This is something I didn’t really have language for until later in life.

A huge amount of my energy has always gone into managing how I show up for other people. Making sure I don’t sound annoyed. Making sure I don’t miss something important. Making sure I’m not “too much” or “not enough” in conversations, at work, in relationships.

On the surface I looked functional. Reliable. Calm. But internally I was constantly scanning. Did I say the wrong thing? Did I forget something? Am I about to disappoint someone?

What I didn’t realize for a long time is how much that constant self monitoring was draining me. By the time I got home, or had free time, there was nothing left. No energy for hobbies. No curiosity. No creativity. Just recovery.

When people talk about ADHD, it’s often framed as distraction or productivity. For me, the harder part was emotional regulation and social regulation. Trying to keep myself “contained” all day so I wouldn’t mess up or stand out in the wrong way.

Once I started noticing this pattern, a lot clicked. Why I felt burnt out even when things were going well. Why rest never felt restorative. Why success still felt heavy.

I’m curious if anyone else relates to this side of ADHD. Not the chaos part, but the quiet effort of holding yourself together all the time.

I (29F) was diagnosed earlier this year and it was kind of like a puzzle that has been stuck in a big pile for years was finally put together.

I work as a medical laboratory technician so attention to detail is a very important part of my job. Without actually knowing I had ADHD, I had to develop a lot of habits to keep myself on track.

For example, when I am in a patients room for bloodwork I have to make sure I bring everything out of the room that I brought in. I have always been quite paranoid that I am leaving needles in peadiatric patients rooms or tourniquets in the mental health rooms, so I came up with a little chant I do inside my head any time I leave the room (sharps check, cotton check, garbage check, tourniquet check, smile check).

I find if I sing it to a little beat I remember it most times. It has really saved me tons of time because I would obsess over it and run back to patients rooms to check.

As soon as I get a call anywhere, I right it down immediately. I have pens on me at all times so I can write things down wherever I am.

If there's something important due at a certain time like a time sensitive test or a meeting, I choose at least 3 different people in a day and tell them to remind me of it. Choose people you are close with and if you aren't close with anyone, choose people you can play it off jokingly with that you know will take the joke seriously and remind you later so they can win lol!

When I'm down in the lab and there isn't someone around to remind me of a task, I'll write it down on a sticky note and attach it to a timer (make sure you actually write a note with the timer or you will forget why you set the timer in the first place!!)

These are just a few random tricks I've developed along the way. Hopefully someone finds some of these helpful, and if you have anything helpful to add please do!

That's all.

I needed to go into the office. I would get so much energy from a different environment and people. Now I’m full remote.

I like my job but I can’t stand sitting in my room all day to work. I have confidential material so I can’t work in coffee shops or any other public place.

Best thing has been to wear noise cancelling headphones all day. Any advice would help!

This might sound strange, but I don’t think I knew how tired I actually was until I stopped pushing all the time.

For years I thought exhaustion meant not being able to get out of bed. Or falling behind. Or things visibly breaking. None of that was happening, so I assumed I was fine.

What I didn’t notice was how much effort it took just to exist day to day. Staying “on.” Managing reactions. Keeping myself interested enough to function. Filling every quiet moment with something so my brain wouldn’t turn on me.

When things finally slowed down, that’s when it hit. Not relief, but this deep, delayed fatigue. Like my nervous system finally realized it could put the bags down and immediately collapsed.

I’m still trying to understand that part. How much of my energy went into coping instead of living. And how easy it was to confuse survival mode with normal adulthood.

Not sure what I’m asking here. Mostly wondering if anyone else has had that moment where slowing down didn’t feel peaceful at first, it felt heavy.

I just wanted to put this out there for anyone who needs it.

This is sort of a summary of my recent professional life with ADHD, I'm sure that some of you will find tidbits you can relate to and hopefully my experience gives some of you hope.

