In late 2011, I was woken from a deep sleep by a call letting me know the lab where I was doing undergraduate research in organic chemistry had flooded. I rushed to campus along with two or three graduate students and through our combined efforts, the mess was cleaned up and the damage mitigated. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t the whole truth. 

To be specific: One night during my junior year at Ole Miss, my mentor called me to let me know that I flooded his lab, and, still half asleep and in pajama bottoms, I ran to campus and helped three exhausted people who hadn’t flooded the lab fix my colossal fuckup.

See, I had been working in this lab for over half a year and so day-to-day I was operating more-or-less independently. That afternoon I had set up a routine reaction that I’d run dozens of times, but for reasons I don’t think I knew even then, I opted for the first time to set up this reaction with a water-cooling system, and I also opted to not secure the hoses in place. At some point after I left for the day, the inevitable happened and one of the hoses (which again was not even needed for this particular reaction) shot off the glassware I’d attached it to and started spraying water directly onto the floor. For several hours. Until someone happened to come in to work up one of their own reactions and found a lake where their bench used to be.

The next morning all anyone wanted to know was: Why? They all had faith that I had some reason for trying the reaction with the coolant and just forgot or didn’t know how to secure the hose safely in place. Forgetting to secure the hose was an understandable mistake, one anybody could have made. Setting it up in the first place? Surely there was a rational explanation. I remember my face getting red and hot enough it could surely have evaporated all the remaining water as I explained: a “No, I hadn’t seen a paper suggesting I could get better yields with water coolant” and “No, no-one had suggested it as a way for me to let the reaction run longer so I could leave it for the weekend”. It was just a catastrophic failure of my autopilot system. It wasn’t the first or last time I made a bizarre mistake I couldn’t explain even to myself. It probably only stands out in my memory because other people were there to witness the aftermath. I have shed enough tears over my stupid mistakes in the years since to flood a much bigger lab, and I didn’t know why I seemed to be the only one making them.

My Diagnosis of ADHD: A Saga

In graduate school my mental health, never on the steadiest ground, fell right off a cliff. As I started to seek help, terms like “major depression”, “generalized anxiety disorder” and “panic disorder” were bandied about pretty freely by my health professionals, and I was caught in what felt like an endless cycle that went something like this: I would make a silly mistake followed by an outsized reaction and prolonged depressive episode, I delayed addressing the mistake because even thinking about it brought up as much shame and anxiety as if it had just happened, some external factor like an upcoming deadline forced me to confront and address the mistake and, finally, I realized my self-loathing and anxiety were way out of proportion with the actual mistake and, if anything, the delay was what caused actual problems for my work. Rinse. Repeat.

Many of you probably read the introduction to this blog and thought, ‘You spilled some water over 12 years ago, the only consequences were some lost sleep for you and the other 20-somethings who volunteered to clean up and you’re still thinking about it?’ Yes. Yes, I am. I’ve had to pause my typing more than once because trying to recall details sent me into a shame spiral. But I expect someone out there read it, had visceral flashbacks to a succession of similar instances in their own life, and to them I want to say, “You, my dear friend, may have ADHD.”*

* I am not a mental health professional and cannot diagnose ADHD. My degree is in mitochondria.

My ADHD diagnosis came in fits and starts. Early in grad school, one of the best therapists I’ve ever had told me, “Everything you’re saying [about shame spirals, panic attacks and extreme procrastination] sounds like it could be a direct or downstream consequence of ADHD. But I just got diagnosed myself so this could be a case of being handed a hammer and seeing everything as a nail.” She also said that bright people with fewer hyperactive symptoms sometimes go through childhood undiagnosed because they develop strategies to mask and compensate that work well enough to keep their grades up even while struggling mentally, and declining school performance is often how mental health issues get noticed in children. Initially I cut that part out of this blog because it felt vain to call myself bright, which I’ve now done anyways through paralipsis, the rhetorical technique most famously employed in the hook for Kanye West’s “Gold Digger”. This digression was brought to you by ADHD. I was skeptical, mostly because I didn’t think someone having regular panic attacks should start taking stimulants, the ADHD treatment that looms largest in the popular imagination, but I continued to work with her on coping strategies that started from the premise that dealing with my focus and executive dysfunction could help improve my self-image and reduce my depression. 

