The Powerful Reframe That Restored My Hope After ADHD Burnout

We need to be talking about the connection between ADHD and hope. Hope keeps us going and it is one of the greatest things we stand to lose in the face of unmanaged ADHD.

Photo by Iván Díaz on Unsplash

I’ve lost a lot of things in my life—ADHD can do that to you. Misplacing keys or other important items can be a regular struggle in the life of an ADHDer. But in all my years living with untreated ADHD, far and above all else, the worst thing my ADHD ever made me lose, was my hope.

ADHD can feel like riding shotgun in your life

Hope, Dr. Chan Hellman, Director of The Hope Research Center, explains, isn’t just the belief that things will get better; this is just optimism. Hope is also *and this part is critical* the belief in your own ability to make them better—a concept known as self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is an individual's belief in their capacity to act in ways necessary to reach their goals.

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled to align my actions to my intentions (AKA reach my goals). While all humans struggle with regulating their behaviour, consistently it seemed that what I aimed to do and what I actually did were at odds. My big plans for life rarely made it past the daydream phase and my goals, whether it was trying to establish a healthy morning routine, break a bad habit, or stick to a budget, repeatedly lost out to short-term opportunities for dopamine. They say we are our habits and my habits would go something like this:

Me: “I’m tired of getting caught scrolling Instagram for hours at a time only to feel bad about myself after. I’m going to quit social media so that I can use my time doing things that are productive and bring me real joy and connection”.

*deletes instagram*

~ 2 hours later ~

Me: “Screw it”

*re-installs instagram*

I remember once trying to explain to my Dad what it felt like for me to “do life”:

“It’s like I’m driving a car and this car is my life but I’m not even in the driver’s seat. Instead, I’m riding shotgun, trying to call out directions to where I want to go (somewhere aligned to my highest good and deepest desires for my life) but the Driver keeps ignoring me, instead steering the wheel towards whatever feels good in that moment”

Moving through life with such little self-control eroded my self-trust over time. While there was so much I wanted to accomplish in life, I couldn’t see a future where I could make any of it happen. It felt like I was trapped in that car, helplessly watching as the places I deeply desired to go grew smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.

Without knowing what was going on in my brain at a neurological level, I resorted to charachterlogical explanations for where I had landed in life: I guess I’m just lazy. I have no will-power. And most painful: I can’t trust myself to act in ways that support the life I want to live.

Luckily for me, I could not have been more wrong.

Why can’t I do what I ultimately want to to do?

At 30 years old I was diagnosed with ADHD and learned that these self-concepts are all too common in the ADHD community. But while they are common, they are far from true. The truth is that our struggle to make happen what we want to make happen in our lives is not an issue of laziness or willpower, but an issue of many other things.

1. Self-Regulation. Initiating and carrying out actions toward a future goal requires us to employ self-regulation skills like self-awareness, impulse control, attention management, working memory, self-motivation and problem-solving. These mental skills are what make up the executive functioning system of the brain (the part of the brain that helps us to execute) and it is in this domain where the ADHD impairment lies.

   “Think of ADHD as a performance disorder,” explains Dr. Russell Barkley. “People with ADHD know what they need to do, but they struggle—greatly, at times—to transform intention into action. It’s an issue directly tied to the executive function difficulties inherent in ADHD. The executive system lives in the brain’s frontal lobe, and it is responsible for putting into action the knowledge that lives in the back of the brain. But ADHD separates these two parts of the brain…This is why people with ADHD seem unlikely, unable, or unwilling to carry out behaviours that they know may be good for them.”

2. Dopamine Addiction. Recall above when I mentioned how my “Driver” was always steering our car away from where I ultimately wanted to go in favour of whatever would feel good right now? It turns out my brain wasn’t doing this just to be difficult or because I lacked willpower. Key aspects of the reward system are under-active in the ADHD brain, making our brains highly motivated to pursue dopamine-producing activities (like scrolling social media, eating sugar, or engaging in any other addictive behaviour). According to Dr. Ellen Littman (a pioneer in the identification of gender differences in ADHD and a personal hero of mine), ADHD brains are “motivated by their search for optimal stimulation, rather than by what others label as important.” Unfortunately for ADHD brains, we now live in a world rife with opportunities for stimulation and quick dopamine hits (most of us live with a dopamine machine right in our pocket), making it practically a full-time job for us to try to regulate away these destructive habits.