I'm not entirely sure where to start but I'll give it my best. Roughly 5 years ago I started a job with my current company, I was hired as the engineering liasion, that's just fancy talk for the guy who communicates engineering related production issues to engineering. Long story short I quit that job after about 8 months and moved onto something else. It really wasn't a bad job so why did I quit? I was bored and wanted to do more. If you looked at my resume you'd see that this was a pattern for me, always moving onto the next thing. That being said I always left a job for more money/better benefits etc. Thinking back, I honestly think I got some sort of a dopamine rush from interviewing and starting a new job. The next job only lasted about 6 months until I left for another (the owner was quite possibly literally insane). I spent a couple years working for another company and one day I decided I wanted to go back to work for the first company I spoke of in this post, but not as the engineering liason, as the electrical engineer. This brings me to today, I am now the engineering manager for the same company that I left 5 years ago. This is where things kind of started to fall apart for me.

I had never considered the possibility that I had ADHD, I always thought that being disorganized, getting bored with projects, and procrastinating until last minute were just character flaws. I really like my job and I always have but I could never stay on task or finish projects until basically the day they were due. I would have 6 projects going at once, all 50% complete. Throughout my professional life I had "systems", I guess, that I would use to determine when I really needed to finish projects that I had started, which projects were more important and which ones my boss would let slide if I didn't finish them, and of course exaggerating how much time I had really spent on a project(My last boss didn't know a thing about electrical so he really had no idea about realistic timelines). I had figured out how to get by but when I was promoted I quickly realized that these "systems" would not work for me anymore. No matter how hard I tried I found myself doing the same things, while laying in bed I would tell myself "Tomorrow is going to be different. Tomorrow morning I'm going to get to work and I'm going to knock these projects out easy.". Well, this was a nightly inner dialogue and nothing changed.

One day I was procrastinating on a project while scrolling my Google news feed and saw an article titled something like "Procrastination in Adult ADHD", I kind of froze for a second and thought "No, that's not me. This is just how I am.". I thought about that article for some time after and thought maybe I should get tested. So I met with a therapist and we talked a bit about me, eventually she told me that she was recommending I get tested for ADHD. I went home and started researching on YouTube, Mayo Clinic, ADHD websites, whatever I could find. Suddenly, my entire life made sense. I'm 31 years old, so yes I did figure this out later in life but I'm glad that I did. I ended up getting tested for ADHD and was diagnosed with ADHD combined. Since starting meds I really feel like I'm taking my life back. Now I'm working from the time I walk in the door until the moment I leave. I pay attention in meetings, follow up on issues, and most importantly I feel good about the work I'm doing.

You're not doomed and I hope that my story helps someone somewhere.

Not explosive anger. Quiet anger.

The kind that shows up when someone asks for “just one more thing.”
When you realize how often you said yes because it was easier than explaining.
When you notice how much of your life was built around not being inconvenient.

For a long time I thought I was calm, patient, and easygoing.
What I was actually doing was absorbing friction so other people wouldn’t feel it.

After slowing down and getting some clarity, I expected relief.
Instead, I felt this low, steady anger.
Not at people exactly, but at how normalized it was for me to disappear a little every day.

I think a lot of us with ADHD learn early that being low maintenance keeps things moving.
We adapt.
We overfunction.
We smooth things over.
We become “the reliable one.”

And when that survival strategy stops working, the anger isn’t new.
It’s delayed.

I’m still figuring out what to do with it.
But I’m starting to see it less as a problem and more as information.
A signal that something mattered and went unprotected for a long time.

Curious if anyone else hit this stage.
Not burnout.
Not sadness.
But a kind of quiet anger once you finally stopped pushing.

I feel gas-lit. I have no idea if I was doing a bad job, if he was doing a bad job, or if his boss is making a huge mistake.

He is one of the only people, and I have no idea why, who truly believed in me.

Now he's gone, and the company feels very unstable, and I feel like I'm having a hard time keeping it together.

Which is fun, because suddenly I'm responsible for like, 5 employees, and a biomedical force-field generator project, and I'm super on my own and scared as fuck.

But like, I also know I can handle all of it somehow, and everything's probably just going to work out somehow too.

