What Does Undiagnosed ADHD Look Like In Adults?

Table of ContentsView AllTable of ContentsRestlessnessDisorganizationProblems With MotivationLack of FocusForgetfulnessTime Management IssuesShifting EmotionsIndecisivenessGetting a Diagnosis

Table of ContentsView All

View All

Table of Contents

Restlessness

Disorganization

Problems With Motivation

Lack of Focus

Forgetfulness

Time Management Issues

Shifting Emotions

Indecisiveness

Getting a Diagnosis

Estimates suggest that somewhere between five and seven percent of the adult population in the United States has ADHD. However, only about 20% of those individuals are ever treated for the condition.

While some with ADHD may choose to go without treatment, many adults who have the condition simply don’t recognize that they even have it.

Thethree types of ADHDare theinattentive type,hyperactive/impulsive type, or the combined type. While children experience the same symptoms, they often look different in adults. In kids, symptoms of hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity tend to be more disruptive and apparent in classroom settings.

This can create a wide variety of problems in a person’s life, ranging from academic struggles to relationship conflicts. To better understand the condition and its effect on an individual’s life, it can be helpful to look at what undiagnosed ADHD might look like in adults.

At a Glance

Symptoms of adult ADHD also frequently resemble other conditions, and the presence of co-occurring disorders such as depression or anxiety can further complicate the diagnosis. Some of the key indicators of ADHD in adults are restlessness, disorganization, lack of motivation, forgetfulness, time management challenges, shifting emotions, and indecisiveness.

As a Neurodivergent Psychologist, Here Are 7 Things I Wish People Knew About ADHD

Hyperactivity is often a major symptom of ADHD. Where in children, this symptom often manifests as an inability to sit still. In classroom settings, kids might fidget or squirm in their chairs, talk excessively, interrupt others, and always seem to be in motion.

This symptom looks a bit different in adults with the condition. People feel restless or unable to relax. Or they might even feel tense, anxious, or on edge.

On the positive side, this means that they always seem to have almost boundless energy.However, it can also make it difficult to sit through work meetings or other activities.

The Lost Skill of Resting With ADHD

Adults with undiagnosed ADHD often seem disorganized or even scattered. These organizational struggles can affect many areas, from prioritizing tasks to keeping track of personal items.

Common signs of organization problems include:

This disorganization also affects speech and thought. Adults with undiagnosed ADHD may have problems organizing what they want to say or may lose track of what they are saying as they are speaking. It also affects their ability to stick to a routine, remember appointments, and complete projects in an orderly fashion.

Managing Disorganization in ADHD

Another common sign of undiagnosed ADHD in adults is a tendency to struggle with what feels like poor motivation. ADHD causes deficits inexecutive functioning, which are the mental skills needed to plan, organize, initiate, and sustain activity.

In other cases, a person might start a task but struggle to stay focused on it. And not knowing how to organize the project into manageable, sequential chunks can make it that much more difficult to stick with it. This means they might start a project only to abandon it.

Unfortunately, this often leads to adults with undiagnosed ADHD being labeled as lazy, unmotivated, and uncaring. Such labels aren’t just hurtful; they can also impact a person’s self-image and self-esteem.

An adult with ADHD might look at the lost list of projects they never started or tasks that were abandoned halfway through and think that it must be a sign that they are lazy.

ADHD and Motivation Issues

Adults with ADHD may struggle to focus ontasks that they find boring, repetitive, or uninteresting. However, what may seem confusing to many is that these individuals may also get lost in projects that interest them.

Because of differences in the brain structure of people with ADHD, they often find it incredibly difficult to feel motivated to stay focused when the task is uninteresting or unrewarding.

A person without ADHD may be just as bored, but they can marshall their motivation and focus for long enough to slog through it. An adult with undiagnosed ADHD may simply lack that focus.

This lack of focus is the most noticeable for time-consuming, predictable, or repetitive tasks. Reading books, completing daily household chores, or managing a checkbook are a few examples of these activities.Projects that take a long time to pay off, like learning a new language or how to play an instrument, can also lead to problems with focus.

ADHD Symptom Spotlight: Lack of Focus

Forgetfulness is a common theme among adults who have ADHD, but these symptoms can seem particularly confusing for those who have received a diagnosis. This symptom can lead to problems like:

An adult who has ADHD may often not realize that they have forgotten something until they get a call from their dentist’s office about missing their appointment or come across a partially-completed project they forgot they were working on.

