What exactly is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder?

What does it feel like to have it? How does it appear to other people?

I’ve put those questions to countless ADHD specialists and to folks who have this disorder or suspect they might. My documentary, ADD & Loving It?!, was my first attempt to explain ADHD in a way that would have helped me understand before I was diagnosed.

The fact that this disorder is so individual and the human brain is so complex means that no single description can capture the range of people’s experiences. I won’t even try. Instead, here are seven explanations, analogies, or models that, taken together, give a good sense of why ADHD is such a frustrating, insidious challenge to overcome. Let me know if this helps you and the people in your life to understand what’s going on.

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ADHD Explained – For People Who Do Not Have It

Folks who don’t have ADHD but may know someone who has been diagnosed, or someone who ought to look into it maybe, you know, naturally have a lot of questions about the exact nature of this neuro-developmental disorder.

They may be curious and seek to understand with questions such as “what’s your freaking problem?”, “what’s going on with you?”, “what the devil were you thinking?”.

All valid questions and basically they’re variations on “as a neuro typical person I find it difficult to appreciate or envision how you experience the world, how your mind works, and how that manifests in daily life, but I’m hoping you can enlighten me”, or the more succinct “what the hell is wrong with you?”.

Tricky. My immediate reaction is usually there’s nothing wrong with me I’m just a fighter jet in a passenger jet world, which actually is not a great analogy cuz I’m the one who keeps getting shot down in the fighter jet.

So one analogy doesn’t capture it for everyone, or even for one person, or even one person over the course of a day. As Dr Steven Kurtz says “one of the greatest things I ever heard was, you’ve seen one kid with ADHD, you’ve seen one kid with ADHD”. As opposed to you’ve seen them all.

So no single analogy can really capture all of this, no one metaphor will cover the experience, so here are 7 analogies and together they may give you a sense of what’s going on with us, and again not always with all of us just some of us.

1 – Ferrari Brain with Model T brakes

Perhaps the most quoted analogy comes from Dr Edward Hallowell author and co-author of a number of books on ADHD, he calls it the Ferrari brain with the Model T brakes, and of course for model railroaders you might say you have a lash up of AC6000 CWS with screw and linkage driven break blocks.

2 – We are sprinters not marathoners.

Remember The Tortoise and the Hare? We are the hare, go, go, go, go, go, go, and then we hit the wall and need a nap. We don’t pace ourselves, yeah I know slow and steady may win the race, that’s okay we aren’t necessarily staying in this till the end of the race, we’re just interested in a quick start.

So we may be quick out of the gates, take the early lead but then decide to join a more interesting new race.

One caveat not all of us have this driven overly eager hyperactivity, some people just struggle managing their focus and their attention, sometimes too little, sometimes too much regardless of what’s urgent or important, or easy.

3 – The On/Off Switch

The ADHD brain is either on or off. We tend to be engaged and or lethargic, we either love it or loath it, but again not everyone some folks who have the uneven attention the problems with focus us but not the hyperactivity ,the impulsivity, may be quieter lost in thought, daydreaming.

4 – Squirrel, or Bird Brain, or Butterfly

I like butterfly, we flutter like a butterfly and that leads to all kinds of creative solutions, of links, of patterns, it’s a bit like a a jazz band in the brain riffing off each other, unlike a symphony where everybody’s playing exactly, this is more like someone singing scat not a choir. It’s not linear, we can get there but not in a bee line.

The point is we’re easily distracted from internal distractions, from thoughts, from memories, emotions that arise ideas, and then there are the external distractions, the sounds, the noises, someone touching us, a conversation happening 40 feet away… yeah sorry what you say? sorry I got a…

5 – My Mind is Like a TV with 100 Channels And Somebody Else Has The Remote

They’re changing, it’s constantly changing, it’s not in my control, it’s crazy making, or maybe it’s a radio station that’s not quite on the channel so you’re getting a little bit of that other station coming…. and now the weather…

As Kate Kelly explained
“We were in a restaurant and you know the waitress was taking our order and and then she left, and my ex-husband said hey Kate you didn’t deck the waitress, and I’ve never decked a waitress but what he was referring to was I used to be real irritable in a in a situation like that, and the irritability was I couldn’t hear.

