Ep 3: Understanding ADHD: Traits, Truths, & Lived Experience

🎙Episode 3: Understanding ADHD: Traits, Truths & Lived Experience

“You’re not inherently broken. Your characteristics aren’t disordered — they just don’t always match what the environment demands.”

Summary:
In this episode, Aaron  takes a deep dive into ADHD through a neurodiversity-affirming lens. He explores what ADHD actually looks like in daily life, why inattentive and internalizing ADHD is so often misunderstood, and how early labels like “lazy” or “unmotivated” shape lifelong beliefs. Aaron unpacks myths, stereotypes, gendered expectations, cultural influences, and the difference between ADHD traits and ADHD disorder. Blending clinical insight with personal stories, he shows how impulsivity, inattention, and hyperactivity can create both challenges and unique strengths — depending entirely on the environment that surrounds them.

Takeaways:

- ADHD is defined clinically by impulsivity, inattention, and hyperactivity, but lived experience goes far beyond these criteria.

- Internalizing ADHD (common in women and quieter kids) often shows up as daydreaming, anxiety, stress, and masking — not disruptive behaviour.

- Early messages like “lazy” or “not trying hard enough” become internalized beliefs that shape self-worth. 

- ADHD traits are not inherently disordered — difficulty appears when the environment demands something mismatched to the person’s natural wiring.

- Culture and gender expectations influence how ADHD is expressed and who gets diagnosed.

- Social stereotypes and TikTok trends capture tiny fragments of ADHD but often romanticize or oversimplify it.

- Impulsivity and inattention can lead to challenges (like overspending) and strengths (like creativity, hyperfocus, career pivots).

- Neurodiversity-affirming practice reframes ADHD as a difference, not a defect.

- The right environment can turn traits that look “disordered” in one context into superpowers in another.

