general rule, if your response to someone struggling with ADHD is to say "why don't you just..." followed by a suggestion for some kind of system or organisational habit, it's basically the equivalent of telling a person with no legs "why don't you just try putting one foot in front of the other?". I.e., telling a person to overcome ADHD by being more organised fails to recognise that the solution requires the functioning of the very equipment people with ADHD don't have).

@LilacBalloonsyeah I get the “why don’t you just”. It’s ultimately a decision for me as to whether I can really be bothered to have someone in my life who can’t deal with this stuff. I am busy enough myself: I can’t adult for her and she doesn’t have a husband and secretary to do what yours do for you.

Saying “Oh, I can’t help it” doesn’t diminish the impact it has on other people, I’m afraid.

Yeah, fair enough - that's your choice to make, and people with disabilities do get used to the fact that not everyone wants or is able to make necessary accommodations.

Thank you for replying. So it is more extreme than me then. I'm usually late because I think I've got loads of time then start doing things and then end up being late or I have extra time and think ow that's good I'll fit this in and still late rather than just go and be early! Again I don't think I have Adhd but my brain does annoy me sometimes! Yours seems more extreme like the walking past cup 5 times so I suppose it's the level that makes it more difficult. My colleague has it and she does the butting in but we know she can't help it, she just has to get her thoughts out. I wonder if some people saying adhd mean ADD as a lot of women seem to have it without the hyperactivity part. I'm glad you have found some coping mechanisms x

I am disabled. My time is also important. I make loads of adjustments for my disabled friends as they do for me. But being consistently late is an awful trait. It leaves everyone else just waiting.

I'm not suggesting your time isn't important, apologies if it came off that way. I'm actually saying the same thing you are - not everyone wants or is able to make adjustments and accommodations for people with disabilities all the time, it's part of life.

You have people in your life you're willing to make adjustments for, and people you don't. You have people in your life who made adjustments for you, and people who won't.

I have people in my life who make adjustments and accommodations for my disability, and I accept that other people won't make those same accommodations and adjustments, and that's entirely their right. I'm not going to be everyone's cup of tea, I'm not going to be worth the effort of accommodation to everyone. It's normal and inevitable and I accept it!

(This does not go for legal accommodations to which disabled people are entitled - those aren't optional and must be adhered to, of course)

@LilacBalloonsgreat, realistic post.

For me it’s task blindness. I rationally know I need to do x but it’s easy to get side tracked or not see it. I don’t mean anything by not doing it, if pointed out, I know I need to but my brain doesn’t pick up on it. (Tidying, etc) I can easily forget what I was in the process of doing. Repetitive tasks are like hell even if initially get excited about it.

I struggle with how this all gets defined. Whats the difference between this in an adhd context and being a disorganised person?

I start to do something and then get distracted because I'm thinking about something else and I go off and start doing another task whilst leaving the first one unfinished and then i ll get distracted again and start something else so I end up with a few things on the go and go back and forth between them all.

A friend with adhd diagnosis described it exactly like this but isn't this loads of us? I dont have adhd but Im like this, i'm quite disorganised, especially at work and if theres no real deadline. Ive realised over the years that often its just about what i "prioritise" doing in the moment.... things that interest me/i care about are more likely to distract me! For me the natural consequences in life have basically trained me resist the temptation by creating external motivators that force me to prioritise what i need to eg...
a) GCSE results were a bit of a disappointment, i got good results but dropped grades in most subjects because i was too last minute with revision.
b) i missed my first choice uni offer because I dropped two grades. Less bad than a) but variation on a theme
c) i failed a professional exam and came close to losing my job.

I've got steadily more successful through my 20 year professional career as consequences for fuck ups have been increasingly clear & firm, it forces me to get done what i have to in time.

I think a hell of a lot of people are like this? Especially around work/study. Theres way more personal motivation to do fun stuff!!

My close relative with ADHD is very impulsive and it’s a real emotional rollercoaster for them of joy and creativity and then terrible self criticism afterwards in an ongoing cycle.

I don't fully understand it myself but I can only assume that the neurotransmitters needed to transmit the instruction from my brain to my limbs were just more or less completely absent rather than merely being a bit too low as they possibly are in people with less severe presentations. Although I'm only hypothesising. I can't see that it's any kind of OCD - can I ask what made you think that? I don't have any other symptoms of OCD as far as I understand OCD. And the response to the meds was phenomenal.

Weirdly, on the one or two occasions when I did manage to pick something up off the floor after hours of wrangling and negotiating with my brain I was immediately overwhelmed by this enormous wave of rage and anger, which was totally unexpected (I had kind of expected relief, euphoria or a feeling of achievement - I'm not someone who struggles with anger at all usually). I was awake for about 8 hours after managing to pick the thing up and it took all of those 8 hours for the rage to subside and to feel normal again. It made no sense and for a while I wondered if I had some weird entitlement issues where I subconsciously believed I was too good to be picking things up off the floor but I couldn't see where these could have come from. I'm a hard working, conscientious person with a solid work ethic and hight standards in other parts of my life. When I was on the stimulants, I could pick things up off the floor easily and there was no wave of rage and anger at all. I felt totally neutral. It was just picking something up off the floor. No tomato induced rage!😂

When I'm in public with people watching me though I can do these things - they take it out of me a bit but it's not impossible. I've found out this is called contextual impairment. This made me think it was psychological for a long time but I no longer believe that. I think it's neurological but I still don't understand it.

