ADHD and anxiety
a post for mental health awareness week
The chances of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder bringing a secondary comorbid condition along for the ride are almost certain.
Of the possible contenders, studies have shown anxiety disorder to be the most likely – with a prevalence of 47% (52% in one recent study) among adults with ADHD.
This suggests that, if you happen to be an ADHDer, you’re as likely as not to also have a condition that puts you at a higher risk of suffering from frequent and intense rumination.
Or severe sleep issues.
Or social withdrawal, or racing thoughts, or substance mis-use.
And guess what every one of these situations has a tendency to exacerbate?
Exactly. Welcome to the ADHD-anxiety feedback loop.
Every year, the Mental Health Foundation shines the national spotlight on a different type of mental health condition.
Today, they're kicking off Mental Health Awareness Week 2023, which this time sees the theme of anxiety taking centre stage.
As it's the perfect day for a little exploration of ADHD’s most common comorbidity, we’re going to do just that.
And then, later in the week, we'll take a look at some of the most effective moves we can all make in a bid to try and keep our levels of anxiety in check.
So let’s begin by teasing anxiety apart from its close relative, stress. Because understanding the difference between the two can be useful in attempting to manage either or both.
It helps to consider stress as a temporary response to an external trigger.
An argument, a missed flight, or the need to get a nine hundred-word blog post out within ninety minutes would all count.
These are relatively short-lived states of varyingly heightened tension. They turn up, they happen and then, at some point soon, they’re gone.
Aside from in the case of serious, traumatic events, stresses are recovered from relatively quickly – once the stressor, whatever it was, has passed or been resolved.
Anxiety, on the other hand, has internal origins.
This is an anticipatory set of emotions, centred around the prediction of danger yet to come – a sense of imposing doom, rather than a physiological reaction to what’s actually going on now.
It’s experienced in a time and place where the incoming threat has yet to play out.
On paper, therefore, anxiety seems further removed from actual events than moments of stress are – as though it’s a product of our imagination, or negative assumption; less tangible than the very real experiences provided by the various stimuli of the here and now.
But anxiety is the result of repeated stresses teaching us to expect the worst. The greater the levels of stress we experience – and the more regularly we experience them – the more inclined we are to predict future threats and ready ourselves to take evasive action.
Once it gets hold, anxiety is reluctant to let up or give you a break. And the persistent sense of apprehension or dread it brings about can have serious consequences for both mental and physical health.
Which, of course, isn’t good.
It’s important to understand, though, that feelings of anxiety aren’t inherently a sign of something being pathologically wrong.
At its most functional level, anxiety is a natural human emotion, evolved to keep us on our toes and sufficiently wary of threat or danger – thereby giving our species a better chance of staying around.
When our ancient ancestors were doing their thing, a certain level of anxiety would be useful in having the awareness required to not get eaten.
Or to seek shelter from, say, an incoming storm.
Today, not getting eaten has been replaced with not getting mugged on the way home. Or scammed online.
Having a job that will earn us the money to keep a roof over our heads is the modern way to avoid getting battered by the elements.
Whatever analogies you care to draw, the fact is, stressors continue to do their job in keeping us alert and aware and with the anxiety we need to thrive.
Trouble is, we’ve designed a world in which they come thick and fast from all directions at once.
The stresses we’re bombarded with daily, barely give us a chance to recover before the next one’s upon us.
We’re simply not designed for it to be this way.
Our base levels of anxiety are way up on where they’re meant to be – raising our blood pressure and rates of depression on the one hand; decreasing our happiness and standards of living on the other.
It’s why eight million people in the UK are experiencing an anxiety disorder at any one time.
And presumably why the Mental Health Foundation chose it as their theme for MHAW this year, too.
To bring it all back to the neurodiversity theme of this blog, though, it’s worth pointing out this:
Many of the traits of ADHD can bring about behaviours that come with consequences.
Such consequences can expose us to stresses, which, over time and through repetition, raise our anxiety to a level it really shouldn’t be.
When our anxiety is high, our ability to keep on top of the more challenging aspects of our ADHD is diminished.
And so the vicious circle goes round. And round. And round.
If you do happen to be ADHD, that’s worth knowing.
In fact, it could serve you very well this Mental Health Awareness Week – and for the rest of your life.
Kev
#ToHelpMyAnxiety