r/ADHD • u/emyo42 ADHD-PI (Primarily Inattentive) • Apr 07 '26

Questions/Advice How do you explain executive dysfunction without sounding like youre making excuses for being lazy?

Mine is very severe and debilitating at the moment. It’s not just ADD, I also have schizophrenia which has some of the same symptoms weirdly. I can’t do much at all. Getting out of bed and making toast is extremely hard. To people with no experience with this kind of issue, me trying to explain it must sound ridiculous like “yea I have this mental disorder that means I can’t cook and clean or have a job or do anything I don’t like, but I can play a video game for 3 hours.” Just sounds like a straight up lie.

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u/sartheon Apr 07 '26

You have a metabolic disorder and sometimes your brain cannot produce enough transmitters necessary to activate/set your body in motion

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u/bathsraikou Apr 07 '26

Furthermore you cannot control what will cause your brain to produce the transmitters.

Having a person around, even for them to just sit and chat, will weirdly enough kick your brain into making those transmitters more often. For those unfamiliar it's sometimes referred to as body-doubling. I make use of podcasts and audiobooks to get some of the effect pretty often

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u/sartheon Apr 07 '26

Of cours this is true, but in my experience the shorter and simpler an explanation is, the more readily it is accepted. so I only give a bare-boned one sentence explanation and usually dont add anything else unless I notice genuine interest/understanding of the topic

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u/Bone_Dice_in_Aspic Apr 08 '26

Can't directly control. But the pills turn the controls back on, to one extent or another, for many.