The vocabulary
The words people use
These are the terms you will hear if you spend any time around this: in clinics, in books, in comment sections, in a WhatsApp group at eleven at night.
Some came from researchers. A lot came from people with ADHD talking to each other and finding language nobody had given them. What follows is what each one actually means, and what it looks like in somebody's real week, with examples that mostly are not mine on purpose. Where a word is a bit off, or where it is pointing at something other than ADHD, it says so. Otherwise it is left alone.
This is not a checklist.
Everybody will find something here. Finding several does not add up to anything, and it is not meant to. Nearly everything below describes an ordinary human experience that only becomes significant when it is frequent enough, intense enough and costly enough. That is a judgement call, and it is not one a glossary gets to make.
Attention and focus
Attention regulation
The heart of it, and a much better description than attention deficit. The issue is not how much attention you have got, it is how much say you have in where it goes and how long it stays there. Some people cannot hold it on the thing in front of them. Others cannot take it off.
What it can look like: A nurse who can run a resuscitation flawlessly and cannot get through the incident paperwork afterwards.
Hyperfocus
Attention that locks on and will not let go, usually to something interesting, often at the cost of eating, sleeping or the thing you were meant to be doing. It arrives on its own terms. You cannot send for it, which is what makes just hyperfocus on your work such spectacularly useless advice.
What it can look like: A teenager who cannot read four pages of a set text and has taught himself to code because a game mod needed it.
Zoning out
There in body, entirely gone in mind, often mid-conversation, often with somebody who matters. The lost stretch can be seconds or minutes, and most people nod through it and reconstruct afterwards rather than admit it.
Sometimes there is an auditory processing thing in this too, where the sound arrives fine and the meaning just does not assemble in time.
What it can look like: Someone who has no idea what their partner just said about the weekend and will not ask, because asking means admitting they have done it again.
Distractibility
Not only noise. Internal distraction counts, and for a lot of people it is the bigger half. A thought about something unrelated pulls just as hard as a door slamming.
What it can look like: A solicitor who reads the same clause four times because a memory from 2009 keeps turning up in the middle of it.
Context switching
The cost of moving from one thing to another. Everyone pays some. For some people the cost is much higher and the recovery takes longer, which is why a five-minute interruption can cost forty.
What it can look like: A developer who cannot get back into the problem after a short chat about the kettle.
Memory and time
Working memory
The small mental desk where you hold things while you are using them. A phone number between hearing it and dialling. Where you were in a sentence. Why you came into this room. It is not a filing cabinet and it is not bad memory. Long-term recall can be excellent while the desk stays tiny.
What it can look like: Somebody who can recite the plot of a film they saw once in 2011 and cannot hold three items from a shopping list.
Prospective memory
Remembering to do a thing in the future, which is a different job from remembering facts. This is the one that goes wrong around bills, appointments, birthdays and replying to people.
What it can look like: A person who knows the car tax is due, has known for a month, and misses it.
Time blindness
Trouble feeling time pass, and trouble estimating how long something will take. Five minutes and forty minutes can feel much the same from inside. It is why I will do it later is often a genuine misjudgement rather than an excuse.
What it can look like: Someone chronically twenty minutes late who is not remotely careless about anything else, and is mortified every single time.
Object permanence
You will see this one everywhere, describing things that stop existing once they are out of sight. The vegetables at the back of the fridge. The friend you have not seen. The task that is not on the desk.
What it can look like: A person with a beautiful set of labelled storage boxes who has no idea what is in any of them.
Worth knowing. The experience is completely real. The word is borrowed from somewhere it does not belong. Object permanence is a term from infant development, about babies working out that a hidden thing still exists, and that is not what is going on here. What is actually happening is closer to working memory, prospective memory, and how loudly a thing has to shout before it registers. I mention it because I used the term myself for a while and it quietly stopped me asking what was really going on.
