Aug 11, 2026 · 48 min · 15 segments
All links mentioned in the post can be found here: https://simplysquaredaway.com/181 Have you ever wondered if ADHD could explain more than you think? Maybe…
Andrea MortonGuestTracy HothHost
If you had a list in front of you right now of all of the symptoms of how women can specifically show up with ADHD, and that is a really important point for your listeners to know, is that women do not typically present in the same way that men do.
Little girls don't show up the same way little boys do, and as with me, a teacher that had a stereotype in my head and thought I knew what I was looking for, a lot of times little girls can be dreamy.
People will say something like, "Oh, she's always lost in her little world." And what they don't recognize is that is a way that ADHD can present in young women.
I have always been a procrastinator, waiting till the very last minute on things, and then allowing the urgency of that moment to push me through, and I'll be talking a little bit more about that maybe as we continue our conversation.
I could wait till the very last minute before a project was due and stay up all night and turn it in and still do well on it, and I thought, "Oh, I just am one of those people that fuels myself with stress." I didn't recognize that for people with ADHD, if you don't have high urgency and you don't have high interest, it is very difficult to get something off the ground.
When I'm locked in on something and really interested in it, I could sit in front of a computer working on it for 12 hours straight and forget to eat because I thought I was just really engaged, but it turns out that I do have this power of the hyperfocus, but it has a reverse side to it, which is if you are-
... not interested in the topic at hand, then it is almost impossible to get interested in it, and there's this really weird dynamic that people like me face, which is that if we are given 100 boring tasks, we might not be able to do any of them because it just, we can't latch into it.
But then if you give us like a really hard, complex, interesting, and challenging task that like literally nobody else can do, suddenly we're like all over it.
And then there's another thing that something called rejection sensitivity dysphoria, which I personally have always had, and so people would call me very sensitive as a child.
If you had a list in front of you right now of all of the symptoms of how women can specifically show up with ADHD, and that is a really important point for your listeners to know, is that women do not typically present in the same way that men do.
Little girls don't show up the same way little boys do, and as with me, a teacher that had a stereotype in my head and thought I knew what I was looking for, a lot of times little girls can be dreamy.
People will say something like, "Oh, she's always lost in her little world." And what they don't recognize is that is a way that ADHD can present in young women.
I have always been a procrastinator, waiting till the very last minute on things, and then allowing the urgency of that moment to push me through, and I'll be talking a little bit more about that maybe as we continue our conversation.
I could wait till the very last minute before a project was due and stay up all night and turn it in and still do well on it, and I thought, "Oh, I just am one of those people that fuels myself with stress." I didn't recognize that for people with ADHD, if you don't have high urgency and you don't have high interest, it is very difficult to get something off the ground.
When I'm locked in on something and really interested in it, I could sit in front of a computer working on it for 12 hours straight and forget to eat because I thought I was just really engaged, but it turns out that I do have this power of the hyperfocus, but it has a reverse side to it, which is if you are-
... not interested in the topic at hand, then it is almost impossible to get interested in it, and there's this really weird dynamic that people like me face, which is that if we are given 100 boring tasks, we might not be able to do any of them because it just, we can't latch into it.
But then if you give us like a really hard, complex, interesting, and challenging task that like literally nobody else can do, suddenly we're like all over it.
And then there's another thing that something called rejection sensitivity dysphoria, which I personally have always had, and so people would call me very sensitive as a child.
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