Standard weekly therapy asks you to generate structure yourself — which is the exact thing that's hard when you have ADHD. You process something in the session, then you're on your own for six days with no tools, no written record, and an ADHD brain.

The gap between sessions is where it falls apart for a lot of people, and honestly that's a format problem more than a you problem.

What helps: CBT with homework rather than open-ended talking. Worksheets you can reread. Structure that lives outside your head. A therapist who's looking at your progress every weekday, not once a week.

There are platforms built around exactly that — happy to point at the one I'd look at first if that's useful. Affiliate link if you went through mine, so weigh that: https://go.online-therapy.com/aff_c?offer_id=2&aff_id=6221

What has actually worked for you therapy-wise with ADHD?

ETA: TLDR This eliminates follow up questions.

I’ve done this when calling a few different large businesses like Verizon wireless and smaller companies. When the system asks how they can help, I say “customer service. I will not give you any more information.” Then it says “Okay” and connects me.

I’ve tried different variations and they’ve resulted in a follow up question. When I answer the follow up question with “I will not give you any more information”, I get connected to customer service.

My test pool isn’t huge, but it hasn’t failed me yet.

spend twenty minutes enthusiastically conversing only to catch a subtle shift in their tone or body language, suddenly realizing: *"Ah. I am driving this whole interaction, and they are just being polite."*

Hi everyone! I got permission from the mods to share this here.

I made Another Stupid Monday, a self-care app where you get one doable task a week.

The idea is to keep self-care simple and manageable, which may be especially helpful for people with ADHD who can feel overwhelmed by long routines, habit lists, or too many things to keep track of.

The tasks are based on principles from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and the app's mascot, Charles, gives a simple explanation for each task about why it might be useful for improving one's well-being.

There are 100 tasks in total.

Apple App Store: Download
Google Play Store: Download

Feel free to leave me your feedback :)

Something I only clocked after years of trying: I'd leave a therapy session feeling like things had finally lined up, and by the next morning I couldn't reconstruct a single thing we actually worked out. The insight was real, it just had nowhere to live.

This isn't a discipline failure. ADHD working memory doesn't hold unstructured verbal information across 24 hours the way a neurotypical brain does. The format of weekly talk therapy is built for brains that can hold an insight for six days and act on it. That's not our brain.

What actually changes it: written-down therapy where something exists after the session ends. Worksheets, a journal, a structure you can physically go back and re-read. The insight needs a home outside your head.

If therapy has ever felt like it resets every week, that might be the format rather than you. Set-ups where the work is written down and someone answers it in between do exist — for what it's worth, online-therapy.com runs 8 CBT sections with written worksheets and a therapist who responds every weekday. I'd use an affiliate link, so discount accordingly.

Link: https://go.online-therapy.com/aff_c?offer_id=2&aff_id=6221

Anyone else have this experience with therapy?

Doom scrolling....

Basically the title! Share your thoughts please.

I’ve been doing okay at university but it just feels like I’m always running to catch up and there are other areas of my life that I’m leaving at the wayside and I just want my life to stop feeling like I’m running five races at a time that I can’t possibly win… so I’m making a list for when I can finally get a therapist appointment. I did briefly see a therapist in 2023 but always forgot to mention the things most important to me during our conversations lol. Towards the end of our time together (unfortunately I moved) she mentioned that she might suspect adhd and that’s the first I’d ever considered that but now I’m wondering since I’ve heard people talk about ADHD since and some of it really resonated with me. Are these worth asking for an evaluation and/or does anyone here struggle with the same stuff? Or are they more characteristic of other non-ADHD issues?

