Diagnosed with ADHD at 35
Last week I wrote a newsletter called I think I have ADHD (in Chinese), about how I couldn’t sleep at 3 AM and ended up taking an ADHD self-screening test. Why can’t I just sit down and finish my book when I’m so close? Or complete my app that I’ve been working on, on and off, for over a year?
This week I saw a psychiatrist. As I expected, I was diagnosed.
Adult ADHD, combined type. Both inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive.
The name “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” misled me for years
I’d heard about ADHD for years. I always thought it sounded a bit like me. But the name itself kept me from taking it seriously.
For a long, long time.
Attention deficit? When I’m interested in something, I can hyperfocus for hours. Skip meals. Forget the world exists. I can be extremely focused.
Hyperactivity? My image of ADHD was a kid who can’t sit still, bouncing around in class. That’s not me. Maybe I fidget with my toes or tap my pen, but if you tell me to stop, I can.
On top of that, there’s a strong cultural attitude: “Just change your mindset.” Depression? Anxiety? That’s just poor self-control. Every self-help book I’ve read says everything is your responsibility. Don’t make excuses. Just do it. Self-discipline equals freedom. So I always thought ADHD was just an excuse people used when they didn’t want to try harder. Everyone has a little perfectionism, procrastination, and shiny object syndrome, right?
During one of my sleepless nights, I searched “too many interests can’t finish anything ADHD,” and found that people with confirmed ADHD described my exact experience. What was different this time was that I chatted directly with AI and took the DSM-5 ADHD screener. It has 18 questions split into inattention (9 questions) and hyperactivity (9 questions). You only need to hit 5 out of 9 to qualify. I hit 7 on both sides.
Combined type, ADHD-C.
After the diagnosis, I went back and reread everything I’d written over the past year. Blog posts, newsletters, YouTube scripts. And I realized something:
Almost every single piece was about ADHD. I just didn’t know it at the time.
The things I’d been calling “procrastination,” “shiny object syndrome,” and “lack of discipline” were all symptoms. I’d been describing how my brain works in post after post. I thought I was just a bit more shiny-object-prone, a bit more of a procrastinator, a bit lazier than everyone else. It never once occurred to me that it wasn’t “normal.”
Here are the clues I found buried in my own writing.
Knowing what to do, unable to do it
If I had to pick the single most frustrating ADHD symptom, it’s this one. You know exactly what you should do. You rationally understand the benefits. But you just can’t make yourself do it. I used to think this was a willpower problem. Now I know it’s called executive dysfunction.
Starting a blog at 34: My very first blog post. I opened by calling myself a “professional-grade procrastinator.” The idea of starting a blog had been bouncing around in my head for decades, but I kept getting stuck researching which tech stack to use. I finally spent $1,700 on a domain name to force my own hand.
I had to crank the external pressure to maximum before I could move. Now I know why.
You don’t believe in science as much as you think: I knew the benefits of sleeping early, exercising, and meditating. I had the time. I just wasn’t doing any of it. I thought it was a willpower thing.
Newsletter 2026: only a mission, no goals (in Chinese): My year-end review scorecard. 0 podcast episodes. 0 YouTube videos. 0 new apps. 0 app updates. The same New Year’s resolutions for several years running. None achieved.
How to overcome perfectionism that stops you from creating (YouTube, in Chinese): I wanted to be a YouTuber for ten years. Bought tons of equipment. Number of videos produced: zero. It wasn’t about time or gear. As long as I never shipped anything, I could never fail. In my head, I was invincible. But actually doing it would expose that I’m not as good as I imagined.
“The better my equipment got, the more afraid I was to start. Because if the gear is good enough and the result still sucks, there are no more excuses.”
Shiny object syndrome: starting everything, finishing nothing
The ADHD brain is addicted to novelty. Starting something new triggers a dopamine rush. But once the novelty fades, the brain starts hunting for the next target. This is probably the symptom that defines me most.
The shelf life of ideas: My Obsidian is stuffed with drafts and app ideas. 20 “brilliant” concepts, half already built by someone else, the other half destined to never see daylight.
“My brain is a perpetual motion machine, constantly generating ideas. But in reality? I can’t even manage one article a month.”
