Part 3: Living with Undiagnosed ADHD - ADHD Burnout at Work

Stephanie Angela
Dec 28, 2025
6 min read

The slow unraveling at work

If college showed me the cracks, working life split them wide open.

Open book symbolizing a work place operating manual

Starting my first real job felt like stepping into a world where everyone else had received a manual I somehow missed. People remembered instructions with ease. They kept track of tasks without drowning. They could sit through meetings without their minds drifting in twenty different directions. Meanwhile, I worked twice as hard just to appear average.

Masking wasn’t something I consciously decided to do. It was something I had trained myself to do long before adulthood. It was survival. You watch, you copy, you adapt. You squeeze your brain into shapes it was never built for. And for a while, it works. At least on the outside.

Inside, it cost everything.

The exhaustion wasn’t normal tiredness. It was bone deep mental fatigue from monitoring myself constantly:

Am I talking too fast,
Do they understand what I’m saying,
Did I forget something,
Did that message make sense,
Why can’t I remember what they just said,
Why does everyone else seem to just know what to do,
Do I look like an idiot,

Day after day, I pushed through with a smile that said “I’m fine” and a brain that was quietly falling apart. I dreaded going to work each day, giving myself a pep talk on the drive there, already disappointed in myself before I’d even arrived.

The office environment was never one I should have been in. The noise was overwhelming and distracting. What counted as background noise for most people was always in the foreground for me. Lights, movement, conversations, phones ringing, it all blended into a constant sensory overload. My brain felt like a swirling mess, unable to concentrate, let alone function the way it was expected to.

Constantly needing to transition from one task to another was excruciating. People would stop by my desk, pulling me out of whatever fragile focus I’d managed to build. I’d have to abandon a train of thought, one I would almost certainly forget, to talk about something else entirely. Returning to the original task was never quick or easy, if I could manage it at all.

Managing a team took everything out of me. The bickering, complaints, and minor issues all demanded my full attention, always taking centre stage. If it had just been about managing workloads and details, it might have been easier. But the people side was all consuming. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that it all felt so trivial. We weren’t in high school, yet some days, it felt like we were.

Friendships: struggling quietly

Friendships were another maze I didn’t have instructions for, especially in the workplace.

I felt everything intensely, but expressing those emotions felt almost impossible. I don’t think I even realised I had emotions that needed expressing. I just felt different. Not quite right. Never really fitting in. Pretending to be just like them, but knowing it was all a front to cover up how I actually felt.

I wanted people to understand what I meant when I spoke, not just the words themselves, but the meaning underneath. That subtle difference often led to misunderstandings. Sometimes even I didn’t fully understand what I was trying to say. And if I was confused, how could anyone else possibly understand me?

So the winding path continued, the one I stayed on, convinced it would eventually lead somewhere. To clarity. To a better version of me. I’m not sure what I thought I was searching for. I just kept walking.

I lived with a constant fear of being too much, not enough, too boring, too intense, too emotional, too distracted, too inconsistent. The constant masking, different versions of myself for different situations, made it impossible for anyone to see the real me. Including me. Who was I really? No one knew. Not even myself.

My friendships were rarely consistent. I befriended all kinds of people, different personalities, backgrounds, interests, but they rarely overlapped. I flitted between individual friendships, changing my mask with each one.

Work friends were often formed out of necessity, in the hope of making work life feel more bearable.

Social friends filled different roles;

The fun, outgoing one for distraction.
The quieter one who seemed excited by my attention, making me feel wanted.
The popular one, where I worked hard to be interesting enough to earn an invitation into their world.

Looking back now, I realise that because I didn’t know who I truly was, I didn’t know what I genuinely wanted or valued. I didn’t know what kind of people I would naturally align with. I was searching for myself through other people.

I didn’t understand why communication felt harder for me than for others. Why I could feel something so deeply but not find the words until hours or days later, if at all. Why some responsibilities overwhelmed me while others energized me. I blamed myself for all of it. What I thought was My flaws. My failures. My inabilities.

ADHD Burnout at Work: when pretending becomes a slow collapse

ADHD burnout at work, a woman looking burnt out.

ADHD burnout at work does not arrive suddenly. There is no dramatic breaking point. It creeps in quietly. For me it was in tasks that were once manageable but suddenly felt crushing. In the growing resentment toward responsibilities I used to handle. In the sense that I was losing myself one tiny piece at a time. Feeling incapable of even the smallest things. The constant sense of falling behind, “You should be further in your career by now.”The nagging voice whispering, “Everyone else is coping. Why can’t you?”

I used to think burnout meant you had nothing left. But ADHD burnout is different.

You still show up. You still perform. You still smile. You still push. But inside, you’re slowly disappearing. By the time I reached true burnout, I didn’t recognise myself. I wasn’t lazy. I wasn’t unmotivated. I wasn’t failing. I was exhausted from years of forcing my brain to operate in ways it was never designed to. From surviving in environments I didn’t feel emotionally safe in. From pretending, constantly. And I was tired of pretending.

I hid it well. No one saw the panic behind the pauses, the self doubt behind every forgotten detail. They didn’t see the young woman who felt constantly behind, constantly confused, constantly overwhelmed, and far too ashamed to admit it. They didn’t see someone living a life that didn’t fit, because she didn’t yet know the truth of who she was.

The Way Out

By the age of 28, I found myself searching for a way out. I knew I couldn’t maintain the persona forever. Something had to change.

Looking back now, at 54, with self awareness and an ADHD diagnosis, the logical steps seem obvious:

Find a different career that works for you.
Understand your strengths.
Analyze what actually works for your brain.

But back then, logic wasn’t leading the way. Impulse was. I just needed out. I needed a big change. The most obvious escape at the time was motherhood, becoming a stay at home mother.

I want to be clear, wanting children was very real for me. Becoming a mother was not a mistake, nor something I didn’t genuinely want. But choosing to stay home became my escape route. It was wrong in the sense that I used it to avoid confronting workplace trauma. I never questioned returning to work. I used my children as a reason not to face what had hurt me, not to unpack the scars, not to search for work that might actually fulfil me. I pressed pause, without realizing that I was also postponing the deeper work I still needed to do.

Coming Next: Motherhood, The Pause

In Part 4, I’ll share what life looked like as I stepped into motherhood. How I found comfort among other exhausted mothers. How, for the first time, I felt on the same page as everyone else, finally understood. Until the children grew older, and everything I’d paused came rushing back.

If this post resonated with you, here are a few

other articles and tools my readers have found helpful.