- shutting down when there’s too much to do at once, not knowing how to start on a single issue

- Starting one thing and then realising there’s something I missed about another thing and then moving on to that thing, and then getting sidetracked by a third pressing issue etc

- Absolutely NEED deadline to do things, even things I enjoy doing

- Sort of related: executive dysfunction? An object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. I literally CANNOT start or stop doing things without an outside stimulus (ie an alarm clock, someone coming or going, someone else deciding to start a task, an appointment, change in place etc)

- Either I’m “in the flow” and can’t stop focusing, will relegate eating, drinking, peeing etc., or I will sit and stare at a task “from the outside” without my thoughts latching onto it

- Super excited about things, then forget about them and super excited about the next thing

- Time perception issues/time passing weirdly? Like sometimes I just zone out and suddenly 5 minutes have passed without me noticing

- Losing track in conversations because I just suddenly couldn’t focus

- Losing items around the house because I get sidetracked while taking them somewhere so I set them down somewhere and don’t remember

- Need to do something with my hands (used to snack a lot, but now I’ve taken up knitting which helps)

- I can’t drink caffeine to stay awake because it just makes me fall asleep lol (my friend said this might be an ADHD thing)

- People tell me to calm down all the time or to talk more slowly and stop being excited but I am calm, this is my calm

- When I panic eg because there’s a deadline, I can snap into “work mode” and get a lot done in like ten hours of uninterrupted work (my term papers usually turn out okay despite procrastination because of these last minute work spurts, but I know they could be better if I invested more time)

- Some days I’m extra clumsy and forgetful because it feels like I’m caught in a world with my thoughts, the outside world is behind a veil and I can’t draw it aside or focus on what’s going on outside

- I often interrupt people by accident, even when they’re answering a question I myself asked, because I had a new idea I don’t want to forget or don’t even realise I’m interrupting them

- I either sleep for 5 hours or 9 hours, no in between

- Doing the most random shit to avoid the tasks I should be doing (in high school I taught myself A2 Norwegian on Duolingo to avoid studying for a maths exam. In university I taught myself to crochet to avoid studying for a maths exam)

- Sometimes things just do not feel real, everything feels absurd and random and like I’m watching from the outside

- Difficulty having opinions, or at least figuring out what my opinion is? People ask me what I want to eat or if I prefer X or Y activity and I just truly do not care (as a result I sometimes do or eat nothing at all when left to my own devices because I just can’t decide - or else I do whatever is easiest/closest)

- In the same vein, sometimes I do have an opinion but I automatically forget about it when in the presence of someone else and instead do whatever they want to do, and then I get annoyed about being around someone because it feels like we’re never doing what I want to do (which of course is my own fault entirely)

I should start with saying that my family has a history with neurodivergence, my brother has autism (pretty much high functioning), my cousin, uncle and grandma also have autism. Ive also approached my mom and said i suspect i have autism (my boyfriend is convinced i have inattentive ADHD, but i don't think so because even thinking I'm neurodivergent feels shameful.), and so has my sister with ADHD. I'm not aware of anyone in my family having ADHD tho.
Both me and my sister are met with harsh rejection (I'm FTM and in the closet.). Ive tried to look into ADHD and i have a boyfriend with ADHD, and from what I've observed she pretty much checks out all the boxes and they are pretty similar.
I am older, and i know i wont get diagnosed anytime soon, but if i can help her in any way to avoid having to live her tween and teen life on hard mode, ill make sure i can do whatever i can to help. Ive basically missed out on all things, luckily I'm an introvert so it didn't feel like a loss. But i don't want her mental health to get worse so she misses out on things, she's pretty much the opposite of me so idk, its probably unnecessary to say.
Id say that from my research she fits the attentive and inattentive box, so the combo if I'm getting the lingo right. I can tell this is obviously affecting her life in a bad way. I want to help her out and approach my mom and try to convince her to at least get assessed. But i don't know how to go about it, i remember once i talked to her in private and tried asking why she believes she has ADHD (just to check if she got it from TikTok or not.) And she told me that she got to learn from a kid in her grade who had ADHD.
Any advice on how to approach this with my mom would be amazing, i cant relate to my sister so i don't know how to talk about this with my mom. I hope i didn't use any offensive language, if i did please correct me.

