ADHD and Anxiety
ADHD and anxiety frequently travel together, and each can mask or amplify the other.
Why They So Often Co-Occur
Living with unpredictable executive function creates genuine reasons to feel anxious: missed deadlines, forgotten commitments, and the constant low-level worry about what's about to slip through the cracks. Over time, this can develop into a more generalised anxiety that exists alongside (and partly because of) the underlying ADHD, rather than being an entirely separate condition that happens to coincide.
How This Can Complicate Recognition
Anxiety can also mask ADHD, or vice versa. Restlessness and difficulty concentrating are features of both, and a busy, anxious mind can look a great deal like an inattentive one from the outside, and even from the inside. This is part of why an accurate understanding of what's actually driving a given difficulty matters, rather than treating "anxious and can't focus" as automatically one diagnosis or the other.
What This Means for Treatment
Where both are present, addressing anxiety without accounting for the ADHD underneath it (the missed deadlines and forgotten commitments that keep generating fresh anxiety) tends to only partly help. Equally, addressing ADHD strategies without attending to anxiety that's become established in its own right can leave someone still anxious even once executive-function support is in place. Both need to be part of the same picture.