How Burnout Got Me Misdiagnosed for ADHD

I want to talk about a problem that a lot more people are dealing with than I realized.

I got the idea for this episode from a comment that someone left on an episode I did about how to recover from burnout.

Misdiagnosed with ADHD Without Realizing It

The story I have is about 12 years ago, I was actually misdiagnosed with ADHD and I didn't realize it until the last few years. It happened shortly after moving into my first leadership role as an engineering manager. What I want to do in this episode is tell you my story and share my lessons that I learned so that we can bring more awareness to this topic, because I feel like this is something that doesn't get talked about a lot.

Before I get too far, I just want to throw out a quick disclaimer that I am not a medical professional. I am not a psychiatrist, and the information that I share in this video does not substitute for professional medical advice. This is just my story and my personal experience with mental health and ADHD and how it impacted me.

Like I said, I was inspired to share this story because I did an episode earlier this year about how to recover from burnout. One of the comments was, Hey Doug, I'd like to hear your story about your experience with burnout and what you went through and what problems did you face?

Actually it's a really intense story. I usually don't feel comfortable with sharing this type of stuff about myself. I try to keep my videos more based on tactical skills, strategies, techniques for leadership training for engineers. But if people want to hear these things and if people find value in it, then I certainly don't mind opening up and sharing. Which on that note, if you want to hear me share more of my personal stories, let me know in the comments, if there's things you want to hear about my experience, I'm more than happy to share. I just never know what people are going to be interested in or not.

Let me go back in time here about 12 years ago. I was in a situation where I was just promoted into my first leadership role as an engineering manager and I was working a lot of hours. It was a very stressful job. I was constantly exhausted and this wasn't like me. I was always a high energy type person. I was always that person that could get things done. I had a great ability to focus and pay attention to details throughout my whole career.

But then all of a sudden it just felt like everything was a blur. I had constant brain fog. I was constantly butting heads with people. I was making mistakes left and right, and then getting frustrated and irritable. I was starting to have problems with my boss too. I was getting into arguments with him all the time. This wasn't like me. I was a relatively easygoing person, positive, friendly, nice to be around. All of a sudden I wasn't really acting like myself.

Initial Symptoms and Behavior Changes

The symptoms that I had was, I couldn't focus. I felt like I couldn't get anything done. I was starting all these things and I couldn't really follow through with them. I couldn't really make my ideas come to fruition. This is all at work, but also in my personal life too. I was getting very irritable. I was getting very impatient. I was going through mood swings where I'd be really happy, let's just say in the morning, but then in the afternoon I'd be really annoyed and angry for some reason.

One of the biggest things that jumped out to me as a problem was I was missing a lot of details and I was always a very detail oriented person, but all of a sudden I'm dropping balls at work. Problems and projects are piling up on me. It was just causing a lot of problems for me and my professional life and my personal relationships because I wasn't following through on things and everything just felt exhausting. Everything felt like I can't figure out how to do this. I can't remember my train of thought on this. I've felt like I was being rushed on everything. I felt like I didn't have enough time to get things done, even though I did, nothing changed.

This was really uncomfortable for me at this time because I never had problems like this before. I was the type of person that was always on top of things. I was a former student athlete. I played college football, so I knew all about time management and balancing, a full time job of being a student athlete with getting an engineering degree. I never had a problem with that type of stuff before.

When I entered the workforce, I actually had better time management skills than most of my peers, and I was a top performing engineer for a long time too. I was able to balance multiple projects. I was able to juggle a lot of balls. I was able to multitask all these things. I never really struggled in these areas. So I was concerned by it, I guess is what I'm saying. This was a 180 for me. All of a sudden I couldn't keep up. I don't feel like myself.

I talked to my doctor about it and, I had read about ADHD at the time. I led the discussion with my doctor asking them, Hey, do I have ADHD? I feel like I can't focus. I can't do these things that I used to do. My doctor referred me to a specialist, a behavioral health care doctor. They scheduled me with a specialist. I had a 10 minute meeting with the specialist. Basically I was diagnosed with ADHD on the spot and they placed me on Adderall. Which if you're not familiar with Adderall, it's a controlled substance. It's very potent. It's very dangerous for people that don't have ADHD. Can cause you to have, high anxiety and panic attacks and things like this.

