Preferences

This might not be relevant for you, but generally, such constellations of symptoms should at least trigger a differential diagnosis between anxiety and ADHD. Anxiety can be simplified as "energy mobilized to handle important challenges." Some people with high baseline activation are really focused on managing challenges, whether external or internal. This could resemble ADHD if the person is not avoiding their feelings but instead enduring them. This would explain both tiredness and low benefit from stimulants, scatterbrain, and high energy/activity levels. People usually think that anxiety just causes someone to sit in a corner and be anxious, but many people channel the energy into action and don’t even realize they are doing it due to an extremely high baseline activation of the nervous system. For these people, it’s almost more physiological than psychological. If the activation is always directed at managing and handling something, as opposed to reflexively focusing on the most interesting thing, I would suspect it’s more in the realm of anxiety, or perhaps better described as a really reactive, hair-trigger nervous system. Not saying that it is anxiety, but it might just be that you are the opposite of apathetic.

Interesting, I have never been diagnosed with anxiety beyond 'well ADHD and anxiety go together, ADHD medication should help' and then a kind of shrug when it made things worse. All these things are possible and are food for thought (I am not saying it definitely is that either). This is kind of US-medicine specific, but everyone I know who is being treated for anxiety is being treated via methods I'm not interested in unfortunately.

> For these people, it’s almost more physiological than psychological.

This stands out to me. I have lifted weights in the past, have not been well physically conditioned in cardio activity since I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 22. Cardio tends to cause my blood sugar to become unpredictable (or at least you have to actually be really rigid in maintaining your exercise patterns to keep things predictable). Maybe a bit of biking or running would do me some good. What would you do?

This item has no comments currently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal