Understanding ADHD: Myths, Misconceptions, and Realities

Guest Kelly Brändli, an ADHD coach, offers valuable insights into the world of ADHD.

Visit https://sofrickinhealthy.com/episodes/kelly-brandli for more information.

00:01 Introduction

01:24 ADHD vs. ADD

08:13 Common Symptoms You Might Be Missing

10:19 8 Areas of Executive Function

15:16 ADHD in Women

21:43 ADHD Mythbusters

Kelly explains the symptoms of ADHD, the differences between ADHD and ADD, and addresses common misconceptions about the disorder. The conversation also touches on how ADHD manifests in women and adults, emotional dysregulation, and the concept of Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD). With humor and personal anecdotes, Kelly and the hosts discuss ADHD's impact on daily life, the challenges of diagnosis, and the importance of humor and understanding in managing the condition.

Mentioned in this episode:

Send us a Voicemail

Click on the link and leave us a voicemail up to 1 minute. Leave us a comment, question, or just some love! Who knows, maybe your voice will be heard on our next episode! (Don't worry, we'll check with you first)

Leave us a Voicemail

Hi, I'm Kelly Brändli, and I'm today's guest on the so freaking healthy podcast. I'm an ADHD coach, a relationship coach, the mother of two boys with ADHD, and the partner of a late diagnosed man.

On this episode, we introduce the basics of ADHD, including symptoms and how it differs from ADD. We're also going to emphasize common misconceptions and overlooked signs, especially how ADHD shows up in women and adults.

Donna, do you want to take the first question or do you want me to take the first question?

I'm first going to say, hi, Kelly.

Oh, we're doing the highs. Okay. I didn't know.

I think it's nice to say, hi, Kelly, and thank you so much for joining our episode today.

Okay, we'll start over. Okay, go ahead.

Hey, Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today.

Hey, guys. Great to be here. Thanks for having me back. I look forward to this exciting episode.

Let's see if 280 hd co hosts can get together through this episode. I think we'll go on 15 tangents.

Before the end, but we may do. I'll see how I can try and keep us somewhat on track then.

If anyone can, it will be you, I assume, right?

I hope so. Let's see. We'll come back to that at the end.

Maybe that will be your test today. Kelly, as Megan mentioned, we're both ADHD.

I personally was diagnosed when I was 20, exactly 20 years ago back then diagnosed as ADd, which we would love to hear what the difference is between the two. Megan, when were you diagnosed? I don't even know.

I was diagnosed in second grade. So my mother was a teacher, and so she knew right away.

So this was back in the mid eighties I was diagnosed, and I still have the diagnosis sheet from the doctor, and I gave it to my husband and let him read it, and he goes, this explains so many things. You are exactly the same. I'm really glad that I held onto that sheet the whole time.

Coming back to the question, what's the difference? There's no difference. They simply change the name from ADd to ADHD to include hyperactivity. So you'll see it written a lot.

It'll be like Ad HD in parentheses. We look at three different types of presentation. One includes hyperactivity and the other one doesn't.

So we've got inattentive and hyperactive and then combination. Those are the three types. And so it's just simply the evolution of the name. There's been many different names over the years. Actually.

They used to call it hyperkinetic issue of childhood, I think it was called.

What year was that?

So we had to change that one pretty quickly. Yeah. So it's had an evolution over time.

I'm glad that evolution happened when I was growing up. So again, Megan, I don't know what your experience was. When I was growing up, the ADHD was like the serious business.

The add was like, you're just, you're not as bad. And there was not much else known. It was just all about attention. How much attention can you put into doing something?

Can you start a project and finish it would be amazing. But nowadays we know that there's not a big difference there. It's just how it presents itself.

Yeah. So you still hear the term Add used a lot.

So people will often refer to what we call more internal ADHD as additive because the hyperactivity is internally oriented versus the ADHD, which we see is externally. So hyperactive, very impulse, without generalizing. We tend to see in women more internal feelings.

So people will say, I have add because I'm not hyperactive. That's why that term gets used a lot.

But at the end of the day, we're looking at a number of different criteria in terms of attention or difficulty directing attention. People with ADHD have great abilities to focus.

