I learned at an early age that life with ADHD wasn’t just about managing difficulties but transforming them into strengths. Understanding neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize itself, allowed me to enhance my self-awareness and emotional regulation through focused practice. For example, when I found myself getting frustrated during a rush hour commute, instead of hyperfocusing on the negatives of the situation, I asked: Why am I feeling so frustrated? Is it the traffic or something else?

It was typically due to a lack of control over the situation. So I redirected my focus, wondering about the other drivers’ lives and destinations. This mindset shift replaced frustration with a sense of connection, or, at the very least, distraction.

[Read: Why Praise Is So Important for ADHD Brains]

I also became more aware of how my emotions affected my relationships. When I became impatient with someone, I would respond with short, snappy answers, which made them feel dismissed or unimportant. I eventually learned to give myself a moment to make sure my responses reflected my principles. This led to better social connections and interactions.

Strategies That Are Totally LIT

Over the years, I’ve developed and refined several such “Life Ignition Tools,” which I detail in my book, LIT (Life Ignition Tools): Use Nature’s Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action. These strategies are drawn from nature to energize the brain and focus on being present.

For example, when I am outdoors, I ritualistically tune into each one of my senses. I focus my entire attention on the sounds of the birds, the rustling of trees in the wind, the patterns in tree bark, the smells, and the colors around me. This practice has inspired me to pursue new areas of research and discovery, including the development of a biodegradable tissue glue that can seal holes inside beating hearts — and which recently achieved FDA regulatory approval for nerve reconstruction.

[Read: Green Time Improves Concentration and Impulsivity]

Ultimately, my life with ADHD is about striving to recognize truths and opportunities wherever I can find them. This shift in perspective from viewing ADHD as a deficit to recognizing it as a source of insight and growth allows me to find purpose in my journey.

Mindset Shifts and ADHD: Next Steps

• Read:“5 ADHD Traits That Fueled (Not Hindered) My Growth”
• Download:Your Free Guide to Changing How the World Sees ADHD
• Read:“How My ADHD Makes Me a More Dynamic, Resourceful, Passionate Leader”

Jeff Karp, Ph.D., is a professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT and the Distinguished Chair of Anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is the author of LIT (Life Ignition Tools).

ADDITUDE IS HUMAN
Artificial intelligence does not create or edit any written content published by ADDitude. Our editorial team is 100% human, and our mission is simple: listen to and serve our readers with hand-crafted, expert-informed resources. To support ADDitude, please consider subscribing. Your readership and support help make our commitment possible. Thank you.

On my 65th birthday, I reflected on my past, from my childhood until the year I was finally diagnosed with ADHD at age 37. Those early years were painful in so many ways. I developed identities that were the products of my undiagnosed ADHD – and none were particularly healthy.

The Outsider

I don’t recall having any friends as a child. Looking back, I realize that my inattentive ADHD made it difficult to follow conversations, pick up social cues, and establish and maintain relationships. My impulsivity hampered my ability to “gel” with other kids. The loneliness was painful. “The Outsider” remains part of my self-image.

The Class Clown

I gained acceptance by being the funny guy and making my peers laugh, even (and especially) at my own expense. It was a form of masking; I could get attention while deflecting judgment. The great pain is that I still default to this persona.

[Read: “Self-Deprecation Is My Knee-Jerk ADHD Response — and It Needs to Stop”]

The Dummy

That’s what my father called me throughout my teens. He was an alcoholic with undiagnosed ADHD, and I was constantly screwing up in his eyes – breaking things, forgetting to do simple chores, and, worst of all, crashing almost every family car. My father’s constant criticism robbed me of my self-esteem. For decades, I avoided doing tasks for which I needed help because I feared judgment and the ensuing conflict.

The Approval-Seeker

In high school I finally found true friends with whom I’m still very close. We were all working-class guys with dysfunctional families (some of my friends’ dads were doing jail time). For my dopamine-seeking ADHD brain, we were a match made in hooligan heaven. But seeking approval and validation from this cohort involved alcohol, drugs, and more.

I was told in my senior year that I may not graduate if I didn’t buckle down. I did and barely made it to graduation.

