Late-diagnosed ADHD: when success runs on stress

From the outside, I probably didn't look like someone who struggled to get things done. Quite the opposite, really.

I've spent much of my working life in demanding environments. I've worked in senior roles, run businesses, juggled competing priorities and generally been someone who gets things done. And I do get things done.

What I understand differently since being diagnosed with ADHD later in life is how I was often getting there. There was a lot of urgency involved.

"I'll relax when I've done this..."

For years, there was a fairly familiar conversation going on in my head. Once I've done this, I'll feel better. Once I've sorted that, I can relax. I just need to get these few things done first. Except there was always another thing. Another problem needed solving. Another idea appeared. Another deadline suddenly felt much closer than it had yesterday.

And if something genuinely became urgent? Brilliant. My brain knew exactly what to do. I could focus. I could make decisions quickly. I could get an extraordinary amount done in a relatively short space of time.

For a long time, I didn't really question that. Why would I? It worked. In fact, I saw it as one of my strengths. I still do, to an extent.

When pressure becomes the starting gun

This is one of the things I've found particularly interesting about understanding my own ADHD.

Something can be objectively important, and I can know perfectly well that I need to do it. But knowing that doesn't necessarily create the same response as feeling that it needs doing now. Give me a distant deadline, and there may be seventeen other things suddenly competing for my attention. Make that same deadline tomorrow, and suddenly we're in business.

For some people with ADHD, the pattern can become something like:

put it off → pressure builds → urgency kicks in → intense productivity → relief → exhaustion → repeat

The strange thing is that it can work. Sometimes extremely well.

If you've spent years operating like this, you may have plenty of evidence that you're capable. You might have a successful career, a business, a mortgage, a family, qualifications, responsibilities.

So why would you question the system? Perhaps because eventually you notice how tiring the system is.

“But I've always coped”

I think the word coping can be misleading. We tend to judge whether somebody is coping by looking at the outcome.

Did they meet the deadline? Yes. Did they turn up? Yes. Did they get the work done? Yes. Did they remember the important thing? Yes.

Fine then. They're coping.

What we don't necessarily see is what had to happen internally to produce that result. Maybe you arrive ridiculously early because the anxiety of being late is worse than sitting in the car for 25 minutes.

Maybe you became incredibly organised because you know exactly what happens when you aren't.

Maybe perfectionism became a way of avoiding criticism.

Maybe you've learnt that leaving something until the last minute creates exactly the pressure your brain needs to finally engage with it.

Or perhaps you've become the person everybody else thinks is incredibly capable while privately wondering why seemingly simple things can sometimes feel disproportionately difficult.

That's quite a confusing place to be. Particularly if ADHD wasn't even something you'd considered

Looking backwards after an ADHD diagnosis

A late diagnosis can explain a lot. It can also leave you looking backwards. I've certainly had moments of thinking, if I'd known this 20 or 25 years ago, would some things have been easier? Probably.

Would parts of my life have been less stressful? Almost certainly.

There are things I understand very differently now. But I also don't particularly want to go through my entire history and relabel everything as ADHD. Because some of the characteristics that probably made things harder have also served me very well.

That ability to spring into action? Useful. Thinking quickly? Useful. Getting intensely interested in something and throwing myself into it? Definitely useful. Being able to respond when everything suddenly goes wrong? Also pretty handy.

There are parts of the way my brain works that I genuinely like. So, for me, understanding ADHD hasn't really been about discovering everything that is “wrong”.

It's been much more about becoming curious about patterns I'd previously taken for granted.

Why am I doing it this way?

Do I actually need this much pressure?

Is this helping me, or is this simply how I've always got myself moving?

Those are quite different questions.

ADHD isn't just being easily distracted

Many people still associate ADHD primarily with concentration problems or the stereotypical image of a hyperactive child.

Adult ADHD can be considerably more nuanced than that.

Someone might experience difficulties with overwhelm, emotional regulation, impulsivity, motivation, organisation or switching off. There can be sensitivity around criticism or rejection, difficulties within relationships and a frustrating inconsistency in what you seem able to do from one day to another.

And then there's focus itself.

The problem isn't necessarily an inability to concentrate. Sometimes it's quite the opposite. Give me something I'm interested in and suddenly several hours have disappeared. That can be difficult to reconcile with struggling to start something relatively straightforward that I know needs doing. Clearly I can concentrate. So why can't I just do this?

And that's where the explanations we give ourselves can become important.

