HealthyGamerGG - Does ADHD Make You More Anxious?

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

Dr. K dives into ADHD and Negative Emotions: why we have negative emotions, bias towards the negative, dirty fuel, and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, for example, let's say I get dressed up and I go to a party and I'm wearing a fancy dress. And nine people walk up to me and say, Dr. Kay, that's a beautiful dress. You look great in it. You're really rocking the dress, bro. And then one person walks up to me and is like, you look absolutely ridiculous. What on earth are you doing wearing a dress? It looks terrible. Y'all need to hear this.

ADHDers use strong negative emotions to motivate ourselves. So I was reading this book, Your Brain's Not Broken by Tamara Rosier and explains the most effed up... Oh, whoops. About how ADHDers motivate themselves using intense emotions since we can't motivate like neurotypicals. As you know, we are motivated by interest rather than importance and consequences. So how do we get the day-to-day stuff done in order to function? Here we go.

Anxiety. We rely on anxiety to tell us what needs to be done. Did I lock my car? What happened if I accidentally unlocked it? My stuff would get stolen. I can't buy a new one. Lock car. Lock car.

Lock car. It is like we inject strong emotions like fight or flight. into ourselves, but the thing is they can linger after. Oh, wait, I just locked the car, right? Yeah, oh, I'm worried. Oh, gosh. And that's mentally taxing. Anger. Getting mad in order to fuel ourselves to do the task. The book gives an example of this guy whose mother was angered by his behavior, and when no one else was around to yell at me, I learned to yell at myself. As you can imagine, this is not healthy and it leads to exhaustion and crankiness. Shame and self-loathing. An intense feeling of flawed of unworthy of love. To start, I imagine how disappointed my supervisor would be

if I don't finish on time. She will then, she will realize she shouldn't have given me the job in the first place. I have to get this right or I'll screw up my kids for the rest of their life. So we are rehearsing different ways we are damaged and competent and stupid. There's more like more in the book, but these are really the top three that I found crazy. We use anxiety, anger, and shame to fuel the motivation deficit and neurotypicals have naturally and it can come at a cost. So I really like this post for a lot of reasons, and there are some things that I would sort of disagree with. The first thing that I really like is that it shows how having ADHD and negative emotions can synergize in some ways. What I dislike about it is that I think it once again oversimplifies into attributing all of these things to ADHD.

So this isn't just true of people with ADHD. This is true of everyone. Where if we kind of think about it, why do human beings have negative emotions, right? let's just start there. Let's start by recognizing that anxiety, shame, and anger are not exclusive to people with ADHD. These are conserved across the entire human race. And why is that? It's because they are very, very useful emotions.

So in today's society, we tend to think about negative emotions is negative, right? It's like, I want to feel a lot of excitement. I want to feel a lot of joy. I want to feel a lot of curiosity. But I don't want anxiety. I don't want anger. I don't want shame. Those are bad emotions.

And those are to be avoided. But let's remember that if they didn't do something for us, we wouldn't have evolved them. And it turns out that the negative emotions are actually very, very powerful motivators. In fact, they're stronger motivators than positive emotions. So let's just understand that for a sec. The first thing to get is that our brain is more sensitive to negative things than positive things. This is a bias that's baked in. So for example, let's say I get dressed up and I go to a party and I'm wearing a fancy dress.

And nine people walk up to me and say, Dr. Kay. That's a beautiful dress. You look great in it. You're really rocking the dress, bro. And then one person walks up to me and is like, you look absolutely ridiculous. What on earth are you doing wearing a dress? It looks terrible. Hey, chat. Subscribing to our YouTube channel allows us to help more people with their mental health. Thanks to your support so far, we've already reached thousands of people from across the globe. So help us out and hit subscribe. Wait, they have to hit subscribe and click a bell now. Now, in my mind, I've got nine compliments and one person has criticized. Which one

do I focus on? I tend to focus on the criticism. Right. So I've also seen this in, especially kids that are South Asian or East Asian, where their parents will focus on, like, it doesn't matter like how much I get right. All that matters is what I didn't get right or that someone else does a better job than I do. It's like you got 92 on the test. But our neighbor across the street, their kid got a 98. Why can't you get a 98? Why do you have to get a 92? And so even like culturally will be conditioned to focus on the negative, right? We'll see that a lot. And so if you kind of think about this, where does this come from? I sort of use food poisoning as a good example.

