In collaboration with other independent podcasters during the global Podcasthon charity event, ADHD-ish host Diann Wingert is opening up about the real costs women face when their ADHD goes undiagnosed for far too long—especially those running their own businesses.
From emotional tolls and damage to self-worth, to identity crises and financial setbacks, Diann unpacks how the ADHD diagnostic criteria based on the behavior of young boys has resulted in several generations of females going undiagnosed, forcing them to struggle and overcompensate just to get by.
This episode is a heartfelt exploration of what it means to finally get answers after decades of struggle, and the reckoning that follows. Diann shares her own journey from therapist to entrepreneur, the lessons she learned raising kids with ADHD, and the impact a late diagnosis had on her life and work.
She also introduces listeners to the nonprofit “Find the ADHD Girls,” an organization dedicated to closing the diagnostic gap for girls everywhere, and invites you to make a difference. You can make a donation or simply share this episode to raise awareness.
So grab your favorite drink and settle in, because this week’s episode is about honesty, hope, and shifting the narrative for women and girls who’ve always felt just a little out of step with the world.
3 key takeaways:
Masking isn’t thriving. Many women spend years camouflaging their struggles, only to later realize they were “passing for normal” rather than actually okay.
Delayed diagnosis has real professional costs. Every ounce of energy spent managing ourselves is bandwidth that’s not going into growth, strategy, or creativity in our businesses—and it adds up.
Early awareness changes lives. The sooner ADHD is identified—especially in girls—the fewer years are lost to self-blame and missed opportunities.
About the host
Diann Wingert is a passionate advocate and expert on ADHD, rooted in her own delayed diagnosis, as well as two decades of experience as a licensed psychotherapist, serial business owner, and parent of several children with ADHD.
For years, Diann—and many women like her—carried a persistent sense that “something’s wrong with me,” a quiet conviction fed by a lack of answers and the feeling that everyone else had life figured out. This experience led her to see the reality: women with ADHD were hiding in plain sight, while the world slowly learned to recognize their struggles.
Now, as the host of the podcast ADHD-ish and an internationally recognized ADHD business coach, Diann welcomes a community of listeners searching for understanding and authenticity, promising strategic guidance and an honest exploration into what it means to live and run a business with ADHD
Share the Episode: If a donation isn’t possible, share this episode with someone who might benefit from it, raising awareness about ADHD in women and girls.
When you don't have a name for what's happening in your brain, you invent one. And most women I know, myself included, invented some version of "something's wrong with me." Not a diagnosis, not an explanation, just a quiet, persistent conviction that everyone else got instructions to life that you somehow missed. Spoiler: you weren't the problem. You were hiding in plain sight while the system caught up to the reality of ADHD in females. Well, hey friend, and welcome back to ADHD-ish. I'm your host, Diann Wingert, and if you're new here, hello! I am glad you found us. You're going to want to subscribe because We don't do shallow around here.
Today's episode is a solo one and it's kind of personal. It's also very timely and I'll tell you why a little bit later on. There's also something I'm going to ask you to do and I think by the time we get there, you will understand why it's so important. Now I want to spend the next 25 minutes or so talking about something I've addressed in bits and pieces across various podcast interviews, in panel discussions, and in many, many conversations with coaching clients, but I haven't done a full dedicated solo episode on it here.
We're talking about what it actually costs a woman, and specifically a woman who owns a business, when her ADHD goes undiagnosed for decades. Not just the emotional toll, although that's real and we are definitely not skipping it. I'm talking about the professional cost, the financial cost, the identity cost, the compound interest of all of it, because growing up knowing that you're different and not knowing why, and then finally getting the right explanation at 30, 44, 52, the relief is real, but so is the reckoning. A delayed diagnosis of ADHD costs you emotionally, professionally, relationally, financially, and in ways that never ever show up on a balance sheet. And that's what we're talking about today so let's get into it and I mean all of it.
