Julie Legg and Jel Legg discuss the big emotions that can accompany ADHD – emotional dysregulation, and the challenges faced when exhibiting them.
They discuss how emotional dysregulation amplifies both positive and negative feelings, leading to intense responses that can overwhelm individuals and confuse others. They explore the role of emotional triggers, delayed processing, and the ways ADHD shapes emotional expression through art or music. Sharing practical coping strategies like self-awareness, distraction techniques, and seeking counseling support, Julie and Jel offer insights to help listeners manage emotional intensity and navigate the challenges of big emotions.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Understanding Emotional Dysregulation: Everyone, including neurotypicals, can have big emotions. Those with ADHD are likely to experience heightened emotions frequently without being able to regulate them, often observed by some as irrational and ‘over the smallest of things.’ ADHD often amplifies emotions, leading to intense responses like mood swings, irritability, and quick temper, which can feel overwhelming and be confusing for others.
- Range of Emotions: While ADHD is often associated with negative emotions, Julie and Jel emphasize that positive emotions like excitement and passion are equally strong and sometimes viewed as “over the top” by others.
- Emotional Triggers and Processing: Triggers for emotional responses may not always seem directly related to the situation, as ADHD often involves delayed or unexpected emotional processing, sometimes through art, music, or movies.
- Coping Mechanisms: Strategies include self-awareness, embracing distractions when needed, and using diversion techniques to manage overwhelming emotions. Recognizing and addressing emotions proactively can prevent them from building up and leading to unexpected outbursts.
- Counseling and Support: They recommend that individuals with ADHD seek support from counselors or therapists to help manage emotional dysregulation, rather than relying solely on ADHD coaches who focus on goals.
LINKS
- Julie is the author of THE MISSING PIECE: A Woman’s Guide to Understanding, Diagnosing and Living with ADHD (Harper Collins, 2024)
TRANSCRIPT
JULIE: I’m Julie Legg, author of The Missing Piece and diagnosed with ADHD at 52.
JEL: And I’m Jel Legg, diagnosed at 55.
JULIE: Welcome to ADHDifference. In today’s episode we’ll be talking about big emotions and often referred to as emotional dysregulation. It’s in the criteria actually, in the DSM, one of the things, one of the boxes that can be ticked for you if you have ADHD – relates to mood swings, irritability, and a quick temper. We’ll be talking about a whole range of emotions in this episode.
JEL: Yeah, interesting. Even just listening to the diagnosis there: mood swings, irritability, and what was it … a quick temper? [A quick temper.] Funny how they’re all negative. Well, not funny. I mean, yeah, they will affect your life in a negative way because they’re negative emotions so they don’t usually have very good outcomes. But we like to include all the other emotions: excitability … come on give some more examples!
JULIE: Oh well there’s enjoyment, well there’s a whole bunch of positive ones!
JEL: Yeah, for sure. And they generally are regarded as good ones and will give you good outcomes in life, but it’s possible, if you use them at the wrong time, you can have bad outcomes too so …
JULIE: And I think that fits in with the whole ADHD as a disorder as far as a diagnosis goes. Those: the quick temper, the irritability, and the mood swings. If they impair your life, just like other ADHD traits do, that’s part of the assessment and the diagnosis. However, we on this podcast like to talk about difference and so it includes both positive and not so positive things. But everyone has big emotions. Neurotypicals can have big emotions. Those with ADHD I think are even bigger and more frequent. And some of the things too – the roller coaster of emotions that we can experience, we can be very angry and within minutes we could be rolling around the floor laughing. And it seems really irrational to observers. How/why were you so angry and then why is it so funny now? But it makes sense to us.
JEL: Yeah, so for me, I’m trying to think what/how I would personally define an emotion, something I have, as we all have. It’s … we know our brains are wired differently. We know our brains are usually firing off the neurons, over-firing off most of the time, trying to settle down, trying to find a way just to reach that equilibrium, therefore seeking dopamine. It feels to me like I can’t control my emotions as well as I ought to be able to because my brain will trigger off an emotion as a response to a situation. It’s not just the negative ones. It doesn’t mean I’ve just got to … I’m not really known for having a bad temper or a quick temper, although I’m aware it sits below the surface and if it pops out, the idea is not to escalate it into being really nasty. The idea is just to nail this quickly, move on because we don’t need this. We don’t need to go there. This is rubbish. My brain, what it’s doing, it’s worked it out very quickly it’s … and it hasn’t got time to mull and process things. But the truth is, I do need a lot of time to process things with emotions and it’s not always with anger. It tends to be more with sadness or shock. I … over my life I’ve definitely found myself not always reacting in a social group, or with a bunch of people, to a situation the same as them. And so, I do mask or fain it. So, I do to fit in, have that empathy with them because that’s the right thing to do but inside I’m thinking “I’m not feeling this emotion that you guys seem to be expressing.”