Explore, but also maintain: I was always chasing novelty. New side projects, new tech stacks, new ideas. Learning something new is addictive. But going back to organize notes? Maintaining an old app? Never wanted to do it.
You don’t get loot unless you finish the fight: A gaming metaphor. Getting a monster down to 1% HP and then running away. Zero XP. I’ve got half-started novels, half-built apps, books I read three chapters of, guitar I gave up after two weeks. Each one abandoned at 30% to go start a new fight.
“Because new monsters are the most fun. The first 10% is always the most exciting, full of possibility.”
Newsletter Fleeting interests and the tortoise and the hare (in Chinese): I compared myself to the hare in the classic fable. Fast starter, but never makes it to the finish line. A friend named Dora said something that stuck with me:
“The tortoise and the hare were never running on the same track.”
Newsletter The expensive camera gathering dust for 4 years (in Chinese): Bought a fancy Sony camera in 2022. Four years later, still collecting dust. Every year I tell myself this is the year I’ll start filming.
“I think this every January, and then suddenly it’s next year.”
How to overcome the fleeting enthusiasm that kills consistency (YouTube, in Chinese): My second video was directly about this topic. I listed a long string of abandoned interests, worried that YouTube was just my latest two-week fling. I once spent over 100 hours in two weeks on music production. Burned out completely. Never touched it again.
Fleeting interests are a superpower: I listed every hobby I’d picked up and dropped. Photography, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, MBTI, astrology, crypto, Buddhism, Stoicism, investing, board games, light novels, anime, fitness, meditation, indie dev, marketing, game dev, music production, writing, video creation…
“The enthusiasm lasts about two weeks. Then I’m on to the next thing."
"So many holes dug and never filled. My hard drive is a graveyard of half-finished projects.”
Decision paralysis: either research it to death, or cut everything down to one
The ADHD brain freezes when faced with too many options. Either you obsessively research, compare, and analyze, unable to pull the trigger. Or you can’t take it anymore and just eliminate every option except one.
My simple approach to investing: I traded stocks for over a decade and kept losing money. Always waiting for the perfect entry point. When it was up, I thought it was too high. When it was down, I thought it hadn’t bottomed out yet. The solution was to remove myself from the equation entirely. Switch everything to a single index fund. Delete the stock apps.
“Why was I giving such an important decision to ‘me,’ someone who clearly isn’t good at playing the stock market?”
Why I only wear black and Uniqlo: Every morning, choosing from 86,400 possible outfit combinations. No wonder I was always exhausted and always procrastinating. The fix? Eliminate everything. Only wear black. Only buy Uniqlo. From 86,400 possibilities down to 1.
How to prioritize what inspires you: Too many interests, no idea which one to tackle first. So I turned the inspiration matrix into a PACE framework, sorting by importance and excitement level. Because without a system, I genuinely don’t know how to choose.
How an engineer dad picks baby names: I spent an absurd amount of time naming my kid. The name had to be short, memorable, two syllables max, and the .com domain had to be available. I turned naming into an engineering problem, because otherwise decision paralysis would mean the kid never gets named.
Gear has level requirements: Before buying a camera, I spent three months researching which one was best. Before buying a microphone, I compared ten models. After buying them? Still couldn’t film. Still couldn’t record. Gear doesn’t solve a level problem. Worse, having good gear added extra pressure. No more excuses left.
“Buying top-tier gear just added another layer of pressure. Everything’s in place now, so why am I still no good?”
Brain won’t shut off: hyperfocus, insomnia, racing thoughts
People think ADHD means you can’t focus. But the flip side is hyperfocus. Once I lock in, I can’t stop. I forget to eat, lose track of time, forget to sleep. And at night, the brain refuses to power down. For me, thinking itself is addictive. Sleep is the most boring thing in the world. The lowest-dopamine activity possible.
Newsletter Escape and restart (in Chinese): During a stressful period, I started binge-reading novels to escape. Read until I got headaches, couldn’t stop, had to skip to the ending and delete the app just to break free. Like escaping an addiction loop.