Well, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know, I have a lot of feelings, a lot of feelings about the history of ADHD diagnosis and treatment. And when I say feelings, I mean that particular brand of exasperated, roll your eyes, are you fucking kidding me frustration that I have had to actively manage so it doesn't take over the entire conversation. I'm going to give you a condensed version. ADHD as a clinical construct was built almost entirely on the observation of young, white, hyperactive boys. That's not me editorializing, that is simply the history.
The research subjects were boys, the criteria in the DSM were written to capture what those boys looked like. And for a very long time, unless you were presenting exactly the way those boys presented, you were never on anybody's radar. Now here's the problem, girls with ADHD, and by extension, the women those girls grow into, tend not to present that way. We're typically not the ones bouncing off the walls, interrupting the teacher, and getting to the principal's office on a regular basis. We tend to be the ones sitting quietly, appearing to pay attention, turning in our homework on time because we stayed up until midnight panicking about it. Or perhaps we are described as a little spacey or very creative, or maybe a chatterbox.
And most of our report cards had something along the lines of, she has so much potential if she would just apply herself. We're the ones getting voted most likely to keep it all together while internally conducting a three-ring circus with no ringmaster. And you know what else? We learned early, usually without even realizing it, how to mask, how to compensate, how to overcompensate, how to perform like a neurotypical with enough consistency that nobody ever bothered to look any closer. And the cruelest part of that particular skillset is that it works. It works well enough, long enough that even the people who should have noticed teachers, pediatricians, therapists, parents usually didn't.
I used to think I was getting away with something and believed for many years that passing for normal was the ultimate flex. It wasn't. And if you also happen to be smart or even gifted, forget about it. Intelligence is one hell of a camouflage. She's doing well in school became the reason no one ever looked harder, as if doing fine was the same thing as thriving, as if white fucking knuckling your way through every single day counted as good enough. So that's the foundation. The criteria didn't fit us. We adapted to survive, and the system took our ability to adapt as evidence that we were A-okay. We were not okay. We just got really good at pretending. Too good.
So now I want to get into what the actual cost is, because I think when people hear delayed diagnosis, they tend to think of it as primarily an emotional story, like, "Oh, boo-hoo, would've been nice to know sooner." But it's so many other things, and I want to name them specifically because there may be a woman listening who has never felt truly understood or even seen before. First, I want to talk about the emotional cost, that is probably the most obvious one. Decades without a diagnosis doesn't just mean decades without the benefit of medication, coaching, or other forms of support. It also means decades of a running internal narrative.
The narrative most undiagnosed women are running is not a nice one. It's like Mean Girls on steroids or perpetually gaslighting ourselves. When you can't explain why you're struggling with things that seem effortless for others, you're just going to fill in the blank with whatever you can come up with. And what most of us come up with is something shameful. You're lazy, you're scattered, you're too emotional, you're too sensitive, you're too— just too much. You start too many things, finish too few of them, lose track of conversations in the middle of a sentence, even when you are the one doing the talking, and convince yourself it means something about your fundamental worth as a human being.
A huge percentage of women who get diagnosed in adulthood have collected other diagnoses along the way, typically anxiety and depression. And the thing is, those aren't necessarily misdiagnoses. ADHD in women is an anxiety and depression delivery system. When you spend 20+ years fighting your own brain with no framework for understanding and no support, of course you're fucking anxious, of course you're depressed. The ADHD that's been driving the bus just never made it into the conversation with your therapist or doc. And if you didn't also acquire an addictive or eating disorder along the way, you are one of the lucky ones.
What that means clinically is that many women, I'd say the majority, spend years and often decades in treatment for the symptoms while the underlying cause goes unaddressed. That is not a failure of individual therapists or psychiatrists necessarily. It's really a systemic gap, but it's still a cost. Years of therapy, years of medication, all those self-help books read and unread, the wellness protocols, the exercise routines, all of it is addressing the smoke while the fire kept burning. Now, this one doesn't get talked about enough.
