Keith Carman—Chief Administrative Coordinator
Sometimes your brain can be its own worst enemy.
I’m having one of those days right now. From the moment I woke up, I felt…terrible. Not ill or in pain. I’m just stuck in this tense, unsettled dismay; a Venn Diagram of negative emotions with me at the centre.
Do I know why? No clue.
Can I pinpoint what feels wrong? Nope.
Can I go back to bed until it buggers off? I wish.
The best I can describe it as is an overwhelming sensation of a million not-good things swirling around in my head like a tornado of unpleasant confetti. I can sense each independently, but they also glom together like a massive beast suffocating me.
Anxiety. Depression. Frustration. Agitation. Futility. Exhaustion. They’re all there. No single entity takes the lead, but all refuse to relent. It’s like a bunch of kids at a school concert pushing one another forth to take the spotlight. There’s no rhyme or reason, sanity or control, but en masse, they create a cacophony you can’t ignore.
Even the words I’m trying to use right now take one heck of a fight to pull out. I want to crawl out of my skin and fly away—or maybe sink deeper into it until I’m just a tiny speck waiting for the day to pass. Absolutely NOTHING feels comfortable or calming. Do you know how frustrating THAT is, when you can’t even point at something and say, “That’s it! That’s what’s causing my unrest!”
Reflecting on my evening, it’s not as though anything was drastically wrong. Sleep was passable in ADHD terms. Insomuch that some happened. You kind of get used to that, sad as it is.
Yet, when I woke up, I could feel the grey cloud. The million thought mice on their squeaky brain wheels were spinning, but it was as if they took some frantic left-hand turn at dawn, headed the wrong way down a one-way street.
The only solace in all of this is that what I’m experiencing today isn’t unique. Exemplified by negative, intrusive, ruminating thoughts, “bad ADHD morning brain” is somewhat common. Yet if you don’t know that, you feel like a crazy square peg struggling to fit into that round hole of life.
(Not that I DON’T feel that way today, but at least I can put a tag on it!)
Thank executive functioning challenges, emotional dysregulation and the aforementioned sleep struggles for such an honour. It leads to overwhelming mental restlessness and mind-wandering.
Add in lower dopamine levels—something ADHDers struggle with already—in the morning, being understimulated as we fight to get through the tedious morning rituals/routines, and you can see how that irritability just compounds.
So, yeah. Everyone has “bad days,” or wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, but we lucky neurodivergents get that little extra slice of fun known as a “bad ADHD morning.”
It’s not fun, but we can get through it and enjoy the “good ADHD mornings” when they come. The ones where you knock a ton of things off your To-Do list before your toast has even popped. It’s just a matter of struggling through the here-and-now with gritted teeth until the next sunrise.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to plough through another carafe of coffee in an attempt to wash away the clouds and create an “awesome ADHD afternoon.”
