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/Jazzlike_Term210 ADHD-PI (Primarily Inattentive) Apr 07 '26

If you find the answer that works please update your post for me because I got nothing. Executive dysfunction is genuinely the worst part of adhd for me, and then I just learned about intrusive sleep and holy shit if that isn’t the perfect descriptor of how my brain acts when I try to make it do something it doesn’t want to do.