JULIE: Yes, and with that I think it’s really interesting because in the privacy of our own home we can be really excited, overly excited. We can be deeply saddened. We can be … we can worry worry worry, all of these things in the privacy of our own room. That’s our natural process of doing things. But when we are in the public eye or where we’re with peers, and our emotions, our big emotions, are observed I think that’s the point that we feel different. You have situations where, for example reading the news, that can trigger some emotions but in an alternative way that [yeah] than most people would. It’s an unexpected way.
JEL: So, it’s …I read a lot of world news and I follow world events, and a lot of them especially at the moment aren’t particularly joyful or good. In fact, none of them are good. I don’t find myself shocked or saddened on a line-by-line, article-by-article basis. I wouldn’t be able to read the article. It takes a while and I … it’s not the event in itself that is causing an emotional reaction, and they are horrendous events, then what will happen … it happened yesterday actually, is I suddenly think of a song. And the song I thought of was ‘Russians’ I think, by Sting. And so, I went and listened to the song and suddenly tears, emotion. Everything I’ve been reading for so long converged into 4 minutes and that piece of art suddenly took on a whole new life after what, 30 years since it come out, whatever. Absolutely amazing and there was the avenue for the emotion to be felt. That’s fine. That’s me. That’s my personal space. It’s not that I’m not emotional. That’s how I deal with things. However, to an observer spending time around me, they might see me as cold and heartless and unemotional but it’s not true. My brain just needs to do it so, do it in a different way. So, it … there’s a convergence. So, multiple events reach a singularity, and in that singularity they’re all dealt with emotionally, often through a piece of art.
JULIE: Interesting. If we’re talking about sadness at this point and so I’ll add my story to that too. I was very young when my grandfather passed away. I was too young to attend the funeral but I was aware, in a motel room I think, I was being looked after by other people as I wasn’t at the funeral itself, and I .. there was something like The Waltons or, I don’t know, I don’t know, I didn’t watch much TV so it was all new to me. But any which way, an elderly gentleman was thinking about ending his life. Now I burst into tears and everyone looked at me like I had a screw loose. But, for me I was processing that this man was, this character on the television, was considering to opt out whereas my grandfather actually didn’t have that choice. And so, for me it … that I can explain now but couldn’t explain at the time, it was probably the injustice that one man had a choice and the other did not. And I thought that was completely unfair and therefore I was upset through that. So sometimes, and we’re talking about triggers and we talk about songs, and in this case something on the telly. I cry at some advertisements. If they just hit the spot overwhelming amounts of emotions can come up. Or, at the movies even, really unexpected, and they take me by surprise as much as the people around me.
JEL: Because I would suggest generally, they’re referring back to a personal experience of yours which could have been decades ago which is still there and still hurts, or has emotions attached to it. And so it just opens that channel for those emotions to come out. It hooks on to something. And I don’t think that’s unique to people with ADHD but what we need to own, I think, is that our emotions can seem a bit more volatile or larger at times. Or disproportionate and not always connected to the triggers that are going on. And that’s fine if we’re on our own but with if/when we’re with other people, then that’s hard for them and confusing.
JULIE: And another example would be, and you’re talking about often a build-up of emotion that you’re trying to put a lid on and it’s at some point, that emotion explodes into … it could be anger, it could be something else. And I remember bursting into tears a couple of times and a couple of situations at work. Now, utterly embarrassing for me and that carried a lot of shame at the time because I couldn’t even explain, undiagnosed, why I had burst into tears over such a small thing in everyone else’s mind. But for me it was this build-up of lots of small things to the point that I just had to get, you know, get it out. And I think that build up, sadness in that situation but also anger. Now anger also is an energy and Jel, you’ll have something to say on that.
