ADHD/SCT is a stress issue, not a broken brain

It might be safe to say I'm cured.

I previously said I was cured. That was about a year ago. For six months after that, I was on probation with my ‘cured’ status, monitoring it to see what else was going on and if anything triggered relapses, etc. I got into quite a demanding position for a bit and I was quite surprised at how I handled it, given I had struggled and shut down at similar situations earlier in life. I think I have a good grip on what’s going on now.

The root cause for triggers - cortisol

I kept finding different triggers that got me back to an unproductive state. It could be rejection. It could be having too many things to do. It could be a big failure. It could be a string of little failures. It could be not sleeping well. It felt like playing whack-a-mole to keep identifying triggers and working on them in therapy.

Well, they all have a common thread - they are all stressful situations that lead to a spike in cortisol.

I had two patterns - one: something big and horrible would happen, and I wouldn’t be able to think for a week. Two: small things would keep happening, and I wouldn’t deal with them straight away because what my brain would do is zone out briefly to deal with the little pain, and over a week or two, it would grow big enough that I couldn’t think straight anymore.

In both these cases, I would feel drained and have no energy to consider things that weren’t right in front of me. I couldn’t remember what task I was supposed to be focusing on, so I’d just look at my devices and do the first thing that was in front of me that seemed like it would soothe me.

I could break out of either of these things when there would be a huge burst of motivation, like a fresh new idea, or something that seemed possible in the next hour or two.

So what was lacking was being able to plan ahead, or look at my task list with a cool mind, or keep my head cool when things were coming at me. Everything would leave me a puddle of blubbering tears.

It feels like everyone faces this level of stress and crumble in its face sometimes. But why was I _so_ stressed by everything?

My upbringing made everything stressful.

I’d like to start by saying I hold nothing against my upbringing or the people involved. They made great sacrifices and worked very hard to ensure nothing but the best.

I come from famine survivors who lost their lands and had to leave their ancestral area and move, and suffer various humiliations on their path to a better life. That meant both my parents, by the time they had me, were extremely anxious perfectionists. And then they faced a whole bunch of new challenges throughout my childhood and teens.

There was some abuse and instability in my background and every therapist I had glommed on to that and in hindsight, they missed the woods for the trees. What a waste of time, honestly.

The core of it was I just grew up among people who were extremely sensitive to stress and I was just bathed in cortisol all my life as a result. No one around me ever took things easily or calmly. Everything was a reason to freak out. Everything was high stakes. My mother had some symptoms of PTSD and had very high anxiety. And it was very easy as a child to feel like I was responsible for all of those negative emotions.

As a result, I was always afraid of doing things wrong and never took any initiative. I stuck to reading - you can’t go wrong with reading. No one gets mad at anyone for reading a book wrong.

I also couldn’t think clearly for myself unless it was about abstract things that didn’t have to do with my immediate environment. There was a lot of metaphorical noise in my environment. Too many instructions coming my way. Too many interruptions. Too many corrections. I think it was only when I was 35 that I had a moment of clarity where I said to myself, “Oh, so many contradictory instructions coming my way, I should try clarifying what is expected of me”. Before that, my mind would just blank out when I had a moment to myself, and I’d forget everything that had come prior to the blanking out.

It also didn’t help that I never saw anyone managing time or energy well. Everyone was working themselves to the bone. I never saw anyone just relax. Even if they did, they’d do it in the guise of something else as they had come up in large, busy households where you couldn’t be idle. No one talked about what they planned to get done that day. No one accurately estimated how much time anything was going to take. It was all haphazard, impulse-driven instruction-driven stuff. Could never plan for anything in life.

Now a lot of people could just dismiss that with “but that’s just how it is in non-American cultures. That sounds just like my Indian family”. Except…. it really wasn’t. Those of my relatives who had married into our family were definitely not like this. They did make time to relax. They did try estimating how long things would take and didn’t overpromise. They didn’t bark instructions at their kids constantly.

And most of all, there was so much conditional self-esteem. I only really saw undeniably positive emotions when something had been achieved. There would be genuine worry and disappointment when I had underachieved. So, yeah, I felt I was only as good as my achievements. This I noticed most of my relatives didn’t do. It’s not a culture thing, that much I’m sure of.

