What does ADD feel like?

"So, what does ADD feel like?"

The title illustrates a good question--an imperative one, actually. But what frustrates me--I mean really frustrates me!-- is that when you Google that very same question, the results are too ambiguous or too technical to comprehend.

Try it now, if you dare. You’ll find phrases like “brain fog, easily distracted, and on overdrive.”

Okay. Suuuure.

But what does that actually feel like? And just as importantly, what does it look like?

That is a question that you might find some actually-helpful answers to on Reddit if you do some digging. But one of the major symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder is boredom. So are people with ADD really going to get the answers they need to understand themselves if they have to dig for a half-hour on it to find anything even remotely applicable?

No.

And that’s sad.

It took me 2 years of considering I could have ADD before I actually believed I did. Then even more time on top of that to learn how it affected me personally. And that has a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t see my struggle represented clearly enough on today’s info sources. Am I distracted? Sure, aren’t we all? Did I have brain fog? (--the thing the internet says the worst bouts of ADD feels like--that thing that feels like you are dizzy and unable to think). Possibly, maybe? Did I have racing thoughts--thoughts going so fast that I can actually notice their speed? No--er--well, I didn’t think so…?

But did I have ADD?

Sure did! Just not the way Google explains it.

So let me try.

One of the best metaphors I’ve come up with is this:

Imagine you are in a single room. It’s empty, minus the rows of cabinets that make up all four walls around you. The cabinets are closed. You walk over to one, pull it open, and inside is a nice, neat stack of clothes. Imagine the perfect fold--like when you go into a Hollister. You grab the item you want and place the original stack back in its place. You close the door. You sigh. Everything is so neat and tidy. Organized. Clean. Aghhh.

If you haven’t figured it out already, each item of clothing represents a thought, an inclination, an idea, or a feeling, etc. The room is your brain. The doors to the cabinets represent the power you have to access and reject thoughts as you wish. What you just saw is a functional, scientifically normal (also called neurotypical) brain. Soooo niiiiice.

Now, let’s try it again, this time taking a peek into the ADD brain (for those of you who can’t stay tuned too long you can skip ahead by scrolling to the section designated by this arrow: ---> below). You are in that same room. You just walked in but already you notice a problem. A few of the cabinets are shaking. Already you’re alittle nervous--you didn’t cause them to shake nor can you get them to stop.

You walk to one cabinet and find a nice, neat stack of jeans. Near the middle, you spot the pair you came here for. You separate the jeans you want from those you don’t, and you turn to walk away. Job done! ...Right?

Without warning and without your permission, a cabinet behind you opens and a t-shirt shoots out and onto the floor. You reach down to pick up and put it back. But, alas! The jeans in your hand have started shaking and so have the rest of the garments in this cabinet!

As you move to put the t-shirt back, a tank top shoots out above you. Fine! You say. I guess you won’t get folded today! You toss the tank top and t-shirt into a ball and thrust them into a heap on the floor. You try to keep yourself calm. You can do this.

You reach back into the cabinet that holds your jeans. As you do so, the cabinet behind you starts shaking harder and harder. You curse. You know what comes next.

As if from nowhere, the entire third wall of cabinets flings open violently. Every single drawer turns outward and upends itself. The cabinet holding your jeans follows suit. They are now somewhere in the middle of all of this mess, and you’ve got only one action left to take.

Strategy is lost to you as you run mad-woman style around the room, flinging whatever you can grab into whatever pocket you can find. You close doors but they open again. You throw clothes into piles but they pop back out again. You trip. You cry. You get back up. You run. You trip again.

You do this for hours. Hours.

Sometimes all day.

----> (for those that wanted to skip past the metaphor)

But it only takes a few hours for you to feel deflated. All matter of garments and clothing float willy-nilly across the room, Harry Potter style, as if taunting you. You decide to go take a nap. Somehow, magically, when you sleep, the room goes back to its original state again. Maybe Dobby the House Elf cleans it for you. Or was it Doony? Doddy? What was his name again? Didn’t he have a girlfriend in book 5? Or was it 6? Was he even in Harry Potter or did you make it all up? You don’t care anymore. You need your nap. Bad.

And this, my friends, is the a-typical brain. A-typical is defined as: not representative of a type, group, or class. Thus, ADD people have a-typical brains. (Incidentally, A-typical is also a fantastic show. Go watch it! It’s on Netflix). While the neurotypical brain keeps thoughts, ideas, memories, impulses, feelings (the list goes on) in organized storage and accesses them with will and with precision, the ADD brain struggles with that same task. As one thought or feeling comes to consciousness, a string of others usually comes along with it. And the metaphor gets even worse. Imagine that those clothes from the closet are also all ripped up and torn. On my really bad days, my thoughts and feelings (etc.) aren’t just a circus, they are disjointed as well. Bits of this and bits of that, all mixing together. And if I want to get anything done, I have to fight. Fight! My own brain! It’s a lot to struggle against.

