Sam Alderson

So… It’s ADHD.

Sam Alderson

Before I talk about the diagnosis itself, it feels important to say this: I didn’t just wake up one morning, decide “maybe it’s ADHD” and immediately get an answer. This is my adult ADHD diagnosis story, and it did not arrive quickly or neatly.

Getting here was a slow, slightly tangled journey – more like finding my way along an overgrown path than following a neat, signposted trail. There were long stretches where nothing seemed to move, and then sudden bursts of progress that left me a little dizzy.

Now I am going to preface this with this is my lived experience. Though some of this may resonate with you there will be things that don’t. Take what you need from it to gather your own strength to approach your own GP and getting your own diagnosis.

Starting to suspect ADHD

It started as a quiet, lifelong suspicion – that feeling of, “Other people seem to find this easier than I do… is it just me?” Tiny moments stacked up over the years: the half-finished projects, the forgotten mugs of tea, the way time kept slipping sideways whenever I tried to do something “simple”.

Then came the late‑night reading, the TikToks and blog posts that felt uncomfortably accurate, the creators who seemed to be narrating the inside of my brain back to me. I kept stumbling across phrases like “executive function” and “time blindness” and thinking, oh.

Slowly, this stopped feeling like a quirky personality issue and started looking suspiciously like a pattern.

Then there were the conversations with friends who had already been assessed and gone down this road. Friends who said things like, “I thought I was just lazy too,” or, “The diagnosis didn’t fix everything, but it explained so much.” Every time one of them said, “Yeah, that sounds familiar,” some small, tense part of me loosened.

Waiting lists and Right to Choose

I spoke to my GP, started the process, and then… waited. For a long time. I spent around nine months on a path I thought was my only option, not realising there was such a thing as the Right to Choose pathway.

Nine months of knowing something was off, having taken the scary step of asking for help, and still not really moving forward. It was a strange limbo – knowing enough to start questioning my old stories, but not yet having anything official to anchor them to.

When I eventually found out about Right to Choose, I switched routes and things finally began to move again – slowly, but at least in the right direction. There were a couple more months of waiting for questionnaires from Care ADHD, and then another fourteen weeks on the list for an assessment call. The admin of it all was a whole extra layer: filling out forms, chasing letters, trying to summarise a lifetime of “little things” into neat tick‑boxes and short answers.

After nearly a 12 weeks of “please wait”, I got a voicemail while in Australia to make an appointment. So the Monday that we got back I gave them a call to get it booked. The lovely person on the call said that they could do an appointment the next day at 9am. Getting a confirmed appointment within 24 hours felt surreal. Suddenly this thing that had lived half in my head and half in Google Docs had a date and time attached to it.

The assessment call itself

Talking with CJ from Care ADHD was harder than I expected. Not because they were unkind – they were lovely – but because trying to put into words what I had already expressed in the questionnaires felt like tipping out an entire junk drawer of memories and hoping it would somehow form a coherent picture.

I had Jono sat next to me, tapping away on his laptop, grounding me just by being there while I answered questions about school, work, lost keys, half‑finished projects, and why “just try harder” had never quite fixed anything. Willow, naturally, was supervising from her bed in the background, occasionally stretching or sighing at exactly the right dramatic moment.

We went all the way back: childhood report cards, teacher comments, the way I used to read under the desk instead of listening, the permanent sense of being “a bit behind” on life admin. We talked about the piles on the stairs, the emails I mentally replied to but never actually sent, the way time seems to evaporate when I sit down at my desk.

Then, after a 60‑minute chat over Teams, I found out on my assessment call – not from an email. At the end of the call, CJ paused, smiled gently, and started to put it into words – tying together years of fog into something that finally made sense.

“Based on everything we’ve talked about today, and your questionnaires, this is combined ADHD.”

I felt the sentence land in my body before it landed in my brain. I just began crying so hard, the sense of relief that I had was overwhelming and I finally had an answer to why my brain is the way it is.

