Earlier in the week I listened to one of my favourite podcasts, Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast. They had a 30 minute interview with a psychiatrist and were talking about how girls get missed and left undiagnosed when it comes to inattentive ADHD. This i just had to listen to, I’m waiting for my assessment and wondered if anything they said would apply to me. In short, the entire podcast related to me  It was fascinating to listen to but here are the main points I picked up which might help some of you personally or if you suspect your daughter may have inattentive ADHD….

1. It takes ages to do homework. I remember my mum writing notes in my books saying I had been working for the amount of time suggested and so she had stopped me. I would work on homework for hours. Something that was supposed to take 20 minutes would quite easily take me 1 to 2 hours. Why? Well the first obvious thing was how much I got distracted, started daydreaming, lost my trail of thought and had to start again. This part was no shock to me but the next part absolutely was. Quite often children with inattentive ADHD are overlooked in class because we are quiet, we look like we are listening. Thing is, we aren’t most of the time because we can’t focus due to how long a teacher has been talking or how much noise or distraction there is. So why did homework take so long? Because when we went home we had to not only do the homework, but teach ourselves the lesson as well. I have done this all my life. I pick out parts of lessons or lectures when I’m physically there, but I never manage the whole thing. I would suddenly snap back into lesson and everyone would be leaving to go to the next one. Much like kiddo teaches himself now, I realised earlier this week that I have been mostly teaching myself out of text books with written instruction rather than using auditory teaching all my life. Mind. Blown.

2. It’s not only external distractions that are the problem, it’s the internal ones. I could be sat in a room with absolutely no distractions in and it wouldn’t make a difference to me. I’d still be distracted, but by everything constantly going on in my head. Words, movie scenes, songs, remembering jobs I need to do. It NEVER stops.

3. If you’re trying to work out if you have anxiety, depression or ADHD, look at what you have tried so far to treat the anxiety and depression. Therapies? Drugs? Homeopathic remedies? I’ve tried them all and everyday I still have to try and manage my brain. If you’ve tried it all and you’re still struggling, you can start to consider ADHD more seriously.

I highly recommend you listen to this podcast, it can be found on Spotify here:

Whenever I have sudden realisations of how many different coping mechanisms I used while I was growing up, I have to stop and take a moment. It’s a really hard thing to get your head round that most other people don’t fight these battles. Yet here you are having somehow beaten every one of them to get where you are today. You’re allowed to be proud. And tired. Very bloody tired.