The doorway effect
Walking into a room and forgetting why. Everybody does this. It happens more, and more disruptively, for some. The thinking is that your mind updates its context when you cross a boundary, and drops whatever it was holding on the way through.
Starting and stopping
Executive function
The umbrella term for the machinery that runs a life. Planning, prioritising, starting, switching, holding a goal in mind, resisting a distraction, seeing ahead. Not intelligence. Not effort. It is the difference between knowing what to do and being able to make yourself do it.
What it can look like: Somebody with a first-class degree who cannot organise their own week.
Task paralysis
Standing in front of something you fully intend to do and being unable to begin. Not refusing. Not avoiding, exactly. Stuck, usually with a rising dread as the not-starting goes on.
What it can look like: A person sitting in the car outside the house for twenty minutes, because going in means starting the evening.
The wall of awful
A phrase from the ADHD coach Brendan Mahan, and one of the most immediately recognisable ideas in the whole vocabulary. It is the invisible barrier that builds up in front of a task from every previous time you did not do it. The task itself is small. The wall is made of the emails you did not answer about it and the guilt you have been carrying since.
What it can look like: A fifteen-minute phone call that has become impossible because it should have been made in March.
Analysis paralysis
Over-researching a decision until the decision never happens. Related to task paralysis but not the same, because here the work feels like progress.
What it can look like: Eleven browser tabs comparing printers, no printer.
Demand avoidance
A strong, sometimes automatic resistance to being told to do something, including being told by yourself. Putting a task on a list can be enough to make it feel impossible.
What it can look like: Someone who genuinely wanted to go to the gym right up until it appeared in the calendar.
Worth knowing. Worth knowing this one gets argued about. It is usually discussed around autism rather than ADHD and clinicians disagree considerably about it, so the description travels better than the label does.
Feeling
Emotional dysregulation
Emotions that arrive faster, land harder and take longer to clear than the situation seems to call for. Not the same as being dramatic. It is a problem with the brakes rather than an excess of feeling.
What it can look like: A person whose afternoon is genuinely ruined by a curt email, who knows while it is happening that the reaction is out of proportion and cannot get out from under it.
Rejection sensitivity
Often written RSD, rejection sensitive dysphoria. An intense, sometimes physical response to rejection, criticism or failure. Perceived is the important word. A neutral message read as coldness. A pause before somebody answers.
What it can look like: Someone who quietly stops going to a class they loved because the instructor did not say hello one evening.
Worth knowing. It is not in the diagnostic manuals, so if you bring the term to an assessment you may get a blank look. Describe what happens instead and you will get much further. What is well recognised is that people with ADHD tend to feel these things more strongly and for longer.
Justice sensitivity
An outsized reaction to unfairness, including unfairness that has nothing to do with you.
What it can look like: Somebody who still cannot let go of a colleague being treated badly three months ago.
Rumination
Replaying something over and over and getting nowhere. A conversation, a mistake, something said eleven years ago at a wedding.
Worth knowing. This one travels with anxiety and low mood as much as it does with ADHD, so it is worth mentioning to whoever assesses you rather than assuming where it belongs.
Alexithymia
Difficulty identifying and naming your own emotional states. Knowing something is wrong without being able to say what.
What it can look like: Someone who can only tell they were upset by noticing afterwards that they were short with everyone.
The body and the senses
Sensory sensitivity
Ordinary input arriving at a volume other people do not seem to get. Lights, labels in clothes, background noise, particular textures.
What it can look like: A person who cannot follow a conversation in a busy cafe and has quietly stopped suggesting cafes.
Worth knowing. This comes up far more around autism, though plenty of people with ADHD report it too.
Sensory seeking
The opposite direction and just as real. Needing input in order to settle. Music on to concentrate, movement while thinking, something in the hands.
What it can look like: Someone who works better in a noisy kitchen than a silent library and has been told their whole life that this is impossible.
Stimming
Repetitive movement or sound that regulates. Leg bouncing, hair twirling, clicking a pen, humming.