Part of me thought, “Of course,” as if someone had just pointed at a very obvious signpost that had been there all along. Another part whispered, “Are you sure you’re not just making excuses?” – that old, familiar echo of every “you could do better if you tried harder” I’d ever absorbed. Hello, self‑doubt.

I did cry a few times on the call. I was so busy trying to hold all the pieces. But as the day went on, the reality of it started to spread out into the corners of my life: the kitchen, my desk, the dog walk, my notebooks. It coloured everything slightly differently.

Welcome to the joy that is being a newly diagnosed adult with ADHD.

The “lazy, disorganised, too much” story

I’ve always been “that person”. The one with a hundred tabs open. The one who can plan your entire content strategy in an afternoon but somehow forgets to eat lunch. The one who has three brilliant ideas in the shower and zero recall by the time the towel is on. The friend who sends you paragraphs of thoughtful messages and then forgets to reply to a basic text for three weeks.

From the outside, my life makes a kind of sense:

From the inside, it has often felt like trying to herd thoughts through fog – fog that everyone else seems to walk through just fine. I could see what I wanted to do, even visualise the steps, and still somehow not get my feet to move.

Growing up and then working as an adult, I collected external, neurotypical stories about myself:

Sometimes people said these things outright. More often, they lived in raised eyebrows, in the way people sighed when I was late again, in the comments about my messy room or the fact that I always had a project “on the go”.

When you hear those things enough, they sink in. They become the story you tell about your own brain: I can do better, I just don’t. Something in me is wrong. Everyone else seems to have the manual and I must have missed that day.

Spoiler: the “wrongness” wasn’t a moral failing. It was unlabelled neurodivergence.

And part of why it stayed unlabelled for so long is that we simply didn’t have the words.

Our grandparents didn’t have this language. Our parents mostly didn’t either. They had “naughty”, “clever but distracted”, “daydreamer”, “messy”, “emotional”, “too much”. They had behaviour to correct, not nervous systems to understand. They had “you just need more discipline”, not “your brain might be wired differently”.

It’s really only in our generation that more of us have gone, “Hang on… what if this isn’t just a character flaw?” and started reaching for better language. ADHD, autism, sensory issues, executive function – none of these concepts are new in terms of human experience, but the vocabulary is. Having the right words doesn’t fix everything, but it does let you tell a kinder, truer story about your own brain.

Chasing potential straight into burnout

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to make good on the word “potential”.

Sound familiar?

Especially running a business, it’s very easy to build a life where you’re always slightly behind your own expectations. The inbox, the client work, the marketing, the bookkeeping, the house, the life admin… somewhere in there you’re also meant to drink water and stretch occasionally. Oh, and don’t forget to walk the dog, reply to that WhatsApp message, and try not to let another plant die.

On a good day, I can do a lot. On a “hyperfocus” day, it’s almost frightening how much I can get through when I care and the dopamine is cooperating. I can blitz through a full website build, make detailed plans, batch‑write content, reorganise an entire system… and then realise I haven’t eaten since 10am and my body is quietly plotting revenge.

But the cost of trying to be “on” all the time – to perform like a neatly organised, neurotypical founder – has usually been:

I thought this was just what being an adult felt like. Overworked. A bit frazzled. Dropping balls and then making jokes about it.

Getting an ADHD diagnosis introduced a different explanation: What if the system was wrong for the brain, not the brain wrong for the system?

What if I wasn’t failing at “normal”? What if “normal” just wasn’t built with me in mind?

My brain does not run on “should”

Something I’m coming to terms with is the idea that importance should be enough. Important tasks. Scary consequences. Big, meaningful goals. In theory, those should all motivate me, right? That’s what so much standard productivity advice assumes: if you just care enough, you’ll do it.