- You are not broken — you simply have a brain that works differently from the societal default.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello friends, welcome to the Audi HD Psych Podcast. I'm Myron Howard, Clinical Psychologist and Human enjoying a lovely Sunday afternoon. Um, unfortunately, the lovely Uma can't join me this week, so I have this Uma to keep me on track and this timer to keep me on track. So let's see how we go. Well, last couple of episodes. Thank you everyone who's had a little listen and a watch and given us some feedback. We really appreciate it. Uh, we've broken a hundred listeners, which is wonderful. And we had a little chat about what we're doing here. And last week we spoke a little bit about autism, uh the diagnosis of and my experience of it. This week, uh I'd love to have a little bit of a chat about ADHD. So we'll talk about what ADHD is, uh, what we can see in real life in my life, and we'll talk about some of the myths and misconceptions around ADHD. So, just before we crack on, if you have a chance, do that whole like, follow, and subscribe thing. That's great, uh, great name building for us, I guess. Um we thank you for it. So I can hear Uma sitting in the background going, hey, it's time to get on with the questions. So, what is ADHD? Well, ADHD from a clinical perspective, we're diagnosing difficulties that arise out of impulsivity and inattention. Now, we did talk often about hyperactivity. Arguably, hyperactivity is the behavioral expression of impulsivity. So I'll talk about impulsivity, but that includes the physical activities as well, the hyperactivity. So, can I say activity one more time? So, what we normally see is uh, you know, adults might go binge shopping when they don't plan to and they have other things to do with their money. We see occasionally, or actually quite often in ADHD, we see um substance use and misuse. We might see people impulsively responding to a question without considering the outcome of the response that's given. In terms of the inattention, the stereotypes and the diagnostic criteria look for difficulty keeping my attention focused on something that doesn't have an implicit anchor. So, for example, and I think I spoke last week about if we put a child in a classroom and they're not intrinsically interested in the information being presented, it's really difficult for them to pay attention to the lesson. However, if we give people something that actually interests them, the disorder goes away and we're able to keep our attention on that. But we don't look at that for diagnosis because when we diagnose in a clinical context, we're specifically looking at when it's unhelpful to us, the unhelpful expression of our characteristics. So we do see that in attention as difficulty maintaining my attention and concentrating, is being easily distracted from a task. Um, and that's you know, sometimes not reading all of the questions. So I get halfway through reading the questions of an exam, and then I quickly start to do the exam questions. And I'm sure there's lots of you out there who have done those tests where the very top instruction is do not answer these questions. And we jump down to the questions and we answer them, and then we don't actually achieve the aims. So that's a really great example of ADHD in action. So look at my timer, and I imagine Uma give me a 30-second wind up. Um so those core traits really are inattention and impulsivity, which encompasses hyperactivity. Why does this model fail us? I think it fails us because there's more to it than that. We know that the diagnostic criteria center on impulsivity and inattention, but the lived experience of ADHD is not just confined to that. You know, we often hear about things like time blindness, about rejection sensitivity and neurodivergent people more broadly. And this tells us that there's something that's not being captured in the clinical descriptions, but also those diagnostic criteria, they're there to help. So they only look at when it's being expressed in a way that doesn't help us meet our goals, and it doesn't look at all of the positive things that come out about inattention now, impulsivity as well. So the next question I have on my little list here is what does ADHD feel like? Um, and I guess here I'll use my experience versus the stereotypes. So I'm a child of the 70s and 80s, I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s. And when I was going to school, what ADHD was was a stereotype of a naughty little boy in a classroom throwing chairs and yelling and screaming. And that's just not my experience. What ADHD looked like for me as an inattentive presentation or an internalizing presentation is all my impulsivity is in decision making, is internal. And when there's the behavioral expression, that hyperactivity, I learned to internalize that really early as well. So it came with anxiety and stress in wanting to do the thing, but having learned lessons earlier in life that doing the thing wasn't helpful for me. And so I internalized. But what you see all through my report cards is things like was often daydreaming or has difficulty paying attention to the task at hand. And that meant that we'd be talking about uh science for some reason is a thing that sticks out to me. Uh, maths, my autism love, science just didn't really interest me, so I can always remember just sort of watching the gardener mow the lawns or trim the bushes, things like that, because it just wasn't implicitly interesting to me. But take me into maths where there was that great structure, the rules of mathematics, and I loved that, so I was easily able to pay attention. I didn't look like that naughty little boy in a classroom throwing chairs. I looked like that really polite young person who didn't pay attention and was off with the fairies or a bit of a daydreamer. And that's actually what a lot of the female presentation of ADHD can actually look at. Whether by culture or biology, I cannot tell you, but what I can say is that biological females tend