Hypervigilance
Permanently scanning. Alert to the room, reading moods, tracking exits, never quite settling even somewhere perfectly safe.
Worth knowing. I would flag this one gently. It is usually talked about around trauma and anxiety rather than ADHD, and from the outside it can look a lot like distractibility. The two can absolutely sit together. But if this is a big feature of your life, say it out loud and specifically to whoever assesses you, because it may be pointing at something the ADHD conversation would walk straight past.
Interoception
The sense of your own inside. Hunger, thirst, needing the loo, tiredness, the early warning signs of losing your temper.
What it can look like: Somebody who has not eaten since Tuesday morning and only notices at four in the afternoon because they feel strange.
Getting through the day
Masking
Suppressing traits, deliberately or otherwise, to come across like everyone else. Rehearsing what to say. Copying how other people behave in a room. Holding still.
Exhausting, effective, and one of the main reasons people go undiagnosed for decades.
What it can look like: A person who is superb at work and unable to speak for two hours afterwards.
Body doubling
Doing a difficult task in the presence of another person who is not helping, just there. It works far better than it has any right to and nobody can fully explain why.
What it can look like: Two friends on a video call, both doing their own admin, neither of them talking.
Waiting mode
Having one thing on later in the day and being unable to do anything before it. An appointment at three, and the whole day is gone.
I have never once said this phrase to a person with ADHD without getting oh, that is a thing? back.
What it can look like: Somebody who took the day off for a two o'clock dentist and achieved nothing at all.
Doom box
A box, a drawer, a pile, where things go when deciding about them costs too much. It will be sorted later. It will not be sorted later.
Revenge bedtime procrastination
Staying up late to claw back time the day took off you, knowing full well you will pay for it tomorrow.
What it can look like: A parent awake at one in the morning watching something they do not even like, because it is the first hour that has belonged to them.
Worth knowing. Not originally an ADHD phrase, as it happens. It came out of Chinese internet culture describing overwork, and got adopted.
Words for the whole picture
Neurodivergent and neurotypical
Neurodivergent describes a brain that works differently from what is typical: ADHD, autism, dyslexia and others. Neurotypical describes one that does not. The broader idea, neurodiversity, came out of the autism rights movement in the nineties.
Presentations
The three recognised forms: predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, and combined. Patterns rather than boxes. People move between them across a lifetime.
Comorbidity
The clinical word for things that turn up together. Anxiety, depression, sleep problems, dyslexia and autism all commonly appear alongside ADHD. It matters practically, because what looks like one thing may be two, and sorting one may not touch the other.
AuDHD
Shorthand for having both ADHD and autism. Part of why it feels like a new idea is that until 2013 the diagnostic manual did not allow both diagnoses in the same person.
One last thing
A few of the entries above step in and say a word is off, and it is worth saying why, because it is not meant as marking anybody's homework.
Some of these words came out of research. A lot of them came from people with ADHD talking to each other, and honestly some of those are the best language anybody has produced for any of this. Nobody has ever studied waiting mode. It is still the most useful two words in the list.
The only places it steps in are where a word is quietly pointing you somewhere unhelpful. Object permanence, because the borrowed term stops you asking what is really going on. Hypervigilance, because it may be about something else entirely and that is worth knowing. That is it. Everything else, use whatever word works.
What none of them can do is diagnose you, and that is the trap a list like this could easily set. But if something in here has handed you a word for a thing you have been carrying around unnamed for twenty years, that is worth having on its own.
If a few of these landed, that is worth taking somewhere
Recognising yourself in a description is not a diagnosis. It is a reason to find out properly. The free check takes about two minutes, needs no email, and tells you whether your answers cross the thresholds clinics actually use.
This glossary is adapted from an interlude in Understanding the ADHD Mind, a book written by Éanna Healy, who runs this site. Saying so here rather than at the bottom of a different page: there is a commercial interest, and the page above is free and complete regardless of it.