Eventually, things got bad enough that I did pursue a medical diagnosis so I could start medication. I had a truly awful experience with a psychiatrist that led to me dropping the whole idea for several more years, but eventually, finally, when I was drowning in my postdoctoral work and desperately grasping at straws, I remembered my previous therapist and tried again. This time, I did a ton of research to convince myself I wasn’t malingering to get attention. I read the DSM V entry, several papers and more Reddit threads than was healthy. I talked to people who had been diagnosed, two mental health professionals and someone at the learning resources center at my university who specializes in working with neurodivergent students.

After one of these conversations with my therapist, I spent an afternoon typing out a three-page word document listing all the reasons I thought I could have ADHD (which, incidentally, I forgot to bring to my diagnostic appointment like my therapist had advised). In the end, it was my Instagram algorithm, presumably primed by all the reading I was doing, that convinced me to give diagnosis another shot. I started seeing reels ripped from TikTok of this guy, Connor DeWolfe, acting out some extremely specific scenarios that he said were linked to his ADHD. I inhaled video after video, many of which felt like they were talking about me and my life. And because of his videos, I was finally able to be like, ‘Look, this may all be in your head, but your experiences are real; you’re not making it up.’ I made the appointment, got put on first Adderall then Vyvanse with a guanfacine chaser and things immediately started to turn around.

The Literature on Careless Mistakes

Despite being a criterion of diagnosis in the DSM, there are only a handful of articles directly interested in “careless mistakes” in adult ADHD. Some studies have shown increases in the frequency of both workplace and driving accidents and injuries. One study found a trend toward increased “adverse underwater events” for navy divers with ADHD, but the study lacked the statistical power to draw any conclusions. This relationship between ADHD and workplace accidents is reduced if you control for conditions like depression, anxiety and addiction, which we are more likely to deal with than neurotypical coworkers.

I can attest from experience that these contribute to a sort of brain fog that make mistakes worse and more frequent, but even when they are well-controlled, I feel like I mess up more often than my coworkers. Part of that feeling is a lie born out of a maladaptive coping mechanism. A couple studies have used simulated workplaces to evaluate people with and without ADHD on different tasks related to a normal day at the office. While both studies found some minor impairments in ADHDers compared to controls, the self-reported impairments among ADHDers were laughably higher than any objective measurement or subjective evaluation by a third party. We can be extremely self-critical, which I’ve come to think of as a way to head off criticism from other people that would otherwise trigger Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and a death spiral of self-loathing.

However, larger statistical studies have shown consistently that there is a significant cost to working with ADHD. Workers with ADHD can expect to make between $8,900 and $15,400 less a year than our age- and experience-matched peers, and we take more sick days, struggle with time management and generally have more performance-related impairments that are estimated to cost our employers an average of $4,000 per worker with ADHD per year. What we are not, surprisingly, is more likely to be fired. Maybe that’s because we’re more likely to be seen as creative problem-solvers who contribute value with our ideas and outside-the-box solutions. Additionally, when we find a career that fits well, we tend to work hard, often to the point of hyperfixating, on the task in front of us. I’m not aware of any estimates as to how much money these traits save our employers, but it seems to be enough to keep us around.

The Creative, Out-of-the-Box Solution

I struggled writing this post because while I think I have an ok handle on the problem: I make dumb mistakes, not as often as I think, but still more often than I’d like. But I’m still struggling with implementing any of the creative, out-of-the-box solutions that billionaire ADHDers like Bill Gates and Richard Branson or more artistic ADHDers like Walt Disney or Paris Hilton are so famous for. I’m turning in this draft with some things I’ve tried, some advice I pulled from my sources and a working theory, but I want to be up front about where I still am in my process.

Ultimately, my advice to ADHDers on the same journey is to take from this what seems useful to you and leave the rest. As useful as ADHD meds have been for me, there doesn’t seem to be a magic pill that will work for every person in every situation. Having ADHD is exhausting. It costs time and money and relationships, and we spend an inordinate amount of energy cobbling together coping mechanisms to make our lives resemble what the lives of neurotypicals look like through our admittedly warped glasses. That said, what follows are some ideas to try that will hopefully work for some of you in some situations.