to internalize a lot more. And so instead of seeing behavior that indicates inattention and impulsivity, we tend to see a lot more stress repressing that behavior and keeping my attention on task. And so anxiety and depression and all of the safety-related concerns tend to appear more often. And we also see biological females are underdiagnosed compared to biological males. Uh, we also see this, the difference between individualist and collectivist cultures. Those cultures that are more community-oriented tend to have less diagnostic rates or lower rates of diagnosis of ADHD. Again, I can see Uma on track 30 seconds. So the next thing I guess I want to talk about is, and I touched on this a moment ago, the common myths and uh misconceptions around ADHD, especially when undiagnosed. So I internalized as a young person that I should have been able to do everything the same way that everybody else could, and that because I couldn't, I was doing something wrong. Uh, often comments about being unmotivated, or I ever heard a teacher talking about me one day saying that I was just lazy, and that's definitely not the case. I did enjoy relaxing at times, but I also really liked not failing. And so to hear that from an authority figure for me was really off-putting, and it sort of taught me that I was lazy in some situations. I started to believe that I wasn't very smart, and in others I felt that I wasn't trying hard enough, I wasn't motivating myself, and I should have been able to. But in reality, uh the expression of our characteristics is probably a couple of things. One is the fact that we have characteristics at higher or lower rates than everybody else. And the other is the more I get told that I'm lazy and unmotivated, the more I start to believe that. And it becomes a central part of the belief structures I have around who and what I am. And so if I believe that I can't do something, I'm less likely to try. And when I do try, I'm more likely to be overwhelmed more quickly and essentially appear to fail at that task. So, are there myths and misconceptions? I think ADHD is we're often thought of as the stereotypes on TikTok. Um, and don't get me wrong, there's some great work being done out there by influencers on TikTok in just normalizing neurodivergence. But I think it can be romanticized a little bit as well. And when we see the creative and the artsy types, which are our strengths, it can also minimize the difficulties that we have. I am a clinical psychologist, I work in this space, and I'm 51 years old, and I still struggle to keep my attention on task. As you may have noticed in this conversation, our conversation, I say monologue, but um, you know, there is there is work that we do that is stressful and it's it's effort. So these ideas that we're not trying, that we're unmotivated, they're just not true, but they have a really negative impact on us and the way we see ourselves. However, a nice balanced view is the fact that yes, there are difficulties with being inattentive and being impulsive. When I went shopping for a tie and a shirt once, no, not at all. It wasn't a great way to use my money when it had other things that it was supposed to be used for. However, that same impulsivity led to a series of events, starting with me impulsively joining the Navy as a teenager, that put me in a position to be able to change careers in midlife and become a psychologist and monologue at lovely listeners like yourselves. So the characteristics themselves aren't inherently disordered or strengths. I don't buy into the superpower notion because I think it really minimizes the difficulties that we have. But I love that for other people. So who am I to tell you how to identify? But when we consider that it can cause difficulties and it can also cause strengths, then we can look at ourselves and say, is it really me that has the difficulty? Or is, as many of us argue, is it really the difficulty caused by the difference between the strengths and weaknesses, or strengths and difficulties that I have and what's required of the environment around me? And if we look at it through that lens, then if I'm in a world where I'm constantly feeling deficient and disordered, I always have an opportunity to change my context, even if just a little bit, to feel less so and to harness those strengths that do come with my characteristics alongside the difficulties. I think I spoke in the last episode about hyperfixation for me. It's really unhelpful when I have work to do early in the morning and I stay up late because I'm really interested in something. But at the same time, it's really helpful in the work that I do because it means I consume much more information and I retain much more of the information that I read and listen to than I would otherwise and in a much shorter amount of time. So I'm seeing myself with a 30-second roll call here. Um, in terms of ADHD as an identity, I really I love the notion. I think that there is so much to be gained from recognizing that we're not inherently disordered or deficient. And in fact, I'd argue that there are probably people out there with significant impulsivity and inattention who have zero disorder and are seeing their characteristics expressed in ways that are really helpful in their world. And we can probably look at a lot of really good artists, a lot of people who are in social settings where they can just bounce from one person to another, which is socially inattentive, but it's also what we refer to as a social butterfly. Um so we can see that our environment is actually can be really helpful to the positive and the helpful expression of our characteristics. So I guess thinking more about what ADHD can look like and some difficulties that can come from it, we often do see, um, and I'll talk about uh biological females and ADHD and internalizing males because this is a conversation that's really skipped over a lot. We can get caught up in stereotypes about how this is a female presentation and this is a male presentation, and it's just not the