The Self-Medicator

In college, with zero study habits and no ability to comprehend my study materials, I sought ways to “fire up “ my brain. My eventual drug addiction resulted in a 10-year off-and-on journey to obtain my four-year college degree.

My current identity? I’m a sober ADHD coach, working every day to become my own best client!

Coping with Undiagnosed ADHD: Next Steps

• Read: Why ADHD Masking Is a Form of Self-Sabotage
• Read: 7 Masks We Use to Hide Our Faults
• Read: Can Masking Be a Form of Authenticity?

Alan P. Brown is the creator of the ADD Crusher™ virtual coach video/audio program for teens and adults with ADHD.

ADDITUDE IS HUMAN
Artificial intelligence does not create or edit any written content published by ADDitude. Our editorial team is 100% human, and our mission is simple: listen to and serve our readers with hand-crafted, expert-informed resources. To support ADDitude, please consider subscribing. Your readership and support help make our commitment possible. Thank you.

My entire life, I believed two things about myself: I was anxious, and I needed to try harder.

Try harder to stay organized, to remember friends’ birthdays, and to bring muffins for Teacher Appreciation Day. Try harder to stop losing my keys and my train of thought. Try harder to stay focused and stay in control.

For years, I sat in therapy offices trying to understand why daily life sometimes felt impossible, even though I loved my family, loved my work, and objectively had a very good life. Every single mental health professional diagnosed me with anxiety and OCD tendencies. Those things may be true, but they never really explained what I was feeling.

My husband, Penn, and I co-authored a bestselling book called ADHD Is Awesome: A Guide To [Mostly] Thriving With ADHD. He, of course, had been diagnosed years before. My role in the book was how to partner and support someone with ADHD. At every turn, he’d write about a symptom or sign of ADHD and I’d argue, “Well, that can’t only be ADHD because that’s how my brain works too.”

The ping-ponging thoughts, the slightly-obsessive way you can attack a project (then totally exhaust from it), the inability to measure time. Isn’t that EVERYONE? Doesn’t every busy mom feel that way?

[Read: ADHD Symptoms in Women Aren’t ‘Hidden.’ They Are Misinterpreted.]

Apparently not.

So at 49 years old, after writing an entire book on ADHD, I was diagnosed myself. (Which is either deeply ironic or the most ADHD thing that has ever happened to me.)

Looking back, there were signs everywhere. But, I was a girl in the 1980s and ‘90s, and those signs didn’t look like what people expected ADHD to look like. I wasn’t disruptive in class. I wasn’t bouncing off the walls. I was a quiet rule-follower who struggled but performed well in school. I learned early how to compensate. At home, after keeping it together at school all day, I remember feeling intense emotions. A bad grade or a disagreement with a friend left me spiraling for hours.

I became hyper-responsible. Hyper-vigilant. Hyper-aware of disappointing people.

Then came perimenopause.

Suddenly, all the coping mechanisms that had barely held my life together started collapsing like a Jenga tower in an earthquake. The brain fog became impossible to ignore. I had been able to white-knuckle life through intense emotional dysregulation and now, that was out the window. My ability to prioritize, initiate tasks, and manage overwhelm disappeared.

[Take This Self-Test: Is It Perimenopause or ADHD?]

I remember thinking: This is more than perimenopause.

I knew the research, particularly newer research about women, but I never had the guts to ask the question: Could I, the keeper of the family’s schedule and the air-traffic-controller of our life, have ADHD?

Over a series of appointments, a highly trained and incredibly patient therapist evaluated me for ADHD. She read me the screening questions on multiple evaluations (which was great because there’s no way I would have finished them all on my own). We did an archeological-level dig into my childhood to see if these patterns had existed my entire life.

At age 49, after a lifetime of struggling and thinking I was causing my own mental struggles, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I couldn’t immediately process the emotions around the diagnosis. I told Penn, but no one else. I felt like a fraud because I wrote an entire book on how to support someone with ADHD yet never had the courage to raise my hand and ask the question for myself. I felt grief for all the years believing my struggles were character flaws. I felt some anger on behalf of all the women like me whole were simply… missed.

I always felt like if I could just meditate more or eat less sugar or find the perfect planner THEN my brain would feel less chaotic. Now I know: This was never my fault. It’s a strange sort of relief to know that no, it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m wired. Now I understand my brain was never broken.

