March 6
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It was a short TikTok that caught my attention.
A psychologist explained that people with ADHD are unlikely to enjoy the 69 position during sex. The reasoning sounded tidy enough: ADHD brains struggle with task switching. In that position you are giving pleasure and receiving pleasure at the same time. According to the explanation, the ADHD brain has to “choose a lane,” meaning one side of the experience will inevitably be neglected.
On the surface, there is something appealing about the logic. Anyone who lives with ADHD knows the feeling of trying to juggle competing demands and watching one of them fall off the table.
But the more I thought about it, the more it felt too reductionist. Not wrong in spirit perhaps—but far too neat to explain something as messy and human as intimacy.
And that raises a bigger issue: we actually know remarkably little about ADHD and sex in adults.
Sexuality in ADHD research tends to appear in one place: adolescence.
If you scan the literature, the dominant themes are familiar:
earlier sexual initiation
higher rates of impulsive behaviour
increased sexual risk-taking
relationship instability
Those studies matter, but they also reveal something uncomfortable. Much of the research focuses on teenagers, and when it moves into adulthood the discussion often becomes thin.
This gap was made painfully clear to me at an ADHD congress. During a session on relationships, a professional openly admitted that they knew very little about ADHD and sex as a topic. Their overview relied mostly on summarising what little literature exists.
That moment stuck with me.
Because ADHD is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition, yet the scientific conversation about sexuality still largely treats it as a teenage behaviour problem.
Even within the adolescent data there is another problem.
Most of the behavioural patterns being studied are strongly associated with hyperactive–impulsive ADHD, not inattentive presentations.
Impulsivity drives many of the risk statistics:
spontaneous decision-making
sensation seeking
difficulty delaying gratification
But the inattentive presentation—often more common in adults and especially underdiagnosed populations—raises very different questions.
For example:
attention drifting during intimacy
difficulty staying present in the moment
internal distraction or intrusive thoughts
emotional sensitivity to perceived rejection
These experiences rarely show up in the research statistics because they do not produce easily measurable behavioural outcomes.
Which means much of the ADHD-sex conversation is quietly built on the assumption that the hyperactive/impulsive presentation represents everyone.
It doesn’t.
The TikTok claim about the 69 position rests on a real idea: ADHD can make managing competing streams of attention difficult.
Executive function challenges include:
task switching
working memory load
attentional control
So the suggestion that a situation involving giving and receiving stimulation simultaneously might feel cognitively complex is not absurd.
But the leap from possible experience to general rule is where things fall apart.
Because intimate interaction rarely happens in isolated tasks.
Sex is usually a reciprocal dance of giving and receiving:
kissing while touching
responding to a partner’s cues
adjusting rhythm and pressure
reading emotional signals
If ADHD truly required people to “choose a lane,” most forms of intimacy would collapse under that logic.
Yet that is clearly not the case.
One of the defining features of ADHD attention is that it is interest-driven rather than purely effort-driven.
In low-stimulation contexts, attention can collapse quickly.
In highly engaging contexts, the opposite can happen: hyperfocus.
Sexual interaction often falls into this category. It is emotionally and physiologically stimulating, which changes the attentional dynamics dramatically.
In other words, the ADHD brain may struggle with two boring tasks at once, but two highly stimulating sensory experiences are a different story.
This alone weakens the claim that simultaneous pleasure is neurologically incompatible with ADHD.
Where the explanation touches something more plausible is sensory load.
ADHD is associated with differences in sensory processing. For some individuals this can mean heightened sensitivity to competing stimuli.
If stimulation becomes overwhelming, attention may fragment. The mind can drift or disengage.
But this is not unique to one sexual position.
The same dynamic could appear in many contexts:
environments with too much sensory input
feeling pressure to perform
emotional anxiety during intimacy
difficulty synchronising with a partner’s rhythm
So sensory load may shape preferences, but it does not create universal rules about behaviour.
When you step away from TikTok psychology and look at clinical discussions and lived experience, different themes appear more consistently.
People with ADHD often report:
Attention drift during intimacy
Sudden intrusive thoughts or losing track of the moment.
Emotional dysregulation in relationships
Arguments escalating faster than intended.
Rejection sensitivity
Interpreting neutral feedback from a partner as criticism.
Novelty-driven desire cycles
Strong early attraction that fades once familiarity sets in.
Executive dysfunction in relationship maintenance
Struggling with follow-through on emotional or practical commitments.
None of these issues can be reduced to a single position in bed, the couch or the great outdoors.
They are about how ADHD shapes attention, emotion, and connection between people.
Short-form psychology thrives on tidy explanations.
Take a real cognitive trait —> Attach it to a relatable situation —> Present it as universal behaviour.
It feels validating because the underlying mechanism contains a grain of truth.
But when complex human experiences are compressed into a rule—“ADHD brains can’t do this”—the nuance disappears.
And with ADHD, nuance matters.
ADHD probably does influence how many people experience intimacy.
But it does so through factors like:
attention regulation
sensory sensitivity
emotional safety
novelty seeking
communication dynamics
These variables shape preferences, not rigid behavioural limits.
Which means some people with ADHD might love the 69 position.
Some might hate it.
Most, like everyone else, will simply figure out what works for them.
The TikTok itself isn’t really the issue.
What matters is that it exposes how little serious discussion exists around adult ADHD and sexuality.
We talk about school.
We talk about medication.
We talk about productivity.
But intimacy—one of the most human parts of adult life—remains oddly underexplored.
Until that changes, TikTok psychology will continue filling the gap with explanations that sound clever but flatten the complexity of real experience.
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