Why I Found Out I Had ADHD at 45, and What I Wish I'd Known Sooner
Written by Robyn Gie, Holistic Health Coach
Robyn Gie is a holistic health coach, TRE® provider, and founder of WHY Holistic Health, known for her intuitive, grounded, and spiritually informed approach. She helps clients reconnect with their “why,” integrating movement, nutrition, and nervous system regulation to create lasting health.
I can't tell you which podcast it was. I can tell you what it did. Someone I had never met described a life that sounded like mine, and a switch flipped. Since my diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) two years ago, almost everything I used to file under "character flaws" has started to look like information instead. If this article lands for even one person the way that podcast landed for me, it was worth writing. It's also the reason a podcast of my own is now on my mind. If you see any of this in your child, don't make them wait until they are 45 to understand themselves.
The character flaws
At home, I was the grumpy one. At school, I was Miss Personality. Head of spirit, prefect, leader, life of the party. Everyone saw one of those people, and my family saw the other.
I'm also not a social person. I love conversations with one other person, and I hate small talk with a passion.
I understand now that the second one was masking. A brain working far harder than anyone could see. It explains why I had to sleep every single afternoon when my friends didn't. It explains why the grumpiness landed on the people closest to me. The performance had to be paid for somewhere.
From a nervous system point of view, performing all day is sustained effort. The cost usually showed up later, in how drained I was by the time I got home.
Thirty jobs
In 47 years, I have had roughly thirty jobs, and I was brilliant at every one of them except waitressing. I know that, at first, this can look like I could never hold down a job, but there is another perspective entirely. Mine.
The short ones were mostly admin. I was good at them, and I quit out of boredom, which baffled my bosses because I seemed happy. I was, in the moment. The work was driven by tasks and lists, so ticking things off gave me the quick dopamine I needed, but there was no lasting interest for me to hold on to.
The ones I kept were the ones that broke down into short goals. The film industry, with short commercial shoots and strong deadlines. Later, the wedding and events industry. The buildup to one big day. Very clear beginnings and ends. Even personal training, which gave me a new small goal every hour of the day. I thought I was restless, but I was actually building the structure my brain needed.
When something interests me, I hyperfocus. This is how an ADHD brain often works. Interest, novelty and challenge switch it on. Importance alone usually doesn't. It makes sense that I know so much about the human body because I don't get bored by its endless layers of learning. Every answer opens another door.
Brain imaging research suggests another piece. The brain's default mode network, the part that wanders when we're not focused, is meant to quieten when we focus. In ADHD, it doesn't always, so attention can slip even on things that matter. Interest, novelty and challenge seem to help the focusing networks take over, and that may be part of why hyperfocus is possible at all.
Depression, anxiety, and the real story
Along the way, I was diagnosed with depression, and then with anxiety. The low days used to frighten me. No energy brought up a familiar feeling in my body, the one the doctor termed "depression." Looking back, I don't think depression was the full picture. My sadness at the time was circumstantial, and it lived in my body, looping whenever my nervous system perceived something from the past. That is how a nervous system works.
But in the past, that feeling was enough to start a chain, from low and unmotivated to highly agitated. That was the "anxiety," my ADHD brain spinning stories, and the stories fed the worry.
As a freelancer, no work meant no pay, and as a trainer, I felt responsible for bringing the high energy, a part I had played since I was a child. As a mom, I often spiralled into guilt when I had no energy to give my children. Many people with ADHD describe an intense sting from criticism or rejection, or from never feeling like they are living up to expectations, their own and other people's. I know that feeling.
When I understood that and found somatic release through Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®), I could break the loop. I could welcome the emotion in, let it move through, and rewrite the story. I'm well-versed now in the feelings that come up in my body from environment and circumstance, and I know how to regulate by allowing them.
The other part of the story is my dopamine. Just having the awareness that the low days were, and are, my dopamine running out has changed how I meet them. In my own experience, medication has largely changed that for me, but I'm also mindful about managing my dopamine instead of working against it, so I reach out for my own healthy hits. Movement, music while I work, painting, working alongside someone, short timed sprints, a breakfast rich in protein, gamifying tasks.
I'm gentle with myself now about how my weeks pan out because I can do nine days of work in one day when I put my mind to it. So on a low day, I don't judge myself. I rest, knowing the next surge will come.
The relationships
I'm not writing this to justify the times I showed up questionably in relationships and even friendships. I'm going to speak freely as someone who has done a tremendous amount of work to understand why, when I have loved so deeply, I have also managed to let go of and lose very valuable connections. Living in a constant state of explaining myself and still feeling misunderstood became so intolerable for my nervous system that it felt safer to just be alone.