So if we weren't biased towards the negative, like let's say that like I got food poisoning from eating something, right? If I got food poisoning 40% of the time, but it was fine 60% of the time, I would be in a lot of trouble if I kept eating it. Because even though technically 60% of the time I'm fine, that's more than half. On average, it's a good idea for me to eat. But the consequences of making that negative mistake are so high that even if you're if you really think about it, if you go to your favorite restaurant and you get food poisoning once,

it's actually like hard to go back there, right? And so we tend to see is that the brain is biased towards the negative, that we weigh the negative more powerfully than the positive. And so what this results in is some of us who struggle with motivation have one really powerful tool to motivate ourselves. And that's negative emotion. And this isn't just kids with ADHD. So you'll see this, for example, in medical students where some med students or most med students are high. on neuroticism. So this is one of the five-factor personality dimensions. And neuroticism is the tendency to worry. And so people may think, like, why on earth would a tendency to worry be a good thing? Like, why would we even have people who have a tendency to worry? Well, it turns out that if

you're worried about failing a test, you're going to study harder. And that fear of failing can make you actually work harder and actually outperform people who are kind of chill. So on the one hand, we have the paranoid medical student who's a, or paranoid premed, who wants to go to medical school. And on the flip side, we have our classic stoner personality. Plus or minus marijuana, whatever. We've got someone who's like, eh, everything will be okay. Right? We're not even saying that it's marijuana related. We just got people who are like that bad, that personality. They're like, I'm just chilling. Like, live for today. Don't worry about tomorrow. Everything works itself out. And the premed is the one who gets an A, the person who's pretty chill, we'll get like a B plus, B minus, right? Because on

Friday night, one of them's out having a good time. The other one's actually at the library study. So what we tend to see is that actually negative motivators, what I call the dirty motivators. So I kind of think of them kind of like nuclear power. They harness a bunch of energy, but they're radioactive. And if you're not careful, they'll damage your life, right? You can succeed, but you won't be happier content in doing so. I see that a lot also in like the fields of like finance and stuff like that. Well, you'll see a lot of imposter syndrome. So people who use dirty motivators will be, will experience a lot of imposter syndrome as well. So I'll give you all, like, let's just take a quick look at this. So if you use shame or self-loathing, oh my God, like,

I'm going to do so bad at this. Let me try my best, even though I'm unworthy of it. And then you end up feeling damaged incompetent or stupid, but you do well enough in school, right, because you're beating yourself up all the time. Then you'll actually succeed and you go to medical school. And then when someone has used shame and self-loathing to motivate themselves and they get into medical school or they wind up in residency at Harvard, what do they end up feeling like? They end up feeling like an imposter. An imposter is someone who has shame and self-loathing on the inside, but performs well on the outside. And we're seeing a growing level of imposter syndrome across society as a whole. And I think part of the reason for that is because we're using shame and self-loathing

as motivator. Now, out of these three specific things, I think the anxiety one is the best. That's ADHD ADHD specific. So the anxiety one really illustrates how we can use anxiety as an antidote to forgetfulness. So in the brain of someone who's got ADHD, they're highly distractible. They also tend to be forgetful. But really, if you look at it, it's not that they have memory problems. It's that they have attentional problems. So when I forgot where my keys are, it's not that I knew where my keys are and then I had a memory problem. What it actually happens is I'm not paying attention when I put them down. So this is important to understand, but it's not the recall that is impaired with people with ADHD. It's the insertion of the information. It's the like, you know, we don't write it to the hard drive well

enough. Like, that's where the real problem is. It's inattention, not a lack of, not really a memory problem. But we can still see how anxiety can be an antidote to that. So when I'm anxious, if I've trained my brain to be paranoid, then I won't forget because I'm always worrying about it. Because what can protect me against forgetting if I'm always worried about it? And even if it's okay, I've trained myself to always worry because I can't trust my memory. So I'm always worrying, always worrying, always worrying. And this is what you see in people with ADHD is that they develop adaptive mechanisms which are harmful to them over the long term. So this is why, for example, ADHD, people with ADHD have a very high risk of depression. Children with ADHD have a very

high risk of developing major depressive disorder later in life. So these kids grow up and they struggle in school. They forget all the time, things like that. They develop some self-esteem issues. So that too, I think this isn't directly a consequence of ADHD. This is usually what happens when you have a kid with ADHD is they look around at other. kids and they realize I'm just as smart as these other kids are. They're told by their teachers. They're told by parents. You're so smart. You have so much potential. So I know I've got the IQ, but then I can't perform in school. So I can't get an A because I get distracted. I can't pay attention. There's a really classic case that I kind of think of, which is that teacher asks the kid,

are you paying attention? Answer the question. And the kid wasn't paying attention. They look around, they see a problem on the board. They look around. Everyone's looking at them. Okay, we're in math class. there's a problem on the board. I see that these other three problems have answers. This one doesn't have an answer. Let me answer that question. Okay, this is the answer. And they say it.