It also didn’t help that there was no real coordination with others to get things done in a non-stressful way. I realized only in my late 30s that I literally had no skills to talk to people to figure out how to get things done and have an ongoing coordination with people on these things. It always got beset by anger or shame or worry about how I’m perceived.

How stress leads to ADHD symptoms

Short summary - I took time off to focus on family, mental health, and writing. I read Gabor Mate and Alfie Kohn and Erica Komisar and realized all my issues could be from growing up with my family, not because my brain was broken. I did some pretty intense cognitive behavioral therapy. I changed my diet and added mineral supplements. And I could then write 1200 words an hour consistently and repeatably. Then I started interviewing and situations cropped up that stressed me the heck out and I all my symptoms came rushing back.

Stress was the cause.

When I had to write a difficult email, for instance, I’d feel the physical symptoms of stress even if one small thing had been wrong, like if I was embarrassed to be emailing the recipient, or feeling like I was bothering them. My mind would go hard into flight response and I’d switch tabs to a soothing feed, like Twitter or Substack, and forget my troubles. I now realize the stress symptoms are so bad that the zoning out was actually protective of my psyche and body. I’d alternatively also blank out so I couldn’t do anything higher order. I would just stare at the email screen. Or I’d scribble in my notebook which was also right in front of me. Or I’d pick up my phone and scroll. Whatever reactive thing I could do. It’s like my prefrontal cortex went offline and I couldn’t plan or make a list or think about how things would go. It was all hear and now.

There are so many supposed ADHD symptoms that could be explained by stress. Not being able to think of words - stress. Not able to remember things - stress. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria - stress about what others will think of me. Not able to estimate how much time things took - stress making it hard for me to think objectively and instead I get wildly optimistic as a way to self-soothe or tell people what they want to hear so they’d leave me alone.

I plan to do a whole series explaining ADHD memes lol. All of it was just stress caused by different things - not knowing how to do things, worry that things would take longer than I had, having too much overwhelm that prevented me from thinking clearly, deep rooted worry in me that I was not enough by myself. But yeah, many different life experiences contributed to feeling stressed constantly and being unable to improve on it. And whatever was the cause of the stress, I ended up with ADHD symptoms.

The genetic root

Google for ‘short allele on the serotonin receptor gene (httlpr)’. It’s a world of insight. For whatever reason, serotonin doesn’t last long in my brain, so my body needs to keep making more. This causes more increased sensitivity to stress. It apparently affects 30% of the global population, and there are many books about it like The Orchid And The Dandelion, which somehow doesn’t find this genetic connection. I haven’t sequenced my genes or whatever, but I’m pretty sure I’m in this 30%.

One of the solutions is to make things not stressful. There are many ways to do so.

Physical fixes

Serotonin needs iron (and possibly other minerals) to be made. And serotonin is made by the gut bacteria. I got to know those things. I started taking mineral supplements. Zinc in particular (which i started taking during a bout of COVID) made me an energizer bunny. I knew I was onto something then. I tried to replicate this with diet, and ended up eating a raw salad with lunch. Suddenly, my energy levels and mood dramatically improved.

It’s gotten to the point where if I’m having negative thoughts, it’s usually because I haven’t had a raw salad for a couple of days. I have a salad and my mood goes straight back up.

Exercise and sunlight also get my mood up. As does avoiding ultraprocessed food and intermittent fasting. If I eat all the snackies from Trader Joes’s, I am barely functional. But I can eat homemade icecream every day and I feel great, and even lose weight. Sleeping well also helps immensely, something I never have done until I started intermittent fasting.

And it wasn’t just feeling happier. It’s not being fazed by things going wrong. If I wasn’t well-rested or well-nourished, it would feel like even a small thing going wrong was a sign that my whole life was messed up. But when I’m healthy, I could see a big mess in my house and be like “oh, gotta clean that up” with no negative emotions attached.

It makes sense that I was at my most ADHD when I was eating the most poorly, not exercising at all, and staying up too late. Wow.

Structural fixes

I didn’t grow up with much in the way of an organized life, and in any case, I left home at 16 to go to college and I skipped all that you learn about adulthood from your parents as a result.