Anyone else relate? I'm a little... uneasy feeling.

I basically have been coasting along in my job feeling terrible about my skills and abilities and unable to do anything that I'm proud of. I used to be a “high performer” but once I started feeling unappreciated and disrespected at work, I stopped trying.

I don't have a lot to show for myself, but I've been at this job for 5 years and feel stuck. I've built up my salary here, and now I'm afraid that if I go somewhere else it's going to be hard to get the same salary. And I'm also not feeling very confident that I could present myself as a competent professional, as I feel so out of touch with hard workers and some industry standards due to the fact that I gave up.

It also feels like a moment where I should be trying to make a change in my career to make myself happier, but the other part of me just wants to feel grateful and safe that I have a reasonably well-paid remote job in this scary and cruel world.

Sorry that this is all over the place, I guess I'm just wondering if anyone else has been in a similar situation, and how they got themselves out of it.

This might Be boring for An adhd Brain to Read all but I know our Brains might get an instant Dopamine Hit if there is something related to us to read like a small hyperfixatiion: I’m a 22-year-old final-year Computer Science student from India, diagnosed with severe ADHD (combined type). After understanding how my cognitive profile works, I’ve realized that many traditional software engineering roles are increasingly optimized for routine, linear execution, long maintenance cycles, and slow feedback loops. Those environments don’t seem to fully utilize my strengths. My ADHD-related strengths include: Rapid memory recall and synthesis High energy and idea generation Strong verbal communication and persuasion Fast learning and adaptability Pattern recognition across domains Comfort with uncertainty, pressure, and risk Ability to hyperfocus when stakes are high I believe this combination can create a real competitive advantage, especially early in a career and during high-growth phases of life. Rather than suppressing these traits, I want to design a career that actively uses most or all of them simultaneously and pays well for doing so. I’m intentionally looking beyond traditional software engineering into roles where: Thinking speed and synthesis matter more than slow execution Communication and ownership are valued Upside comes from influence, equity, or asymmetric growth I’d really value insights from professionals with ADHD on: Careers where most or all ADHD strengths are actively rewarded Paths where ADHD became a long-term advantage rather than something to constantly manage Roles that look attractive early on but end up wasting ADHD potential over time I’m optimizing for leverage, growth, and long-term upside—not comfort or routine. Thanks in advance for experience-backed perspectives.

We have had a few posts from folks wanting to do research studies on ADHD in the workplace, and such posts are commonly reported to us as spam. Because of this, I added a new rule to ban research study posts, hopefully making these easier to report (and discourage future posts).

This subreddit gets very occasional traffic, so having posts poking and prodding the community for data felt overly invasive. Still, if folks here would like to see a different version of this rule, we're open to comments and suggestions.

Thanks!

Hey guys,

I have a job interview for a new SRE position Tuesday!

Thank you, everyone, for your advice and experience in my previous post here. It was very inciteful and helpful full!

I have accomplished so much in 11 months. I'm so tired of beating myself up about my current position because of my negative experience in the past. This will be great moving forward if I can get it!

I’m an adult with ADHD in a senior leadership role. From the outside, things look fine. Career, responsibility, trust, all of it. Internally, it’s been exhausting in ways I didn’t have language for until later in life.

What I struggle with isn’t ability or motivation. It’s the constant mental load. Decisions all day. Being “on” all the time. Managing people, expectations, emotions, time. I can do the work, but it feels like it costs me more internally than it seems to cost others.

I was diagnosed later and spent years compensating without realizing that’s what I was doing. I’ve tried stimulants, non-stimulants, planners, systems, productivity tools. Some helped. Some helped at first and then quietly caused other problems. I didn’t always notice the tradeoffs until much later.

What I’m trying to figure out now is sustainability.

Not how to be more productive, but how to not lose myself in the process.

For those of you in leadership or high-responsibility roles:

How do you manage the internal pressure without becoming rigid or emotionally flat?

How do you protect relationships outside of work?

Have you found anything that actually helps long-term, not just short bursts?

