Is It ADHD or Perimenopause? | Coach Debbie White on why symptoms surface at midlife

Debbie, I'm so happy that you are here joining us on Hello Menopause because I feel like the overlap and confusion around menopause, perimenopause, and ADHD, what's going on in the brain with hormones and things like that has been confused, conflated.

I'm curious if you felt like your ADHD became more prevalent because of perimenopause, or do you feel like it's... completely separate from perimenopause.

How do we know what we're looking for? And why is there such a sudden onslaught of ADHD symptoms without necessarily having that diagnosis?

So for me, I always was scattered and disorganized.

Even as an ADHD coach, it's still an opportunity area, let's say.

So I always exhibited ADHD symptoms, but being 52 years old, girls didn't have ADHD.

And what's funny is I have a twin brother who...

I only recently found out was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid because I never talked about it.

So basically, I always exhibited symptoms, but it definitely got worse as demands got higher.

I was less able to juggle.

Let's talk first a little bit about what the symptoms of ADHD are, particularly the way that you describe them as scattered, right? Some people have hyper-focus, some people have no focus, some people have some combination of the two.

A lot of the times I think that the conflation with perimenopause has to do with the forgetting everything.

the brain fog, feeling that overwhelm.

And do we think that there is a version of ADHD that either presents itself at perimenopause or that the symptoms are just so similar we get confused between what we're looking at?

So menopause and perimenopause doesn't cause ADHD.

Nobody just shows up with ADHD.

You might have symptoms.

But it doesn't just happen because it's a neurobiological condition that's starts at birth.

Whereas perimenopause and menopause are impacted by perimenopause impacted by an inconsistency in estrogen.

versus menopause where it just finds and that's the end of it.

And so in doing my research and also in working with clients, I learned it's perimenopause really that gives women a lot more issues than menopause because of the inconsistency.

So, right, the systems that don't work necessarily because of the inconsistency in hormones.

But if we're saying that ADHD is a neurobiological condition, then you're born with it whether you show signs of it or not.

Do we think that the inconsistency in hormone fluctuation can reveal ADHD? A hundred percent.

A hundred percent.