Thoughts coming continuously but not getting organised into a sequence. Difficulty choosing which thoughts to act on. Things feel disproportionately hard, even when I want to do something. Losing large chunks of time and then feeling awful about ‘wasting’ the time. Procrastinating until it becomes urgent. Often being late as I’ve procrastinated so much. Or just a poor sense of how long things will take. Noise sensitivity sometimes feels painful (kids screaming) or just makes it hard to think. I’m always noticing the small details which becomes exhausting. These are the main ones that apply to me, any way.

It's a question of degree and impact. Absolutely yes, everyone struggles with disorganisation and executive function sometimes. I think the distinction is really about impact, persistence annd pervasisveness. Everyone is disorganised, forgetful or prone to procrastinating sometimes, that's just being human. With ADHD, those difficulties are persistent and significant enough to have a negative impact on your functioning, and they tend to show up across different areas of life (work, relationships, home, managing day-to-day tasks etc.), rather than just being occasional lapses or personality quirks. It’s not that someone with ADHD is more scatty than everyone else; it’s that the difficulties are much harder to control and have a meaningful, ongoing effect on our lives.

Over the years (and especially in the years before I was diagnosed) ADHD has cost me friendships, opportunities, jobs, literally thousands of pounds, innumerate belongings, my self-esteem and considerable mental well-being. It has made me behave in profoundly unsafe and inexplicable ways. It has frustrated people I love, and who love me. It has caused me deep grief and been a source of sef-loathing for years. I would love to not be this way, and I would give up the 'benefits' (creativity, unparalleled ability to produce good results under intense pressure, associative imagination, deep empathy) in a heartbeat if it meant not having ADHD anymore.

I suspect I have ADHD traits - at university the only way I could get my essays done was to stay on campus during the holidays when everyone else went home so that I could work quietly and not feel distracted. I struggled to get into that space where I could concentrate. I required frequent changes of scene to help me concentrate. Sometimes the only way I could form an idea for writing was going for a run - I needed a lot of movement to keep my thoughts clear. I tend to put things off and struggle to prioritise work without a lot of structure and planning.

Also to add to my previous post - everyone I know who is diagnosed with ADHD, particularly those diagnosed a little later in life, had a deep sense of something being profoundly wrong with them before diagnosis. I think the explosion of adhd content on social media (while supportive and helpful in some ways) has created this idea that ADHD is 'teehee I'm so scatty and untidy and creative!'. But in reality it goes hand in glove with depression, anxiety and low self esteem, along with higher rates of self harm and suicide (before I was diagnosed I was hospitalised twice for self harm and on and off antidepressants for years). It is a brutal condition to live with.

Came looking for this thread because I have a live example! I don't have ADHD, not even self-diagnosed, but I've got executive dysfunction in spades. This is what it looks like:

I'm going to an event this weekend. I paid for my ticket and booked a hotel six weeks ago. In that six weeks, I have not prepared a single thing. I've thought a lot about what to wear on each of the days and what I'll need to take.

I have not prepared anything, much less packed. I'll be wearing whatever doesn't need washing: my planned outfits are all in the wash 😬 I haven't emptied my weekend bag from its last use - months ago - and have just placed a supermarket order to the hotel, to cover off the essentials I'll probably forget or can't locate right now.

I may well miss my train. I booked the latest possible, so I'll have some time in the morning but, as you can see, I need to compress six weeks of prep into three or four hours.

I've been like this all my life - and, yes, I have missed international flights, crucial exams, interviews and surgeries. I am genuinely great at planning. In between planning and enactment, some necessary link falls into a bottomless void and I'm left with plans, panic and failure.

Very, very occasionally, like once a year or less, I do things at the right pace in the right order. Then I marvel at how nice it is! How calm! This must be how people do things, I think; I should do this all the time! The next thing comes and the magical link is in the void.

Oh, the PARALYSIS! Thank you so much for this!

Why am I on Mumsnet instead of packing, washing my hair, making sure I've got all my meds for the weekend??

Yup.

ADHD has a specific neurological cause. That is the difference between it and just being disorganised.

I also shared your view about what I thought ADHD was until I learned more about it. What you describe in your brother is certainly one manifestation of ADHD, but it is wrong to think it is the only one, and there is a huge span of how ADHD manifests itself in individuals. For one thing, ADHD itself can be either Inattentive ADHD (more associated with difficulty focusing or hyperfixation, difficulty in organising oneself or getting going), Hyperactive ADHD (more associated with impulsivity, risk-taking etc) or combined ADHD. And within those broad categories there are variations in symptoms.

Scepticism about diagnoses does nothing to help those who have ADHD and could benefit from an early diagnosis and, if they wish, treatment.