ADHD, anxiety and the pressure of deadlines

Looming deadlines can present us with a love/hate relationship. Many people struggle with deadlines, but for those living with ADHD, anxiety, or both, they can bring additional layers of pressure and overwhelm.

With anxiety, there might be underlying thought patterns and fears which can escalate anxious thoughts and decrease the ability to meet a deadline, or mean it is completed with such high levels of stress that it becomes exhausting.

ADHD may present as overwhelm, where struggles with executive functioning skills, such as time blindness or organisational/priority skills, as well as differences in how the brain regulates motivation-related chemicals, such as dopamine, can make it increasingly difficult to navigate deadlines.

Sometimes, both ADHD and anxiety may be present, which can make managing deadlines feel even more challenging.

Why deadlines feel overwhelming

This isn't just that one deadline to send an email at work, or the essay deadline set by the university; deadlines are all around us and become difficult to juggle for many in the modern world.

Deadlines can show up in many areas of life. It might be doctors' or dentists' appointments, meetings at work to resolve things that are not urgent but left until the last minute so they become urgent, using food before its 'use by' date, or a tyre that needs pumping up before it wears out. 

However, for those with ADHD, this can extend to overwhelm at times. Why is it that despite us loathing the pressures, we also become our own worst enemies and leave everything until that dreaded last minute? For those living with anxiety, it may also mean 'putting off' the task to avoid uncomfortable feelings, despite this usually making it even worse an outcome for us.

While we can’t avoid deadlines entirely, we can explore ways to manage the pressure they bring.

How ADHD and anxiety can affect deadlines differently

Before considering how to manage overwhelm, let's establish what the driving force behind it is.

Many clients with ADHD, when sitting in therapy, will indicate that they loathe deadlines. They create pressure in a world that we find pressured enough. Waiting room syndrome can be a common, freeze-like state that many clients report, which finds us sitting, unable to accomplish much else if we have an appointment or deadline for something that afternoon.

We might promise ourselves that the next appointment will be different and we will make it on time without stress, but how often does that plan still fail? Or, sometimes, it might be pressure to constantly remember the deadline, and yet still don't understand why our brains just don't 'get on with it'! 

For clients experiencing anxiety, different fears will arise: what if we get something wrong? What if the bus breaks down? What if we fail the exam? What if everyone judges us? Learning to identify and tune in to the fear can allow us to combat that thought – how realistic is it? How can we reframe things? How likely is it that something that occurred in the past is impacting us today? With discussion and understanding, we can also consider if the cycle we are in is helpful anymore.

How ADHD and anxiety can affect time and pressure

For people with ADHD, deadlines can be particularly challenging without supportive strategies and understanding in place. Time blindness means we either overcompensate (making sure we plan to be early for an appointment) or we may find ourselves relying on the rush of a last-minute deadline to create the motivation to complete a task.

Years of critical responses to perhaps being undiagnosed are also internalised and therefore increase the critical outlook we may hold about deadlines and ourselves – feeling the pressure even more to not let 'ourselves down' yet again.

With anxiety, we may struggle with pressure, and thus we may use avoidance tactics to protect ourselves from the deadline pressure. The anxiety may cause many physical symptoms such as shaking, rapid heart rate, sweating and flushing as the sympathetic nervous system is triggered into action. 

Common reasons we avoid deadlines 

In therapy, we often explore the different factors that may be contributing to deadline avoidance. These can vary depending on whether someone is experiencing ADHD, anxiety, or a combination of both.

Some common reasons include:

Feeling overwhelmed

Our nervous system might be in 'fight or flight' mode, making it impossible to think straight to undertake the task.

Fear of leaving our comfort zone

For those living with anxiety, we might be shut down by fear of the stretch zone. This is where we have sat in our comfort zone for so long that anything outside of this is feared. By exploring the fears with a CBT therapeutic approach, we can usually start to push into that stretch zone now and again quite safely.

Past experiences

We may have past experiences that are holding us back. For example, we might 'always' feel a certain way when we have that meeting with that person and thus avoidance tactics come into play.

Seeking the pressure of a deadline

If our brains are chemically low on dopamine, we might crave a stressful deadline to release this, as opposed to healthy ways to obtain this or via medication. Whilst this seems strange when we really don't want to feel that pressure, we also can crave it due to this chemical imbalance.

Challenges with time awareness

For those with ADHD, we might struggle with an awareness of time and thus more pre- planning, working using the 'backwards' method alongside visual timers may work for some clients.

Expectations from others

With ADHD, we may accept we will be late, but feel pressure from others. It can help to discuss this with those impacted and agree on different timings (friends, for example, with awareness may provide an earlier expected time for a date than necessary to manage expectations).

Waiting room syndrome

Sometimes, with ADHD, understanding “waiting room syndrome” can help us manage it. For example, choosing morning slots for appointments with awareness of the impact an afternoon one will have can help. With anxiety, we may be stuck in a 'freeze' state until said deadline is over that day; similar tactics to avoid the long waiting times may be useful.

Taking on too much

Sometimes, we may just have taken on too much. This is common for people living with anxiety, who might people please, and those with ADHD might leap to say yes, that sounds fun, without considering how many things we have committed to until they all come at us! Again, awareness in both examples in counselling can begin to manage the impulse to say 'yes'.

How counselling can help 

It can be useful to explore together the thoughts and feelings that neither anxiety nor ADHD is a “fault” that requires fixing. Sometimes, however, they may require understanding, acceptance, as well as identifying strategies – all of which can be explored with the right counsellor.

An end goal is to walk away knowing that you feel armed to cope with who you are and the way your brain may be wired. So that when things don't go as perfectly as we wish or as seemingly easy as the person we may compare ourselves to, we remain self-compassionate and curious in the moment. That can go a long way to feeling more positive.

An analogy that can be helpful is that of a snakes and ladders board: we may hit a snake, but we rarely end up back at square one, as we are always moving forward, the more we explore and understand ourselves.