JEL: PiL. [PiL being?] The band. Yes. Public Image Limited. Anger is an energy, as was sung, which is completely true. Well, feels like it’s true to us. [By?] John Liden. [Who is?] Sex Pistols X front, current front man technically. Yeah. Yeah anyway, one of my heroes. The guy, I just love him to bits. Yeah so it’s not always anger and not always sadness, there’s the whole range of emotions. This is my theory. This is how it feels for me so I don’t know whether this is true for everyone but my brain is always firing off all the time. There’s this, like a pinball machine. There’s hundreds of thoughts what’s going around. It doesn’t always know how to focus. If it does, it hyper focuses on something. That’s not something that happens in the middle of an emotional response. I’m not … I would be hopeless at martial arts where you really need to focus. I just couldn’t do it. My brain would be thinking about something else and I’d always get bashed up in martial arts. I wouldn’t … when I’ve been involved, but I’d be rubbish at it. Yeah it’s like … it does feel like there’s a dopamine element connection to it so with anger it does get the endorphins or something going, where you can feel a roller coaster and you’re just going to roll with it until you’re worn out. And so there is a mental side where I need to pull it back but also once it goes, it goes. With sadness it’s the same. Even though I don’t think sadness releasing endorphins but love, falling in love … yeah I know, that’s where you want to go. Falling in love, when we fall in love we do it big time, like a juggernaut rolling into town.
JULIE: Absolutely and history shows that … that for us that emotion of love it is very strong. And in that moment we’re imagining 10 years down the track, and there’ll be kids running around, and there’ll be this, you know, beautiful house or caravan or whatever we wanted to imagine. So it can be very intense. Now for some neurotypicals that can be seen as such an enchanting wonderful feature to have – this intense love. And it can be quite … [Bunny boiler-sh is the word I’m thinking of.] Well the opposite! Some people, “Oh no they’re a bit too full on I don’t know, I don’t think so.” Bunny boiler, brilliant. I love it. So again, other people can, I don’t know, translate our big emotions. We’re not responsible for how they translate them. They’re our emotions and they can have their own opinion on it either way.
JEL: I’ve never, I still don’t understand when you ask someone: oh so have you met anyone? “Yes, I yes.” Oh how’s that going? “We’re just taking it slowly. It’s been a couple of months. We’re just really just taking it gently and slowly,” and I’m thinking I’ve never done that. I just can’t relate to that concept it’s … [If you know, you know, right?] If you know, you know, yeah. And sure, we both have made mistakes. We’ve both gone into relationships full on and pulled out … To back-track quickly, yeah. I don’t know, sometimes it might be a couple of dates in, sometimes it might be a couple of years in.
JULIE: And with that too, you know, the exit of a relationship sometimes can also emotionally not make sense to a lot of people, that we do have the ability, and it sounds really harsh, but we do have the ability to extract ourselves and move on quite quickly. Which, yeah, which for others might seem cruel, that we’re not attuned to our emotional emotions and why wouldn’t perhaps we have more sadness around that or … you know what I mean? I doesn’t seem right but we’re able to go in full on and also to retreat and move on quite quickly.
JEL: Which shouldn’t be a surprise for falling in love because it’s one of the strongest, most powerful emotional sets of emotions really, releasing all those endorphins, feeding our brain, excitement, new things. All the things that our brain wants to experience. Yeah. So, it is intoxicating. Yeah.
JULIE: So emotions for ADHDers, the majority of us I think would agree that our emotions are very close to the skin, ready to you know expose itself at any time. And I’ve … over the years, I’ve been involved with film and acting and for me some of the characters had to, were in a position where they were very upset and tears would be appropriate at this point in time. So for me I didn’t act. I didn’t act ‘oooooo’ because that was meant to resemble what sadness may be, for me I … my emotions, all I had to do was conjure up those emotions within me, which is very easy to do, and I had genuine tears and genuine feelings of this really strong sadness that was called for and celebrated – rather than having fake tears which is the standard thing to do. But, it’s there and it can be used for good, or in a positive way. It doesn’t always have to be a negative way.
JEL: So, I’m thinking another example. We think of it as over-excitement or passion, being fired up. Sometimes, this is an interesting one, because more than once, a lot of times, someone we know has come into our space and said they want to, they’re thinking of a new career or turning a hobby into a career and we know they’re rather good at that hobby. And then we run away with all this passion, that it’s just going to be brilliant at it. Now we’ve run a few businesses, we know how to do that sort of thing and we generally know how to turn passions into careers, and then sometimes it’s really hard, that doesn’t work. But we will dive into their shoes and we get so excited. [And so we’ve got an action plan for them.] It’s all worked out. [Got to do this. Do that.] Marketing materials. Yeah yeah yeah.