This also contributes to conflict with other family members, who may misinterpret the behavior as a lack of care or responsibility.

Like other ADHD symptoms, research suggests that forgetfulness stems fromdifferences in how the brain worksin people who have the condition. People with ADHD are less able to filter out irrelevant distractions so they can focus on what’s important. This negatively impacts the ability to both encode new memories and retrieve old ones.

ADHD Symptom Spotlight: Forgetfulness

Adults with undiagnosed ADHD often struggle withtime management. They may always seem to be late, unsure of what needs to be done when, and unclear about how much time they have left to finish important tasks.

This may be because people with this condition experience something known as time blindness. They struggle to sense the passing of time, which means that they have a hard time recognizing how much time has passed.

These time problems often result in issues such as:

Time management issues can create serious problems in a person’s life. Always being late for work can hurt a person’s professional reputation.

Chronic lateness can also negatively affect relationships. And because people often don’t understand the reason why they struggle with time management, it can contribute to feelings of frustration and poorself-image.

Time Blindness in ADHD

Adults with undiagnosed ADHD may also experience symptoms ofemotional dysregulation, which means they may struggle to control their emotional responses. Some of the ways that this might be expressed include:

Unfortunately, these problems with emotional regulation are often misunderstood. It also contributes to the underdiagnosis or misdiagnosis of ADHD.

A healthcare provider or mental health professional might look at these symptoms and, without knowing about the other ADHD symptoms the individual is experiencing, conclude that the person has another condition such asbipolar disorder,borderline personality disorder(BPD), ordepression.

This also means that the person experiencing these intense and upsetting emotions may not understand why they can’t seem to moderate their feelings. Other people in the person’s life might conclude that they are overlysensitive, temperamental, oraggressive.

RecapUndiagnosed adult ADHD can seriously impact many aspects of a person’s life, including their work, friendships, and romantic relationships. Troubles regulating emotions help feed these struggles.

Recap

Undiagnosed adult ADHD can seriously impact many aspects of a person’s life, including their work, friendships, and romantic relationships. Troubles regulating emotions help feed these struggles.

ADHD Symptom Spotlight: Emotional Dysregulation

Indecisiveness is a common problem for many adults, but it can be particularly troublesome for those who have undiagnosed ADHD. It can manifest in a variety of ways, including:

According to one 2021 study, adults with ADHD experience indecision and various other decision-making-related problems.

In particular, adults with ADHD often struggle with working memory, the type of memory that allows people to hold and manipulate information for long enough to think about and act upon it.

Challenges in making decisions are also related to the same executive functioning impairments that lead to many othersymptoms of adult ADHD. Such functions allow people to plan, organize and prioritize.

Indecision in ADHD

If you suspect that you might have undiagnosed adult ADHD, talk to your healthcare provider or a mental health professional for future evaluation. For many adults,getting a diagnosiscan be both a relief and life-changing. It often helps explain struggles and problems that a person may have been dealing with all their life.

It’s never too late to get treatment for your condition, and you may find that medication and lifestyle modifications can help you better manage some of the symptoms that make it difficult to function in day-to-day life.

Is ADHD Overdiagnosed?

7 SourcesVerywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Symptoms and diagnosis of ADHD.Sedgwick JA, Merwood A, Asherson P.The positive aspects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a qualitative investigation of successful adults with ADHD.ADHD Atten Def Hyp Disord. 2019;11(3):241-253. doi:10.1007/s12402-018-0277-6Morsink S, Sonuga-Barke E, Mies G, Glorie N, Lemiere J, Van der Oord S, Danckaerts M.What motivates individuals with ADHD? A qualitative analysis from the adolescent’s point of view.Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2017;26(8):923-932. doi:10.1007/s00787-017-0961-7Lenartowicz A, Truong H, Salgari GC, et al.Alpha modulation during working memory encoding predicts neurocognitive impairment in ADHD.J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2019;60(8):917-926. doi:10.1111/jcpp.13042Ptacek R, Weissenberger S, Braaten E, et al.Clinical implications of the perception of time in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): a review.Med Sci Monit. 2019;25:3918-3924. doi:10.12659/MSM.914225Kring, AM, Sloan, DM.Emotion regulation and psychopathology: A transdiagnostic approach to etiology and treatment.The Guilford Press. 2010.Schulze M, Coghill D, Lux S, Philipsen A.Disentangling ADHD’s presentation-related decision-making—a meta-analytic approach on predominant presentations.Front Psychiatry. 2021;12:519840. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2021.519840

