actually, I’ve been making a lot of posts about misconceptions about adhd, but I never EXPLAINED how all these symptoms connect to adhd and why
so here’s a post about the lesser-known symptoms of adhd!
- everyone knows autistic people stim, but did you know people with adhd stim as well? people with adhd tend to have stims for the same reasons as autistic people, to let out overstimulation or understimulation and to express themselves.
- people with adhd experience something medically referred to as “RSD”, rejection sensitive dysphoria. rejection sensitive dysphoria is best described as someone telling you, calmly, ‘hey, you did something that was bad and made me upset’, and you replying with ‘oh, sorry’ then immediately thinking, wow, I need to kill myself! some argue that rejection sensitive dysphoria doesn’t exist and is a product of ableism, but it’s the only term for the experience.
- people with adhd also experience heavy intrusive thoughts and impulsivity, which can go hand-in-hand with RSD. this impulsivity CAN be signing up for a club without thinking… or it can be seeing melted wax and having to force yourself not to drink it.
- caffeine can make you tired, sluggish, or calm if you have ADHD due to the fact that stimulants often have the opposite effect on us, this also applies to medications like vyvanse! HOWEVER, caffeine, unlike some medical stimulants, can also cause severe anxiety if you have adhd and heighten your impulsive/intrusive thoughts.
- adhd is most often comorbid with autism, anxiety, and depression, and if you have adhd it’s very likely you have one of those three as well!
- have you ever wanted to do something but COULDN’T, and you couldn’t imagine why? you didn’t really want to do it, but no matter how hard you tried suddenly you couldn’t read or write or clean? this can either be TASK INERTIA or EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION, and they often go hand-in-hand and apply heavily to adhd. task inertia is when you’re switching tasks, so say you put down your math homework and try to do history, but suddenly you can’t read and you’re reading the first sentence over and over. executive dysfunction can occur at any moment and is more based on one’s mood or how one feels than based on what one is currently doing, at least for me. it’s essentially not wanting to do something so your brain shuts down and simply doesn’t LET you. in both cases, this condition can cause you to dissociate, zone out, lose focus, begin to cry out of stress, melt down or shut down and there are different ways to cope for everyone.
- many of these things ALSO APPLY TO AUTISM which is why they’re so difficult to differentiate between and often appear at the same time!