5 Quick Tips to Reduce Anxiety With ADHD

If you are someone who lives with anxiety, then you understand the persistent and often self-defeating cycle of catastrophizing, what-ifs, and negative self-talk. If you add attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) into the mix, these patterns are intensified because of the natural challenges with executive functioning skills that come with a neurodivergent brain. It’s just tougher to manage the strong emotions before they take over and leave you dysregulated and overwhelmed.

Despite misdiagnoses, ADHD differs significantly from anxiety. At its core, anxiety is an overestimation of a problem and an underestimation of the personal resources someone has to deal with it. While people with ADHD wrestle with organization, prioritization, productivity, working memory issues, and other executive-function challenges, those with anxiety struggle more with compulsive, obsessive, or perfectionistic behaviors; psychosomatic ailments; and debilitating specific phobias. Issues related to food, housing, or job insecurity; systemic racism; or trauma further intensify anxiety. With ADHD, the primary issues relate to focus, concentration, and impulse and emotional control. It’s primarily a condition of dysregulation. Anxiety reflects persistent distress, unease, or fear in situations (regardless of them being benign or dangerous) that have identifiable and clear triggers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, anxiety rates in adults range from 12.5 to 18 percent with the severity of symptoms differing by sociodemographic and geographic characteristics. For adults with ADHD, the co-occurrence of anxiety is considerably higher at 50 percent due to the combination of neurological patterns, executive functioning challenges, past histories of criticism, bullying, social and academic difficulties, and other adverse experiences. Ongoing concerns about “messing up again” amp up into persistent worry about the next time that you may (unwittingly) make another mistake or forget something important. It’s common to become overwhelmed beyond your coping capacity with ADHD, which makes anxiety more likely.

Nervousness, worry, and anxiety, while used interchangeably, are not the same things. Nervousness refers to an emotional experience that goes away once a skill has been mastered. Worry refers to how we think about something. Anxiety is our physiological response based on negative thoughts and distorted beliefs. We cannot eliminate anxiety: It’s a natural human response that’s evolved for survival. In our post-COVID world, anxiety has reached new levels—thriving due to greater health and socioeconomic concerns and increased social media usage.

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Without useful self-management strategies and tools to access the internal resources you need, anxious adults with ADHD tend to become agitated, panicked, or shut down. When people learn how to talk back to worried, negative thinking and rely on past successes for confident choices in the present, they learn how to tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty and take reasonable risks. They also accept the possibility of disappointment that anxiety is trying to avoid. This is how we develop the essential resilience that’s crucial for successful, satisfying lives.