In practice, my brain often looks at “this is important” and shrugs. It’s not that I don’t care. I care deeply. I care so much it keeps me awake sometimes. It’s just… there’s no spark. No traction. No “oomph”. My brain files it under “overwhelming” and quietly shuts the door.

ADHD brains don’t run on “should”. They tend to run on a slightly more chaotic fuel blend of:

Give me something I’m fascinated by and a timer, and I can be unstoppable. Give me a boring but important task, and I can stare at it for three weeks like it’s written in ancient runes.

Before diagnosis, that felt like a personal failing. After diagnosis, it feels like information. I can work with information. I can’t work with “you’re just not trying hard enough”.

So I’ve started to experiment with working with my motivation system instead of trying to bully it into behaving. If my brain needs novelty, can I change the environment or the way I approach the task? If it needs urgency, can I create a gentle external deadline? If it needs interest, can I tie the task to something I actually care about instead of leaving it floating as “admin”?

It’s a work in progress, and I still get it wrong regularly. But now, when I get stuck, I ask, “What kind of fuel does my brain need for this?” instead of “Why am I such a mess?” and that alone feels like a huge shift.

Spoon maths and borrowing from tomorrow

One of the frameworks that made sense to me in the past was spoons – little units of energy you start the day with.

If I wake up well‑rested and calm, I might have a big handful of spoons. If I’ve slept badly, I’m stressed, or my brain is already noisy, I might start with far fewer.

Everything costs something:

And here’s the thing: I’m very good at borrowing from tomorrow.

I can push through the “out of spoons” feeling because something matters, or someone needs me, or I’m excited… but the debt catches up eventually. It usually shows up as:

Trust me, this diagnosis has not magically given me more spoons. I still have to make choices. I still misjudge my capacity. I still fall into the trap of “I’ll just squeeze one more thing in.”

What it has done, however, is hold up a mirror and say, “You’re not imagining this. Your energy is real and finite. You’re not weak for needing to protect it.” This change in self‑talk has been a huge awakening for me and is starting to help me realise my brain is wired differently, and that this wiring affects my body, my mood, and my work.

I’m learning (slowly, stubbornly) that rest is not a reward for getting everything right. It’s part of how I keep going at all.

Running a business with a neurospicy brain

A lot of ADHD content online is framed around school or office work. I don’t live there. I live in the land of self‑employment, where there’s no boss watching – just a lot of open loops and the gentle threat of “if you don’t do the thing, nothing happens”.

Being a business owner with ADHD means living in the tension between:

It means bouncing between “I could build an entire new offer this afternoon” and “filling in this one form feels physically impossible”. It means being very good at solving other people’s problems and simultaneously losing your own tax letters.

Since my diagnosis, I’ve started looking at how I work with a lot more curiosity and a lot less judgement.

Instead of:

“Why can’t I just do this like a normal person?”

I’m trying to ask:

“What would this look like if it were designed for my brain?”

That question doesn’t magically conjure a perfect system, but it does immediately soften the edges. It turns the problem into a design challenge instead of a character judgement.

A few experiments that are helping:

1. The rule of four

Long to‑do lists are my personal boss battle. The more items I see, the less likely I am to start. It’s like my brain looks at the page, screams “nope”, and wanders off to reorganise the bookshelf instead.

So I’ve been playing with a simple rule:

Four things max per day.

Not four emails. Four priorities.

Some days those four things are chunky – “finish client site”, “call the GP”, “batch‑write three emails”, “do my weights workout”. Other days they’re gentler – “answer that one email”, “make soup”, “take Willow for a proper walk”, “put laundry away”. The point isn’t to do more; it’s to be honest about what fits.

Anything else that pops into my head still gets captured, but it goes onto a “parking lot” list. I’ve started thinking of that list as “delegated to the universe”: acknowledged, noted, but not today’s responsibility. This keeps my day feeling contained. When everything is important, nothing is.

The rule of four isn’t perfect – some days I ignore it entirely – but it gives me a shape to come back to when I feel myself spinning out.