It’s not about being deaf in in in the sense of uh you know your auditory nerve or something, um with ADD there’s the filter in the brain doesn’t work so well, so you know we talk about the grounds getting mixed up with the coffee, and sound can you know you can’t distinguish foreground and background in terms of sound, um so a crowd restaurant could be uh drive you crazy it’s like fingernails on a Blackboard.

Rick Green – So a noisy office or a noisy classroom or a big party ah!

6 – We Are The Folks Who Respond When You Call 911 Not 411.

We can thrive under pressure, danger, risk, excitement, it wakes up the brain, it provides the dopamine and the Norepinephrine that we are low on, we actually crave the stress, the pressure, the danger, cops, firefighters, emergency room staff, soldiers, athletes, entertainers, oh come on, stunt performers.

As one paramedic told me not all of my colleagues have ADHD but the best ones do, the ones who don’t either burn out, leave, or end up in administration.

Basically we find ways to wake up the brain, we may leave things to the last possible moment to create that pressure, which can drive our parents and the teachers crazy at school.

Or we take on a dozen things, we fill our plate so we’re never bored, lots on the go, great! Finishing any of them? It’s stuck I’ll just go do this one for a little while because I got….

7 – Executive Function Disorder

I love this one. Think of a company with great workers but terrible management, you may work for a few.

What do the executives at a large company do? They do the long-term planning, they set the goals for everyone to focus on, they prioritize the tasks, we need the frame of the car before we can start adding the body parts, good thinking, that should get at the top.

They’re budgeting the time, the energy, the expenses, the labor, they’re tracking the progress, how’s it going? How’s it going? Where are we at? They’re checking the details, they’re following up, they’re building the structure and the routines, the consistency, the predictability, so that the right colored door arrives on the right colored car at exactly the right time.

And that is not us.

So those are seven analogies, I’m sure there are others like, oh right the movie projector

7.5 We Are Stuck at The Shutter

We can experience life like the old fashioned movie projector you know with the two reels, the one where the movie is, and this is the take up reel, so this is the future, this is what’s coming, this is the past, this has been through the shutter.

We are stuck at the shutter, at the the gate, we’re projecting one frame at a time, for us it’s always now, now, now, now, now. Of course they don’t have movie projectors today we have Instagram, totally unrelated, one after another, our mind hopping around, dopamine, dopamine, oh that’s interesting, that’s interesting, that’s interesting, they’re all over the place.

The take up reel has come and gone, what did we learn from the past, ah not now I’m busy with the now, with the shutter.

The past is the past, it fades, no wonder so many people with ADHD wonder if they have dementia cuz they can’t remember stuff, what was your childhood like? the doctor will ask, I don’t know and I was there.

Then that feeder reel up top what’s yet to come, what’s going to happen in our lives.

So we can have great goals, wonderful dreams, but not think about the steps we’ll need to take to get where we want to go.

I want to retire at 50, and what are you doing about it, uh you know I’m thinking about retiring at 50 and dreaming of all things I’m going to do when I’m retired, and I have enough money saved to retire, and I don’t know how I’m going to.

You see we may not be pondering the potential roadblocks or the steps we have to take to get where we want to go, or simply thinking ahead enough to go, should I actually blurt this out to my boss.

Ironically we are in the now and yet we’re often not present, we’re zoned out, we’re tuned out.

So there they are seven analogies or seven metaphors that that capture some but not all of the experience of ADHD.

1 – The Ferrari Brain

2 – Sprinters Not Marathoners

3 – The On/Off Switch

4 – The Flitting Butterfly

5 – Someone Else Is Channel Changing

6 – 911 not 411

7 – The Big Company With the Bad Management

Some may ring true for you, others not so much, oh and the movie projector okay so 7.5 but that’s it, oh actually there’s one more…

Featured in this video:
Steven Kurtz, PhD, ABPP
Kate Kelly, co-author, You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?!
Quoted in this video:
Edward (Ned) Hallowell, MD

This video is for entertainment purposes only. Copyright © Big Brain Productions 2024. All Rights Reserved.