ADHD and Neurodiversity Coaching in Milton Keynes

Wiring, Not Intellect

I am dyslexic. At school in the seventies and eighties every piece of creative writing came back covered in red pen for the spelling, and you were put in what the teachers themselves called the stupid class. I believed for a long time that the academic part of me was not there. It took me until much later, and a diagnosis, to be able to say: it is not that I am not good at this. I am. I just have to do it differently.

The same is true of ADHD, and I think it is the most useful thing I can tell you. It is about wiring, not intellect. You can be a very clever person and still need to do things in a different way.

Attention deficit is a misleading name for it. Most people with ADHD do not have an absence of attention. They have trouble regulating it. You can spend six hours learning everything there is to know about something that fascinates you and be unable to read three pages of the thing that actually matters. The brain is not saying "I don't want to concentrate". It is saying "I can't engage with this particular thing right now", and those are different problems with different fixes.

One caution, and I mean it. Everybody procrastinates. Everybody gets distracted. Having some of these traits does not mean you have ADHD. A diagnosis needs a broader pattern, going back to childhood, that gets in the way of work, study, family or relationships. That is what the assessment is for.

The Part That Usually Needs Treating Is Not the Forgetfulness

Imagine a child who repeatedly hears: you're not listening, you're always forgetting, why can't you just concentrate, you're so disorganised, you're capable of so much more. Some of it from teachers, some from parents. Eventually the child stops hearing it from other people and starts saying it to themselves. I'm useless. I'm lazy. I'll never get my life together.

Thirty years later that person sits down opposite me, and the thing that needs attention is rarely the forgetfulness. It is the shame that has grown up around it.

The research says the same. When 52 women diagnosed as adults in England were interviewed, they described diagnosis as a relief tinged with sadness for the years before it, and almost no psychological support from anyone afterwards. A 2025 study of late-diagnosed women found the same: internalised criticism, guilt, low self-esteem, and grief for the life they might have had. This is the counselling half of what I do, and it is the half nobody else seems to be offering. If the self-doubt has spread well beyond the ADHD, my self-esteem page is about that.

Emotional Volume Control

For some people the emotional dial goes from two to ten with nothing in between. A small criticism lands as "you're a failure" rather than "you forgot an appointment". That experience has a name people use, rejection sensitivity, though it is a description rather than a diagnosis.

It is not imagined. A meta-analysis of 13 studies covering 2,535 adults found much higher emotion dysregulation in adults with ADHD than in others, with emotional lability the strongest part of it. Faster, more intense emotions that need more conscious effort to manage, not less control overall.

The one idea I would give you is this. An emotion is not an instruction. Notice it, breathe, name it, and then choose the response. Just because you are angry does not mean you have to send the email. If the anger has become the main problem, my anger management page takes that further.

What the Evidence Honestly Says

Medication has the most evidence behind it. A review of 40 systematic reviews found it clearly beat placebo, and found the evidence for everything else in adults "only preliminary". The NHS also says not everyone needs or wants to take it. Either way, it is a conversation for you, your GP and your specialist, and I am not the person to advise on it.

For talking approaches, a Cochrane review of 14 trials with 700 adults found that structured cognitive behavioural therapy beat a waiting list on people's own ratings of their symptoms. Here is the part that cuts against me: compared with supportive talking therapy, which is closer to what I do, it showed no difference on those same ratings, in evidence the reviewers rated low quality. And coaching specifically has less research behind it than either. So I am not claiming this replaces treatment. It is what you do with a diagnosis, or while you wait for one, and I would rather you knew the size of that claim before you paid for anything.

Neurodiversity More Widely

Neurodiversity is the plain observation that brains vary in how they think, learn, pay attention and take in the world, the way people vary in height. None of it makes one brain better than another. The trouble starts when the way you process the world does not match the environment you are in, and the most useful question I know is not "what's wrong with you" but "how does your mind work".

Autism is not a personality and not a measure of intelligence, and it can mean social situations that are exhausting because you are working so hard to read the rules everyone else seems to have been given. Dyspraxia affects coordination and planning, as if the instruction manual skipped your desk. Dyscalculia is not being bad at maths; it affects how the brain handles numbers, quantities, time and money. I work with adults across all of these, and the thing they have in common is that a diagnosis is a framework for understanding yourself, not an identity. It does not tell anyone whether you are kind, funny or good at your job.

If it is your child rather than you, my parent coaching page is the better place to start.