My 'ADHD' brain
Letter 155. My 'ADHD' brain.
Dear friend,
Today I caught myself telling a friend, "my brain is an ADHD brain."
I said it casually, the way you'd say you have a sweet tooth. And the moment it left my mouth, something in me paused. Because I don't actually know if it's true. I've never been diagnosed. That pause is what this whole letter is about.
Let me tell you where the phrase came from.
For about six months now, the same ad has followed me around Instagram. An app for ADHD men, over forty, professionals and founders. A salt and pepper man, clearly accomplished, sitting in some podcast chair, saying things that land a little too close to home:
The world sees me as successful, but I know the reality.
For years I tried, but I could not build discipline or consistency.
The promotion, the recognition, went to someone else, while I did the work.
I know I'm good. I've done the work. Yet the results haven't come.
Many of them hit. Some of them hit hard.
So today, talking to my friend, I described my brain as a hungry pet. You throw it something to chew on, it devours it, and it's back at your feet, tongue out, tail wagging, begging for the next thing. If it doesn't get it, it yelps and circles and pulls at your clothes until you give in. It stays relentless until it gets the next morsel.
That is exactly what I have done my whole life. I keep feeding it. New things to learn, new hobbies, new challenges, new projects. I learned guitar. I build software and little robots. I paint, I cook, I make content. I co-founded India's first working BBA, Let's Enterprise.
The fast brain is a gift. It learns quickly, breaks down complex ideas, builds fast, reads a room. But it also drops things midway. It breaks what is already working. It re-invents the wheel for things that never needed reinventing. And worst of all, even after it builds something beautiful, it stays hungry. Restless. Unsatisfied. It never feels rested.
That is not a good feeling.
So, being me, I did what my hungry brain loves. I downloaded a dozen research papers on adult ADHD, fed them to Google's NotebookLM, and asked it to crunch the lot into a few bullet points. My ADHD brain loves AI. It doesn't have the patience to read. It just wants the tasty bits.
It came back with the familiar list. Sudden mood swings. A quick temper, followed by instant regret. A constant inner restlessness, the kind that uses the panic of a last-minute deadline just to force some focus. Trouble naming what you actually feel. And, on the good side, joy and energy felt more intensely than most people feel them.
Then I asked what helps, without medication. Therapy. Sleep, good food, cardio. Lists, reminders, routine, a quieter desk. Community with people who get it.
Finally I asked the real question. How do I know if I actually have this?
I'm not going to share that answer. Because the truth is, I don't know if I have this condition. And that, finally, is what this letter is about.
Knowledge is a double edged sword. And half knowledge is a double edged sword in the hands of a monkey.
We have to be careful with labels, self-diagnosis, and fancy sounding jargon.
Do I relate to the ad? Yes.
Do I relate to the research? Yes.
Does that mean I have ADHD? No.
Should I keep saying "my ADHD brain"? No.
Should I see a professional and find out? Maybe. That's a choice, and only a trained professional gets to make that call. Not an Instagram ad, and not me.
What I can do is take the parts anyone could use, label or no label. Move my body. Learn to sit with my emotions. Build systems that hold my focus. Write down what I feel.
I've said this for years. Writing is clarity. Putting your thoughts and feelings on a page brings a relief that almost nothing else does. By the way, what do you think these letters are?
Here's the part the ad never shows you. What I've actually done with this brain.
Eight years ago I wrote you a letter called "Are you interested in too many things?" Back then I was sure my wide, restless mind was a curse. I dipped my fingers in a dozen pots and never went deep enough to find the gold. What I've understood since is that it was never a depth problem. I go very deep. I just wanted to go deep into everything at once. The fix was not to kill the width. It was to choose one thing to be deep in, and let the width serve it. I chose young people. Now the art draws the cartoons that reach them. The writing becomes this body of work. The technology helps it scale. The width finally has a job.
And around that one choice, slowly, over the last decade, I've built scaffolding for a brain that won't sit still:
A daily meditation practice.
A workout I guard, the rule being I never miss two days in a row.
A morning hour for reading, music and art, before the world gets loud.
A journalling habit, though that one is only two weeks old.
Two coaches, over the years, whose real job was to help me see my own strengths and actually use them, instead of fighting them.
A team I've built and handed real power to, so the things my brain drops midway don't fall.
A daily time-tracking practice, so I can see where the hours really go.
And one small ritual: three things to focus on, every single day. Just three.
Now the honest part. These habits break. All the time. I miss the meditation. The workout slips. The journal goes blank for a week. And the only thing that has actually made a difference is this. I restart without guilt. Every time. No punishment, no long story about how I've failed again. I just begin again.
Because, and I wrote a whole letter about this once, "Pleasure is the antidote," the restless, never-satisfied feeling is not a discipline problem you beat with more control. It's a receiver gone a little numb from being overfed. The answer isn't to feed the pet more, and it isn't to cage it. It's to learn to taste the tea. To savour the small win instead of sprinting past it to the next one. To feel more, not less.
There's one more thing about that app I have to tell you, because it's a masterclass.
It's called persona targeting.
What the makers did, brilliantly, is define one narrow person. Male, forty plus, professional or founder, smart but restless. Then they interviewed dozens of people who fit, and listened for the exact feelings, the exact words, the exact situations those people live inside. Then they built ads that say those words back to you, until the screen feels like it's reading your mind. That is why the ad worked on me. It was built to.
This is sophisticated marketing at its best, and it hides under many names. Value proposition design. User research. Design thinking. Pains and gains. Product-market fit. Different doors into the same room. Whether you build a company or a career, you should understand this deeply, because the same skill that sold me a label can help you genuinely understand the people you want to serve.
If that interests you, write back and I'll send you a few good places to start.
I made moong dal halwa this week. If you've made it, you know the joke of it. You cannot walk away. You cannot multitask. You stand over the kadhai and stir, and stir, and stir, for forty minutes, and the moment you reach for your phone, it catches and burns at the bottom. My hungry brain hates it. Which is probably exactly why I should make it more often. The ghee, the dal, the patience. It only turns golden if you stay.
And before I go, the question I can't stop turning over. If we built our schools and our workplaces around bursts of deep focus followed by real rest, instead of demanding everyone perform evenly from nine to five every single day, how many of us would suddenly look a lot less broken, and a lot more alive?
Two weeks ago I wrote to you about hunger in young people, how we keep mistaking it for laziness. This week the hunger is mine. Maybe that's the thread. Maybe most of us aren't broken at all. Maybe we're just hungry, and we've been handed the wrong labels.
If anything here found you, write back. Tell me what you've tried, and what has actually helped you live a fuller, more satisfying life. I read every reply.
In fratitude (friendship and gratitude),
Adi
P.S. If that restless brain sounded a little too familiar, I wrote a whole book about what happens when you stop fighting it and put it to work. It's called Restless to Remarkable. You can find it here.
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