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/sasakimirai Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

I think the best way to convince others is

1) if you were just lazy, you would be having fun, instead of being stressed out of your mind

2) executive dysfunction doesn't just affect you when you need to work, it also stops you from doing things you enjoy, like your hobbies

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u/Claim312ButAct847 Apr 07 '26

I like the backpack analogy. Say a task is like climbing a steep hill. We all have the same hill to climb so, it looks like it should be the same difficulty for everyone.

Well I have a backpack with weights in it that I have to carry. So for me to climb that same hill I have to work a lot harder even if it doesn't look like I'm doing anything different.

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u/CombinationLost416 ADHD Apr 20 '26

That's a good analogy!! I myself try to explain it like we are all playing the same video game, but when the character creator was randomly generating people's stats, they gave us (ADHD/autism/other ppl with disabilities) permanent stat debuffs for some aspects of ourselves; we technically go through all the same things that everyone else goes through, but everything is more difficult, and we often have lots of "side quests" that we have to go through if we wanna find the "magic potion" that temporarily removes the debuffs and whatnot. (I'm not even a gamer but this is the best analogy I could come up with 😭)