It was amazing how doing small things to organize my life helped so much.

Bullet journaling was a big part of it all. Bullet journaling helped me get clear about what my day/week/month looked like, what my short term/long term goals looked like, and how I felt about all the things. This helped me develop a sense of self finally. No longer was I doing things because everyone else was doing it or it fit the idea of me that other people had.

It was like my brain was a storage unit, and what bullet journaling did was to organize it all nice so if I wanted a little pink bouncy ball, I didn’t have to climb up a tall unstable stack of books to find it.

I also started quizzing ‘normal’ family members about how they did all the things. How do you decide how long is it going to take to get to work? What do you do on Sundays to plan your week ahead? What do you do before you sit down to work? I didn’t adopt exactly what they all said, but just knowing that this was the level of effort normal people with no big stakes put into their lives, I felt less and less like everything ought to be instantaneous.

That itself took a lot of the pressure off, and feeling like I had permission to prepare for things, it helped greatly.

Emotional fixes

This is a work in progress, but the big change has been realizing “I am enough”, as cliche as that sounds.

A lot of my self-esteem was tied up in knowing all the things and getting things done, which made getting things done very stressful, especially when I didn’t know all the things.

It helped so greatly to read Alfie Kohn’s book The Myth Of The Spoiled Child to understand that this was what had been missing throughout my life. I don’t think my parents intended to build up conditional self-esteem in me, but that’s what ended up happening. I realized it also pervaded how I talked to people - like if something didn’t go right, I blamed that, inadvertently on the person rather than on the situation. “What kind of a person puts away laundry like that” type of stuff. Just getting over that led to better interpersonal relationships and interactions.

And I just got so much kinder to myself, and my mood got much more stable. I stopped stressing out over a lot of things because my self-esteem wasn’t tied to these things to the same extent. I didn’t need to zone out anymore if I wasn’t getting things done. I could look at incomplete work and not freak out. I could look at hard things and persist. A lot of the ADHD symptoms, especially inattentiveness, just disappeared.

Beyond that, Cognitive Behavioral therapy has been magic. Essentially, lots of thought processes were contributing to feeling stressed out about everything. Unraveling each of those threads with a therapist has helped a lot, and over time I could just do it by myself.

Managing stress is a lifelong endeavor now.

Life keeps throwing up new stresses. I’ve decided that’s the nature of life now. I’m trying to find my way to a career path that’s a lot less full of stress, but until then, I’ll have to keep coming up with ways to keep stress down. I need a lot of help from friends and family on an almost daily basis to keep going. It also can get expensive. But it feels like I get better at stuff over time and I can achieve my full potential.

I’m currently in a phase of extreme stress, and I’m pretty impressed with how I’m keeping up. I need to spend 45 min a day doing yoga to keep me going, and that’s a tough ask.

The thing that would trip me up on lifestyle interventions before was this - I SHOULDN’T have to eat a salad every day and SHOULDN’T have to do yoga daily to function. Most people don’t have to. Ergo, something’s broken in me.

Sure, but then I've to take a pill daily, which comes with other side effects I’m not sure I want. It’s all a pick-your-poison thing. Yoga, healthy meals and a strict bedtime, or a life of ayyashi and a rotating cast of pills. Only one of them gives you museum-quality bowel movements though.

Conclusion

Just yesterday, I came across this talk of Erica Komisar where she suggests that ADHD is a stress reaction, not a disorder. That’s the conclusion I came to independent of her work as well. I’m quite surprised this isn’t a conclusion more people are coming to.

I’ve read so many books that tell you how to deal with ADHD symptoms, but none of them literally talk about stress and how stress triggers a lot of the symptoms. There’s so many weird techniques suggested in these books, like “body doubling”, where you get another person to hang out with you while you do stuff you’re avoiding. I didn’t understand why that would stop working for me… in this context though, I realize the issue is the expectations of the other people stress me out more and make it hard for me to keep going.

It’s insane how the “cure” for ADHD seems so obvious in hindsight, but no one’s taking it up seriously despite billions of dollars being poured in towards “reasearch”, none of which somehow turns up chronic stress as a possible cause.