ADHD Overwhelm

A roundabout in rush hour

Mar 29, 2025

∙ Paid

For neurotypical people without ADHD, thinking and doing is like approaching a set of traffic lights on a quiet road. You have one direction. One thought. The light turns green, and you go. Thought → action. Simple.

But an ADHD brain is more like entering a chaotic roundabout at rush hour—with no traffic lights. You’ve got a dozen exits, and they’re all possible destinations:

Finish the email
Start cooking dinner
Check on the laundry
Book the appointment you forgot
Google that random health symptom
Rewrite your to-do list again because it feels wrong

Every time you try to enter the roundabout, another thought-car swerves in front of you. There's no obvious right of way. Every idea feels urgent. But choosing one feels impossible.

So what happens?

You sit, engine running, cursed with indecision and tension—and go nowhere - but your engine gets flooded. Not because you don’t want to move, but because every direction is yelling for your attention at once. This is the inaction born not from laziness, but from cognitive gridlock.

The Neurology Behind the Gridlock

This kind of mental overwhelm isn't just psychological—it’s neurological.

In ADHD, several key areas of the brain are involved in what we call executive function: the ability to plan, prioritise, initiate, and complete tasks. These include the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the basal ganglia—all areas that are structurally and functionally different in ADHD brains.

Some critical differences include:

Reduced dopamine transmission in pathways that govern motivation and reward. This means the ADHD brain doesn’t get the same chemical “kick” for beginning or finishing a task.
Decreased prefrontal activation, which impairs the brain’s ability to prioritise and hold intentions in working memory long enough to act on them.
Disrupted default mode network (DMN) activity. This means spontaneous, non-task-related thought (like daydreaming or mental drifting) competes more with task-focused systems than it does in neurotypical brains.

Put together, these differences create a situation where the brain is rich in ideas but poor in prioritisation. It knows it needs to go somewhere—it just can’t choose how or when.

Why ADHD Inaction Is Not the Same as Procrastination

People often respond with well-meaning but frustrating comments like: “Oh, I get overwhelmed too,” or “I procrastinate all the time!” and the best one - “Isn’t everyone a little ADHD?”

And it’s true—everyone experiences moments of delay or distraction. But the ADHD experience is not just about putting things off. It’s about being neurologically unable to begin even when you desperately want to. What looks like a lack of motivation is a lack of access to initiation.

Imagine being stuck in that roundabout, needing to get off, needing to get going, but every exit is too full, too fast, too loud. That’s not avoidance. That’s a form of executive system failure.

Research has even suggested that ADHD should be viewed not as a disorder of attention but of self-regulation. Dr Russell Barkley, a leading researcher in ADHD, argues that people with ADHD struggle not because they aren’t aware of what needs to be done—but because they cannot regulate their behaviour in real-time to align with those intentions.

The Emotional Weight of the Gridlock

Sitting at the edge of that mental roundabout isn’t just frustrating—it’s exhausting. This isn’t just a cognitive problem; it’s an emotional one. The inaction creates shame, and shame is fuel for further paralysis.

You know what needs to be done. You want to do it. But you can't seem to start. And every second that passes without action adds another layer of internal criticism:

"Why can't I just do this like everyone else?"
"I'm such a mess."
"Maybe I'm just lazy."

The Cycle of Inaction: How One Small Task Can Collapse an Entire Day

Let me share a personal example—one I know many of my clients resonate with, too.

It starts simply:
I need to shower.

But I can’t shower because I’m meant to go to the gym, and showering before the gym feels like wasted energy.

But I can’t go to the gym because I haven’t put the washing away, and I can’t find the right clothes.

And I really should be working anyway—I’ve got deadlines. So going to the gym feels indulgent.

But I feel restless. I need to move.

Yet I know that if I move, I’ll feel guilty for not working.

So I do… nothing.

I sit in this sticky, shapeless tension between too much and not enough. Too many competing thoughts, too many internal rules, and not enough clarity about where to start.

This is ADHD paralysis in action. A cycle of blocked impulses where every intention cancels the other out. It’s not a lack of motivation. It’s a lack of clear, safe permission—from the body, the brain, the environment—to act on any one thing. And initiation becomes inertia.

What Changed for Me: The Gym Became My Initiation Ritual

The breakthrough came when I started seeing the gym not as “time away from work,” but as a tool to fill my dopamine tank. Movement is one of the fastest ways for an ADHD brain to activate—especially aerobic or strength-based movement that brings us into the body and out of the swirl.

I realised that the time I lose in paralysis—often hours of indecision and guilt—far outweighs the time I “lose” at the gym.

Because when I go?

My brain quiets.
My nervous system settles.
I return with enough fuel to begin.

What was once a loop of internal conflict becomes a small sequence of wins:
Move → Dopamine → Clarity → Action.

