Discovering ADHD in Adult Women

In this episode of the ADHD MOM podcast, we dive into why many women are diagnosed with ADHD later in life—and how hormones, masking, and misdiagnosis play a role. 

You'll learn about the power of a 'done list' to help track wins and stay encouraged, especially when to-do lists feel defeating. 

Tune in for real talk, practical tools, and space to reflect on how your brain really works!

Transcript

Jessica Lewis: 0:01

This is the ADHD MOM podcast. Hey, I'm Jess. Today we are talking about being a late bloomer discovering ADHD in adult women. And today's quick win is creating a done list, not a to-do list. But before we get into that, first, let's understand late diagnosed ADHD in women. Did you know that women typically get diagnosed with ADHD about maybe four or five years later than men? Many women don't discover they have ADHD until their thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties, and here's why. Women often present different symptoms than men. We tend to be more inattentive rather than hyperactive. We especially see this in little boys. I have one. We're also masters at masking our symptoms through perfectionism and overcompensating, you know, pushing down those scattered brain emotions to make it look like you know exactly what someone's saying. You know exactly what happened yesterday and you remember everything. Yeah, we pretend we mask that. All of that is not overwhelming. Healthcare providers sometimes miss the signs because they're focused on other symptoms like anxiety and depression, and although that can happen with ADHD, sometimes it masks the ADHD or the depression masks. It's just, it's complicated, right? Especially when we're masking it and we don't understand what is going on. Many of us spend years feeling like, okay, there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm getting treated for anxiety or depression. Maybe it's just ADHD is the root cause all along for me. It was like the puzzle pieces finally came together. I could see the whole picture. It didn't change who I was, but it did help me understand how my brain works. Before I was diagnosed and I was dealing with my son's diagnosis, a friend and mental health worker asked, okay, so let's say you get diagnosed. Now what? And that is such a great question, and I think that the answer is going to be different for each and every one of us. Does it change who we are? No. But for me it was helpful in getting a clearer picture of what I was dealing with, and it also helps with what strategies could help and what strategies do not help. So for me, going through the testing, I realized my memory is really bad. I mean, I think my husband knew that, and I think I knew that. But to see the data on paper is like, oh, okay. I do struggle with memory, so I needed to put structure into place to help with that. I use Notion in the Second Brain system, but that's a whole other show. And also for another show is the whole hormonal connection. Our hormones play a huge role. Research is showing that ADHD symptoms can actually change during our monthly cycle, pregnancy and postpartum, and perimenopause and menopause. Yay. This is why some of us might feel like our symptoms are all over the place at different times of the month. There are definitely days just before my cycle that I feel completely scatterbrained and I just can't keep everything in focus. Hormones are surging and going crazy, and so it makes sense that that is the connection. Now, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a researcher. These are just things that I have picked up and read. So I encourage you to do your own research and look all of this up and see if these are the connections that you're also making. So if you're newly diagnosed or you're thinking about getting diagnosed, or you think you have ADHD, but you're not sure, all of that is okay. It's a journey. But today's quick win is create a done list, not a to-do list. Throughout the day, write down tasks as you complete them. Even small ones like I made the bed, or I responded to that email that's been sitting there for weeks. That's a huge win. The practice of creating a done list can help you recognize how much you actually accomplished despite feeling scatterbrained. It helps you build confidence in your abilities. You accomplish something, you did something. Here's the proof. It also helps identify your natural patterns in peak productivity times. So for me, this is really hard. I love to live in the future. I'm futuristic, vision minded, and I struggle with memory, which is, you know, looking back and thinking about the past. I can't remember things five minutes ago, let alone what I did yesterday or the week before, or what I did for my birthday last year. No idea. Poof. It's gone. So my challenge, and it might be your challenge too, is living in the present moment and reflecting on the past. It takes time and effort and it's something our ADHD brains don't like effort. Uh, no thank you, because it slows us down and it makes us think, and thinking can be really hard to look back. It doesn't give us that dopamine hit, but reflecting on our past is really important to help put things in place for the present and to make a better future. Right? It's hard to build confidence when we don't understand what we accomplish during the day. If you took the time to reflect on your day, you realize all the laundry you washed and folded, all of the clients that you lined up and emailed back, all the meal planning you did, all the taking care of the kids, driving them to and from sports. We're not trying to be perfect here. We're just trying to reflect back on all the things that we do every day and put together our done list. So what could your done list look like? Do you physically write things down on sticky notes or a notebook? Maybe you do post-it notes on the side of the fridge, or I've got one of those magnetic whiteboards that are, that's on the side of the fridge. But the idea is that you write your task list down, don't erase it, maybe cross it off, and then you can see all the things that you've done at the end of the day. So practically for what that looks like for me, I lose paper. I'm not very good at carrying the same piece of paper around with me all the time. So I use Google tasks and it's on the side of my email and it syncs to my phone.'cause I have the app, the Google Tasks app on my phone. So when I cross off a task, it disappears, which is great because it cleans everything up and it feels like I'm actually making progress. But sometimes it's helpful to go back and look at all of the things you've crossed off. Like you can look at the archive and sometimes we write one big, huge task down and cross it off. And we don't realize that that one big, huge task actually involved 10 different tasks to be able to get to that one cross off. So don't forget about the small little tasks that add up. Our brains need to see that we have done a lot. So count every freaking task that you have done during the day. And maybe it sounds crazy, but it's a simple mind shift that helps us combat the negative self-talk that many late diagnosed women have internalized over years of undiagnosed ADHD. Your diagnosis does not make you a failure. It's just a first step toward understanding yourself better and creating strategies that work for your unique brain. Do you have a tip or technique that works for your brain or something that works for your kids? I'd love to hear it and share it on the show. Email me jessica@theadhdmom.com, or you can visit our website, the adhd mom.com for more resources and blog articles and leave comments on there as well. Thanks for listening. Share the show, spread the word help. Our favorite creative ADHD moms go from surviving to thriving. Until next time, make it a beautiful day.