When effort becomes invisible, exhaustion becomes identity.
[ADHD Awareness Month Myth 3: Trying Harder and ADHD]
“Everyone gets distracted.”
That’s the sentence that silences thousands of adults with ADHD before they even ask for help. When distraction is treated as universal, struggle becomes personal - a flaw in character instead of a difference in wiring.
We learn to internalize it: If everyone else can manage, I just need to try harder.
My clients know, we are NOT Nike people
And when trying harder fails, shame takes over where understanding should have begun.
The Myth of Equal Effort
We live in a culture that worships a particular brand of productivity - the ability to push through boredom, to do what must be done, no matter how uninspiring.
So, when someone struggles to start, or drifts mid-task, it’s seen as laziness.
But ADHD isn’t a problem of knowing what to do — it’s a problem of activating what we already know.
The brain’s reward and motivation systems are wired differently; novelty and urgency light them up, while routine tasks fall silent.
It’s not lack of willpower — it’s biology.
AND what the phrase “everyone gets distracted” misses is the difference between infrequent, inconsistent distraction and persistent, impairing dysregulation.
Everyone loses focus sometimes.
But ADHD means the losing is chronic — it’s not a lapse in attention; it’s a pattern that defines it. It’s not occasional inconsistency; it’s a persistent inability to rely on focus when it matters most.
Still, society doesn’t measure effort in biology. It measures it in output.
The Effort Trap
For people with ADHD, effort is often invisible because the result looks ordinary.
No one sees the mental wrestling just to begin, the energy it takes to refocus after every derailment, or the guilt that follows a missed step.
By the time we reach adulthood, “trying harder” has become our entire identity.
We overcommit, overexplain, and overwork — all to prove we’re not lazy.
And the irony is cruel: the harder we try to appear effortless, the more effort it takes just to keep up the illusion.
In my final years in corporate, I worked in a toxic environment where your worth was measured by internal politics and paper qualifications. Experience and contribution meant nothing if you didn’t play the game.
For someone with ADHD, that kind of meaninglessness is lethal to focus.
When the work lacked purpose, my motivation disappeared — and so I built my own distraction.
While colleagues saw “laziness,” I saw survival.
I’d immerse myself in the news, staying constantly updated — not out of defiance, but to feed the restless need for engagement. It kept me connected, informed, alive in a place that otherwise felt hollow.
ADHD will always find stimulation; if you don’t feed it meaning, it will create its own.
But no one saw that nuance - only the judgment that I wasn’t “focused enough.”
“They said, ‘With Us You Are Number One.’
What they meant was — as long as you think like everyone else.”
Beyond Excuse
ADHD doesn’t erase accountability — it reframes it.
When we understand our brains, we stop fighting them and start working with them.
Structure replaces shame. Scaffolding replaces self-blame.
Calling ADHD an “excuse” misunderstands both the science and the struggle.
The truth is, no one tries harder than someone who’s been told all their life that they’re not trying hard enough.
Closing Reflection
The myth that ADHD is an excuse doesn’t just invalidate effort — it weaponizes it.
Because when the world assumes the struggle is moral, not neurological, no amount of effort ever feels like enough.
And that’s the real exhaustion: living in a world that mistakes survival for laziness.