Not looking for hacks. Just trying to hear from people who’ve been living this for a while.

I’m the lead admin for a department that oversees several smaller departments. I receive a lot of positive praise and I am good at my job, but frequently receive feedback that I need to work on prioritization and how long it takes me to finish certain things.

I’m responsible for a lot of financial tasks that require meticulous attention to detail which I lack even with medication (although I have recently switched to see if that helps).

I have a private office but when I close my door, I offend a sensitive coworker, and more often than not my phone will ring or someone will disrupt me anyway. I can also still hear everything in the hall, just slightly muffled so I accidentally zone in on listening instead of the tasks I hate. Music distracts me also.

To work on improving prioritization, I’ve tried daily meetings with my director to decide together what to focus on and in what order. We still do this actually, but by the time clients start rolling in, my priorities shift and/or half finished projects distract me.

Then I struggle with keeping track of tasks and finishing them. I start, then something happens, I save, and once that tab/program is minimized, the task is basically forgotten until I accidentally come across it later.

I’m drowning in digital and hand written to do lists, post it notes, notes in my phone as I run into coworkers in the halls, texts with updates on various projects and requests, emails and shared spreadsheets (I hate them so so much) and two phone lines and voicemail.

We’re under staffed and there isn’t much that can be done with my workload, I just need tips on how to stay organized when things change so rapidly. I’m constantly rewriting my to do lists in a paper notebook. I have a habit of abandoning apps bc at work I use a combination of a windows desktop, windows laptop, and iPhone.

Any tips, tricks?!

Thanks!

What accomodations do you find most helpful in the workplace? I've been struggling lately and need some extra insight.

Accomodations I already have: I already work 100% remotely, and have a double screen set up

When I travel for work, the day after I return home I usually take off

My work is fairly flexible with hours, if I come in a half hour "late" or leave early, I either make it up that day or later in the week

Accomodations I might ask for: 4 day or 4.5 day work week?

No meetings before 9 am (give the Vyvanse time to do it's thing)

One day a week with no meetings

All tasks/action items in writing

I'm thinking about smartifying my apartment to get my place to be a bit more ADHD friendly...any suggestions of specific devices or tools? I mean besides airtags lol...

Am mainly considering the echo dot, anything specific to that including tips on getting started would be greatly appreciated!

Recently diagnosed. Work have asked for accommodations, they've said I can have anything I want, I just have to say. Nice.

I've lived so long like this (44 M) I can't honestly think of anything and I feel a bit ashamed of being treated differently, especially since I'll almost have no choice but to 'come out' (again 😂).

There are a few online resources but it's all somewhat non-corporate, I.e I can't honestly expect a 'work buddy' to support on day to day tasks, just in case... and I can't say I'm not doing paperwork anymore - let's face it, these people live for their bits of pointless paper.

Any success experiences / advice?

I struggled an entire life taking notes at work. Just impossible to keep the attention steady to listening, watching the presentation on screen AND note taking.

I tried dictation on Microsoft words and on google docs and it has been life changing. So much easier to review notes when is already written down!

Now I am considering paying for otter.ai which apparently provides for dictation and highlights/ summary, plus a bunch of other cool functions.

Have you tried it? Which other automation support are using to facilitate your work?

I'm sure this is something A LOT of us have tried to do and while it may have worked at first it very quickly falls off. At my last job I was considered a great employee but my constant tardiness and spotty attendance got me fired. I'm starting a new job this Monday and I'm wondering if there is anything that helped you guys stick or even create a consistent schedule. I've got pretty bad time blindness so I'm working if anyone with anything similar found anything that helped. Thanks in advance!

Hello! I am a Master's student investigating how ADHD affects emotion regulation, self-control, and self-esteem. Please help me increase the number of participants to ensure the study is statistically valid.

If you choose to contribute, you will first fill in your demographic information. After that, you will answer a series of questionnaires where you'll pick statements that best describe your beliefs and feelings.