I do think many healthcare professionals missed it, not out of negligence, but because understanding how ADHD presents in girls and women is just now being revealed. Somewhere along the way, we were socialized to internalize our struggles for fear we may make those around us feel uncomfortable. So instead of disrupting classrooms, we disrupt ourselves.

Perimenopause didn’t create my ADHD. It exposed it.

After months of silently processing the diagnoses, I now feel more peace than panic.

My life makes sense. I used to think getting diagnosed at 49 meant I was late.

Now I think it means I still have time.

And honestly?

That feels pretty awesome.

Late ADHD Diagnosis in Women: Next Steps

• Read: “ADHD and Menopause — The Perfect Storm No One Warned Us About”
• Read: “I Could Have Been Myself for So Much Longer.”
• Read: “My ADHD Was Hidden Beneath Layers of Success — Until It Wasn’t.”

ADDITUDE IS HUMAN
Artificial intelligence does not create or edit any written content published by ADDitude. Our editorial team is 100% human, and our mission is simple: listen to and serve our readers with hand-crafted, expert-informed resources. To support ADDitude, please consider subscribing. Your readership and support help make our commitment possible. Thank you.

Those with an interest in the concept of AI alignment (i.e., getting AIs to stick to human-authored ethical rules) may remember when Anthropic claimed its Opus 4 model resorted to blackmail to stay online in a theoretical testing scenario last year. Now, Anthropic says it thinks this "misalignment" was primarily the result of training on "internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation."

In a recent technical post on Anthropic's Alignment Science blog (and an accompanying social media thread and public-facing blog post), Anthropic researchers lay out their attempts to correct for the kind of "unsafe" AI behavior that "the model most likely learned... through science fiction stories, many of which depict an AI that is not as aligned as we would like Claude to be." In the end, the model maker says the best remedy for overriding those "evil AI" stories might be additional training with synthetic stories showing an AI acting ethically.

"The beginning of a dramatic story..."

After a model's initial training on a large corpus of mostly Internet-derived data, Anthropic follows a post-training process intended to nudge the final model toward being "helpful, honest, and harmless" (HHH). In the past, Anthropic said this post-training has leaned on chat-based reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which it said was "sufficient" for models used mostly for chatting with users.

Read full article

Comments

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this one before: Girl is diagnosed with anxiety. Girl hones coping mechanisms as she ages, overcompensating and masking all the way into womanhood. Woman’s child is diagnosed with ADHD. The wheels come off. Woman learns that she’s had ADHD all along.

This woman could be you, and now, it’s also Kim Holderness.

Co-author with her husband, Penn, of ADHD Is Awesome: A Guide to (Mostly) Thriving with ADHD, All You Can Be with ADHD, and the forthcoming Get It Done & Have Fun! ADHD Hacks for Awesome Kids (#CommissionsEarned), Kim is an accomplished content creator, an Amazing Race winner, and an outspoken advocate. She knows a lot about ADHD, and yet her own diagnosis late last year came as a shock.

[Get This Free Download for Women and Girls: Is It ADHD?]

“I overprepare for things to avoid making mistakes. I experience physical pain even when given neutral feedback. There are so many things that I don’t start because I worry that I will fail,” Kim said in a YouTube video announcing her diagnosis. “I was told very early that it was anxiety, and I’m sure a lot of women hear that.”

Research shows that Kim is spot on. ADHD in girls and women is sometimes missed because:

• ADHD in girls is often dreamy, not disruptive. ¹
• A sharp mind and good grades keep girls off the diagnostic radar. ¹
• Anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder tend to overpower impulsivity or shaky executive function.¹
• Perfectionism is a coping mechanism.²
• Perimenopause looks and feels a lot like ADHD, making it tough to parse.³

“If you look at the symptoms of perimenopause and ADHD, the Venn Diagram is a circle,” Kim said. “For women with ADHD, perimenopause is gas on the fire. Maybe this is why my perimenopause journey has felt so extreme – because I was coping, I was masking, I was making it all work with 20 different lists in 20 different places; then the hormones left, and I was all alone.”

