Wondering if you have ADHD as an adult? Start with what feels familiar

Many adults begin wondering if they have ADHD later in life, often after years of struggling, masking, and doubting themselves.

You may have already looked at symptom lists or diagnostic criteria and thought:

‘Maybe… but I don’t fully see myself in this’.

That response is more common than you might expect for adults who weren’t identified as children.

A different starting question

It’s common to start with the question:

Do I tick enough boxes on the symptom lists?

But for many late-diagnosed adults, a more helpful first question is:

Does this feel familiar?

Diagnostic checklists can be useful, but they don’t always capture the lived experience of ADHD in adulthood. Many people first recognise ADHD not through criteria, but through moments of resonance: descriptions that reflect how life has felt, not just how symptoms are defined.

Starting here makes space to consider both:

• how ADHD commonly shows up in adults

• what ADHD often feels like from the inside.

This is not a diagnosis. It’s a starting point.

Why ADHD can be harder to recognise in adults

ADHD diagnostic criteria were originally developed based on observations of children. While the criteria have since been adapted for adults, including different symptom thresholds and adult-specific descriptions, they remain largely behaviour-based.

In adulthood, ADHD often looks different:

• hyperactivity is frequently internalised rather than being physical and directly observable

• coping strategies and effort mask difficulties

• challenges can show up as exhaustion, overwhelm, or emotional strain rather than disruption.
  

Research and clinical experience both suggest that ADHD in adults often presents as an internal, subjective experience rather than obvious outward behaviour. This contributes to under-recognition, particularly for women, high-functioning professionals, and those who learned early on to ‘hold it together’.

As a result, many adults don’t recognise themselves in checklists, even when they do have ADHD.

ADHD in adults: the core symptoms in adult terms

ADHD symptoms are typically broken up into three overlapping core areas: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. In adults, these often appear in quieter, less obvious ways.

Inattention: beyond can’t focus

Inattention is not an inability to pay attention at all – a common misunderstanding that arises from the name itself and from misinformation.

More usually, it looks like:

• difficulty sustaining focus on tasks that feel dull, vague, or unrewarding

• drifting mentally during conversations or meetings

• needing urgency, interest, or pressure to engage

• rereading the same page without absorbing it.
  

Many adults with ADHD can focus intensely, sometimes for long periods, when something is engaging. The difficulty lies in regulating where attention goes. The phrase interest-based nervous system is often a relatable shorthand people use to describe this.

Hyperactivity: often internal

By adulthood, overt physical hyperactivity is often replaced by:

• constant mental activity

• difficulty switching off thoughts

• internal restlessness

• a nervous system that struggles to downshift.
  

This form of cognitive hyperactivity isn’t always visible but it can be exhausting to live with. This kind of overwhelm is sometimes mislabelled as anxiety, particularly in women, although ADHD and anxiety also commonly co-occur.

Impulsivity: not just behavioural

Impulsivity in adults often shows up as:

• speaking or acting before fully thinking

• difficulty tolerating frustration or delays

• emotional reactivity

• changing plans or priorities quickly.
  

Rather than recklessness, it’s often about a reduced pause between feeling and response.

How I recognised ADHD in my own life

For me, ADHD didn’t make sense through checklists. It made sense through patterns I recognised.

At work, I would berate myself to ‘just grow up and stick with things’. I had ended up in a career that didn’t genuinely interest me, and I found myself relying on urgency to get things done and switching jobs frequently to create enough novelty to substitute for real interest.

Later, when life’s demands increased, particularly after having children, everything began to feel unmanageable and overwhelming. The demands on my executive functions simply became too great.

I used to imagine my life was like the game of Mario Kart my children loved to play. I was trying to move forward, but bananas were constantly being thrown at me. From the outside, it seemed easier for everyone else. I was comparing my insides to their outsides, imagining other mums as Disney princesses with birds clearing their path.

I couldn’t understand why everything felt so hard all the time.

Everyone’s experience is different, but the internal logic often feels familiar: the usual advice doesn’t work, and it doesn’t make sense why things feel so hard.