We call it hyperfocus, and have really challenges sometimes to focus on things that aren't very interesting.

And we look at how attention is directed and then we look at impulsivity, how much of a filter there is in terms of do you think before you speak or act? I always think of it as the sort of the swinging door. Does that door have a lock on it or is it just constantly swinging?

And whatever wants to come out, gets to come out is how impulsivity shows up in the world. And so that's what the official diagnosis is, those two criteria. But there's a lot of other aspects of ADHD that people aren't really aware of.

So things like emotional dysregulation. People say you've got anger management issues. It could be difficulty managing your emotions.

We can have people who have difficulty managing their own feelings and their own bodies, like, they're not very aware. So things like they don't even notice they're hungry until they're, like, starving or they have to go to the bathroom until it's almost too late.

So these kinds of things, they hurt themselves a lot. They're like, really clumsy. Bump into stuff all the time. It's just one of the aspects.

And then there's something which has been talked about a lot recently, which is RSD rejection, sensitivity, dysphoria, which is a sense of being criticized, whether it's just perceived or real, that you feel like you're constantly under attack.

I have recently two instances of this. So I started a new job, part time job in a little office. And these people have been working together for years and years.

And I realized that they're sending an email, oh, can you do it this way? Or you remember to do that? Which I've asked them to do because I'm training. Okay.

It's not very difficult job, but there's a lot of little things to remember. And every time I get one of these emails, I'm like, I'm not doing that way. And I just instantly my blood boils. And I'm like, calm down, Megan.

That's like way overreaction to an email that they're just simply being like, just remember to lock the profile when you're done. And I'm just like, ah, how dare.

You attack me that way?

And then I also realized that I overreact a lot to my husband. And just after we saw you at the expat expo the other day and you mentioned this, and I was like, oh, remember, I have to tell jorn about this.

I have to remind him. And it happened. I blew up at something small, or like, I don't know, it was a stack of papers he wanted me to move.

And I'm like, why can't the stack of papers just stay here? Just like, oh, honey, I'm so sorry. Can I just tell you about this thing that I remembered?

And I told him about rejection, dysphoria, he goes, okay, I won't take it personally, but can I remind you that this is happening? I'm like, yes, please.

Excellent. Yeah, so it sounds like you guys have incorporated the number one tool with ADHD, and that is humor.

Yeah, it's funny because for those who are just listening to the episode, they don't see you speaking. And Megan and I just like, wide eyed, huge smiles, like, nodding hysterically. Oh, my God, yes. That's so true. Oh, my God.

So, yeah, watch the video, guys. Just, if you want to see us, like, shine with, like, yes, ADHD. Uh huh.

We covered ADHD versus AdD, which from my perspective, it was just I never really had so much of a difference between the two other than what you said. Hyperactivity.

And you already started talking about some of the symptoms with the rejection dysphoria and some other things besides what we know of hyperactivity and what looks like lack of focus. Again, I'm using air quotes. I don't know why I use air quotes all the time.

It must be an ADHD thing.

It's a common mechanism.

Are there other kind of more surprising things people wouldn't normally think of as with ADHD, like the rejection dysphoria? Are there other things that fall in there?

So there's a couple definitions of ADHD that I really love because encompass sort of all these different things. One of the definitions is from a us doctor, Doctor Russell Barkley, and he says ADHD is not about the things you know, but not doing what you know.

And so often we hear stuff, especially with kids, this kid's really intelligent, but the rubber doesn't meet the road. It's, I know they know this stuff, but they're not doing it.

And that is one of the characteristics of ADHD, is how do you execute on the things you know? And that's troubling, because another part of ADHD is executive dysfunction.

It means that the front part of our brains, which are responsible for basically controlling what we think about the actions we take, there's deficits there, and there's eight areas of executive function, and any one of them can have weaknesses there.

And this is why, when you've met one person with ADHD, you've met one person, because everybody has a different combination of these executive functions or dysfunctions, and that's why it looks different. And so what are these eight executive dysfunctions?

So we've got organization and time management, we've got impulse control, planning and prioritizing, emotional control, flexible thinking, working memory, self reflection and initiating tasks. So these are the eight areas that people can struggle with. And you can imagine this comes in any combination.