I wanna get into the relational cost because undiagnosed ADHD does not happen in a fricking vacuum. It happens inside of relationships, marriages, partnerships, parenting, friendships, dynamics with your family of origin. Others of whom may also have ADHD because this is a genetically transmitted condition. When you don't have a framework for your own behavior, how the hell are you supposed to explain it to the people around you? The partner who is frustrated that you forgot again, the friend who feels like you don't care as much about the relationship, because you canceled again. The guilt of knowing your kids are seeing a version of you that is reactive, overwhelmed, and inconsistent. The internalized belief that you are fundamentally hard to love.
I have worked with clients who, after getting their diagnosis, kind of had to do a retroactive analysis of their most important relationships, sifting through years of conflict and misunderstanding with a different lens. That can be healing, can also be heartbreaking and then there's the financial cost. Now, this is where this is squarely in my lane because I work with business owners and entrepreneurs. The financial cost of a delayed diagnosis for women who are business owners is something I want to talk about very directly because it rarely gets the airtime it deserves. Let's start with the obvious, years of underperforming relative to your true potential. Not because you weren't capable, you absolutely were, but because you were spending an enormous percentage of your bandwidth just managing yourself.
The mental overhead of keeping everything together through your sheer force of will is expensive. It leaves a whole lot less room for strategy, for creativity, for the high-value work that actually moves a business forward. Then there's the pattern of starting things and not finishing them. The one that's personally caused me the most shame over the most years. Those business ideas that were genuinely good, and there were a lot of them because ADHD brains generate ideas in their sleep. But those ideas never got traction because the follow-through fell apart. Not because you were uncommitted, because the dopamine of the new idea ran out and the systems weren't there to carry it across the finish line.
And can we talk about the undercharging? God Almighty, the undercharging. I cannot tell you how many women I've worked with who spent years pricing their services at a mere fraction of their value, not because they didn't believe they were good, but because somewhere underneath the competence was this unexamined belief that they needed to compensate for being inconsistent, unreliable, difficult even, what I call the shame tax priced right into their rates. Then there are the impulsive decisions, the shiny object syndrome that led to investments in courses, in coaches, in software, in entire pivots that were driven by the ADHD brain's need for novelty, not strategic alignment.
Now, I am not throwing any kind of stones here, I've done it too, and I've got receipts. Then there's what I think is the most under-acknowledged financial cost of all, and I'm talking about the burnout cycles. The pattern of going incredibly hard, because when an ADHD brain is turned on, it is all the way on, followed by a crash that can sideline you for days, weeks, or longer. The boom and bust rhythm really makes sustainable business growth genuinely difficult. Not because you don't have the ambition, because without the diagnosis, and the appropriate support structures, you didn't know how to build it differently.
That's a lot of money, friend, and a lot of opportunity cost and a lot of momentum that got lost and had to be rebuilt sometimes multiple times. And the one that I think is the hardest to quantify and maybe the one that sits with me and maybe you the heaviest and that is what I call the identity cost. Who would you have been before you spent 30 years explaining yourself to yourself and getting it wrong? What choices might you have made differently if you'd had the right information earlier? What version of yourself in your business, in your relationships, in your sense of what you are capable of, got foreclosed because the framework arrived so late. Now listen, I wanna be crystal clear. I am not saying any of this to trigger you or spiral you into regret.
Regret is probably the least productive use of the ADHD brain's energy that I know of. And we have limited bandwidth, so let's be strategic about what we point our brains at. I just think that acknowledging all of these costs is important because it makes the case for why early diagnosis truly matters, not just for the individual woman sitting in a doctor's office finally getting answers, but for the girls who are in classrooms right now, hiding in plain sight, beginning to write their internal narrative, about why they are the problem. Now, I'm not going to go into my complete origin story because frankly, we'd be here for another hour and you got shit to do. But I want to share enough that this doesn't feel like a lecture from someone who's observed all this from a safe clinical distance, because that's not what this is.
I was a therapist for a long time before I pivoted into coaching. I have a master's degree. I had a clinical license. I'm even a board-certified diplomat in clinical social work, something less than 5% of people in my former profession achieve. I ran a very successful private practice. I taught graduate students, I ran a hospital social work department. Hell, I even ran an entire clinical department of a mental health agency. I also raised 3 kids with ADHD, most of it as a single parent. And it was somewhere in that process of watching my own kids navigate the diagnosis, learning everything I could about ADHD and how it presents differently in females, seeing myself reflected back in the research I was doing all the way back in grad school.