Why relatable content matters

Because of the gap between diagnostic language and lived experience, many adults first recognise ADHD through content that reflects how life feels, rather than through formal criteria.

Relatable descriptions:

• capture effort mismatch and emotional fatigue

• normalise chronic self-doubt and over-compensation

• explain why ‘trying harder’ hasn’t worked.
  

This kind of recognition can be clarifying, especially for adults who have spent years explaining their struggles in unkind ways, as the only way they knew to fill the explanatory void.

Importantly, this does not replace diagnosis. It helps people decide whether ADHD is something they want to explore further.

Recommended Resources

Here are some of the resources I’ve found most helpful, for when you are trying to move away from symptom checklists and instead focus on the subjective experience, mentally, emotionally, and relationally.

Books

Look for books that bring ADHD to life through narrative and lived experience, not just description. Books that cover how ADHD feels often resonate more deeply than lists of traits and offer a good balance between relatability, organisation of the material and credibility compared to other types of resources. They also generally offer options of reading or listening to suit your processing style.

A few books I recommend as particularly helpful with relatability are:

• Delivered from Distraction by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey. Engagingly written by two of the foremost authorities on ADHD. It includes a chapter called ‘The Feel of ADD’ (the former name for ADHD) and a self-assessment quiz that is highly relatable and includes specific examples such as – ‘Do you go off on tangents easily?’ and ‘Are you chuckling to yourself’ as you read these questions?’
  

• The Year I Met My Brain by Matilda Boseley. Balances her journalist background with ‘Diary Entries’ for relatability. Chapters that particularly help with identification include ‘What’s Wrong With Me?’ and ‘What Does ADHD Mean for a Grown-Up?’
  

• How to ADHD by Jessica McCabe. While Jessica McCabe is most famous for her YouTube channel, she has established both credibility and relatability, and her book reflects this. She structures chapters around common ADHD challenges such as ‘How to Motivate Your Brain’ and ‘How to Remember Stuff’, with each chapter beginning with her personal story related to the topic.
  

• Small Talk by Richard & Roxanne Pink. Similar to How to ADHD in that it grew from social media, but their credibility has since been established through two books. Their second book, Small Talk, is highly relatable and explores the stories many adults with ADHD told themselves before diagnosis. Chapters are organised around what they call ADHD ‘Lies,’ such as ‘I’m Not Trying Hard Enough’, ‘I Quit Everything I Start’, and ‘I Am Useless’.
  

Websites

Organisations such as ADDA (Attention Deficit Disorder Association) and CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) publish independent and evidence-informed resources focused on helping people with ADHD as well as offering online events and opportunities to connect in a supportive community.

In contrast, ADDitude is a large media platform rather than an advocacy organisation offering ‘ADHD Science and Strategies’ with an abundance of free resources and a newsletter to offer curated content.

Podcasts

While I primarily engage with ADHD content through reading, so can’t recommend podcasts personally, many adults prefer this format, particularly for hearing lived experience in a more conversational way.

Podcasts that clients commonly mention finding useful include ADHD reWired, ADHD for Smart Ass Women, and Hacking Your ADHD.

Social media

Short-form content on platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok work best as a starting point. Due to variable quality and accuracy, use it with caution for relatability. Use it to notice patterns, not to draw conclusions.

When diagnostic criteria do matter

If recognising yourself in ADHD descriptions leads you toward seeking an assessment, diagnostic criteria become important later in the process.

At that stage, criteria act as a translation tool:

• helping you connect lived experience to formal requirements

• preparing evidence for assessment

• supporting access to medication and accommodations.

This is where symptom lists become useful. Not as a first step, but as preparation for a thorough specialist assessment.

Putting this together: recognition comes first

Wondering whether you might have ADHD doesn’t mean you’re looking for a label. Often, it means you’re looking for an explanation that fits more accurately, and more kindly, than the ones you’ve used before.

Recognition starts with felt familiarity.

Diagnosis comes later.