Some people have two areas where they're really weak and the rest they're strong in. And some people have weaknesses in all eight. And so it shows up very differently from person to person.

What is working memory? What does that mean?

We have working memory and we have long term memory. So working memory is like the ram of your computer, like it's a fixed amount of space, and when you fill that up, you can take on no more.

And so people who have a deficit in working memory have very little capacity to keep something in their working memory, to actually execute on it, which is why you can think, I'm going to go in the other room and make myself a cup of tea. And you get to the other room and, oh, the plant needs water. The cup of tea is gone because you've exhausted your working memory.

The next idea has come in and it pushes the first idea out.

So this is the Dory effect.

Yes. Okay.

And self reflection. Can you expound on that just a little bit?

So it's one being able to evaluate your own sort of experience and how you're coming across to other people how much effort you're putting into things. So a lot of people with ADHD that have trouble at work think, I gave the best presentation ever. That was the best.

And then they'll get feedback and go, that didn't land. We expected way more of you. And they're like, wait a second, I don't get this. I thought I did amazing.

And so it's that ability to judge your own skills in the moment, what you're delivering on, and it's often, it misses the mark.

Is that the case where people often think that they did better than they did, or can it also go the other way to say that they didn't do as well? It's just a dysphoria of being able to objectively analyze their skills, whether it's positive or negative.

Exactly. It can go in both directions. A really common one is people with ADHD are often told constantly, you're being too loud.

And they're like, no, I'm nothing. They just have no sense of where their volume level is.

Yeah, this whole episode is just. It's going to make me cry at the end.

I know. I'm just sitting here going, oh, my God. Yes. Because honestly, with, in my household, both of my boys have just lately been diagnosed with ADHD.

And funny enough, this weekend my husband and I took a couple of online tests. He also seems to be ADHD. And all of us also seem to be on the spectrum. So it's really fun.

It's really fun and it's really loud and it's really manic and help. And help.

Yeah. There is some positivity to that, actually. When, like in couples and families, when everyone has ADHD, it can be quite chaotic and spontaneous.

But actually, the upside is people understand each other.

Where we see more challenges is when you have neurotypical and neurodiverse in one family, it's like you're reading from two completely different books and that can create even more chaos and misunderstanding. So, yeah, there's positives and negatives to every dynamic, right?

Yeah, totally. And honestly, I always said that my ADHD is my superpower.

So I think that when you really understand it properly and understand your own positive qualities that can lift you up, that actually we are, I think we are superheroes. We're battling with life, and we're super smart.

Yeah.

And we can get into some of the really positive sides of ADHD because there's a whole list of that. Or is that for a later?

Yeah, that's our. Yeah. So for the listeners, we're trying to really spread out all the good stuff with Kelly here.

But since we're all women here and this is becoming, and I'm doing exactly what Donna does, we stop. We don't finish our thought. This is, I think, also another ADHD trait.

You think you finish the thought in your head and you don't finish it out loud anyway. So this is always a pain in the ass when we're editing our episodes because we both do this and it.

Tries your brain so fast. Exactly. Yeah.

So I think the prevalence of ADHD information online has been very helpful.

I personally had totally forgotten about my ADHD until about two years ago when I started on TikTok, and somehow I got an ADHD talk, and all these people came with these symptoms, and I'm like, oh, no, I haven't really outgrown this at all. And most of the people that I see talking about ADHD are women on social media.

And I think that's also, again, because of misdiagnosis or under diagnosis of women in general, but also as children, because that's also one of the myths that only ADHD is only a boys thing. So why is ADHD often missed in women?

And what are the unique challenges that as women, especially adult women, we have that we face being diagnosed later?

Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Boys get diagnosed three times more frequently in childhood than girls do.

And part of the reason for that is that boys externalize their symptoms and girls internalize their symptoms. You've got the boy jumping around the classroom and standing on desks, which is actually then disrupting the lesson.

And you've got the girl who sits in the corner, who looks more depressive to the teacher. She's super quiet. She doesn't raise her hand. She struggles to do it.

