TL/DR
My adult ADHD experience… After a serious illness in my 50s, I was slow to recover. Besides the physical recovery, I also had a fair amount of cognitive impacts, including memory problems, attention loss, severe anxiety, depression. During an intake interview related to treating anxiety/depression, we discussed the ADHD I was experiencing. After reviewing my history, the interviewer suggested I was ADHD as a child and young adult and it had reoccurred after my fevers. I asked why I did not have it as an adult, then? She replied, I likely had developed coping skills to manage it as an adult; and then that illness (“an insult to the brain”) had disrupted those coping skills.
Slowly, as time went by, my memory recovered somewhat and I redeveloped enough coping skills to embark on a new career.
There may be some drugs that help manage adult ADHD, but I think working on some coping skills may be valuable. For me, these skills are associated with awareness, limiting multi-tasking, and keeping focus “just a bit longer” to help interrupt the cycle of tripping from half-done task to half done task .
For example, if I was starting to make an iNat observation on my iPad, I might run off to go out to the yard to take a better picture of, say, the host plant. But, I see something else, and get a picture and edit that, then go look up some factoid and get totally sidetracked following tangential links, then go back out to the yard and water some pots, and then get something to drink… and then… and then.
Finally, perhaps hours later, I see my still unsubmitted observation sitting in a tab. I totally forgot to add whatever it was I needed to check in the yard.
Do I run back out to the yard and start that cycle again? I have done that. But, I try not to do so. I am always re-learning to just interrupt the unfocused cycling and sit down and finish a task at hand.
As a skill builder, I try to catch myself in such cycles. When I find I’m drifting into unfocused leaping from task to task and leaving most unfinished, I try to look up. I remind me to just stick with this one task until it’s done (say, filling in the basic iNat data and hitting submit).
FWIW…