7 Sources

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Symptoms and diagnosis of ADHD.Sedgwick JA, Merwood A, Asherson P.The positive aspects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a qualitative investigation of successful adults with ADHD.ADHD Atten Def Hyp Disord. 2019;11(3):241-253. doi:10.1007/s12402-018-0277-6Morsink S, Sonuga-Barke E, Mies G, Glorie N, Lemiere J, Van der Oord S, Danckaerts M.What motivates individuals with ADHD? A qualitative analysis from the adolescent’s point of view.Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2017;26(8):923-932. doi:10.1007/s00787-017-0961-7Lenartowicz A, Truong H, Salgari GC, et al.Alpha modulation during working memory encoding predicts neurocognitive impairment in ADHD.J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2019;60(8):917-926. doi:10.1111/jcpp.13042Ptacek R, Weissenberger S, Braaten E, et al.Clinical implications of the perception of time in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): a review.Med Sci Monit. 2019;25:3918-3924. doi:10.12659/MSM.914225Kring, AM, Sloan, DM.Emotion regulation and psychopathology: A transdiagnostic approach to etiology and treatment.The Guilford Press. 2010.Schulze M, Coghill D, Lux S, Philipsen A.Disentangling ADHD’s presentation-related decision-making—a meta-analytic approach on predominant presentations.Front Psychiatry. 2021;12:519840. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2021.519840

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Symptoms and diagnosis of ADHD.Sedgwick JA, Merwood A, Asherson P.The positive aspects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a qualitative investigation of successful adults with ADHD.ADHD Atten Def Hyp Disord. 2019;11(3):241-253. doi:10.1007/s12402-018-0277-6Morsink S, Sonuga-Barke E, Mies G, Glorie N, Lemiere J, Van der Oord S, Danckaerts M.What motivates individuals with ADHD? A qualitative analysis from the adolescent’s point of view.Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2017;26(8):923-932. doi:10.1007/s00787-017-0961-7Lenartowicz A, Truong H, Salgari GC, et al.Alpha modulation during working memory encoding predicts neurocognitive impairment in ADHD.J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2019;60(8):917-926. doi:10.1111/jcpp.13042Ptacek R, Weissenberger S, Braaten E, et al.Clinical implications of the perception of time in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): a review.Med Sci Monit. 2019;25:3918-3924. doi:10.12659/MSM.914225Kring, AM, Sloan, DM.Emotion regulation and psychopathology: A transdiagnostic approach to etiology and treatment.The Guilford Press. 2010.Schulze M, Coghill D, Lux S, Philipsen A.Disentangling ADHD’s presentation-related decision-making—a meta-analytic approach on predominant presentations.Front Psychiatry. 2021;12:519840. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2021.519840

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Symptoms and diagnosis of ADHD.

Sedgwick JA, Merwood A, Asherson P.The positive aspects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a qualitative investigation of successful adults with ADHD.ADHD Atten Def Hyp Disord. 2019;11(3):241-253. doi:10.1007/s12402-018-0277-6

Morsink S, Sonuga-Barke E, Mies G, Glorie N, Lemiere J, Van der Oord S, Danckaerts M.What motivates individuals with ADHD? A qualitative analysis from the adolescent’s point of view.Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2017;26(8):923-932. doi:10.1007/s00787-017-0961-7

Lenartowicz A, Truong H, Salgari GC, et al.Alpha modulation during working memory encoding predicts neurocognitive impairment in ADHD.J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2019;60(8):917-926. doi:10.1111/jcpp.13042

Ptacek R, Weissenberger S, Braaten E, et al.Clinical implications of the perception of time in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): a review.Med Sci Monit. 2019;25:3918-3924. doi:10.12659/MSM.914225

Kring, AM, Sloan, DM.Emotion regulation and psychopathology: A transdiagnostic approach to etiology and treatment.The Guilford Press. 2010.

Schulze M, Coghill D, Lux S, Philipsen A.Disentangling ADHD’s presentation-related decision-making—a meta-analytic approach on predominant presentations.Front Psychiatry. 2021;12:519840. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2021.519840

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At a Glance#

Recap#

At a Glance

Recap