When I had some cognitive space back in 2022, I ran through some diagnoses intakes with my psychiatrist. We decided not to review for autism because the test is time consuming and there isn’t really anything you can do with the results. For the OCD intake I was like “of course I do these things, any rational person behaves this way,” (no, they do not). For the ADHD intake I was like “I do not have trouble activating to do things or focusing on them once I’m doing them, so this isn’t me; EXCEPT for when I’m on my period, in which case absolutely yes.”
Then I went on testosterone and things got a little more gnarly. If you do a search for this, you’ll see that hormones (estrogen in particular) and ADHD have some interesting correlations that may in fact be causation. Some tendencies I’d always had got more extreme.
And now, I’ve quit drinking, at least for awhile, and the feeling of being full of bees is back. I wrote about this way back in 2014, about turning anxiety into productivity. See, the world is full of things that Need Doing, and I have all this Anxious Energy, and my brain calms down when I Do The Things, otherwise I am physically uncomfortable. Or I can self medicate to slow my brain down to a pace that more closely matches things like, say, cooking a meal, or even conceiving of doing yard work, or spending more than 30 minutes with a (very lovely) 4yo who really wants to be a kitty tucked into bed 13,984 times in a row. I now also lay awake in bed for upwards of 2 hours with very good sleep hygiene (no screens, reading low-intensity things beforehand, etc) listening to audio books I’ve already read many times so my brain will latch onto the book instead of coming up with new ways to approach problems which would mean 3+ hours awake instead. So many run-on sentences in this post, but it matches the energy I’m writing this with.
In discussing how to deal with losing my main decompression mechanism with my lovely husband, who has been such a champion and rock during my ebbs and flows of self-medication, it suddenly dawned on me that maybe I do have ADHD. It’s just that the things I hyper fixate on are considered beneficial to society and so no one thought it was a problem at any point. Like, I will absolutely make you an amazing database to track things. I will then obsess over it until it feels even more perfect. I will forget to eat while doing this, and I will want to talk about it with anyone who will listen. And, if I decide during unemployment that it would in fact be better for me to take on yard work instead of paying a lovely human who is way more skilled at it than I am, it simply will not get done no matter how much I know I need to do it.
Also, you know, absolutely thriving when I have 4+ intense, drastically different projects in flight at a time that I can bounce between. Apple was great and all, but the dozen projects I’d have in flight at once were all similar enough to each other, and the tracking functions were all supposed to be the same (great for leadership to have a consistent view across projects, terrible for adapting to the actual nuances of the projects themselves, and also not what my brain wanted).
So I guess I pick up a mindfulness practice again, and get used to being full of bees, and try to find enough stimulation that I’m not overwhelming any one group of people I’m interacting with by trying to sheep dog them because of my own internal issues. I dunno. How do y’all deal with this?
What’s that? A call for collaborative thinking on overlapping experiences of neurodivergence? Well for completely neurotypical reasons, I won’t be able to move on with my day until I engage fully with this.
I see a lot of my own experience of AuDHD in your descriptions here even though the natures of our hyperfocuses (and, I suspect, some pretty significant structures in our brains) are quite different. If we grant the premise that we would both clinically ping the radar for being within the spectrum as well as ADHD, I would crudely differentiate between us by guessing most people would attribute more ADHD than spectrum-ness to how I appear to them, and likely the opposite as true in your case. I find that framing at once useless for a huge variety of reasons, but also somehow instructive because it may gesture at the right approximate *vibe* of how our brains might converge and diverge in their natural handling of information. I suppose all of that is to acknowledge that, while I think there are similar ingredients in our pots, one of us may be cooking soup while the other’s got a stew going.
Similarities that feel fair to pathologize:
– Your ability to thrive under the gun of the combined force of 1. intense pressure, and 2., wild deviation between your projects feels extremely alive in me; I very much molder amidst a dearth of either, and am sharpened to a fine point when I max the volume on both.