So when Google says “ADD people have racing thoughts,” it’s really not the truth. My thoughts and feelings (etc.) don’t actually feel fast. But they do feel chaotic and they come out in disjointed ways, often when I am not expecting them, and outside of my own will. (I should argue for the DSM to change the terminology from racing thoughts to unintentional strings of thoughts, ideas, and emotions instead.) When one thought or feeling comes, I must contend with all the others. It gets heavy. And it gets hard. And it all happens within a short span of time.

And that’s just what’s happening consciously-- dealing with literal thoughts and feelings I can consciously identify in my mind. Subconsciously, I’m being overworked as well. Thoughts are usually emotionally charged; it’s just the way us humans are wired. So along with the actual, narrated thoughts come the subconscious emotional triggers and intuitive hits. There are so many and they are so diverse, that actually tapping into my baseline or settling appropriately into the situation in front of me is sometimes near impossible. This is why sustained effort on any task is difficult, even the ones I enjoy. I’m constantly fighting through an internal barrage just to be present to the literal world around me.

I’m constantly fighting through an internal barrage just to be present to the literal world around me.

And there’s even more. What I just detailed above is only the distraction stemming from inside my brain. There’s assault from the outside physical world too. Do you hear the clock ticking? The air conditioning unit blowing? How about the tapping of your dog’s nails across the floor? Do your eyes hurt from the lights in the room? Can you feel that your feet are cold but your shoulders are too warm? The pressure where your glasses sit on your nose?

I’ll tell you this: I can and I do notice it. I notice waaay too much. And it takes energy just to sustain it. For neurotypical people, I expect such a high level of energy is exuded only in extreme cases. Like tuning out a baby’s shrill wail, for instance, or a train passing nearby. But for me, at all times during my waking hours I am exuding energy just to sustain the effects of all that stimuli. When I tell people that, the response is usually, “but can’t you tune it out?” Well, I would LOVE to tune it out. But before I even have the ability to tune it out, I must first cope with it. That step comes first. And for most ADD people, we can’t get past that first step in order to even attempt the other.

For ADD people, we must first cope with the stimuli before we can ignore it, and coping usually takes all of our energy.

I cope in a number of ways--most of them against the societal norm. I wear earplugs even in the car. I’m the weirdo wearing sunglasses inside the grocery store. My shirts are two to three sizes too large so I don’t have to feel the fabric rubbing against my skin. I wear my hair up in a bun even when I go to bed because I can’t stand the sensation of the hair across my neck.

The list goes on.

ADD symptoms flair and fluctuate, too, so it looks different on different days. Heck, even at different hours! One minute I’m so amped by all the stimuli that my mind feels like I’m on a sugar high or like I’m suffering a brain freeze. Other times my body has had way too much of it all and decides to shut down. I feel numb. My mind is empty. But it’s just because I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t possibly take even a single thought more. On really bad days, I can wake up in one of those two states before the day even begins. It’s both mentally and physically exhausting. I recently spent three days visiting a friend at their hotel apartment. We did nothing but swim a few laps in the pool and chat. Didn’t even walk outside. By the third night, my body was so taxed that I could hardly keep my head up at dinner. I felt like I had endured a marathon.

I often have little energy. But that's just because I’m so mentally and physically overstimulated that my body is crying out for a break.

What I’m getting at is this: there is more to the ADD experience than what is currently being iterated and digested across the masses. When words like “brain fog, easily-distracted, and racing thoughts” are the key words used to iterate the ADD experience, it leaves way too much room for interpretation and misunderstanding. “And why is that?” you ask. Because EVERYONE experiences these things to some extent. So an ADDer has little room to see themselves among those descriptions. And symptoms become way too easy to ignore or explain away.

Instead, this is what needs to happen: Google and WebMD and all those places where information is housed should provide concrete examples of what ADD looks and feels like. True, ADD looks and feels different for each person (and my experience detailed here is only one of many) but a frame of reference would do wonders.

Of course, there is much more to say about the ADD experience. However, this is all I’ve got for now. I can feel my body getting overwhelmed from the data stream in my head and all the light coming in from the window. I need to go take a nap now. (*wink*)

But seriously, I may just go take a nap.

Nighty-night, people. Stay classy.

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Author's Note: I would also like to note that my experience of ADD is on the less-impulsive side, and that I am also an HSP (highly sensitive person), so the experiences detailed above are in some ways also colored by that.