And because she's not disruptive she doesn't get the same attention as the boy does, who's running around, basically. And that's a big part of it. And even the medical community for many years didn't understand the different ways that ADHD could present itself.

And so a lot of girls didn't get diagnosed. Girls also learned very young, it's part of our socialization to compensate. Right. And they can compensate for quite a long time.

For a lot of women, it might be the first time they've done brilliantly in school. There was, had great marks. Everything went well till they got to university. And now all of a sudden, their coping mechanisms don't serve them.

They get overwhelmed with the lack of structure. There's nobody there to say, hey, go to this class. You got to do everything on your own. And then it comes out.

And so getting diagnosed when you're late teens, early twenties, is quite common for women. Another time is after having children, when all of a sudden you don't just need to manage yourself, you also need to manage another human being.

That can be overwhelming. And then right now, we see a huge spike in women getting diagnosed around menopause.

And they didn't understand this for a long time, but they now realize that dopamine is actually connected to estrogen, which. How fun. When your estrogen goes down, your dopamine goes with it. Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter associated with ADHD.

And for many women, they're getting to midlife and going, what is going on here? I don't remember anything. I can't focus. I can't sleep. Is this really what menopause is all about?

And they're going to doctors and they're saying, no, this doesn't sound like typical menopause symptoms or something else going on.

I actually also realized for myself that I went through burnout just lately, and I realized that my ADHD is tenfold somehow because, yeah, I'm in perimenopause anyways. But also just the burnout was like, if you thought everything was overwhelming before, lady, think again.

And that was just a huge wake up call for me as well. Oh, wow. Now I understand how much my ADHD can really hijack my life and my brain, and maybe it needs a little bit of extra help.

Yeah. So ADHD burnout is a real thing. This is not just a TikTok phenomenon. It is real. A lot of people with ADHD are super at delivering and doing.

When they find something they love, they do it and they overdo it and they can overdo it to the point of burnout. Combine that with not taking a lot of notice of how you're feeling, right. You just get in this.

And sometimes people can go days without eating or drinking. They don't. It doesn't come to their mind. And so you don't realize your body saying, hey, you need a break.

And so it's, there's a tendency to push past that point. Do that over a long enough period of time, and you're going to crash.

And so a lot of people experience that if they're not learning how to listen to their bodies better.

So I've heard that people with ADHD are one of our superpowers is being very good in crisis mode. If there's something that happens, hyper fixation is turned on and they're able to just go, this, you do that, you do this. Okay?

This is what's going to happen. Do you think that people who are in positions like emergency medical people, they're more commonly people who have ADHD?

Emergency medicine is a great profession for people with ADHD for a couple of reasons. One, what you're talking about ADHD is, as I said, it's a bit of a lack of filter. So that swinging door goes in both directions.

It can come outward, but you can take in everything. And in a crisis situation, that is a superpower to be able to take in all the information and really quickly process it.

And that takes huge amounts of energy and brain power that adhders are used to doing every single day. And so if you don't have ADHD and you're put in a crisis situation, a lot of people get quickly overwhelmed.

Where the ADHD goes, hey, I can handle this. This is easy for me.

I get, I see everything, I hear everything, I process it, and I can see the direction and of course, creative thinking out of the box. The standard way people would do it would be this. But what if we did this? It would be way faster. We'd get things organized.

And so that's why a lot of people in these kind of emergency type situations, firemen, emergency workers, also people who love things that are really changing all the time, like, not the same every day. They're drawn to those kinds of professions. Police.

We're going to close out this episode with a little bit of rapid fire ADHD myth busting. And I have collected a bunch of myths from the Internets. Do we just pick one, Kelly? And then you give us like a two or three line? Why is this wrong?

Sure.

Yeah.

So the first myth busting question we have is that kids with ADHD can't focus on anything for a long time.

They can. When they're interested, they will get hyper focused. If you've ever seen an ADHD kid game, you will know that is absolutely not true.

They just struggle to get focused on the things that don't excite them and don't give them a dopamine release.

If a child isn't hyperactive, they can't have ADHD.

We know that there's three different types, and one type includes hyperactivity. Other type does not. It's inattention challenges focus. So not true.

ADHD is caused by poor parenting.

Yes. That's why my kids are ADHD.

