Unmasking the Hidden Struggle: ADHD in Adult Women and the Path to Empowerment

Cultural and social norms make many women struggle in silence. They are often taught to keep a brave face and not burden others with their personal issues, no matter what’s going on inside. ADHD in women frequently flows exactly like this, which is why it's often referred to as a "hidden diagnosis" and is usually identified later in life. Let’s learn more about ADHD in adult women and girls and ways of overcoming the inconveniences of the disorder.

Upset young woman sitting on sofa at home, looking down
Image by katemangostar on Freepik

Understanding Women ADHD

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder and, in most cases, people are born with it. The disorder is still under research and no specific root cause has yet been established. What’s known for now is that ADHD may impair a few levels of the structure and function of the brain e.g. dopamine function, executive functions like attention control and working memory, etc.

According to the DSM-5, a diagnostic tool published by the American Psychiatric Association, to be diagnosed with ADHD one’s symptoms should reveal before the age of 12 and impair functioning in at least two settings e.g. home and school. DSM-5 also subdivides the disorder into three types:

While the most common type of ADHD is combined, women tend to be diagnosed with the inattentive one and this is one of the major root causes of the disorder being “hidden”. The problem is that lack of focus, poor memory, and time-blindness often go unnoticed by family members and friends. As a result, women learn how to cope with the problems themselves, and often by means of their own mental health.

A Typical Scenario of Women’s ADHD

In childhood, unlike hyperactive boys running around a classroom, a girl with inattentive ADHD tends to be shy, silent, and withdrawn. She doesn’t call attention to herself or bother her peers, often lost in her own world, which makes it easy for educators to deal with her. Early on, she learns to blame her problems with attention or memory on her inherent brokenness and stupidity.

As she grows up, she develops all kinds of unhealthy coping mechanisms to keep up with expectations. For example, to compensate for her inattentiveness, she studies long hours, which often leads to burnout, fatigue, and anxiety. To avoid seeming forgetful or disorganized, she might rely heavily on notes and plans, turning into a perfectionist.

Women with hyperactive-impulsive or combined types of ADHD might experience similar challenges but work hard to mask different sets of symptoms.

Ideally, at some point, she might start to question whether her way of living is healthy and seek help from a mental health specialist who can diagnose her ADHD and work out the right treatment plan.

If not, she might continue living in a cycle of stress and overwhelm, which could eventually lead to depression or other mental health struggles.

Unhealthy Coping Strategies and Problems Unique to ADHD Women

Undiagnosed and untreated ADHD may lead women to develop a set of unhealthy patterns to compensate for their symptoms. They can be the following:

The study shows that compared to ADHD men, women with ADHD are more likely to be diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety as comorbid conditions. Also, often girls tend to be diagnosed with depression and receive treatment for it before the official ADHD diagnosis. Together with it, women with the disorder may also:

Getting Diagnosed as an Adult Women

  1. Schedule an appointment with a psychiatrist, a neurologist, or a physician.
  2. Try to learn your family history with ADHD, if possible, and recall how your symptoms were unraveling from childhood.
  3. A medical specialist may evaluate your state via interviews, questionnaires, electroencephalograms (EEG), etc., and work out a treatment plan that fits your ADHD type.
  4. Usually, you’ll visit the doctor every month during adjustment and fine-tuning the medications. Then, the period of visits may extend from 3 to 6 months, depending on the doctor’s guidance.

Dealing with ADHD Symptoms Healthily

Yoga and Meditation to Calm Down

Numerous studies suggest that yoga and meditation can help ease ADHD symptoms like inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, as well as related issues like eating disorders, psychological traumas, anxiety, and depression. It’s important to understand that it’s not just the physical poses that benefit mental health, but yoga in its true sense, which is the combination of poses, controlled breathing, and meditative techniques for relaxation.

Why does it help? Yoga and meditation teach the brain to focus on the present moment, current feelings, and thoughts, and observe all of it without judgment, which, in turn, helps create a sense of calm and control. By training the mind to stay present and acknowledge thoughts and emotions without reacting impulsively, yoga and meditation can reduce overall stress and contribute to a more mindful living.

These activities are flexible and can be adapted to suit your personality, as there’s no one correct way to practice yoga and meditation. You can also practice them anywhere when you need to remind your brain to slow down or quickly focus—at work, before bed, or first thing in the morning.

Restructuring Thinking Patterns with CBT

Women with ADHD often struggle with self-criticism, overthinking, and catastrophizing, which can become major obstacles in their healing process. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) helps by reshaping these anxious thought patterns, teaching individuals how to transform negative thoughts into more neutral or positive ones.

For example, if you often find yourself thinking, "You're a failure, so you have to work twice as hard as everyone else," CBT can help reframe that into something like, "You don't need to wear yourself out to succeed, and it's okay to take things at your own pace." This shift in mindset can reduce the mental burden of unrealistic expectations and make life more joyful.

Tech for Daily Support

What do we carry around with ourselves 24/7? Our phones! So why not let them help to tame our ADHD? Apps can make ADHD routines much smoother and easier if chosen consciously.

Let’s take the HeyZen wellbeing app, for example. It doesn’t require you to spend your time and energy on yet another task of organizing a healthy healing schedule, as everything will be already prepared for you and adapted to your personal issues.

HeyZen creates daily personalized plans with meditation, yoga therapy, and educational podcasts—all bundled to work out a specific aspect of your mental well-being. So, basically, they’ve comprised all practices that are science-proven to help with ADHD symptoms and organized them for you.

So, when choosing an app for your routine, make sure it has a nice personalization feature like this, as there’s never a one-fit-all approach in mental health!

Befriending Your ADHD Instead of Fighting

To live peacefully with ADHD, it's important to embrace the modern mindset of neurodiversity. All brains function differently, and ADHD is simply one variation of that! Just as everyone needs to learn how to adapt their personality and behavior for effective social functioning, you also need to do so—but from an ADHD perspective.

ADHD treatment and healing used to be challenging in the past as everyone had to fit an imaginary “norm," sometimes at the cost of their personality and mental health. Today, we can live, work, and interact effectively by embracing our unique ways of thinking and focusing on strategies that work with our ADHD, rather than against it.