2. Stacking dopamine with the boring stuff

Some tasks will never be exciting – like chasing receipts, fiddling with DNS, or writing copy that doesn’t light me up. No amount of mindset work will make me genuinely thrilled to categorise expenses, or do invoices, or write copy that just doesn’t interest me.

But I’ve noticed I can sometimes “borrow” motivation from things I do enjoy – pair them together until my brain makes the connection.

For example:

Over time, those little rituals become cues: this music = that task. It’s not foolproof, but it’s a lot kinder (and more effective) than just shouting “you should be able to do this” at myself.

3. Outsourcing my memory (because I will forget)

You’ll know that I’m a planner person. I have redundancies on top of redundancies to ensure that I have captured tasks that need doing at some point. You can see more of this in practice here in my planner series.

I’ve finally accepted that my brain is brilliant at ideas and terrible at storage. So instead of fighting that, I’m leaning on tools:

I can remember oddly specific details from conversations years ago, but not the one ingredient I need from the shop. That used to feel ridiculous. Now it just feels like, “Ah yes, the ADHD again – better write it down.”

4. Evenings are kinder than mornings

Morning routines used to work for me, especially a few years ago when my life felt a bit more predictable. I would get up at 6am and have a couple of quiet hours to myself that I could spend catching up on TV shows or doing a bit of journalling. It was cosy and intentional and made me feel vaguely like one of those “together” people on Instagram.

However, I now wake up in a swirl of half‑formed thoughts and cravings and notifications. My mornings feel more like being dropped into the middle of a conversation than calmly starting my day.

Evenings, though? That’s where the magic might live.

I’ve started using a few quiet minutes at night to:

It’s not a strict ritual – more like leaving myself little notes in the margins of the day:

“Hey love, you’re going to forget this by morning. Here’s a breadcrumb trail.”

Sometimes I follow the trail perfectly. Sometimes I kick it over and do something entirely different. But even then, the simple act of having thought about Future Me the night before feels like an act of care.

Grief, relief, and letting the dust settle

I wish I could say that getting the diagnosis instantly made everything calmer. In some ways, it did. It’s incredibly validating to have a professional look at your life and say, “You’re not broken, your brain is just wired like this.” There’s a particular kind of exhale that comes with that.

In other ways, it’s stirred up a lot:

And alongside all of that: relief.

Relief that there is a reason for the patterns. Relief that I can stop punishing myself for not thriving under systems that were never meant for me. Relief that I get to build something new – slowly, kindly, in a way that honours both my energy and my ambitions.

There’s also a strange kind of re‑reading happening. I keep looking back at older versions of myself and seeing different things: the kid who “talked too much” because their brain was fizzing, the student who left everything until the last minute because that was the only way to feel focused, the adult who was always “a bit tired” because masking and compensating is exhausting.

I don’t have a big, neat conclusion yet. I’m still in the “early days” chapter of this story: reading, experimenting, talking to professionals, figuring out what support looks like for me, and adjusting when things that worked for a while suddenly… don’t.

But I do know this: I’m done treating my brain like a badly behaved employee.

It’s mine. It’s messy. It’s magical. And it deserves a life built to fit.

If you’re reading this thinking “…oh”

If anything here feels uncomfortably familiar – the forgotten tabs, the tidal waves of burnout, the way “just try harder” has followed you for years – I want you to know a few things:

You might not be ready to seek an assessment. You might be mid‑waiting list. You might just be quietly collecting information and trying it on in the privacy of your own brain. All of those places are valid.

I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m not a clinician. I’m just someone who finally got a name for the way my brain works, and I’m learning how to live with a little more care because of it.

If nothing else, I hope this nudges you towards treating yourself with the gentleness you’ve probably been reserving for everybody else.

Your brain is allowed to need different things. You’re allowed to build a business and a life that honours that.

The rest, I think, we figure out one small, manageable experiment at a time.

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