JULIE: Get the domain name immediately because this is going to work for you. We’re more excited than potentially they are.
JEL: Even though it’s their passion, and they would love to do it, and they say would love to do it. But we’ve got it all nailed. But of course, we’re not taking the risks. We’re not … we are risk takers of course with ADHD, but we’re not taking the risks for them in their shoes. So, that over passion, that’s such a lovely thing to do, to support and inspire someone but that can be overwhelming for them.
JULIE: And that could be seen as being pushy. “Hang on. I just said I like photography; it doesn’t mean that I need to run my own business and you know throw on my day job. [Sell the house and …]” Absolutely. I was also going to mention how our emotions can be pushed to the side and in steps adrenaline and impulsivity, in the likes of a crisis of course where there’s not a lot emotion involved and in fact our emotion is parted like the waves in a miracle situation. We just stop what we’re doing and we just go straight into action. Whereas other people may be quite emotional about a crisis. Let’s say it’s an accident ah, example no. Thankfully we haven’t been involved or witnessed or had, you know, in anything major major. But there was a situation where I … where there was a man who had fallen off his bike on the foot path and there were a couple people standing around and they weren’t actually doing anything, I thought. You know, in a split second I said “They’re not being particularly helpful.” So, I pulled the car over, I locked the car, my children were in the car and I said don’t you move. I pulled a blanket out of the boot, which is a brand-new blanket, ripped off the plastic and then went to this person; put them on their side, put a blanket over them and you know put some support under the head. Now, no I was not emotional about it. It just … that had to be done and I did it, but I I wasn’t crying about it. I wasn’t saddened by it. I wasn’t overjoyed that I was able to help you know what I mean? It’s funny. I was almost emotionless in that situation.
JEL: So you know, we’re talking about emotional dysregulation which means … it doesn’t mean a lack of regulation, unregulated. It’s dysregulation. So inappropriate regulation in different situations. We’ve met a couple of people recently who are involved in emergency services who are/who have ADHD, recently diagnosed you know, post qualifying to work in those areas and they’re brilliant. And you know, it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t be an emergency responder with this. It may be that you may, I’m only suggesting, I might be wrong, it may be you’ll be very well equipped to deal with … using dysregulation when you arrive at a car crash. You have to put the emotions aside. The typical/normal person ought to have a response of horror and fear for the situation and yeah. But someone who can put the emotions aside, that is a form of dysregulation I think.
JULIE: Other emotions … so we’re bouncing around. Just a reminder that these podcast episodes are not scripted. So, with ADHD typically we will over-talk. We’re being actually quite good at the moment but it’s not necessarily in a linear fashion. So, I thought we should also talk about fear as an emotion. And there was a situation … yesterday, yes. It involved a spider. Now I don’t like spiders. I’m the first one to anything bigger than a …oh I don’t know, a one cent piece, which we don’t have any more but if you can imagine something relatively small. Anything bigger than that, I’m out of there and so I call … [This one was a 20 cent piece.] I call to Jel saying “Please do something with the spider!” He will casually put a glass over the spider and find a piece of paper and take the spider outside and let it loose into the wilderness. But there was a situation that was different. So yesterday, what happened?
JEL: I noticed that was one on my shoulder. A black one on my white jumper and it was quite, yeah. He was just having a wee look around and going for a ride and it just freaked me out and so yeah, my response was an over dysregulated emotional response of throwing clothes around all over the place. “Get it off! Get it off!” and I could feel my blood pressure rising and my heart rising thinking: I could kill myself over this. It’s not … it’s just a spider but there’s no control in that moment. Once you go, you go and then I still I don’t kill it. I still pick it up and shake it outside even though it’s just probably nearly killed me through a heart attack or something. I’m not going to kill it and I’ve put it outside only to find its way back in at some point. But there are other situations, emergencies, when you suddenly realize there’s water pouring in your house. I don’t have that sort of reaction to that. It’s a very practical one but then see that’s, I could say that’s not driven by fear. I have acrophobia, an irrational fear of spiders, but I ought to have a much bigger fear of water pouring in the house. That could be expensive and not very good.
JULIE: Maybe that’s an example of that crisis point where you just put emotions aside and action is more important and you just dive straight into that.