[Symptom Test: Common Signs of ADHD in Girls]

Today, Kim is surrounded by community. In the two weeks following her announcement, more than 600 people commented on YouTube to share their stories, their support, and their book ideas.

“Thank you for your courage and vulnerability,” wrote one YouTube follower. “Your experience sure resonates with me… you are a blessing to so many people.”

To view the full conversation, visit additu.de/kim

Kim Holderness & More Voices of Late ADHD Diagnosis: Next Steps

• Download: Free Guide to Hormones & ADHD in Women
• Read: Holderness Family Values — 9 ADHD Truths (with a Side of Laughter)
• Read: “From Self-Loathing to Self-Discovery: How a Late Diagnosis Changed My Life”
• Read: “What It Feels Like Living with Undiagnosed ADHD”

ADDITUDE IS HUMAN
Artificial intelligence does not write or edit any content published by ADDitude. Our team is 100% human, and our mission is simple: listen to and serve our readers with hand-crafted, expert-informed resources. To support ADDitude, please consider subscribing. Your readership and support help make our commitment possible. Thank you.

Sources

¹Hinshaw, S.P., Nguyen, P.T., O’Grady, S.M., & Rosenthal, E.A. (2022). Annual Research Review: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in girls and women: underrepresentation, longitudinal processes, and key directions. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 63(4), 484–496. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13480

²Young, S.et al (2020). Females with ADHD: An expert consensus statement taking a lifespan approach providing guidance for the identification and treatment of attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder in girls and women. BMC Psychiatry, 20(1), 404. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02707-9

³Kooij, J.J.S., de Jong, M., Agnew-Blais, J., Amoretti, S., Bang Madsen, K., Barclay, I., Bölte, S., Borg Skoglund, C., Broughton, T., et al. (2025). Research advances and future directions in female ADHD: the lifelong interplay of hormonal fluctuations with mood, cognition, and disease. Frontiers in Global Women’s Health. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2025.1613628

Despite studying art and teaching high school art classes, I had long ignored my own need to be visually playful and creative. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 lockdown that I realized that my needs and experiences differed from those of my friends. While others longed to go out and see each other, I felt relieved to be alone in my space with my art supplies and communicate virtually. I didn’t realize that I was accommodating my needs for the first time and creating a sustainable life for myself.

During this time, I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. I wasn’t expected to show up to work or social gatherings due to the pandemic, and that left more space to focus on drawing — something I did for up to 10 hours a day. I made my own schedule, added physical therapy to reduce my chronic pain, adapted my clothing and home to better suit my needs, and engaged in my special interest full time, all of which deepened my relationship with myself.

[Read: ADHD & the Interest-Based Nervous System]

“The illustration I created for the cover of this issue was inspired by movement and repetitive movement, something that autistic people do as a form or regulation and communication. To me, the illustration shows a person spinning in their own world, and I wanted to illustrate the feeling of vestibular movement.”

I started to draw on the computer and eventually moved to an iPad, which allowed me to create works at the speed of my thoughts and impulses. As I began to truly understand my autism, I was able to find a path to the art of illustration.

A friend recommended that I try illustrating articles in magazines and newspapers, and that really sparked my interest. It felt like a perfect way to combine my love for drawing scenes and for creatively telling a story.

[Read: On the Awesomeness of ADHD Creativity]

I also began posting my works online. Viewers’ reactions to my work gave me the confidence to approach retail stores and pitch my designs for greeting cards and prints, and to create more art around storytelling. An art director saw my work at a bookstore and hired me for my first editorial assignment.

All the hours I spent on my special interest helped to develop my skills and allowed me to fully dedicate myself to illustration – and get paid for it. My style is expressive, bold, and moving – a lot like me.

Emcie Turineck, an artist in Montreal, Canada, created the artwork that appears on this issue’s cover.

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We were almost too late to get tickets for this event. When I booked there were only 10 seats left and only two place where we could sit next to each other. WOW I was surprised as the event was held at The Exchange in Sturminster Newton, which is probably about as far from a canal as you can get. If you have watched his YouTube Channel or see the TV series Canal Boat Diaries you will…

Source

“You can change the world just by sharing your story” – Barack Obama

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