Yeah, exactly. It's all your fault. No, I'm just joking. That's so not true.

But that is what we were told and what actually even the medical community believed for a really long time. There's even a doctor out there who proposes that it's attention deficit from the parents that caused ADHD, which is so incorrect.

We now have studies with millions and millions of participants that prove that ADHD is genetic. It is not the fault of parenting. It is not anything you've done. It runs in families.

Okay, I have one. Kids who take stimulant medications for ADHD are at higher risk for addiction.

Absolutely incorrect. This was a belief for many years. Let's not give kids stimulates.

And there was a huge campaign started by the Church of Scientology against Ritalin to tell parents that this is the case. We've actually done studies that proves that kids have a higher risk of ADHD with untreated ADHD.

And when they're medicated, it actually goes back to the baseline of kids of their age. And the reason for that being is when you lack dopamine, your body will do something to get it.

And whether that's addiction to caffeine, cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, cocaine, you will find it. Medication actually lowers the risk of addiction.

Yeah, I can add just a little anecdote there.

I had, as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, that I was diagnosed when I was in second grade, and I was on Ritalin at the time, and I think it was only on five or ten milligrams of Ritalin.

There was a kid in my class that was, like, on 50, but there was a time when I was in elementary school that the Ritalin was just making my heart pound out of my chest. I even had, like, muscle tremors in my hand. And so obviously, I went off of it for a little while. They reduced it.

I never did Adderall or any other kind of medication. I only ever did Ritalin. And then I think I stayed on going into high school, and then, and we'll talk about this more.

We're going to have an episode specifically on medication and what it does. But I actually went off most of my medication in high school because I was so structured and because I didn't like being on the medication.

And then I went back on, as you said, in college, at university, because I said, I cannot function, I'm going to flunk out. And I started the medication again. And I've never been addicted to any substance.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think I never had any addictive qualities to that.

I can say anecdotally, addiction to medication, that's another topic. And we can get into that. But a lot of people say, oh, you get addicted, you'll need your ADHD medication. Yeah. Because you're lacking dopamine.

I always relate this to insulin. If you were a type one diabetic and you needed insulin every day to survive, are you addicted to the insulin? Yeah.

You need it and you need the dopamine.

Okay, so the next myth is people with ADHD just need to try harder.

Try harder, Megan. Geez.

Yeah.

Wouldn't that be. Yeah. If you could just try harder, wouldn't you have already?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like we try harder. I feel like we.

I feel like we try hard all the time.

All the time. Yeah. It feels like even when I'm resting, I'm trying harder.

Yeah. So this is probably one of the most unhelpful pieces of advice that people give all the time to people with ADHD, just try harder. Right.

You can do it if you want to. Yeah.

Or it's like telling a person with depression, just think happy thoughts.

Exactly. Yeah. Really quick, we'll get into medication and how the dopamine works. But dopamine transmits impulses in nerves in your brain.

When you have dopamine, the nerve gets, or the impulse gets across the nerve. When you're lacking dopamine, it gets stopped, and therefore, you cannot take action on that impulse because it's just stopped in the synapse.

That's the biomedical definition of why trying harder doesn't work. You need to try different.

All right.

Can you grow out of ADHD?

No.

We used to think that when kids went through puberty, they grew out of ADHD. And the reason being is that in puberty, your brain goes through reorganization.

It's like a building site for a couple of years, like nothing's really going on. All of a sudden, like a building pops up, and you're like, oh, wow, that's really cool. Puberty is like that. Everything's getting reorganized.

And so ADHD changes the symptoms through puberty, and the hyperactivity doesn't continue into adulthood. You learn not okay to jump on desks at work, so you rarely see adults doing that. Very rarely, I think.

But that was what the doctors were using as criteria decades ago to say, oh, they're not doing that. So they've grown out of it.

And we know now that ADHD is a lifelong disorder, and you will manage it in different phases during different levels of stress in your life, differently, but it will always be there.

I think it just presents differently, because I remember a few very specific times as an adult where my future boss, that he wasn't my boss at the time, was like, can you just stop and listen for a second? And I was so taken aback, and I was really offended at the time. I'm like, wow, that was pretty rude of him.