Adderall Felt Like a Magic Pill At First

I started taking this medicine, which I started referring to it as the magic pill. You take this pill and 20 minutes later, you have a laser focus on anything. I felt like Bradley Cooper in Limitless. There was nothing I couldn't do. I was able to keep a laser focus on projects. I was able to balance everything again. I was actually doing things better than I ever could before. I was eating less food. I was losing weight. I was keeping up on my exercise. I was eating healthy. I was keeping up with everything at work. I was keeping up with all my social life. Everything was just coming into place. I just felt like I could do no wrong. I felt like a high functioning robot. I could just do everything.

This was immediately after taking the medicine. So I'm thinking, okay, this was the problem. This was the problem. This solved it. This must be what was wrong. I was actually able to keep pace with this for many years after starting to take the medicine. I was continuing to work long hours at work and it didn't bother me. I was able to just focus and all of a sudden the whole day would go by without realizing it. I got so much done. I was only needing four to five hours of sleep at night. So I would work nine hours at the office. Then I would go home, eat dinner, hang out with my girlfriend and work a few extra hours at night just to get things done and get ahead at work. Cause there was always a lot of work to do. Then I would, wake up the next morning at 5 30 AM, hit the gym and then get to work.

All my friends that knew I was doing this, as far as, not getting enough sleep and working so many hours, they thought there was something weird about it, but I didn't. I just thought okay this is me I have this level of energy. I have this level of focus. I'm able to do this I didn't really attribute it to the medicine at all. But I did feel superhuman. I felt wow, this has been the missing link for me this whole time.

Negative Side Effects of Adderall

But then it eventually caught up to me. A few years after I started taking the medicine, I started experiencing the burnout symptoms again, but this time it was at a greater scale. I'd go through these cycles where I had the high energy and focus like I was just talking about, but then it would be followed by periods where I could barely get out of bed each day. It would be like a sine curve. I would be these extreme highs. Then these extreme lows. It was, basically like going hard and then I would have a recovery period. I had to just basically make up for the sleep I wasn't getting, for example.

I was basically like a completely different person. I'd go back and forth. When I was in a good mood, I could do no wrong. I could do anything. But when I would have these cycles of my low points... I basically couldn't do anything, even, taking the garbage out felt exhausting. I literally could not do anything.

It really put a huge strain on a lot of the things in my personal life because I was not able to be there for people. I was not able to deliver on the things I said I would do or follow through or be consistent. I couldn't remember things that people were telling me.

The first time that this happened, this type of like negative cycle happened, I immediately brought it up to my doctor and their suggestion was to increase my Adderall dosage. I did. Now, this type of cycle happened every couple of years. I would increase the dosage, things would feel better. I'd be back to my level of focus and that would maybe last me for a year or two. Then all of a sudden there'd be another kind of burnout phase period where all these symptoms crept up again. Each time they felt a little worse.

Now I went through this cycle with the doctor a few times over the course of four or five years where we were increasing the dosage each time. Each time it fixed the problem, but I felt less like me. The medicine was getting stronger and I was feeling more robotic and less personal. I was feeling less emotionally in tuned with myself. I was feeling more rigid and I wasn't feeling like I was a human honestly. I felt like I was this, programmed, productive robot that was just, constantly thinking about what's the next most productive thing I could do. I was really like missing out on my life and missing out on personal experiences.

I was basically just living to work, which isn't like me. I always took my job seriously and I always put a lot of effort into my work and I put effort and focus and passion into anything I'm doing, but I am not the type of person that's a workaholic. I'm the type of person that likes to have a healthy work life balance but it was all leaned in on my work, at this time.

I kept continuing at this pace and I never really thought about the idea of like, where is this all heading? The fact that I'm burning out and then increasing my medicine every couple of years just to recover from it. I didn't really think about the fact of there's a law of diminishing returns here, where does this end? I can't just keep increasing my dosage on a extreme medicine like Adderall, because there's a lot of health risks that come with it. I never really thought about that at the time. I was just doing what I needed to do to get by.

How I Discovered I was Misdiagnosed With ADHD

Now, it all came to a head for me when I moved across the country to New York. It turned out that, new York has a lot stricter laws on controlled substances like Adderall. So when I moved to New York, I had to find a new behavioral health doctor and my new doctor basically said that they don't prescribe Adderall unless it's absolutely necessary and she preferred to get me on a lesser intense medicine called Vyvanse.

