You are sitting at your desk when an email from your boss appears: “What’s happening with the presentation you were supposed to send this morning?”
Your heart starts pounding. You stare at the screen and quickly type: “Almost done, sending it soon.” There is only one problem: you have not prepared even a single slide.
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ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders
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That does not mean you are a bad employee. It does not mean you are lazy. And it does not necessarily mean you are a liar, at least not in the way most people understand lying. It may be part of one of the less-discussed patterns associated with ADHD: a small, almost automatic “fib,” often made under pressure, overwhelm, shame or fear of disappointing someone.
“From the outside, it can look like avoidance, and if you look at it from the side, you could say: she lied,” says Inbal Green, an organizational consultant and business mentor who specializes in working with women with ADHD. “But in the world of ADHD, I don’t call it lying. It is a survival response. It happens when the brain experiences a threat, even if from the outside it looks like a simple question: Why were you late? When will it be ready? Why didn’t you do it?”
ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders. A broad review published in 2021 estimated that about 2.58% of adults worldwide live with persistent ADHD, while the share of adults with symptomatic ADHD may reach about 6.76%, meaning hundreds of millions of people globally.
But when it comes to women, the picture is more complicated. Boys are diagnosed far more often than girls in childhood, while in adulthood the ratio of diagnosed men and women moves closer to 1:1. A review focusing on ADHD in women noted that in childhood, roughly three boys are diagnosed for every girl, suggesting significant underdiagnosis among girls.
“With boys, you often see more of the hyperactive or behavioral side,” Green says. “With women, it often appears more in the emotional world: emotional flooding, difficulty regulating emotion, daydreaming, inner chaos. A girl can look quiet, as if she is listening, so she is diagnosed less often.”
Green, 42, is married and a mother of one. She has spent more than 17 years advising businesses, companies and entrepreneurs. She has worked with small startups and large companies, but in recent years she has found herself increasingly drawn to what happens behind the scenes for women who manage careers, businesses or homes and keep asking why the “small” things in life so often bring them down.
“There are a million business consultants and a million organizational consultants,” she says, “but many of them simply do not understand how an ADHD brain works, and certainly not how a woman with ADHD works.”
What, exactly, do they not understand?
“First of all, the word disorder already does damage,” she says. “When people say attention deficit disorder, it sounds as if there is a normal brain and something is interfering with it. But ADHD is not a flaw in a person. It is a different brain structure. The goal is not to take a woman with that kind of brain and teach her to work as if she has a different brain. The goal is to understand how her brain works and build tools around it that suit her.”
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A broad review published in 2021 estimated that about 2.58% of adults worldwide live with persistent ADHD
(Photo: Shutterstock)
According to Green, one of the central experiences of women with ADHD is the almost unbearable gap between internal ability and external results.
“They know they are capable,” she says. “They know they are smart, creative and ambitious. Then they ask themselves: Why can’t I send invoices on time? Why can’t I finish a project? Why am I doing everything at the last minute again? Why do I keep promising myself that this time will be different, and then it doesn’t happen?”
In the workplace, that gap can be especially confusing because many women with ADHD appear highly functional from the outside. They can be charismatic, sharp, quick to respond, good at rescuing situations at the last minute, improvising, generating ideas and performing brilliantly under pressure.
But behind the impressive presentation delivered on time may be a sleepless night, tears, guilt and a feeling of collapse.
“You might see that I arrived with an amazing presentation,” Green says, “but you won’t see that I worked on it until 5 a.m. You won’t see that the second after the presentation I am in bed crying, asking myself why I did this to myself again.”
Is that procrastination?
“Not necessarily,” Green says. “There are things that look like procrastination, but they are not procrastination. With ADHD, you can open a task list and your brain is simply flooded. You cannot approach the task. It is not that you don’t want to, and it is not that you are lazy. Often there is a lot of motivation. You really mean to do it. You really sit down at the computer. But something in the mechanism of starting, continuing or finishing gets stuck.”
One key concept is “time blindness.” Green explains that for many women with ADHD, time is not experienced as a clear sequence of now, in an hour, tomorrow or next week.
“The brain often works in two times: now and not now,” she says. “What is urgent, what is burning, what has a deadline in an hour, that can be handled. But everything that is not now becomes amorphous.”
How does that affect getting tasks done?
“A woman with ADHD can sincerely promise that a task will be ready by Friday,” Green says. “She truly believes it. But in practice, she does not necessarily know how to estimate how long the task will take, how many stages it includes, when she needs to start, and what will happen if something goes wrong along the way. When that gap repeats again and again, the people around her may begin to see her as unreliable, and she herself begins to believe she is the problem.”
Is that where fibbing comes in?
“Yes,” Green says. “Fibbing is essentially a response to threat. We know the classic survival responses: freeze, fight or flight. There is another response that is discussed less, called fawn, meaning appeasement. It is the place where instead of running away or fighting, you try to please the person in front of you in order to lower the threat.”
