Nobody Warned Me About the ADHD Overwhelm Spiral
Sometimes I feel genuinely insane for feeling the way I feel.
Something exciting happens. Something good. An opportunity, a plan, something I’ve been looking forward to. And instead of feeling excited, there’s this dread that creeps in and sets up camp. The day before something big and new, I spend most of it on the edge of tears. I’m snappy, I’m heavy, I’m in my head. And then I’m angry at myself for being in my head, which makes it worse, which makes me angrier, and so on, until I’ve managed to ruin my own anticipation entirely before the thing has even happened.
It feels insane because the feeling doesn’t match the situation. You’re about to do something good. Why are you like this?
It’s not always tied to something exciting, either. Sometimes it’s more ordinary than that. A sudden spike in workload. A plan that doesn’t go the way I’d mapped it out in my head. Something small that shifts, and suddenly everything feels too big. The unknown feels too wide. The gap between what I’d imagined and what’s actually happening feels impossible to cross, and I don’t know how to explain that to someone who doesn’t experience it, because from the outside it probably looks like a completely unreasonable response to a pretty manageable situation.
And some days it just arrives. This weight, sitting on my chest, like something is horribly wrong and I can’t work out what. I want to curl into a ball. I don’t want to talk to anyone, but I also don’t want to be alone. I feel too much, all at once, about nothing in particular, and there’s no way to explain that without sounding dramatic.
I’ve spent a lot of time being angry at myself for this. Mostly because I’ve been given the message, in one way or another, my whole life, that I’m a lot. You’re great, but. You’re fun, but. You’re so much, and it’s a lot to take on. In jobs, in relationships, in rooms where I was trying very hard to hold it together and apparently not doing it as invisibly as I thought. There’s this quiet, persistent fear that I will always just be average. Never quite enough to be chosen, never quite easy enough to keep, never quite the right amount of anything.
That fear doesn’t help with the spirals. If anything, it feeds them.
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Here’s what I’ve been trying to do instead of just suffering through it: actually understand it.
Because it turns out there’s a reason this happens, and it’s not a character flaw. When you have ADHD, your brain processes the world differently. Your nervous system is more reactive, your emotional responses are more intense, and your ability to regulate those responses works differently too. What neurotypical people experience as mild stress, our brains can register as an emergency. What they experience as a manageable change of plans, we can experience as everything falling apart. It’s not dramatic. It’s neurological. The overwhelm is real, the dread is real, and the fact that it seems disproportionate from the outside doesn’t mean it isn’t completely genuine on the inside.
The term for it is emotional dysregulation, and it often shows up alongside executive dysfunction and sensory overload. All different faces of the same thing: a brain that’s working incredibly hard, in a system that wasn’t built for it, with fewer of the automatic buffers that make daily life feel manageable for people who don’t have this.
I’m not writing this because I’ve solved it. I’m writing it because understanding it has helped, even a little. Knowing there’s a name for it, and a reason for it, makes it slightly easier to stop blaming myself every time it shows up. I’m learning my own brain in real time, and this is one of the ways I’m doing that.
What I want, what I think a lot of us want, is just to not have to apologise for existing the way we exist. To not have to shrink the overwhelm so other people find us more manageable. To be loved for the full version, not the edited one.
That takes people who are willing to understand, and I won’t pretend those people are easy to find. It takes time, and patience, and a specific kind of reassurance that we probably need more of than we let on, because most of us have spent years being told in a hundred quiet ways that we’re not quite right. Not quite enough. A lot to handle.
We’re not too much. We’re just a lot, and the right people don’t experience those as the same thing.
I’m still figuring out how to believe that on the hard days. But I’m getting there.
Slowly, and with a lot of feelings about it, obviously.