I'm not a doctor, but my understanding of the big difference between the two medicines is that with Adderall, you get this big energy surge when you take the pill. It boosts your energy. It's like having a dozen cups of coffee instantly or a dozen shots of espresso. You really feel it kick in when you take that. So you have this extreme high level of energy and focus all day. With Vyvanse, you don't get that. It has all the other effects that Adderall has, but you don't get this energy element to it. When I started switching to that medicine, I noticed it right away. There's this big drop off. I felt like I had no energy each day. I had no motivation. Furthermore, I was feeling depressed and emotional and even paranoid at times.

In talking with my doctor about this, she basically told me that these were the withdrawal effects of switching off of Adderall to Vyvanse. Vyvanse is an ADHD medicine. It's not like Vyvanse doesn't help with ADHD. So basically what I was noticing is it's the difference between an extreme medicine like Adderall and I guess a less extreme medicine like Vyvanse. Remember, I'm not a doctor, so I'm totally, getting terminologies wrong here and I'm not even going to try to explain specifics because that's not what I'm here to do, as far as the medicine goes.

In discussing this with my doctor as I was making this medicine switch, and in building that relationship with my doctor and telling her about my experience with how I got diagnosed for ADHD, and just what my life was like before I ever had these problems, we basically discovered that I was misdiagnosed for ADHD way back 12, 13 years ago. What we uncovered was that I was most likely just experiencing symptoms from stress and from burnout and exhaustion, and maybe a little bit depression.

Similarities Between Burnout and ADHD Symptoms

It took a lot of work to discover this, but just in working together with her, the two main things that were key indicators that it was. stress and burnout versus ADHD was that, number one, I didn't experience ADHD symptoms as a child or as a teenager or even as a young adult. According to my doctor, it's extremely rare for adults to just randomly develop ADHD out of nowhere. Now, just to be clear, she didn't say it's impossible, but she said it's a very low chance that it just develops later in life like that. She told me that it would have been very difficult for me to get through, high school and college and get an engineering degree if I had ADHD all these years and was never diagnosed.

The second main indicator is that I didn't go through a rigorous testing process to get diagnosed with ADHD. All I did was I went to my primary doctor. I told them that I couldn't focus and that I felt like I was struggling with energy. Then she referred me to a specialist. 10 minutes into that meeting with the specialist, they're diagnosing me as ADHD, and then they're prescribing me Adderall. Then I take the pill and I feel a lot better so I, just assumed that was the problem. In talking with my new doctor, I learned that there's a much more rigorous testing process that goes into diagnosing people as ADHD. There's lots of, questions you get asked, basically situational questions and there's actually like focus tests and questions and listening questions and tests. So there's a lot more to it than just Hey, do you feel like you're burnt out? Or do you feel like you can't focus? Okay let's give you the medicine. I didn't go through any of that type of testing 12 years ago. I learned that, there should be more of a formalized testing to diagnose people with ADHD.

In continuing to work with my doctor on this, what we concluded was that by taking Adderall, it was basically masking my real problem all these years. I was burnt out at work. I was burnt out in my life. I was going through levels of depression. I was going through levels of anxiety. Instead of addressing those and facing those problems, I was taking a pill that basically masked it and prevented me from figuring out what the real problem was. It gave me all this energy to just muscle through it. What really happened though, is it enabled the problem to grow worse for me. At the time, what I really probably needed was, to focus on my physical and mental self care. I probably needed to, explore what was really causing all this stress for me and what was causing all this burnout and what had me anxious. But instead of exploring those areas, I instead just took a pill and then became dependent on it to function. It's a super pill, so you don't really realize that there's anything wrong. But I took the pill for so long that I became dependent on it and never really thought about it. I didn't realize how much I was relying on it until I switched to this new medicine.

Now I Couldn't Function Without Adderall - Low Energy and Focus

Once I made that switch, it was really hard. I felt like I couldn't function for at least a few months, one to two months at least. I had to force myself to do my job each day. I had to force myself to get out of bed. I had to force myself to stick to my routine and do my exercise and all the things that I need to do to take care of myself. All these years I really thought, okay, I'm this high functioning person that has all this energy and all this focus and all these things. No, it was the medicine that was helping me do that. Because I was relying on it so long, I didn't really realize there was any problems.

The reason I'm sharing all this is because this is my journey and I've spent the last year weaning off the medicine. The goal has been for me to be taking no more ADHD medicine, which I can say that I've been ADHD medicine free for about four weeks now and hopefully forever. Because I don't need it. I've just been dependent on it and there's a difference in that, but it's been a lot of work.