In people, she explains, appeasement can look like excessive niceness, taking responsibility for something that cannot realistically be done, automatically agreeing to requests, or giving an answer designed to calm the person in front of you.
“Someone asks: Can you take this on? And you really can’t, but you say yes. Why? Because in that moment you feel uncomfortable, you cannot bear to disappoint them, or your brain experiences the refusal as a threat.”
In the case of fibbing, the response may be an inaccurate answer.
“Someone asks when it will be ready, and you say Friday. Someone asks why you were late, and you say there was traffic. Someone asks whether you started something, and you say yes, even though you didn’t really start. From the outside, it looks like a lie. From the inside, it is often an automatic attempt to stop pain, fear or shame.”
What happens in the brain at that moment?
“The brain activates a survival response,” Green says. “The amygdala, which is like an alarm button, lights up. In people with ADHD, it can light up in response to emotional threats too. Not only a tiger in the forest, but also an email from a boss, a message from a client, a partner asking why you forgot something. The brain does not always distinguish between a physical threat and an emotional threat. As far as it is concerned, there is danger and it needs to respond quickly.”
That is often compounded, she says, by heightened sensitivity to rejection.
“None of us likes it when someone is angry at us,” Green says. “But for some women with ADHD, that feeling is experienced with much greater intensity. It is not just, ‘Oh, that’s unpleasant.’ It can feel like unbearable pain. Then the answer comes out before you have had time to think.”
Fibbing, she emphasizes, does not necessarily come from a desire to deceive. Sometimes it comes from impulsivity: the mouth answers before the brain checks. Sometimes it comes from time blindness: the woman truly believes she will manage. Sometimes it comes from filling in gaps: the brain completes a missing detail and she is convinced that is what happened. Sometimes it comes from shame: the desire to avoid the moment when someone once again says she is irresponsible, unserious or does not keep her word.
“The problem is that after this happens a few times, you begin to believe about yourself that you are a liar,” Green says. “And the people around you begin to label you that way too. But inside there is a woman who really wanted to meet the commitment, really meant it and really believed that this time she would succeed.”
How does this affect relationships?
“There is a term I use a lot: compassion fatigue,” Green says. “At first, a partner may laugh about the fact that you are late or forget things. But after years, when he feels it affects him again and again, the compassion begins to wear down. If people do not understand that ADHD is involved, the relationship will face very difficult fights.”
Beyond lateness and disorder, there are also intense emotions.
“Many people with ADHD feel things with very high intensity,” she says. “You can be excited in a wow way, fall in love in a wow way, enjoy things in a wow way, but also fall very hard. Then you ask yourself: Why am I dramatic? Why do I make a big deal out of everything? It is not that you are creating drama. Sometimes you really experience things differently.”
Parenthood can create another layer of difficulty for women with ADHD.
“Parenthood meets women with ADHD in their hardest places,” Green says. “A child constantly requires thinking ahead: what is happening tomorrow, what needs to be brought, when there is a birthday, what needs to be prepared, what the afternoon will look like. And that is exactly the place that can be hard for us.”
Alongside the organizational challenge, there is also an internal battle over presence and patience.
“Many women struggle with themselves not to explode, to sit, to explain, to play, to be inside a situation that does not provide enough interest for their brain. Then a great deal of guilt arrives: Why am I not like everyone else? Why can’t I be a calm, organized mother?”
So what can be done?
“First of all, stop working against the brain,” Green says. “You need to learn it. If you know you have time blindness, don’t try to beat it with willpower. Measure it. Write down how long you think a task will take, and then check how long it actually took. After a few times you will see the gap, and you can begin planning according to reality rather than according to what your brain tells you.”
And what about tasks that feel impossible to start?
“I like to prepare in advance a list of small, simple tasks that do not require many decisions,” Green says. “Tidying something small, sending a short email, washing dishes, organizing a bag. When you are frozen, you cannot always approach the big task, but you can stay in motion. Very often, the movement itself helps you get out of paralysis.”
Movement can also help with emotional overwhelm, she says. Sometimes the best thing is to stand up, move, go outside or walk for 10 minutes.
“Nature helps a lot with calming, and so does movement,” Green says. “The goal is not to force yourself to sit in front of the screen when you are frozen, but to help the brain return to a state in which it is capable of acting.”
For Green, the most important starting point is legitimacy.
“Many women discover themselves again at 30, 40 or 50, and suddenly say: I am not defective. There is nothing wrong with me. I have a brain that works differently,” she says. “That does not solve everything, but it removes a great deal of shame. In the end, the goal is not to turn a woman with ADHD into a ‘regular’ woman who is always organized, always consistent, always quiet. You do not need to become someone else. You need to understand how you work. Once you understand your brain, you can stop fighting it and start building a life that fits it.”