Helpful things I’ve tried:

Finding what works for me at work

This isn’t the easiest or most practical advice, but for me and many ADHDers before me, finding the right fit for work cannot be overstated in terms of being successful at what you do. Not only will you pay more attention to tasks you care about (and so make fewer mistakes), your work environment will always play a huge role in how well you meet your goals. We tend to do better in positions with flexible hours that reward performance over hours clocked. We also are better at jobs that offer us variety and challenge in our day to day. Maybe our autopilot is less developed than that of neurotypicals, but I often feel like getting used to a task can paradoxically lead to more careless mistakes than if I regularly have new challenges to tackle.

Accessing good mental health treatment

I’ve already talked a bit about how important medication and therapy have been for me. They aren’t magic, and finding the right combination of treatments requires time, money and luck that many people won’t have access to, but treatment can be life-changing. It is worth pursuing if you at all can.

Making lists

This is a common strategy for ADHDers from me to Alex Clairemont-Diaz in Casey McQuiston’s delightful novel Red, White and Royal Blue, and it can be incredibly helpful. There are better and worse uses for lists. I have notebooks from my childhood with scribbled lists of everything from people I thought would make good friends to times I’d been a jerk to Digimon I thought would be good pairs for people in my life. Admittedly, none of these were particularly helpful for mitigating ADHD symptoms. However, making to-do lists at the beginning of the day, week and month will make you think through all the things that need to get done and prioritize them so you can allocate enough time to important tasks. Rushing can be a source of a lot of careless mistakes. Even beyond that, having protocols and checklists in front of you while you work through a particular task will help ensure you don’t skip steps or mis-remember their order, measurements and wait times, all of which have been sources for my own mistakes.

Things I’ve read can help:

Hacking reward pathways

Many of our problems with addiction, hyperfixating and distraction arise from our complicated relationship with our brains’ reward pathways. But this is something that can be made to work for us rather than against us. (In theory. I am still very bad at this.) If you can gamify your daily tasks, you can make accomplishing them activate your reward pathways to help keep you focused and interested on the things on your list. I wrote myself a table-top game where I roll dice to allocate time to particular tasks, and I assign more numbers on a D20 to more important tasks so that they are more likely to come up throughout the day. I have only successfully played it twice, but it was quite helpful both times, and I have aspirations of developing it into a habit.

Engaging in physical activity

Having periods of physical activity throughout the day, either as part of your work or as breaks from it, can be really helpful at levelling you out and keeping you from rushing through tasks out of impatience or making hasty decisions, both of which can lead to mistakes. I’ve taken to taking walks in different directions around campus when I get that “crawling out of my skin” feeling, and it always helps. I aspire to implement a more regular exercise routine.

Having a good support network

Building relationships with people who can keep you accountable and with whom you are comfortable asking for help can be a useful strategy for both preventing and mitigating mistakes. Mentors, collaborators, friends and family can (and are often happy to) give you reminders, help you brainstorm and plan, and help you troubleshoot and commiserate when things go wrong. I am admittedly bad at asking for help when I think I’ve done something stupid, but the times when just discussing things with my boss or husband or friends have brought me out of a shame spiral are legion.

My Working Theory

Some of these strategies might help you. They might lower your mistake frequency or give you a better perspective when problems do come up. But even if nothing here feels like it’s working, I hope you’ll be kinder to yourself. It’s easier said than done, but I encourage you to look at the evidence and write a reminder somewhere visible that you are harder on yourself than others and, likely, think you’re doing worse than objective metrics would show. The world, both in and out of the cubicle or lab or stable or scuba suit or wherever your “office” happens to be, has in-built accommodations for the problems that impact neurotypicals, but most attempts to accommodate and even celebrate neurodivergence are in their infancy. 

Overall, please remember this: You bring value to your job, relationships and hobbies even on days when you break things, and it is ok for you to give yourself the grace you so often give to the people you compare yourself to. That’s my working theory: Be kind to yourself and embrace the mess. I’m sorry that it’s hard, and I wish it weren’t, but you’ve got this.

Brian studies cardiac regenerative medicine in the Qian lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They completed their B.S. in Chemistry and Biological Sciences at the University of Mississippi in 2014 and their Ph.D. in cell physiology at the end of 2020 under Dr. Mitra at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. They live in Greensboro with their husband and too many cats (6). Getting diagnosed and treated for ADHD dramatically improved their quality of life, and I’m sure they’d love to tell you about it at length on Twitter at @brineshrimp2.

This blog is kindly sponsored by G-Research.