ADHD Therapy in The Hague

Specialized ADHD Therapy for Neurodivergent Adults

What Are Some Common Symptoms of ADHD?

These days ADHD can be diagnosed as Inattentive, Hyperactive, or Combined.
It is important to note that ADHD is neurodevelopmental, which means symptoms must have been present in childhood for it to be diagnosed.
For a full list of the diagnostic criteria please refer to the DSM-5TR .

If you suspect you have ADHD it is recommended that you have an assessment done by a qualified assessor. In the Netherlands, you can ask your MD to make a referal for this. This list of symptoms is meant to help you understand possible signs of ADHD but does not serve as a diagnosis or a diagnostic list.

• An Abundance of Attention:
  People with ADHD do not have a deficit in attention (despite the misleading name of the diagnosis), rather they are often attending to too many things at once. Many of my clients have described their experience of ADHD as being like having a thousand television sets on at once-but with each set tuned into a different channel. Each channel is competing for the person affected by ADHD’s attention. Folks affected by ADHD often feel like their brain is going a million miles a minute.
  
• Difficulty With Response Inhibition and Impulsivity:
  Folks affected by ADHD tend to have a hard time waiting. This can manifest in conversations (not being able to wait your turn to speak), in games (having a hard time waiting for your turn), in lines (deciding not to buy groceries because the line to the check out is too long), and in many other areas of life. I find this symptom becomes most noticeable when people enter university or start their career. Response inhibition helps us do a little bit at a time to reach a large goal. With limited response inhibition people affected by ADHD have a hard time starting and completing bigger (assignments (such as essays or research), and may put off loftier career goals because they don’t offer immediate rewards. This symptom is also one of the more dangerous symptoms as it can result in behavior such as walking across the street without looking for traffic, or risky driving maneuvers.
  
• Getting Bored (difficulty sustaining attention):
  ADHD brains tend to do well with things that interest them. Sometimes a person with ADHD can become hyper-focused on something of interest, which can be useful, although often it can be disruptive for other aspects of their life (imagine you are at work and suddenly become hyper-focused on how video games are made. The rest of your day is spent researching video games, which puts you behind on your project and your boss gets frustrated with you). When an ADHD brain is set to do a task that isn’t novel, or seems boring it can be almost painful to do the task. Often my clients and I have to come up with ways to make mundane things (like doing the laundry) fun or “gameify” the boring task. The task simply isn’t interesting enough to sustain attention. This is one of the symptoms that can also result in many things being started but never getting finished.
  
  For neurotypical folks this can seem silly. “Why don’t you just force yourself to do it? No one likes laundry. Don’t be lazy” they might say. It isn’t than simple for the person affected by ADHD. They really are trying, but there is a war going on in their brain where they feel they should do the laundry (and there is often shame around this too), but a part of them finds this task too unstimulating, too uninteresting, or in some cases too overwhelming to do.
  
• Ants in Your Pants (difficulty with sitting still):
  For many people with ADHD sitting still is very difficult. Often people who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) learn to mask this symptom with great difficulty due to social pressures, leading to the symptom going unnoticed in childhood. This symptom can look like: needing to shift in your seat, tapping your feet or hands, having a hard time sitting in one place, chewing on pens or pencils, and feeling restless.
  
• Day Dreaming and Zoning out:
  Zoning out, or day dreaming is a commonly missed trait of inattentive ADHD. Many of my clients have reported that as children they would day dream during class and have moments of panic when they realized the teacher was talking to them or that class was done. This can cause a cummulitive effect in education as children might miss large chunks of information and fall behind as a result. Adults sometimes report that while talking to their spouse or partner their mind zones out of the conversation and goes somewhere differently entirely.
  
• Difficulty With Sustained Organization:
  Many people I know who were diagnosed late in life with ADHD thought they were very organized people. If you went into their homes it looked like they were very organized, but underneath it all was a huge sustained effort, combined with many coping strategies, that allowed for things to seem that way. For people with ADHD, keeping things organized can be very difficult. Creating the organizational system can be easy, but the actual sustaining of it tends to be hard for ADHD brains. Some people affected by ADHD have what their own systems of organization that seem messy to others but work for them, but for many folks with ADHD keeping organized is a daily struggle. This can look like: Agenda’s that have been used a handful of times, toys all over the house, cups and dishes in randoms places in the house, paperwork scattered around the house, misplaced items, and piles of dirty laundry.
  
• Memory issues:
  Working memory is especially impacted for most people affected by ADHD. The phrase, “In one ear, and out the other” is something many of us can relate to. It is not uncommon for someone with ADHD to forget a task moments after being asked to do it, which is why many ADHDers tend to keep little notebooks with them, or takes notes on their phone. Birthdays and special occasions can be difficult to remember, as can due dates and deadlines. An impaired working memory system means it is that much harder for people affected by ADHD to code things into long term memory. I find that many of my clients spend far longer on homework and studying in school and university than their peers. Unfortunately, many of them receive lower grades despite the extra time they take to study.

It is important to note that this list is not exhaustive and that each person experiences ADHD differently.