• lazy
• disorganised
• too sensitive
• not disciplined enough
• difficult
• why can't I just be more like everyone else?

If you've been telling yourself some version of that for years, an ADHD diagnosis can provide a very different context for understanding your behaviour.

But understanding something intellectually doesn't necessarily mean all those old beliefs immediately disappear.

When being good under pressure becomes living under pressure

There's another distinction I've become increasingly interested in. Being good under pressure is not necessarily a problem. It's a useful ability. The difficulty comes when pressure becomes the environment you need in order to function.

You solve one problem and immediately notice the next. You finish one task, and instead of experiencing much satisfaction, your mind moves straight to what still hasn't been done.

Even relaxing can become strangely conditional.

• I'll sit down once I've...
• I'll enjoy the weekend when...
• I'll feel better after...

There's always an afterwards.

For some people, that can eventually start to show up as exhaustion, irritability, difficulty switching off, poor sleep or simply the feeling of having a brain that never quite stops scanning for the next thing.

You may still be functioning. You may still be successful. But you might also begin wondering whether everything really needs to feel this hard.

Do I actually need to change?

I think this is an important question, particularly when we talk about therapy and neurodivergence.

The aim shouldn't automatically be to make a neurodivergent person behave more like a neurotypical person.

If something works for you, perhaps it works for you. I don't believe every ADHD characteristic needs correcting. The more useful question might be whether the way you're currently functioning is costing you more than you want to pay for it.

Perhaps you're successful but permanently exhausted. 

Perhaps work gets the highly productive version of you and the people you care about get whatever energy remains.

Perhaps you're brilliant in a crisis but find it surprisingly difficult to relax when there isn't one.

Perhaps you're achieving plenty, but rarely experiencing much satisfaction before your attention moves to whatever comes next.

Or perhaps you've simply reached a point where the pressure that used to motivate you has started to feel more like something you're trapped inside.

That's different from saying ADHD itself needs fixing.

Where solution-focused hypnotherapy can fit

Solution-focused hypnotherapy isn't a treatment for ADHD itself, nor is it a replacement for an ADHD assessment, medication or medical support where these are appropriate.

What we can work with are some of the patterns surrounding it.

That might include stress and overwhelm, confidence, sleep, unhelpful habits, emotional responses or finding different ways of approaching situations that currently create a lot of pressure.

One of the things I particularly like about the solution-focused approach is that we're not starting from the assumption that everything you're doing is wrong. We're interested in what already works.

• When are things a little easier?
• What's different on those occasions?
• What are you already doing that helps?

And rather than only asking “What's the problem?”, we can also begin asking a slightly different question: “What would I like instead?”

That can sound deceptively simple. It isn't always.

If you've spent years focused on what needs fixing, what needs doing and what might go wrong next, thinking about how you'd actually like things to be can feel surprisingly unfamiliar.

For somebody who may already have spent a lifetime hearing what they should do, be more organised, stop procrastinating, calm down, try harder, don't take things so personally - I think that distinction matters.

Keeping the strengths without needing the crisis

I don't want to lose the part of me that can get things done.

I don't want to become less enthusiastic, less driven or less likely to get ridiculously interested in something and disappear down a rabbit hole occasionally.

Those things are part of me.

What has changed is my understanding of some of the machinery underneath them. I'm much more aware now of that old internal voice saying: "Just get this done. Then you can relax."

Sometimes I still listen to it. Probably more often than I'd like to admit. But I'm also getting better at noticing that there will almost certainly be another “this” waiting afterwards.

And perhaps that's where movement starts. Not by deciding that everything you've been doing is wrong. Not by trying to become a calmer, tidier, more conventionally organised version of somebody else. But by getting curious about whether you actually need quite so much pressure to be you.

What would be different if I could still get things done without everything feeling urgent?

What if finishing something occasionally felt like finishing, rather than immediately looking for the next thing?

What if I could keep the drive, creativity and ability to act, but experience a little less of the exhaustion that sometimes comes with them?

For somebody diagnosed with ADHD later in life, or perhaps only beginning to wonder whether ADHD might explain some long-standing patterns, there can be quite a lot to make sense of.

You don't have to work all of that out at once. Sometimes change starts much more quietly. You notice something you've always done. You understand it slightly differently. You begin to wonder what you'd prefer instead. And from there, perhaps you make one small movement towards it.

Because being capable of functioning under enormous pressure doesn't necessarily mean that's the only way you can move forward.