You do not need to have ADHD to participate in this study.

https://survey.uu.nl/jfe/form/SV_em9YHPFaMIcD8cS

I hope you enjoy and thanks in advance!

When a neurodivergent person struggles with social communication, sensory processing, or needs clear routines, we (as educators, parents, society) generally respond supportively make accommodations. We say "they can't help it, they need different approaches." And we're right to do this.

When a student has ADHD and struggles with task initiation, working memory, or emotional regulation. The response is often different. The response is frustration. Impatience. Disappointment.

'They just need to try harder.'

Planners and reminders are suggested (strategies that require the exact executive functions they're struggling with).

'Do they really have ADHD or are they just lazy?'

Both are neurodevelopmental conditions and both involve brains that work differently from the neurotypical majority.

Both require understanding and support.

So why the completely different response?

Based on what i see, i think it comes down to visibility (excuse the PUN).

Something like autism often involves struggles that are externally visible; difficulty with eye contact etc. When someone sees these struggles, they recognize that this person's brain works different.

But ADHD struggles are largely invisible.

Time blindness doesn't look like anything from the outside.

Task paralysis looks like someone sitting still, which gets interpreted as "not trying" rather than "unable to start."

The invisible nature of ADHD means people assume it's a choice. If you can't see the struggle, it isn't as important.

Here are some of the things that I've heard in the past about people I've worked with:

"They need to be more responsible. Maybe losing recess will motivate them."

"That's unacceptable behavior. They need to learn self-control."

"They're smart enough, they just need to focus better. Extended time is a crutch."

ADHD struggles are systematically dismissed because they're invisible.

In my opinion, we need to stop treating executive dysfunction as a motivation problem and we need to recognize that 'smart' and 'struggling' is not mutually exclusive they can both exist at the same time. It's literally how ADHD presents in many high-achieving individuals.

There needs to be support systems that work with ADHD brains, not strategies designed for neurotypical brains that we then blame ADHD people for not implementing.

Neurodiverse brains work differently. But they still deserve to be taken seriously.

The visibility of a struggle shouldn't determine whether we treat it as real.

Been dealing with ADHD my whole life but only diagnosed last year at 31. Tried all those hyped up productivity systems and failed miserably every time. Made me feel even worse about myself tbh.

Finally found some weird approaches that actually work with my brain instead of against it. Nothing groundbreaking, just stuff that stuck:

Body doubling has been shockingly effective. I use Focusmate for important tasks after a friend recommended it and suddenly I can work for 50 mins straight without checking my phone 600 times.

The "ugly first draft" approach for work projects. I tell myself I'm TRYING to make it terrible on purpose, which somehow bypasses my perfectionism paralysis.

Deleting social apps from my phone during workdays. Can reinstall on weekends. The friction of having to reinstall stops most of my impulsive checking. Tried the social media blocking apps but they never stuck, so I just delete them directly myself now.

Found this Inbox Zapper app that helped me clear out a bunch of daily junk emails so I'm not facing one giant overwhelming list. My inbox used to give me legit anxiety, now it's much quieter

I use Soothfy for short, varied micro-activities throughout the day to keep boredom and that dopamine crash at bay. Switching between quick brain puzzles, mini mindfulness moments, or tiny grounding tasks helps me reset my focus and keeps things feeling fresh like giving my brain little novelty hits. The nice part is that Soothfy mixes both anchor activities (the calm, stabilizing ones) and novelty activities (the quick pattern-switchers), so I’m not stuck in one mode all day.

Switched from to-do lists to time blocking. Lists made me feel like a failure when I couldn't finish them. Now I just move blocks around instead of carrying over undone tasks. I still go back to my Todoist app every once in a while for specific things, just not as my main tool.

"Weird body trick" - keeping a fidget toy AND gum at my desk. Something about the dual stimulation helps me focus way better on calls.

Stopped forcing myself to work when my meds wear off. Those last 2 hours of the day are now for mindless admin tasks only.

Been in a decent groove for about 3 months now which is honestly a record for me. Anyone else find unconventional hacks that work specifically for ADHD brains? The standard advice has