So. You get diagnosed with ADHD.
You finally go in for the long neuropsychological evaluation — the one you’ve been putting off for years, the one that costs more than your car payment and requires you to sit still for longer than your brain has ever agreed to in its entire life.
And after about three hours, the psychologist looks up from her notes, takes a breath, and says: my dear, you have ADHD.
And you are elated. Relieved. Triumphant. You are — and I say this with complete sincerity — you are Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters when he finds out he doesn’t have a brain tumor and he wanders into a movie theater and watches Duck Soup and decides that life is actually worth living.
That specific quality of joy. That’s the one.
You get in the car. Wind the windows down. You’re pounding music. You’re returning calls you’ve been avoiding for three weeks. You call the friend who has ADHD — the one who has been gently suggesting for years that you might want to look into this — and you say: you were right.
Relief. Finally, a name for the thing.
The chaos. The hyperfocus. The time blindness. The emotional intensity. The career pivots that made complete sense to you and zero sense to everyone else. You now know you weren’t imagining it. You weren’t lazy. You weren’t difficult.
You were undiagnosed.
And then, in a moment of pure ADHD optimism, you think: I’ll try stimulants. Who needs a GLP-1 when you can take Adderall? Focus, yes! Finally become the person I always suspected I was underneath all of this, yes!
AND THEN.
You begin looking back.
Oh. I left that job.
Oops. That relationship.
I didn’t show up for that person when they needed me, even though I really really wanted to.
The pattern recognition — which is your superpower, which is genuinely extraordinary — starts firing backward through your entire life like a search engine that has just been given the right keyword for the first time.
You call your friend back. You say: the only thing I’m worried about is my pattern recognition. It’s biting me. I can’t stop going back.
And she says: don’t do that. Whatever you do, don’t do that.
What nobody hands you after the diagnosis
Here’s the thing nobody tells you.
You get the news. You get some paperwork. And then you’re just… released. Back into your life. Which is the same life it was three hours ago, except now you’re looking at it through a completely different window.
Nobody hands you a roadmap. So here’s mine
Take your hyperfocus and use it.
You are going to hyperfocus on ADHD whether you intend to or not. So lean in. Start with Driven to Distraction and ADHD 2.0 by Dr. Ned Hallowell and Dr. John Ratey. These are the foundational texts. They will explain your entire life back to you in a way that feels less like reading and more like someone finally translating a letter that’s been sitting on your kitchen table for forty years.
Make the medical appointment.
A dedicated conversation with your doctor — not a general check-in — to discuss your results and your options for medication. Bring printed documentation from your evaluation. Walk in prepared.
I believe in medication. I think of it like an epidural during labor — why go through the extra pain if you don’t have to? It doesn’t work for me personally, but I will never be the person who tells you not to try it. The evidence base is strong and the quality-of-life improvement for many women is significant.
Get a coach.
Not instead of therapy, necessarily. Possibly in addition to depending on how this is landing for you. But you need someone who has been through this, who understands the specific terrain of late diagnosis, who you can Voxer at 7am when the pattern recognition is running hot and you need a running mate, not a rescue.
And if one-to-one coaching feels like too much — group coaching is not a consolation prize. It is sometimes actually better. Here’s why.
Why being in a room with your people is not optional — it’s neurological
ADHD brains have a dysregulated dopamine system. Not broken. Dysregulated. Which means the usual social rewards that regulate a neurotypical nervous system don’t land the same way. Small talk is exhausting. Masking burns through resources that neurotypical people don’t even know they’re conserving.
But when you’re in a room — or a Zoom — with people who share your neurotype, something different happens.
The ventral vagal system comes online. This is the branch of your nervous system responsible for genuine social safety — and it only activates in the presence of real co-regulation. Real recognition. The specific quality of being understood rather than tolerated.
Dr. Stephen Porges, who developed Polyvagal Theory, calls this neuroception — your nervous system’s unconscious assessment of whether you’re safe. When you are finally with your people — people whose nervous systems operate like yours, who aren’t subtly signaling that you’re too much or too scattered or too intense — your neuroception says: safe.
And you exhale in a way you didn’t even know you’d been holding.
This is why community isn’t a bonus feature of ADHD support. It’s the medicine.
Regression. And why it happens to almost everyone.
Here’s the part I really want to talk about.