case. What we're really referring to is an externalizing presentation and an internalizing presentation. Those who act on the impulsivity, who are used to expressing it, externalizing, and those who don't, those who keep it inside, those who internalize. And we've all got stereotypes about the externalizers, um, but we don't really know much about the internalizers in terms of the broader community. I think what we do see there is people like me with significant, significant anxiety early in life because I was always trying to keep those characteristics in because I'd learned that when I expressed them in certain ways in certain environments, that I would get told that I was lazy, that I was get told that I wasn't trying to pay attention, that I get I would get told that I wasn't doing the right thing or saying the right thing. And so I learned to shut up and keep it inside. But there's work involved in that. And I think, and I can't speak for other people, but I think this is the experience of a lot of biological females as well, but also a strong proportion of biological males. Um, roll in gender-diverse people, and there's just not even enough research out there to tell us what that experience is from a scientific perspective. So, anyone who's looking for more research, I think there's a great uh research project, probably a great PhD project there. So, what else? What else can we talk about? That's a fine question. I've lost my train of thought, and if Irma was here, she'd give me a nice little question to lead me in. So, I guess looking at ADHD through the neurodiversity affirming paradigm, what we're seeing with that is kind of the conversation that I've been having uh with the podcast, but here today. And that is ADHD, despite having deficit and disorder in the title, is when there are difficulties arising out of our characteristics, just like any other psychological diagnosis or psychiatric diagnosis. However, the characteristics themselves are not inherently disordered. Disorder comes when there's a misalignment between what I have and what the environment around me requires. So if I I don't know, if I have$5 and my environment requires me to spend$100, then there's a mismatch there. If I have five dollars worth of ability to suppress impulses and the environment requires me to spend$100 of impulse suppression, then there's going to be disorder. However, if I'm in a room full of people who don't expect me to be inauthentic, who allow me to be inattentive and get halfway through a conversation and get distracted, and who enjoy that nonlinear conversation that bouncing from one idea to another, and then eventually later in the conversation coming back, all of a sudden the disorder vanishes. Suddenly, I have a group of people who have characteristics and an environment that accepts and sometimes expects those characteristics, and so deficit doesn't appear, and disorder doesn't appear. But bring in a person who thinks in a linear way instead of going from A to B via X, P and Z, they just go from A to B, and suddenly they're the person who doesn't meet social expectations and societal norms and environmental demands. And so the typical person in that room becomes the person with a disorder based on the way our diagnostic systems are constructed. So bringing that to mind, I think it's really easy to see how ADHD isn't underpinned by problematic characteristics. It's just that they're being expressed in places that demand a different characteristic or a different level of that characteristic. And that in itself doesn't make us bad people or disordered. It just makes us people. Just as a tall person is disordered when they have to walk through short doorways and bump their head, or a short person is disordered when they have to reach up to get a high cupboard, uh, to reach into a high cupboard to get something down. It's the environmental demand versus my characteristics that cause the difficulty. So I guess as a closer, I really think it's important to recognize that if you're out there and you have ADHD, you're not inherently broken. There's nothing wrong with you. You're different. And if you're out there and you're not ADHD, you're more in the neurotypical space, nothing wrong with you either. There's something fortunate about that. There's privilege in living in a world that's constructed generally by people like me, so therefore for people like me. But just know that it is that disconnect between the environment and someone's characteristics that creates disorder. In terms of a clinical context, I think it's really important that we consider the fact that, especially when diagnosing, it shouldn't only be a conversation around what's wrong with you, because for every person with ADHD, we'll also be able to look deep enough and find that there are characteristics where there are expressions of characteristics that are really, really helpful. You know, I gave a couple of examples earlier, but everybody has some expressions of those that really help them out in life, whether it's in their art, whether it's in their social world, whether it's in their just being themselves and enjoying life, whether it's driving me to be a traveler and go and see the world, or whether it's making a job like being in the Navy for 23 years, tie into my novelty seeking, to that inattention to a single thing, to that interest in the new people being posted in through posting cycles. Our characteristics have strengths and weaknesses. Well, I think we've almost hit some time there, and I had a lovely little monologue today. Thank you all so much for listening today, and I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Please feel free to give us some feedback. Like, follow, share, subscribe, all of those wonderful things. And next time we'll have a bit of a talk about autism and ADHD together, the Audi HD presentation, and what that can look like. Sometimes, sometimes I'll leave that for next week. Well, thank you very much, friends. I look forward to your feedback, and we'll see you next time.