Pretty number syndrome: I gave a name to my “can’t stop” problem. I promise myself I’ll sleep at 11:30, but 11:31 isn’t a pretty number. Better wait until 11:45. Actually 12:00 is cleaner. 12:01, well, might as well wait for 12:15…
Then 5:00 AM: “Why am I still awake?!”
In Low HP? Return to town and heal, I wrote about working or watching movies for six hours straight without moving. Forgetting to eat. Holding off going to the bathroom.
“Going to sleep feels like today’s version of me committing suicide, handing over the right to enjoy life to tomorrow’s me. So every night I drag it out as long as possible.”
Newsletter Adults should sleep at 9 PM too (in Chinese): My home WiFi auto-shuts at 10 PM. Steam gets blocked at 10:30. So I switched to mobile data to look up game walkthroughs until midnight. If the rope isn’t tight enough, I’ll find a way out.
“Tomorrow-me will be exhausted in the morning. But that has nothing to do with today-me.”
Automatic brainstorming before bed: Every night the moment I lie down, my brain boots up. What should I do tomorrow? What should I write next? How do I fix that bug? What’s the meaning of life? Lying awake until 2 or 3 AM is normal for me. My wife falls asleep the instant her head hits the pillow. She doesn’t understand why I can’t “just think about nothing.”
I wish I could.
Slave to dopamine
The ADHD brain’s dopamine system works differently. Anything “not stimulating enough” gets zero motivation. But high-stimulation activities are completely irresistible.
Maybe we’re all buried geniuses: Short-form video, social feeds, instant messaging. Like a never-ending slot machine. I tried deliberately making myself bored, forcing myself to create instead of consume. But honestly:
“Even understanding all of this, I still often choose to lie down and mindlessly consume YouTube. My brain defaults to whatever requires the least effort.”
Why are video games more fun than real life?: This post opens with me talking about my “decades-long procrastination problem.” Coming home exhausted from work but able to game for eight hours straight. Learn a new skill? “No time.” Write something? “Too tired.” Exercise? “Tomorrow.”
“This isn’t a motivation problem. It’s a design problem.”
Games offer instant feedback, guaranteed progress, freedom of choice, the ability to retry, and gradually increasing difficulty. Real life offers none of that. The ADHD brain needs these things to function, but reality doesn’t provide them.
Play less games, play more life: After playing several masterpiece games back to back, returning to reality felt unbearable. Not because games are bad, but because they’re designed too well. The contrast is crushing.
“Games are overwhelmingly positive. Life has mixed reviews.”
After working at Meta, I deleted social media: I worked at the world’s largest social media company. I saw exactly how those apps are engineered to be addictive. But knowing how it works didn’t help me escape.
“Knowing exactly how the system is designed, still unable to escape. Like a casino employee playing the slot machines after their shift.”
The sprint-crash cycle
ADHD also affects emotional regulation. It’s not mood instability, it’s mood intensity. The highs are higher, the lows are lower. And after an all-out sprint, there’s almost always a crash where you don’t want to do anything at all.
In Another explanation for my self-discipline problem (in Chinese), I attributed the pattern to childhood emotional neglect (CEN). Looking back, CEN and ADHD might both be pieces of the same puzzle.
“No wonder I keep swinging between extreme self-criticism and extreme indulgence. Workaholic one moment, revenge-relaxing the next, wiping out all my previous progress.”
Newsletter I still want your likes (in Chinese): Three years after deleting social media, I went back online. Compulsively posting, compulsively liking. 20 newsletter subscribers made me walk on air for two full days. My emotions completely hijacked by external numbers.
I secretly started writing daily and After a month of daily writing, then what?: In October I challenged myself to write daily. Wrote 24 posts in one month. Then what? Got sick, played games, stopped writing, slacked off, revenge-relaxed. My carefully built morning routine collapsed. Didn’t touch my app for two months. A textbook sprint-crash cycle.
Deliberately break your streak: Miss one day after a 365-day streak? Brain immediately says: “Starting over is too hard.” Then you actually quit everything. All or nothing. No middle ground.
Without external pressure, game over
School had homework deadlines. Work had bosses watching. For over a decade of employment, ADHD was perfectly masked by external structure. But when I quit my job to become an indie developer and had to manage myself, everything fell apart. Like my newsletter said: carrying a hidden debuff.