The next months after diagnosis will be wonderful and wonky. You will have AHA moments constantly. You will laugh. You will cry. You will feel a profound freedom of oh, that’s why I cared so much. Oh, that’s why I started having social anxiety in my thirties when I never had it before.
And you will regress. You will regret. You will go back.
I remember going to see a renowned couples therapist at one point. And he said to me: stop revisiting the past. Move forward.
And I said: but that’s just how my brain works. It takes memories from the past to inform the future. Isn’t that a good thing?
Up until that point in my life, it always had been.
Here’s what I didn’t understand then, and what the science explains beautifully now.
The ADHD brain has a particular relationship between two neural networks: the Task Positive Network (TPN) — your focus network, active when you’re working or creating — and the Default Mode Network (DMN) — your mind-wandering network, active during rest, self-reflection, and the processing of autobiographical memory. Your past. Your story.
In neurotypical brains, these two networks have a clean toggle. Task on, DMN suppressed. Task off, DMN comes up for air.
In ADHD brains, research by Dr. Marcus Raichle and others has shown this toggle is dysregulated. The DMN bleeds through. Which is why ADHD minds drift — but also why ADHD minds make unexpected connections, see patterns others miss, and pull from memory in ways that feel almost involuntary.
Here’s a good way to remember this, TPN – TASK Neural Network allows you to stay in action mode. DMN – DEMON – Defualt Mode Network – has the ability to tap into past memories to inform new experiences, but when it doesn’t shut off, this is incredibly useful for things like directions, social moments that are similar, information from “history” used to inform the future. But when it doesn’t toggle off so easily as with ADHD people you’re ability to connect patterns from the past and information form the past with the future can come in as a flood of too much information and tamper and dampen, even infiltrate the Task Postive Network making a simple task seem too complicated, too complex, to flooded with emotions. (this is information is also taken from ADHD 2.0 by Dr. Ned Hallowell and Dr. John Ratey, chapter 2)
After a late diagnosis, the DMN goes into overdrive. Because now it has a framework. Now the pattern recognition has a context. And it will not rest until it has reviewed everything through the new lens.
This is regression. And it is completely neurologically normal.
Dr. Ned Hallowell also describes this as a grief process. You are mourning the diagnosis you didn’t get earlier. The accommodations you didn’t receive. The version of yourself that might have emerged with the right support at the right time.
That grief is real. It deserves to be honored — briefly, intentionally, and then set down.
When does the regression end?
When you have enough new material to work with.
When the present becomes more interesting than the past. When you have tools, community, structure — and the diagnosis stops being the most fascinating thing about you and starts being one useful piece of context among many.
The regression ends. I promise you that.
What you’re actually building
You are not fixing yourself.
You are rebuilding — consciously, deliberately, with information you finally have — a life that actually fits your brain.
Do the hyperfocus dive. Read everything. Let your brain do what it does. Then come up for air and start building.
Start a meditation practice — any sort. Walking meditation counts. Five minutes of intentional breathing counts. The goal is a practice of returning your attention to the present moment. The DMN cannot run the regression if you keep gently bringing yourself back.
Find tools that fit your type of ADHD. Not generic productivity advice. Not the system your neurotypical colleague swears by. Yours.
For me, ADHD is a constant upgrade. Like the software that drops into your phone every year — I need to revisit what’s working and rebuild what isn’t. It is something real, and something that needs to be managed, in one form or another, for life.
I spent years developing a method for myself — drawn from clinical research, therapeutic frameworks, and coaching practice. And I’d like to share it with you. It’s called CORE. And my group coaching program launches May 15th.
If you’re in the regression right now — if you’re the woman with the windows down who has already started looking backward — I want you to hear this:
What you’re doing is not wallowing. It is not weakness. It is your extraordinary brain doing exactly what it was built to do: finding the pattern, running the data, making sense of the story.
Let it do that. And then — gently, deliberately, with the right support — turn it toward what you’re building next.
The waitlist for CORE Group Coaching is open now, get on the waitlist here:
https://libbyandrewstudio.myflodesk.com/coregroupcoachingmembership
Sign up for my newsletter and get news on the free webinar, the course, and everything else coming up:
https://libbyandrewstudio.myflodesk.com/libbyandrewstudio-sevensignsguide
And if this landed — if you heard yourself in the car with the windows down — send it to the friend who you’ve suspected might have ADHD, for years.
Listen to the lates podcast version of this blog post here:
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