3. Idea Overload. ADHD brains are idea machines, fuelled by our above-average divergent thinking —the process of exploring and generating multiple ideas through free-flowing, non-linear thought. The challenge, however, lies in staying focused on one idea long enough to bring it to fruition. I often find myself brimming with excitement over a new idea, rushing to the bookstore to buy a book on the topic. On the drive home, I might start listening to a podcast that mentions another book, and before I know it, I'm standing in my living room, about to buy the new book on Amazon, while still holding the book I just purchased (true story). Just this morning I found myself googling a new course I wanted to take WHILE on a zoom call for a course I’m currently taking. Sigh.

We have our own unique user manuals

Understanding all of this has been paramount for me in letting go of the negative self-beliefs that plagued me for years. But this past winter, even though I was starting to understand that my challenges in life were not a result of me not trying hard enough, I felt frustrated that my brain worked the way it did. I was in the midst of the worst burnout and depression of my life and found myself standing in the kitchen trying to explain to my Sister what this burnout felt like with the help of another analogy (I speak primarily in analogies if this wasn’t clear by now. Car analogies in particular, apparently).

“It feels like life is just this Formula 1 race and everyone is whipping past me in their Audi’s and I’m trying my hardest to get my car going - I’ve got the thing in Drive. I’m pushing on the gas. I’ve got my hands at 10 and 2. I’m doing everything I was told I should do to get it to work. But I’m stalled out. Once in a while I’ll get a burst of energy but then I lose control of the thing and I crash into the wall. I feel like my car is broken. I’m so tired of trying to participate in this race with a broken car. I can’t do it anymore.”

My Sister, deeply aware of my struggles, having witnessed them from day one of this “race”, looked at me with compassionate determination, and reflected back to me what I had spent the last year learning:

“Laura”, she said, “you’re not driving a broken-down car. You’re driving a freaking spaceship; you just haven’t learned how to drive it”.

She was right. ADHD brains “have their own rules of engagement”, says Dr. Ellen Littman. Our brains are complex and need different environmental conditions than our neurotypical peers in order to thrive.

ADHD: a gift, a curse or both?

In their book ADHD 2.0, ADHD pioneers Dr. Ned Hallowell and Dr. John Ratey, write, “Yes, ADHD is a powerful force of pain and needless suffering in too many lives. But if mastered, it brings out talents you can neither teach nor buy. It is often the lifeblood of creativity and artistic talents. It is a driver of ingenuity and iterative thinking. It can be your special strength or your child’s, even a bona fide superpower”.

This perspective, while optimistic, rubs many ADHDers the wrong way. Calling the root of my chronic depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behaviours—a condition that has kept me from achieving my goals, causes me to be extremely self-critical, and has stopped me from engaging in so much of life due to it making me hypersensitive to rejection — a "superpower" feels like a bit of a stretch. I also think of Dr. Russell Barkley who went on record to say people need to stop referring to ADHD as a gift as its a hugely impairing, life-threatening disorder and by marketing it as a “gift”, we are undoing all the work that has been done for people to receive the very real supports and accommodations they need.

And yet, I feel truth in what Dr. Hallowell and Dr. Ratey are saying. There is no denying my brain is fast and powerful. But without knowing how to work it, without the proper guardrails and systems in place, I’ve only witnessed that power be the destructive kind. I once heard Dr. Hallowell compare ADHD to Niagara Falls - powerful, noisy, and extremely fast with potential for destruction, but build a hydroelectric plant and you light up the state of New York. I don’t know if I’ll be lighting up the state of New York anytime soon, but hearing this did shift something in me. What could this fast, powerful and creative brain be capable of if I figured out how to harness it?

The bottom line is this: ADHD brains are built differently and we need to stop pretending that they aren’t. I’m picturing myself sitting in the equivalent of an airplane cockpit, surrounded by all these colourful button and levers, feeling frustrated for not being able to get it to move by turning on the ignition, switching the gear into ‘Drive’ and pressing a gas pedal. I refuse to spend one more day of my life feeling like a failure for not being able to drive a vehicle that I never learned how to drive.

The ADHD brain is impaired. And just as a person with impaired vision uses glasses to support them in seeing, we too need the appropriate accommodations in place to help us be able to engage fully in life. I now see my goals, all the “things” I want to experience in life as beautiful destinations or road trips I’ll get to go on one day. But in order to go on said road trip, I first need to learn how to drive the vehicle that is taking me there. That is what I am doing now.

With this new mindset, I have touched back into hope. I can see a future where I’m able to align my behaviour to my intentions. I’m happy to report that my Driver and I are doing a lot better these days. We’re getting along pretty well and since I’ve taken the time to get to know her, she’s actually started to listen to my navigation requests. It turns out someone is much more likely to listen to you when you are speaking their language. Who knew?