JEL: Sorry just on that I remember actually being back in the UK when water was pouring in the house and my sister and I had a very different reaction. I think hers was more of an emotional one and mine was again a more practical one. Yeah, interesting. It’s yeah.
JULIE: The other one too is excitement and you know I, well we’ve spoken about excitement for other people but there’s also in a situation some, in public, again our overreaction might be too excitable. You know, we’ll be throwing hands up in the air and jumping around. That might be seen a little bit OTT [over the top] for others but anyway, that happens. Now I just wanted to also say, with emotions ADHD is a difference but within ADHDers there’s also a difference between ourselves. So not everyone has the same emotions. Some people will be fully into it, others will be quite reserved. Whether that’s a defense mechanism because they’ve learned that big emotions may have had some negative outcomes for them in the past. That could be potentially why. But I think a lot of the emotions that we have experienced undiagnosed, fast forward that to post-diagnosis I think for me, because I understand my brain more, it gives me more of an insight. So, in a situation where I naturally would have a big emotion, for a split second, I know it’s going to happen and I can do something about it. It doesn’t mean that I can completely control it but it gives me a little bit of that pre-warning, yeah.
JEL: Age, experience, and wisdom and so on. But we do have to acknowledge that if our brains, not if they are they’re wired differently to neurotypicals, if they’re firing off the neurons all the time as I said earlier, I think the key is emotions come from those innate or sometimes cognitive processes. What comes as a result of what our brains are doing. We shouldn’t be surprised if our emotions can be exaggerated larger, a more extreme shift from one space to the next quite quickly.
JULIE: And add in other ADHD traits like overthinking, don’t be surprised if we ruminate over sadness and you know. And there are little tactics and we spoke about that when we were talking about overthinking in a previous episode, this diversion therapy to get off that hamster wheel, that loop and sometimes just to allow ourselves to be distracted by other things, is a good thing. And we can we can ease ourselves out of that quite quickly. I wanted to talk about also too, just oh so briefly, ADHD coaches and counsellors/therapists. I think for the counsellors It’s probably one of the main issues that ADHD clients would come to them with, and that’s how do I deal with my big emotions. So, it’s not just an abstract thing it’s actually quite a major thing in our lives and yeah, and it can have some impairment. So there is help from a therapy counselling point of view. Coaches, excuse me, are more likely to help you with a goal but as far as dealing with emotions, it’s best to deal with that first through, as I said through a counsellor or therapist.
JEL: Agreed, which would be very interesting to spend some time with for us. Neither of us have, have we? [Not an ADHD counsellor.] No. No, very interesting. Yeah. We’ve got this far but yeah, if you … if again I often say if you’re 30 years younger than us watching this then yeah, it can be tough. It will be tough at times but don’t … try not to beat yourself up over it too much because you can survive it. You can get through it and …
JULIE: It can be really overwhelming though I think when you don’t understand, when you don’t understand. “I don’t know why I burst into tears and I was a sobbing mess over the slightest thing.” When you don’t understand why, yes that can be overwhelming. But again, with a little bit of knowledge and understanding about why this happens to our ADHD brains I think we can be a little bit more forgiving of ourselves but also help others understand the situation.
JEL: Yeah, I really do mean don’t beat yourself up over your emotional responses because you don’t have to respond the same way as everyone around you. Based on the principle that you know your brain works differently to people around you, typically, and if you randomly find 10 people, the odds are you’ll be the one that has ADHD and they don’t. Those sorts of statistics aren’t far off, are they? One in 10, one in 20, somewhere between those numbers? So, you know sometimes yeah you’ll just have to fake it to fit in and you’ll wonder “I’m not feeling what these people seem to feel.” That’s okay, you … it doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t mean you can’t feel sad, or shock, or horror, or injustice. You feel all these things but often you’ll need to process them in a different way when your brain’s ready to settle down and process it and then it may leap out, as Julie’s often said in this chat, suddenly your brain finds a little moment and what seems quite innocuous, that’s not the word is it. What seems like a very trivial, minor thing to those around you, you’ll get very upset by. That’s because you’re reacting to something that may have happened days, weeks, months earlier. It just gets focused into another area and just yeah, it’s just how it is.
JULIE: So there you go: big emotions, emotional dysregulation, mood swings, the fun parts of big emotions, and some impairments, I think we’ve covered a bit of a chunk of those, do you think? [Well done, yeah.] Thanks for listening.