But on the other hand, sometimes you need that because self reflection doesn't work very well. And it was something I remembered for years, going, okay, I don't need to talk all the time. I should learn how to listen.

I need to learn how to be quiet. And it's not me not participating, but it's me allowing other people to participate. I know my husband and donna both hate it.

I just talk about TikTok all the time. But what I love about it, that platform, is the ability for people to demonstrate what it's like to have ADHD for people who don't have ADHD.

And there was a woman who did a great little skit about, oh, do you have ADHD? Do you have trouble interrupting people? And she's like, oh, no, no. I'm sitting there, and I think, I'm trying so hard, so very hard not to interrupt.

And I have really good points, but I'm not going to say them. And by the time my point comes up, I can't remember my point anymore, but I'm trying so hard. And they're like, yeah, you have ADHD.

Exactly.

I feel like this is how it presents more in adults.

Is when you're in a situation at work and you interrupt other people all the time, or you can't stay on task, or you keep task switching, because the next thing is the more interesting thing to stimulate the dopamine brain or you can't finish projects. I feel like this is really how it presents, and it can present as somebody who's lazy and doesn't finish their work and hops to the next thing.

On one hand, if everybody starts to realize that that's what's going on, then you can put that person into a position, like a generalist or a project manager who has a project for the very specific time period, so they can move on to the next thing.

And once you yourself know that if you have ADHD and you can explain this to your boss, then I think then your superpowers can reign supreme when you're in the workplace. But that's what I feel, and I love is coming out about all of this stuff now, is that people are now recognizing. People without ADHD are recognizing.

Oh, I think so. And so on my team is like this. So how can we optimize this for this person?

Yeah.

If I may challenge, before you lose your thought, will you lose your thought, Danny, or can I interrupt with that?

I think I'm okay.

You think you're okay? TikTok, I think, is great for doing that. But I also think there's a flip side of that coin, which is it's entertaining or entertain ADHD.

And I think it is also making it a bit of a joke for a lot of people to say, oh, it's funny, these things that happen.

And there's actually a really serious side to this, that there's people who suffer, people that struggle to keep a job because of their inability to finish a task, or people who have really strong emotional dysregulation. And everyone thinks they're like, completely aggressive anger management issue people. And these are the deficits.

And while it's great on raising awareness, I think it's lacking on TikTok, is actual, real education about the serious side of it and not just the funny side of it.

Yeah.

The one thing that I keep thinking about, which I think is important for, hopefully those who are listening, who might not have ADHD, but are interested because a family member has it or something like that, is that I feel like the hyperactivity is not necessarily physical with everyone, but it is definitely a mental hyperactivity. So our brain is on all the time we have about.

I don't know about you, Megan, but I have at least ten voices in my head at all times, and most of it is negative, unfortunately. But it's something that I think people need to understand, because when I say I'm ADHD and they're like, oh, really? And, yeah, I'm not.

I'm not bouncing on the sofa constantly. Yeah, you'd see me fidget sometimes, but been with it for my whole life. I'd learned how to hide it. Like using the ring that you gave me.

Was that from my friend?

It is. It's been saving me since.

But, yeah, I think that's something to really understand, is that the hyperactivity doesn't always have to be physical, but it is always mental.

You're absolutely right. And it's also so we see a lot of things. My partner said, he goes, I think my dad had ADHD. And I said, why do you think that?

He says, because his office was above my bedroom and I would hear him working at night and I could hear his leg bouncing constantly on the floor. And that's almost an acceptable. Like, the leg bounce is hyperactivity, but it's been contained to something that's socially acceptable.

The pen clicking, the fidgeting with the ring or whatever it might be. So that's one piece. And the other way hyperactivity comes out is actually an impulsivity. Right. Yeah, it's the. I feel like I'm driven to do stuff.

Shopping addiction is very common, like spending money on things, because there's this need to be moving. Moving generates dopamine. So what do we do if it's not hyper? We get impulsive and we do things that stimulate the dopamine.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Kelly. This was just a perfect episode.

I'm really looking forward to jump into our next one where we'll talk about understanding the testing and the diagnosis, but we'll keep the rest for.