– Your utter inability to slow down to a reduced speed without either notable self-medication or intense emotional and physical distress is also profoundly familiar to me, and is quite possibly my least favorite feature of my brain. Folks with ADHD alone certainly experience impatience and discomfort with under-stimulation, but the only people I’ve personally been aware of who *really* struggle with it feeling painful to a point of extreme irritability seem cozied into the AuDHD portion of the Venn Diagram. This anecdotal observation, if at all accurate, is likely only valuable in helping determine who might have more-versus-less useful insight into coping strategies.
– Your wholesale failure to take over the paid labor tasks in your household during unemployment despite the obvious benefits to financial circumstances and the likely emotional benefit of having done something discretely productive with the day, and that you’ve earnestly intended to get to for a capital-L, capital-T **Long Time**.
– Your struggle to cook a meal without self-medicating because of its unfulfilling speed and levels of stimulation.
Unfortunately, I have only two strategies for coping with these things that work reliably for me. Of course, the first is self-medication that at least flirts with creating larger systemic dysfunction in life as a side effect. Damn.
The second, which is much healthier but far harder, is what I refer to as “dopamine loading,” or I’ve heard others call “dopamine surfing.” I’ve certainly shared it with you in the past, but to likely put it into better wording here, the basic idea is to engage in a bunch of activities that build your store of those sweet, sweet neurotransmitters before doing things that deplete them.
In my life, because it is much easier of obligation, I’m able to begin each day with a ritual of making a slow cup of coffee, and then sitting and snuggling typically with two cats (hello oxytocin) and reading things for *pleasure* that bear no relation to my work or day other than to how they might inspire my imagination.
For me, because reading text on a page is actually quite hard, this activity helps with dopamine for me by being something I’m proud of myself for having accomplished in degrees that mount the further I go.
I got through a page? Fantastic, that first one was dicey as hell. Reached a break in the chapter where I could theoretically stop and place my bookmark if need be without fear of struggling to find where I was when I pick back up? Look at me go. Finished a chapter? I’m cooking. A second chapter? I didn’t think I’d actually make it through two chapters. Three chapters? Who do I think I am? Four? It’s almost inconceivable to me that neurotypical people could understand the vastness of my accomplishment. Five? I am likely, as it turns out, the most focused human being who’s ever lived, and am certainly the most focused human being alive right now. The laser focus of my attention might literally set the pages on fire.
And as I successfully read over the course of multiple days and weeks, the sense that I’m doing something hard and doing it *well* despite my brain constantly trying to throw spanners in the works helps order my life and moor me for those events and moments that would otherwise cast me adrift. Or, to put it in your terms, this sort of mounting practice of disciplined self-care that’s geared toward my own inspiration helps quell the ongoing buzzing of the bees; the edge of agitation that lives pretty readily within me requires more activation for it to draw my blood.
I believe, based upon how I understand our brains, this sense of effort and accomplishment is necessary for self-care as a neurodivergence coping tool. There are other things I could do that would bring me a sense of satisfaction in the mornings because they produce *pleasure*, but that would not gear me toward accomplishing, managing, or even navigating harder things later in the day.
As a matter of practical suggestion, it’s hard to imagine how such a practice tailored to your brain might slot into your schedule. Your life is so much busier than mine that I would be a shit to propose a general idea that might call for any amount of reorganizing it. It was noteworthy to me, though, in your post about how you spent your time in 2025, that self-care was as small a portion of it as it was. I think self-care moments are very important in addressing our innately dry stores of neurotransmitters (dopamine specifically), and finding space for them is vital for achieving the extremely high level of over-function to which brains like ours are uniquely suited.
I hadn’t heard the term “dopamine surfing”, but it plugs in very well with the new morning routine I’m trying of some sort of physical activity (yoga, bike, lifting) to get the juices flowing that seemed to be helping my concentration for the rest of the morning. Yay! 💙