Relationships can be tricky terrain for someone with ADHD, and I want to share what I've learned, for the person who feels mostly misunderstood and for the partner who may be missing the piece that matters most.
If I had understood some of this earlier, things might have been different. Maybe this helps someone get there sooner.
Many of us feel things fast and big. The part of the brain that slows a reaction down works differently in ADHD. A nervous system that has spent a lifetime hearing it was too much, too sensitive or not trying hard enough reads a look or a tone as a threat before the thinking brain has a say. Then we spend time afterward repairing what the moment did.
For some of us, that looks like a big reaction. For me, it looks different. I shut down in arguments, and I can need days to come back. It isn't punishment, and it isn't not caring. It's a nervous system that has reached a threshold and goes quiet to protect itself. For a partner who doesn't understand that, the silence can read as a threat to a nervous system that is ready to fight.
Many of us start with hyperfocus. Interest is high, attention is total, and it can feel like the real thing. When the novelty settles, the attention moves, and the other person can feel the shift without knowing why.
It's true for me after a wonderful weekend or holiday together. Afterward, I go quiet. Before, I thought it was depression of sorts, and I beat myself up about it. Closeness and fun take real energy. Days of high attention and stimulation, often with some masking, mean a system that has been switched on that long needs time to come down, and for many people with ADHD, that looks like being alone and doing very little. The dopamine high of novelty and connection may drop afterward too, leaving me flat or drained, although that is a hypothesis and not an established finding. Deeper closeness can feel exposing, so the system pulls back to protect itself. It isn't a sign that I didn't love it.
Missed plans, forgotten details and being late can look like "you don't care." For many of us, it's a brain that loses track of time, and the caring is still there.
Friendships work the same way. When my dopamine is high, I'll make the call. If you don't answer, you can probably be sure that when you phone or text back, it will take me days to respond because my dopamine is low. When we do chat, it will be for hours. The friendships that understand that have become my truest and longest because having someone understand me and love me anyway means more to me than anything.
None of this makes me easy to love. It makes me worth understanding, and it gives me something to work with. When I can name what is happening in my body, I can slow down, regulate, and come back to the conversation.
If you've loved deeply and felt misunderstood, you're not alone. Understanding yourself is where it starts to change.
Why perimenopause changes everything for me and my ADHD
I want to be clear. Perimenopause doesn't create ADHD, but it does remove the scaffolding that might have been "hiding" it. I also want to be upfront about where I've found the science to be sitting. The estrogen and dopamine relationship is more complex than "low estrogen equals low dopamine," and a lot of the evidence is still emerging, so please speak to your doctor about your own situation. This is my experience.
I'm not alone in only finding out about my ADHD in my forties, largely because estrogen has been quietly propping up the dopamine system the whole time. Estrogen stimulates dopamine production, slows its breakdown and reuptake, and acts on the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning, working memory and impulse control. For decades, it has worked like a safety net under a brain that was already wired differently.
Estrogen drops every month in the days before menstruation, too. If you already have a dopamine system that works differently, that monthly drop may land harder. It's worth knowing, for ourselves and for our daughters.
Then perimenopause arrives, and estrogen doesn't just decline. It swings. The net becomes unreliable, and the strategies that worked for thirty years stop working almost overnight.
If you recognise yourself
If you are a woman over forty who has spent a lifetime being "too much" and "not enough" in the same breath, who has been the life of the party and then needed to lie down, who has been brilliant at a job and then quit it for no reason anyone could see, this may be worth looking into. Not because something is wrong with you. Because there may be a name for it.
ADHD gave it a label. At first, I thought my ADHD was getting worse. Then I realised that by understanding myself through this lens, I could take the mask off.
Here I am. Unapologetic where I need to be, at peace with why I'm difficult to understand, gentle with myself, and well, me.
Read more from Robyn Gie
Robyn Gie, Holistic Health Coach
Robyn Gie is a holistic health coach, TRE provider, and personal trainer with over a decade of experience in movement, nervous system regulation, and nutrition guidance. She is the founder of WHY Holistic Health, a practice rooted in the belief that lasting change begins when people reconnect with their deeper why. With a background in the film and events industries, Robyn brings creativity and authentic storytelling into her coaching and writing. Her work integrates strength training, nervous system-informed movement, and practical nutrition support to help people build sustainable health and resilience. Through lived experience and embodied practice, she supports individuals in moving out of survival mode and back into connection with themselves.
