The Trouble with Missing Concentration

It is said that one of the issues you may run into if you are somebody who was diagnosed with ADHD late in life is a sort of skills regression.

Most people who function really well with undiagnosed ADHD go through life in such a way that most people aren't even aware that they have an issue. This is generally referred to as "masking."

If you're really effective at masking, you are pretty much indistinguishable from the world around you. Your ability to mask isn't necessarily tied to the extent to which you're afflicted by ADHD, and it varies considerably from person to person.

When you receive the diagnosis late in life you invariably end up spending quite a lot of time looking backwards and examining situations you've encountered in life, analyzing them in light of the fact that you now know that you weren't just "feeling crazy," you actually had a psychological condition to contend with.

I can definitely remember when I finally realized that ADHD was a problem for me, feeling the sense of relief that I wasn't some kind of freak who was just maladapted to life; instead there was an actual name for some of my difficulties.

But not all of this learning process works out to offer a sense of relief. There is also a sort of relaxation that starts happening in which you recognize that maybe you don't need to put on the mask you used to put on with quite the fervor that you used to.

Although I don't really like the term "skills regression," it does serve to describe what happens — mainly that you don't quite hide as much as you used to because now you understand that what you are hiding before was due to the condition we call ADHD.

As such, you "regress" a little bit because maybe you now allow yourself to be slightly more messy and unreliable. Maybe you start cutting yourself a little more slack about the fact that you're naturally inclined to run late because you suddenly remember all sorts of things right before going out the door.

And then people start asking you things like "is everything okay with you?" because you're not quite as polished as you used to be because you're allowing yourself to Simply Be as you naturally are, rather than putting on a mask.

And that is also often where you run into trouble with concentration, or rather a lack of concentration. And it can often manifest especially in terms of being able to concentrate enough on what is at hand to get started on it in a timely fashion. What I used to call this is "a 3-month and 10 minute project;" that is to say three months to get around to doing it, and ten minutes or actually do it... that becomes something that happens a little more frequently.

While it is definitely a positive when you can feel comfortable talking about what you are dealing with, it can also be a bit of a negative when you become a little less functional in life because perhaps you have a tendency to just sit there and blame the condition rather than to just knuckle under and get things done.

And sometimes life is just plain confusing!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Are you familiar with ADHD? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 2026.10.14 01:33 PDT
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