1. Eye contact: Avoidance of eye contact is ADHD behaviour – your child/young person may look as if they are ignoring you but some find making eye contact really difficult.
Eye contact is supposed to mean something, and for some of us, it means too much – so we avoid it. It is considered to be a way of communicating that a person is listening, but for some of us, it's impossible to look and listen at the same time. It can cause a sensory overload.
A student with inattentive ADHD may quietly stare out the window while her work goes unfinished; this 'spacey' or 'daydreamy' behavior is overlooked or mischaracterized as laziness or apathy.
Many people with ADHD experience a physical hypersensitivity to a variety of things, including touch. Being hypersensitive may mean that stimulation of their genitals might be uncomfortable or even painful in someone with ADHD. This sensitivity may also extend to other senses as well.
Coping strategies can ease ADHD symptoms like hyperactivity, impulsive urges, and difficulty focusing. Taking exercise breaks and setting timers can help refocus your thoughts if your mind wants to wander.
Differences in emotions in people with ADHD can lead to 'shutdowns', where someone is so overwhelmed with emotions that they space out, may find it hard to speak or move and may struggle to articulate what they are feeling until they can process their emotions.
Often girls with ADHD have a physiological sensitivity that results in their not wanting to be touched or feeling really sensitive to physical affection, such as hugs. e best thing to do is to nd out what type of interaction will work for them, because they do want affection.
Emotional detachment, or the act of being disconnected or disengaged from the feelings of others, is a symptom of ADHD.
Common ADHD-Related Problems
Impulsive spending or overspending. Starting fights or arguing. Trouble maintaining friendships and romantic relationships. Speeding and dangerous driving.
Spacing Out With ADHD
It's an involuntary process that happens even when you are actively trying to pay attention. If you've ever started reading a book, only to find yourself lost in thought or staring at the page without really seeing or comprehending the words, that was spacing out.
Astigmatism is a type of refractive error, and it is more common in children with ADHD. Convergence insufficiency: Convergence insufficiency means that the eyes lose alignment when a person tries to focus on a nearby object, causing blurry or double vision.
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD; anxiety)
While you'll often spot the two together, some clinicians are quick to diagnose anxiety, but not ADHD. If you have trouble concentrating and completing tasks on top of the anxiety, this can be an indicator that something more is going on.
For example, children with ADHD often fail to attend to others' eyes during emotion recognition [15] and are not using others' gaze direction to guide their attention [16].
People with ADHD can struggle to regulate their emotions which means they may respond in an emotionally charged way. This can make texting difficult to navigate, particularly when you aren't able to read the other person's body language and hear their tone of voice.
People with ADHD can be hypersensitive and overwhelmed by everything that's going in a room. Or, they can seem very cold, very insensitive, or blissfully unaware of the feelings of others. When they disengage — whether due to lack of focus or because they're overwhelmed — they can seem callous or narcissistic.
One of the many ADHD traits that gets misread as a sign of rudeness is the habit of interrupting people in conversations, usually with a thought that seems completely unrelated to the topic. When someone gets cut off, they often think it means you weren't really listening or you don't care what they have to say.
Studies have shown that the greater the number of ADHD symptoms, the greater the fear of intimacy. Fear of intimacy and a reduced belief in the value of intimacy appear to be strongly related to symptoms of inattention. Sex is a component of intimacy in a relationship and ADHD also affects sexual activity.
In one study, researchers found that people with self-reported ADHD symptoms earned lower scores for affective empathy compared to other participants. However, they were still within the range of what's considered typical for empathy levels overall.
“Opposites Attract”: People with ADHD are attracted to “organized” and joyless workers bees who can keep the trains running for the both of them and who in turn are drawn to their free-spirited ADHD partner's spontaneity and sense of fun.
Hypersensitivity is a common sign in individuals with ADHD. This is one of the traits that makes it most difficult to diagnose between having ADHD or being an HSP.
When people with ADHD are activated, they are often plagued by self-sabotaging, negative internal talk that prevents them from believing they can do things. It can be conscious or unconscious and can keep folks from setting, working towards, and reaching goals. It holds them back from doing what they want to do.
Some signs that you might be understimulated include: Lack of motivation. Physical hyperactivity. A sense of unease, making you feel "flat" or irritable.
Having ADHD means you have a brain thats hungry for reward, stimulation, something interesting. Uninteresting tasks dont fulfill that need, which is why we tend to have a hard time sustaining focus on them. Essentially, sitting still is the perfect example of an “uninteresting task” thats unrewarding and unstimulating.