One of the main reasons I'm sharing this whole story with you is because getting off the medicine after being misdiagnosed and after taking it for 12, 13 years, this has been one of the hardest experiences of my life. I'm not understating that in any way. This has been a very stressful and exhausting experience because I've basically had to do rehabilitation on my brain. My brain has been dependent on this type of medicine. This, medicine that is, an addictive substance and it's, an amphetamine. The medicine changed my way of thinking. It changed how my brain worked all these years, and now I've been having to rehabilitate my brain and I've been having to rebuild the dopamine levels in my brain.

That's one thing Adderall does is it just gives you a big dopamine surge every time you take it. Then your brain stops producing dopamine on its own. When you go off the medicine, your brain is relying on that pill to produce that dopamine. Now that it's not, it's really hard to find motivation and energy each day to do the things you need to do to get done.

I've had to be very intentional and working with my doctor and doing specific exercises to restore dopamine levels, to reconnect neural pathways in my brain so that it restores how I would function and how I think about things and how I would tackle decision making and things like this.

It's been a very complex thing. Picture what it takes to rehabilitate an injured leg, if you broke your leg. It's like that, but it's with your brain. It's very hindering and it has a big impact on your life. Like I said, this recovery experience has been one of the hardest things I've ever had to go through. I don't wish this on anybody and I'm still working through it. I don't feel like I'm where I want to be or where I don't feel like I'm where I was. 13 years ago before I was diagnosed with this, or I should say before I was misdiagnosed with ADHD. I'm going to keep working on this to get there.

Recognize That the Symptoms of Burnout and ADHD Can Appear Similar

The reason I shared this story is because I want to give you my biggest takeaways that I hope you take from this story.

I want you to recognize that the symptoms of burnout and depression and stress are very similar to the symptoms of ADHD. Something to keep in mind is, if you're all of a sudden feeling like you can't focus or, you're having mood swings or, these stereotypical ADHD symptoms, if you're all of a sudden experiencing these out of nowhere, and you haven't been experiencing these symptoms throughout your life. It's worth considering that maybe it isn't ADHD and that instead it's burnout, stress, anxiety, or depression. Remember, I'm not a medical doctor. I'm not giving you advice. I'm just saying it's worth considering that.

What I would do is, if I'm experiencing these things, and I could do it all over again, I would reflect on when did I start experiencing these symptoms of, brain fog, let's just say. Did I start experiencing this two months ago? Around that time when things changed, did something else change in my life around that time? Did I start a new job? Did I move? Was there a new family situation or something else? Was there some outside circumstance that changed my life in some way? Have I been under a lot of pressure or stress at work or in my personal life? Have I not been taking care of my physical or mental health in that time frame? Have I not been getting all the sleep or the rest that I need? Another big thing is, have I been lacking consistency or structure in my life?

What you want to do is take a look at kind of that before and after point from when you started experiencing things, these symptoms, and then just look at what are the other things that are going on in your life before and after that point?

For me, It was moving into a new work position, and all of a sudden I was in a leadership position where I didn't really get all the training that I needed to be effective as a leader in a role. I wasn't given any manager training or manager skills, so I had all these people depending on me on my team. I wasn't used to having that type of pressure. Meanwhile, I had all this other pressure from my boss, which is a whole different story, but I had a very toxic boss at the time too, who was putting a lot of pressure on me too.

Before I was in a leadership position, I was a top performing engineer. I never had any of these types of problems. All of a sudden overnight, I'm experiencing, these feelings of failing and constantly being behind and imposter syndrome. It basically was just too much for me to deal with at the time. So I was struggling to focus and struggling, with anxiety and things like that at the time.

I interpreted that as ADHD for myself. That's what started this whole process. Now my story isn't necessarily the same as yours, but I just hope that my story gives you some insights if you are going through anything like this. I think it's just good to start with self reflection and start with trying to come from a place of self healing and just self care and taking care of yourself to see if that's the challenge or that's the problem before you just turn to an ADHD stimulant medicine. I really hope my story gives you perspective and it helps you.

If you do feel like you're struggling with burnout, I encourage you to check out my episode called Seven Steps to Recover From Burnout, because in that I obviously share some of the tools and techniques I use to recover from burnout throughout my career and throughout these experiences that I shared with you.

But one more thing before we go. In that episode, that's the one where someone left a comment about asking about my personal experience and that's what inspired me to create this episode sharing my personal story. If you're watching this and you're curious to hear more about my experience with ADHD or just other experiences from me and you want me to create future episodes about that, please let me know in the comments because I'm happy to share.

Thanks for watching.

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