Common symptoms of adult ADHD which we overlook

Do you feel restless and obstructed many a times, which often comes in your way of work and life? You might be suffering from ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Highly characterised among children, ADHD is also prevalent among adults and plays a huge impact on one’s self-esteem.

For many adults, ADHD goes undetected in childhood and hence, the symptoms go unrecognized. People mistake these signs for aloofness. The patient too feels bullied and mistaken. These problems create difficulty in executing day to day tasks for adults. Here are some signs to look out for if you feel your loved one might be feeling out of place and disoriented. Identifying these signs can help find a way to an effective solution.

A mental illness or impair causes the brain to react in an unusual way. In case of ADHD, the planning part of the brain, usually associated with the frontal lobe goes bad. Deficits get formed in the brain due to which regular prioritizing and organising becomes a huge burden for people with ADHD. In some cases, genetics have also been found to cause a mismatch in the neurotransmitters which leads to an attention miscalculation.

A person suffering from ADHD is considered to be a social misfit. Low self-esteem and feeling under-confident may be one of the most prominent signs of ADHD but anxiety is one of the most common symptoms found in ADHD patients, especially adults who have not been diagnosed before.

ADHD doesn't simply slow down the brain but in many cases, keeps it occupied with too many things, making it difficult to pay attention or stay focussed on one simple thing which becomes quite troubling, especially for an adult brain with too much information to process and retrieve. Some visible signs may be interrupting conversations frequently, drift off, display risky behaviour which might not seem normal.

When people discuss ADHD, they forget to cross out hyperactivity. Simply put, a patient tends to be hyperfocused when they are immensely concentrated on a particular job. When interrupted or nagged, it may make them extremely hyper, irritable and sometimes violent as they feel attached to the job they have been assigned to finish. It becomes extremely difficult for them to switch on to another task. Paying a little too much attention to the job, the brain gets no other healthy information to process.

People with ADHD have been found to have a low track on their emotional flexibility. Emotions are one part of mental functioning which requires high-level focus which they find difficult to cope with. When they have no control over their emotions, they are bound to feel extremely frustrated or pensive at times of a trigger activity.

Having tics or fidgets might be one of the most commonly found symptoms among kids with ADHD but this also extends to adults. While adults grow out of the hyperactive stage, they continue to experience some form of nervous tics and fidgeting like skin picking, constant moving of the leg or the hand, lip biting or making random noises.

Feeling blue and left out after any form of rejection or criticism is very common for people but with ADHD patients, a negative reaction or failure can trigger a 'rejection syndrome', making it hard for them to identify with themselves and forces them to detach from the society and maintain relations.