This is where science meets self-trust. Studies have shown that physical activity increases dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin—all neurotransmitters involved in mood, attention, and executive functioning (Pontifex et al., 2013). For ADHD brains, movement isn't optional. It's medicine.

So now, instead of arguing with myself about where to begin, I begin in the body. The gym isn’t a luxury. It’s my gateway to momentum.

The Thoughts and Feelings Tangle

So we see how the ADHD experience becomes entwined with emotional dysregulation—a core but under-recognised part of the condition. In fact, research shows that emotional dysregulation may be as central to ADHD as inattentiveness and impulsivity, yet it’s often overlooked in diagnostic criteria.

A 2014 review (Shaw et al., 2014) in the Journal of Affective Disorders highlighted that people with ADHD show heightened emotional reactivity, increased sensitivity to perceived failure or rejection, and difficulty regulating intense emotional states. These emotional states, in turn, amplify the difficulty of initiating tasks, especially those that feel high-stakes, complex, or potentially unpleasant.

This creates a vicious cycle:
Overwhelm → Inaction → Shame → Emotional Flooding → Further Overwhelm

The Nervous System Is Not Broken—It’s Overloaded

It helps to think of ADHD as a different operating system—one that runs hot, fast, and erratic without the proper regulation tools.

This is why bottom-up strategies—those that calm the body first—are often more effective than top-down reasoning. You can’t logic your way out of executive dysfunction. But you can often regulate the nervous system enough to reduce internal noise, allowing for clarity and action to emerge.

Neuroscience supports this. Polyvagal Theory developed by Dr Stephen Porges explains how our nervous system constantly scans for cues of safety or danger. When the system detects threat—whether physical or emotional—it shifts into sympathetic arousal (fight/flight) or dorsal shutdown (freeze).

ADHD brains are highly sensitive to perceived threat—not just from the environment but from internal pressures like perfectionism, fear of failure, or overwhelm. That traffic jam in your brain? It’s interpreted as danger.

So what’s the antidote?

Safety.

And safety begins in the body.

Somatic Tools for Getting Out of the Roundabout

When your brain is gridlocked, thinking harder won’t help. But bringing your body back to a state of safety and presence often can.

Here are a few science-backed, trauma-informed strategies to try when ADHD overwhelm hits: (I include the science as these exercises can seem so simple that often there is little trust that they can be helpful and people can struggle to try them.)

1. Orienting to Your Environment (Nervous System Reset)

Turn your head slowly and look around your space. Let your eyes land on things that feel safe, neutral, or pleasant. This helps activate the ventral vagal system (our route to social engagement), signalling to your brain that you're not in immediate danger and reducing sympathetic arousal (fight or flight).

Research Insight: Visual orienting is known to engage the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) and can reduce physiological stress markers such as heart rate and cortisol levels (Schore, 2003).

2. Two-Minute Task Activation

Pick one action that takes less than two minutes. Pour a glass of water. Stand up and stretch. Open your laptop and write one sentence. This small win gives your brain a dopamine hit, and dopamine is a key neurotransmitter that ADHD brains lack in consistent supply.

Research Insight: Volkow et al. (2009) found that dopamine transporter density is altered in people with ADHD, making dopamine harder to retain. Small task completion triggers just enough release to begin building momentum.

3. Hand-to-Heart Touch and Breath

Place one hand over your heart, one on your belly. Inhale for four counts, exhale for six. This engages the vagus nerve, regulating your stress response and allowing your prefrontal cortex to come back online.

Research Insight: Slow exhalation activates baroreceptors in the heart, which in turn stimulate the vagus nerve and down-regulate sympathetic activity (Porges, 2011).

4. Externalise the Overwhelm

If your thoughts are a crowd of cars all honking for attention, let them out. Use a “thought download” technique—write everything down without trying to sort it. This acts like opening the roundabout to traffic lights—separating what matters now from what can wait.

Research Insight: Externalising internal experience through journalling has been shown to reduce working memory load and improve focus (Smyth, 1998).

A New Way to See Yourself: You Are Not Lazy

The greatest shift in healing ADHD-related overwhelm is changing the story you tell yourself. You're not failing because you lack willpower. You’re navigating a nervous system wired for responsiveness, not rigidity. A system designed to feel the world intensely and respond to many things at once.

And while that system can sometimes gridlock, it also brings gifts—creativity, intuition, multidimensional thinking. You just need the tools to manage the traffic.

This is why traditional productivity advice—“just do it,” “try harder,” “set better goals”—fails us. Because they don’t address the real issue: activation and regulation, not motivation and discipline.

Paid subscribers can scroll down to my Somatic Reset Menu: 15 Body-Based Tools to Break the Paralysis Loop

Share Wired to Wonder