In Find your main quest while playing, I tried “retiring” for a while. Without the structure of a job:
“Less socializing, less structure, less reason to get up every morning. Every day I stayed up late watching shows and playing games.”
Maybe it’s not starting that scares you: I changed “building a habit” to “running a four-week experiment” and suddenly I could start. Because my brain isn’t afraid of difficulty. It’s afraid of “forever.” Endpoints make it possible to begin.
Only play games in full-screen mode: I installed blocking software, set the WiFi to auto-disable, put my phone in another room. Because I know willpower alone doesn’t work.
“The problem isn’t that your willpower is weak. It’s that your environment keeps pulling you out.”
The clues were always there
Looking back, the answer was right in front of me the whole time.
I thought I was lazy.
I thought I lacked willpower.
I thought I wasn’t disciplined enough.
I thought I was just the hare who could never finish the race, always envying the steady tortoise.
After the diagnosis, I decided to set everything else aside for now and start writing a short book for rabbits. For myself.
Here’s the preface:
The Rabbit Playbook (working title)
Every self-help book you’ve ever read was written by a tortoise, for tortoises.
Atomic Habits: Start with small habits, don’t break the chain, and compound interest will do the rest.
The 5 AM Club: Wake up at 5 AM every day and your life will be beautiful.
Grit: Sustained passion plus perseverance is the key to everything.
The 12 Week Year: Plan by quarter, execute by week, stay disciplined, and you’ll achieve your dreams.Great advice. But it’s all written for tortoises.
You’ve tried all of it.
It works for the first two weeks. Then the novelty fades, your streak breaks, and you’re back to square one.
You’re filled with shame.
Why can everyone else do this but me?
You go looking for the next system, waiting for the next bestseller.
But somewhere deep down, you suspect the problem isn’t the system. It’s you.
That makes it even worse.But have you considered:
You can’t do it. Not because you’re lazy. Not because you lack discipline.
It’s just because you’re a rabbit.The tortoise and the hare were never running on the same track.
Rabbits don’t have shells like tortoises, so they were never meant to run the same way.
It’s just that nobody ever taught you how to run like a rabbit.
You’re a rabbit. You need to learn the rabbit’s way.
“Nobody ever taught you how to run like a rabbit.”
I’ve written before (in Chinese) about how I rarely cry. But I started crying when I wrote that line.
Remembering all those late nights pulling all-nighters for school assignments and work projects because I’d procrastinated until there was no other option.
Remembering studying until 5 AM, setting an alarm thinking I’d sleep for just one hour, oversleeping anyway, and missing more than one final exam. The deep shame and panic.
Remembering how nothing worked, and I had to figure out my own Game Mindset from scratch.
I always felt like I didn’t quite fit in. 35 years. Now I finally know why.
Even if this is just a psychologically validated excuse, I suddenly feel so much lighter.
It’s not my fault. I’m not lazy. I’m not broken. My brain just works differently.
I don’t think of this as a disability. It’s just harder to live with in today’s world. If I’d been born in the Renaissance, this would be an absolute superpower. But this society rewards people who can be cogs in a machine, follow orders, stay consistent. Those are the tortoise’s rules.
I’m just a player who’s been carrying a hidden debuff (and a buff) for 35 years, and only now noticed that tiny line of text in my character status screen.
The diagnosis isn’t the end. It’s not an excuse either. It’s a starting point.
Now I know how my brain works.
Maybe I can finally stop forcing myself to be a tortoise and start designing a way to run that’s made for rabbits. Made for me.
P.S. Birds of a feather flock together. I’m pretty sure there are undiagnosed ADHD readers of this blog. If you enjoy reading what I write, and you’re a bit more shiny-object-prone, a bit lazier, a bit more of a procrastinator than most people, and your brain also refuses to shut off at bedtime, you might have ADHD too. I just learned that untreated ADHD reduces life expectancy by an average of 12 years. Please take it seriously. If any of this resonates, you know where to find me.
Indie developer, AI music miner, and aspiring writer.
Documenting my journey of personal growth and the pursuit of simplicity.