Helpful Things to Know About ADHD Overwhelm

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You know that feeling when it feels like you have too many tabs open in your brain? Or like there are 10 different radio stations playing at the same time and you’re trying to figure out which one to pay attention to?

If you have ADHD then you know what I’m talking about.

Overwhelm.

Jon Kabat-Zin describes overwhelm as the feeling of trying to take a sip of water through a fire hose. It feels like too much or more than you can handle.

What makes this such a common experience for people with ADHD?

The ADHD nervous system is always on. It craves the interesting, novel, fun, and exciting. There is no “deficit” of attention, despite the name. Instead, attention is excessive and it bounces around, ignoring the thing you should be paying attention to. A better name is more like Plethora of Attention Disorder.

There’s a movie called Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now that is a great description of ADHD attention!

There is SO MUCH to pay attention to! Making decisions, staying on task, taking in sensory input from your environment (florescent lights, noises, itchy clothes), deadlines, remembering to text back, (remembering anything!), drinking enough water, keeping your kids/animals alive and thriving, staying on top of your schedule, getting started on that creative project that you’ve been putting off, laundry…. It’s exhausting.

So what can you do?

First, it’s helpful to first identify why you feel overwhelmed.

Adults with ADHD often feel overwhelmed for a variety of reasons. Let’s take a look at why this happens and how these factors can pile up to make life feel more stressful than it needs to be.

1. ADHD Makes it Challenging to Prioritize

One of the most common challenges of living with ADHD is deciding where to start and prioritizing what’s most important. ADHD makes everything feel urgent and important. If you don’t have a system for prioritizing, deciding where to start or organizing your steps can feel impossible. When there’s no clear path forward and you’re uncertain about your next step, you procrastinate, things build up, and then you’re more likely to get stuck in overwhelm.

2. The ADHD Time Warp

There’s a thing called time blindness and it can be really challenging to deal with and manage. I call it The ADHD Time Warp.

Time isn’t linear to the ADHD brain. It can feel like this nebulous, abstract concept that isn’t real. You can easily lose track of time and you are naturally bad at estimating how long things will take.

Let me illustrate this for you. You have an appointment to get to and you’re getting ready at home. You tell yourself, “It will only take five minutes to get there. I have plenty of time to (insert task that you are overly optimistic about completing in a short amount of time).”

After you absolutely cannot fit in “one more thing” before you go, you grab your keys and head out to your car. You’re about to pull out when you look at the clock. HOW AM I LATE?!!!??? Somehow, 20 minutes has passed, even though you’d bet your left arm it was just TWO minutes ago that you grabbed your keys?!

That’s the Time Warp.

When deadlines sneak up, things don’t get done on time, or you’re always unintentionally late, it adds to more stress, leaving you feeling behind and out of control.

3. The Rollercoaster of Emotions & Moods

People with ADHD feel things more intensely, and balancing emotions can be tricky. Stress (real or perceived) feels bigger, frustration tolerance is difficult, and feelings may come and go like the wind. When you’re in the middle of an emotion it can be very hard to press pause and reel it in. You can be thrown around by whatever emotion arises. Without the necessary skills to hop off the rollercoaster, life and your moods can feel out of control.

4. So Many Distractions

The ADHD brain has a hard time filtering out background “noise”, making it difficult to focus on the things you need to be focusing on. Distractions may be external like the sound from a TV, others’ conversations, etc., or internal distractions like thoughts and memories. Since all of these are competing for your attention, it’s easy to get overstimulated, leading to feelings of frustration and irritation.

You know you’re trying to concentrate, but you get interrupted or something in your environment pulls you away. Feeling pulled in a million different directions is hard for anyone to manage, but for someone with ADHD, it can be very overwhelming and exhausting.

5. Perfectionism and a Strong Inner Critic

Many adults with ADHD struggle with perfectionism.

Growing up you may have received a lot of negative feedback, or you can recall many instances of not meeting your own high expectations (or unrealistic expectations from adults who don’t know enough about ADHD), it’s easy to see how perfectionism can creep in.

Imagine: you want to do a good job, but maybe you jumped in headfirst without a plan or a good idea of what the finish line looks like. When you don’t do it perfectly, you feel disappointed and beat yourself up. Sound familiar? If it does then you’re not alone.

Without a growth mindset where you remind yourself that it’s better to strive for progress over perfection, you set yourself up for disappointment.

Your self talk influences how you feel about yourself and about your life overall. Having impossible standards for yourself and your performance can lead to feeling more overwhelmed than you already are.

6. Procrastination and Avoidance

It’s easy to put things off.… Especially if the thing you need to do is unpleasant, complicated, or hard. Just the thought of getting started on a dreaded task can feel paralyzing. As you probably have experienced, the more you put things off and avoid, the harder it is to deal with and the more things pile up, the more you feel overwhelmed.

7. Overcommitting and Saying Yes When You Need to Say No

If you’re someone who wants to make others happy, it can be difficult to say no which leads to taking on more than you can handle. This also might mean that asking for help is hard as well. If this sounds like you, learning to set boundaries and being really clear about your priorities and your time can be helpful skills to practice. Otherwise, you’re just going to feel stressed out and overwhelmed.

8. Constant Mental Fatigue

ADHD can make getting through the day feel like a marathon. It’s a lot to manage and it takes a great deal of mental energy to keep things running smoothly (ish). When you’re always working hard just to keep up, it can feel completely exhausting to get through the week. Try to practice staying on top of managing your energy to avoid feeling drained and burned out.

9. Pressure to Stay Productive

We all receive messages that we have to work hard, stay busy, and that rest needs to be earned. We’ve all worried that if we take some much-needed down time to relax, daydream, or rest, we will be perceived as lazy. We’re taught that we must be good…good at work, at school, and at home. We have to be a good parent, friend, partner, coworker, employee, and an overall good person. If you’re not clear about what’s important to you and you’re not able to unapologetically make those things happen, it’s easy to see how you might feel overwhelmed.

Say it with me….Constant striving is exhausting. Rest is productive. I am not a machine. I can go at my own pace.

Understanding why we feel overwhelmed is the first step to finding ways to cope and make things easier on ourselves. Recognizing these common challenges can help reduce some of the stress. From there, you can start to explore tools and strategies to help you feel more in charge of your ADHD and ultimately the direction of your life.

If you want to learn more about overwhelm and how to manage it, grab my free guide How to Calm Down: Quick Tips for Emotional Dysregulation.