Emotions, and struggles with and between various emotions, play a central role in the daily life of all children, adolescents, and adults. Emotions guide what we notice and what we ignore, what we focus on intently and what we carefully avoid. Conflicting emotions can cause us to disrupt engagement with a task we want to accomplish, or lead us repeatedly to do what we consciously intend never to do again. In many ways – sometimes recognized, sometimes not, subtly and powerfully- we are pushed and pulled by our emotions. Yet we also exercise some control over them: we try to distract ourselves from uncomfortable emotions; we choose how much we want our emotions to show in our words or actions, we talk to ourselves to try to tone down or jack up how noticeable our emotions are to others and to ourselves. We manage and are managed by the complexity of our emotions.
As an ADHD coach, I have seen that emotional struggles play an especially large role in the daily life of people with attention deficit disorder. The same chronic impairments that interfere with other aspects of their cognitive functioning also tend to interfere with their ability to manage and be adequately guided by their emotions. People with ADHD often suffer chronic difficulties in responding to and sustaining emotions that motivate them for important tasks.
Most people with ADHD experience the same frustrations, fears, sadness, pride, shame, excitement, and so on that spontaneously arise in everyone else in various situations. What is different is the chronic difficulty most people with this disorder experience in managing and responding to their emotions, particularly in the many situations where emotions are mixed and conflicting – being very smart does not prevent a person from struggling with these emotional problems, nor does it prevent having ADHD.
Today, we know that emotions are linked to the brain. Often people think of emotions as distinct from the brain, as being “from the heart” or “in the gut
The difficulties that people with ADHD have with emotions are similar to the problems they often have in prioritizing tasks, shifting focus, and utilizing working memory. While cleaning a room, they may get interested in some photos they pick up, soon becoming completely diverted from the job they had begun. While searching for some specific information online, they may notice a web page that draws them off the search they started and into a protracted investigation of something totally unrelated, derailing their original task. They may abandon a task that they find boring, overlooking the fact that adequate and timely completion of this task is essential to gaining something they really want, and that failure to complete the task will inevitably bite them with a painful payback.
People with ADHD report that momentary emotion often gobbles up all the space in their head, as a computer virus can gobble up all the space on a hard drive, crowding out other important feelings and thoughts.
In a similar way, many people with ADHD tend to get quickly flooded with frustration, enthusiasm, anger, affection, worry, boredom, discouragement, or other emotions, not keeping in mind and responding to related emotions also important to them. They may vent their momentary anger on a friend or family member with a hurtful intensity that does not take into account that this is a person whom they love and do not want to hurt. People with ADHD report that momentary emotions often gobble up all the space in their heads, as a computer virus can gobble up all the space on a hard drive, crowding out other important feelings and thoughts.