The teacher kind of looks at them with skepticism, writes the answer on the board and moves on. This inattention makes it very difficult to function in school. Everyone recognizes your potential, but you don't live up to it. And then everyone says, oh, you should just try harder. Doesn't apply himself. Doesn't apply herself. Doesn't live up to her full potential.

And so then what happens is you start to feel broken if you have ADHD. Because you recognize that I'm just as smart as these kids. When I pay attention, I'm able to learn just as fast as they do. But I'm not able to pay attention. And no one recognizes that my problem is a lack of attention. It's like exactly what happens. Imagine a child who goes to school is super smart, but needs glasses and can't read because they don't have glasses.

How would that child feel about themselves? If no one recognized that, oh, the problem is the kid needs glasses. The child would stumble, adapt, do all kinds of stuff to just be average. They exert so much effort. to just perform at an average level. And they end up feeling terrible about themselves. Because what they see is I'm trying hard. I try hard every single day.

I'm trying so, so hard. And if the best I can do is average, how screwed up must I be? Because everyone says I could do great, but I can't do great. And I'm trying so hard. So they develop self-loat. Now, is this a direct consequence of ADHD?

I don't think so. I think this is the consequence of undiagnosed and untreated ADHD and growing up in that situation. So this is important to understand that you've got to differentiate those out a little bit. And the reason that's important is because once you treat the ADHD, some of this may go away, but this won't. A stimulant medication isn't going to fix this. This needs independent treatment, right, in psychotherapy or something like that.

Now, anger is a really interesting example because we do know, for example, that emotional dysregulation is common in people with ADHD. People with ADHD can sometimes have low frustration tolerance. They can kind of perseverate, and if they get disturbed, they can respond with anger. There's some evidence that given the same stimuli, people with ADHD will feel more anger. But that, once again, I think you've got to be kind of careful because I don't know that that's necessarily an adaptive mechanism like the other two. I think sometimes people with ADHD just experience more anger and frustration and have

difficulty with frustration tolerance. That has something to do with probably the way that their frontal lobes struggle to inhibit the negative emotional circuitry in the brain. So for a neurotypical person, if I experience some amount of anger, There's another part of my brain that's like telling me, okay, calm down, take a deep breath, let's not lose control. And that's the part of the brain that really doesn't function very well in people with ADHD or some people with ADHD. Now, what all human beings will tend to do in that situation is like, if I'm going to be angry anyway, let's make the most of it. So people with ADHD will develop some adaptive strategies, but I think anger is a little bit different.

Just to kind of summarize, I think it's really unfortunate, but oftentimes people with ADHD will experience high levels of negative emotion. In the case of anxiety, sometimes that's almost an adaptive mechanism to make up for being forgetful, distractible, or not paying attention to things. Other examples of the negative emotions they experience aren't necessarily adaptations per se, but are consequences of frequently growing up without a diagnosis or treatment of ADHD. And the important thing there is that if we say that self-loathing is a part of the ADHD, then treating the ADHD should fix the self-loading. But in my experience as a clinician, it doesn't work like that, that you can treat the ADHD. but you need to deal with the self-esteem and self-loathing independently. And the last emotion is anger, which in my experience, a lot of times people just get dysregulated very easily.

I don't know that it's necessarily adaptive. Maybe a portion of that is adaptive. But understand that part of ADHD is to be unable to regulate your emotions. And then as most people with ADHD do, they'll adapt to those circumstances as best they can, maybe use that anger to manage social situations, maybe use that anger to even beat themselves up a little bit. And then what we do know is that people tend to internalize the dialogue that is used with them. That has nothing to do with ADHD. That's just how we all work.

So you can take a kid in an abusive situation where they have ADHD or don't have ADHD. If they're given abuse of language, they will internalize those thoughts and have self-esteem problems later. At the end of the day, I do think it's really, really important to understand the connection between ADHD and emotions. And hopefully we've sort of illustrated that a little bit today. If you found this video helpful, check out Dr. Kay's guide. We've spent hundreds of hours writing and filming to help people understand their mind so that they can build the lives of the they want so check out the link in the description below