Is It ADHD or Anxiety? How to Tell Them Apart

How do I tell whether it's ADHD or anxiety?

Track what pulls your focus away. Restlessness with no worry behind it, even on calm days, leans toward ADHD. Distraction pulled by fear leans toward anxiety.

What you need:

• A notebook or notes app you carry for several ordinary days
• Old report cards, or a parent who remembers you in grade school
• A short list of the places focus breaks down: home, work, friends
• A record of your bedtime and wake time

1. Write down what was in your mind each time your focus broke. Anxious distraction often comes from hypervigilance, which means scanning for danger or a bad outcome. ADHD distraction looks more like a brain hunting for stimulation, such as reaching for your phone in the middle of a dull task. Hypervigilance can also follow trauma, which trauma and PTSD therapy in Frisco, TX works on directly.
2. Check whether starting and finishing tasks stays hard on calm days. Kari Overstreet, DNP, a pediatric nurse practitioner at The REACH Institute, describes two things children tell her. Some think, "If only I weren't so worried, I could pay attention." Others say, "If only I could just focus, I wouldn't be so worried." Executive function is the set of mental skills you use to plan, start and finish things.
3. Notice whether your restlessness arrives with a worry or with none. Tapping, fidgeting or pacing while nothing is bothering you points one way. A tight chest and racing thoughts about what could go wrong point the other.
4. Look for the same pattern in your grade-school years. Under DSM-5-TR criteria, several symptoms must have been present before age 12. Parents can run these same steps for a teen and bring the notes to therapy for teens in Frisco, TX.
5. Compare how you function at home, at work and with friends. A problem that follows you everywhere tells an evaluator something different from one that appears only in stressful places.
6. Read back over what your worries are actually about. Worry that grows out of ADHD often centers on the symptoms. The REACH Institute describes children with untreated ADHD who worry about forgetting homework or getting in trouble. Worry about many everyday things that is hard to control fits generalized anxiety disorder more closely, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
7. Bring your notes to an evaluation that checks for both conditions. If anxiety turns out to be part of the picture, anxiety therapy in Frisco is one place to begin. We tell clients that weekly sessions for 12 weeks is a standard length of time for therapy to make significant progress on a treatment plan, though timelines vary based on the complexity of the trauma and the counseling approach, and clients with complex trauma may take longer.

Common mistakes

• Treating poor sleep as proof of one condition. Selman Gündoğan and colleagues, emergency medicine researchers in Istanbul, measured 609 adults at their hospital's emergency department and found that shorter sleep correlated with higher ADHD and higher anxiety symptom scores alike. The study reports correlation rather than causation, though the link still matters, so log your sleep without letting it decide the question.
• Letting an existing anxiety diagnosis close the question. Ask your evaluator to look at attention and restlessness on their own terms as well.
• Reading one online screener score as a diagnosis. Bring the score along as one more note for the person evaluating you.