Yeah, research on ADHD. I finally connected all the dots. And by the way, I had been in and out of therapy for much of my adult life and was being treated for anxiety and depression. No one ever brought up ADHD. My oldest son got diagnosed at the age of 8. My daughter, not until college and myself, well into midlife. I wasn't the kid constantly sent to the principal's office. I was the kid who was bright but inconsistent. My first grade report card said, "Diann's very clever, but you need to tie her to the chair." So I actually was fairly hyperactive, but I got with the program and I learned how to sit still. While shredding my cuticles and twirling my hair the whole time. I also lost things constantly, but I learned to be charming enough that most people found it endearing rather than alarming.
I had intense, passionate interests that consumed me entirely and then evaporated into the ether. I felt everything loudly, and I learned to perform composure because I learned that the alternative was just not acceptable. So I built careers, several of them. I held it together in ways that looked from the outside like competence from the inside was a different story. I felt like I was running a marathon in stilettos—technically possible, deeply inefficient, and eventually unsustainable. When I finally had the right framework for my own brain, 2 things happened simultaneously. One was relief, that very specific kind of relief of finally having all the pieces of the puzzle and a story that finally fit.
But the other was grief for the years of misdirected effort, for the version of myself I might have been with better tools and earlier support. I can't get those years back, but what I did get was clarity and a fierce commitment to make sure this conversation keeps happening quite loudly, quite specifically, and in rooms where it can actually change something and this is where you come in. Over a year ago, I was invited to partner with an organization called Find the ADHD Girls, and I wanna tell you about them because they're doing work that matters. Find the ADHD Girls exists specifically to close the diagnostic gap that I've been talking about today. Their mission is focused on awareness, early identification, and making sure that girls get a better shot at getting the right answers sooner.
They work with families, educators, and clinicians to shift the conversation around how ADHD actually presents in girls and women, and they're doing it with a level of commitment that I genuinely respect. I have spoken for them, I have hosted panel discussions with pediatricians, therapists, coaches, all of them specialists in ADHD and all of them women diagnosed in adulthood. I am proud to be in their corner. Here's my ask, there is a global event from March 14th to the 20th called Podcasthon, where independent podcasters from around the world participate by raising awareness and funds for a nonprofit they believe in.
This episode is my Podcasthon episode and Find the ADHD Girls is my chosen nonprofit. I wanna ask you to donate, not because I think you have unlimited resources. Most of you are running lean businesses and making careful choices about where your money goes. But I'm asking you to donate because I genuinely believe this is one of the places where a relatively small amount of money can create a disproportionate amount of change. Every girl that gets identified early is a woman that doesn't spend 30 years writing the wrong story about herself.
That math works for me, and I hope it does for you too. The donation link is in the show notes, it takes about 2 minutes and if donating isn't in the cards right now, no worries. Share this episode with someone, it'll cost you nothing and still moves the needle on awareness, which is the first domino that leads to everything else. And I wanna say something to anyone listening who heard themself in today's episode, who choked up a little or teared up a little, recognizing something of their own story in the decades of wrong explanations, the exhausting overcompensation, the relief and the reckoning.
You were not the problem. You were never the problem. You were a woman with a brain that works differently in a world that was far too slow to understand that. If your diagnosis came late, that is a loss worth acknowledging. It's also not the end of the story, your story. The women I work with who got diagnosed in their 40s and 50s, and some beyond, are some of the most strategically self-aware, creatively capable, and fiercely motivated people I know.
Not despite their late diagnosis, but because of what they developed in the absence of the right support: true grit, determination, and resilience. That does not make the delay okay, it only means the delay didn't win. I wanna thank you for being here today. The donation link for Find the ADHD Girls is in the show notes, along with more information about Podcasthon and how you can support other independent podcasters who are doing the same thing. I'll be back next week, and until then, take care of yourself, take care of your business, and maybe be just a little less hard on your brain. It's been working overtime for a very long time.