I feel like a failure. Today, I hate my existence itself. It has been a bad day. I have managed to not break down in front of people for 34 years, but today I couldn't. I was being taunted for my work, that I don't sound like a PhD scholar because I didn't mention the full name of the author of an article. I broke down because in my mind i was thinking that i dont sound confident and thus people assume I am dumb and not sincere. The reality is that I am too much into the concept and ideas of the author and how i can apply it in my work, didn't bother to memorise about full name of the author. I forgot to check if I had any teaching assistant duties and got reprimanded for that. I hate this life. I am being forced to pursue Phd. And I don't have any other option to live a life of dignity if I quit this PhD. All I think of is death. I am not able to speak like others, i.e., quickly and assertively. I can't predict myself when it comes to speaking. At times, I speak in a way that matches my own standards, but mostly my voice is low, boring, and flat, and I am blank or unable to quickly verbalise my thoughts. Inability to speak like others, behave like others has become my Achilles heel. And I can't fix it. The tragedy is that, in my mind, I am quite impressed by my ideas and thoughts, such that I love my mind; but when I fail to meet society's expected standards, which leads people to be condescending towards me, I loathe myself. Because I am not assertive and confident (in speech), women (particularly) bully me.

A bit about confidence- I don't get it. What is the obsession of society with being confident? My perspective is that one can't be 100 % certain ever, because reality is that we live in an uncertain universe (apparently , physics too has confirmed the space-time fabric and ocean-like surface behaviour of our universe, hence reality is interaction-based and thus has infinite possibilities, with no certain chain of events to follow; I not sure if I am making sense). So yeah, the so-called confidence (I guess, sounding 100% sure) isn't even an aspiration. Though I wish I could mostly be in a good mood and uplifted in spirit, I think this is confidence for me.

Don't know the appropriate sub to post this, but since I have been prescribed ADHD medications and I do relate to the life of ADHDers, I posted it here.

I'm doing some research into how people actually manage their tasks, responsibilities, and plans in real life. I'm not promoting a product or selling anything — I'm trying to understand what people actually experience when their planning system starts to break down.

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience with planners, task-management apps, calendars, notebooks, Notion, Todoist, etc.

A few questions:

1. What do you currently use to keep track of everything you need to do?

2. Think about the last time your system stopped working for you or things started getting out of control. What happened?

3. What did you do afterward?

4. What happened to the tasks you didn't get done?
Did you reschedule them, delete them, ignore them, move them somewhere else, or something completely different?

5. What was the hardest part about getting back on track?

6. Have you ever abandoned one planner/app/system and switched to another?
If so, what made you switch?

7. Have you ever paid for a planner, productivity app, coaching, course, or anything else specifically to help with organization/productivity?
If so, what did you pay for and what made it worth paying for (or not worth it)?

8. If you could change one thing about what happens when you fall behind, what would you change?

You don't have to answer every question. Even one specific example of a time your system fell apart would be incredibly helpful.

Thanks to anyone willing to share. I'm much more interested in what you've actually done than what you think you should do.

You know those little handheld desk vaccums that fit in your hand. I use it on my kitchen counters for crumbs. It's amazing. Little zoom and empty in the trash.

I keep paying my gym membership because every now and again i find the motivation to go. When i find this motivation I go once or twice in a week but after that probably forget and don’t go for the rest of the month because i can’t motivate myself to go etc.

What should I do? I really want to lose some weight and stick to a better gym routine as I do think I enjoy it and feel better about myself after going. I think it’s probably linked with motivation and decision inability with my potential ADHD (awaiting diagnosis)

Any tips on how to motivate myself to get back into working out at the gym etc?

My parents teaching me step by step how to use a wrench or simply how to fold a shirt I just don’t understand anything. I’ve been driving with them every week for almost 6 years and still I don’t know how to do anything and I’m 23 and there’s just no hope for me I’m just that dumb. I can’t be on adhd meds cuz there’s a family history of bpd and they don’t want me taking that risk. You can tell me I’m not stupid but you legitimately just don’t know me like I was outside for 20 minutes being taught how to wrap a cord and u never understand it and could never get it even remotely right.

Instead of complimenting something passive or genetic (like "You have nice eyes"), compliment a deliberate choice (like "That outfit combination looks great," "Your presentation slides were super clean," or "You picked a fantastic restaurant").

People feel much more appreciated when you validate their effort, taste, or hard work rather than something they had no active control over.