Have you ever wondered if you have attention deficit disorder (ADHD)? Only a mental-health professional or licensed counselor can tell for sure. Here are common complaints from women living with ADHD:

• Feeling overwhelmed in stores, at the office or at parties.
• Unable to shut out sounds and distractions that don’t seem to bother others.
• Time, money, paper, or “stuff” seems to dominate your life and hamper your ability to achieve your goals.
• Spend most of your time coping, looking for things, catching up, or covering up frustration.
• Trouble balancing your checkbook.
• Space out when other people are talking to you.
• Lose track in conversations.
• Have a difficult time “switching-gears” from different activities.
• Often feel as if life is out of control and that it’s impossible to meet demands of daily life.
• Feel that you have better ideas than other people but are unable to organize them or act on them.
• Start each day determined to get organized and regain control.
• Watched others of equal intelligence and education reach their goals as you struggle.
• Despair that you can’t consistently meet your goals.
• Start tasks but struggle to follow-through.
• Clueless about why you never seem to gain control.
• Feel like an imposter because others think you’re doing well (you spend a lot of energy hiding these traits from others).

The diagnostic criteria for ADHD focuses more on symptoms in children, but many adults live undiagnosed with ADHD. Learn more about how the symptoms present in adults and call a counselor to discuss completing an assessment.

• ADHD, Activation difficulties with: organizing tasks, estimating time to a project or travel, prioritizing projects, getting started on tasks and responsibilities, chronic difficulty with procrastination, slow start even on important tasks.

• ADHD, Focus difficulty with: basic focusing, sustaining focus, and shifting focus to tasks/object, picking up on only part of conversations, easily distracted by activities going on around them, distracted by own thoughts, and many people report focus difficulties when reading.

• ADHD, Effort difficulties with: regulating alertness, sustaining effort on a task, slowing processing speed when working on project, can perform short-term projects well but have difficulty with sustained effort over longer periods of time, difficult completing tasks on time, difficulty regulating alertness, many people report staying up too late because they can’t shut off their minds, and often report deep sleep with problem getting up in the morning.

• ADHD, Emotion difficulties with: managing frustration and regulating intense emotions. People often report emotions feeling so powerful that it is difficult to give attention to anything else or gain perspective.

• ADHD, Memory difficulties with: memory and accessing recall, difficulty remembering where something was placed/left, struggling to remember what someone said or described, difficulty holding thoughts while attending to other tasks.

• ADHD, Action difficulties with: monitoring and regulating self-action, impulsive and chronic problems in regulating their actions, impulsively saying things, impulsive thoughts, acting too quickly to inaccurate conclusions, problems with social interactions because of these actions, chronic difficulty in regulating the pace- either slowing self down or difficulty speeding up when action is required.

Conscious Living Counseling has a counselor who specializes in woman and ADHD.   Please call if you would like more information.