ADHD: The Chicken and the Egg
Was I born with this brain, or did I train it to be this way?
That question has haunted me for years because the evidence points both ways: I’ve always been restless, quick to start, slow to finish, and addicted to the sheer jolt of momentum, but I’ve also lived a life that demanded constant motion—one crisis after another, one reinvention after the next.
So maybe it’s not nature or nurture, maybe it’s a feedback loop: a brain shaped by chaos, and a life shaped by that brain.
The Brain That Builds the Storm
ADHD is often described as a chemical imbalance, a shortfall of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that signals motivation and reward. But that’s only half the story.
Dopamine isn’t static—it’s responsive. It’s sculpted by experience, environment, and the stories we tell ourselves about effort.
A life lived in fight-or-flight mode, a childhood spent scanning for cues, a career built on adrenaline, the daily task of raising children in a world that never lets you fully rest—these things train your dopamine system just as much as genes do.
The constant vigilance, the split attention, the invisible calculus of a pressured mind (“Who needs me next?” “What did I forget?”) keeps the nervous system running on high alert. Over time, that state can blur the line between innate wiring and learned adaptation. Your brain learns to crave motion, to equate stillness with danger.
The Architecture of Chaos
In neuroimaging studies, ADHD brains often show over-connectivity between the Default Mode Network (the brain’s imagination engine) and the Salience Network (the system that flags relevance—that is, what it thinks matters). It is a beautiful, unruly design that means creativity and chaos live side by side. It also means the boundary between internal and external worlds can blur—your thoughts become too loud, your emotions too immediate, your attention too porous.
When I look back, I can see the shape of this wiring everywhere; I built a life that mirrored it: fast-moving, stimulating, unpredictable. The external world became my regulation system. Chaos on the outside matched chaos within. And in the brief still moments, the silence felt unbearable, so… I’d stir something new.
Chicken, meet egg.
The Gift and the Glitch
There’s a reason many creative people have ADHD; the same brain that struggles to stay on task when things aren’t registering as “relevant” can spend twelve hours lost in design, writing, or building something new.
That’s hyperfocus—a neural lock-on mechanism that floods the brain with dopamine and quiets distraction. When the task feels alive, ADHD turns into flow It’s not attention deficit—it’s attention intensity.
That’s the Gift. The Glitch is what happens when the dopamine fades and the meaning evaporates.
When the dopamine fades, the gears grind. The world goes dim as shame fills the space where energy used to live. ADHD isn’t a lack of willpower—it’s a mismatch between interest and obligation.
And that mismatch creates a lifetime of self-blame: “If I can hyperfocus on a project for twelve hours, why can't I focus for ten minutes on my taxes?”
The answer isn’t discipline, not exactly, it’s more like dopamine choreography.
Training the Brain You Have
Neuroplasticity means the brain is always under construction. Each repetition of a task or thought strengthens the connections you choose to use, while unused ones weaken.
Even dopamine receptors adapt: the more often you complete a rewarding task (no matter how small), the more sensitive those receptors become. Every tiny success becomes a vote for stability.
For ADHD brains, structure isn’t a constraint—it’s scaffolding. Routines, cues, and rest don’t tame creativity; they make it sustainable. Understanding and harnessing this means taking control and working with your own dopamine choreography—developing the patterns that help your brain predict reward instead of constantly chasing it.
You can’t cure ADHD, but you can rewire your relationship to it.
You can decide which traits to cultivate—the curiosity, the inventiveness, the capacity to see patterns others miss—and which ones to gently retrain.
Chicken or Egg
So, was I born this way? Or did I build myself this way?
Maybe the answer is both. Maybe ADHD is architecture and adaptation: an inherited rhythm amplified by a world that rewards speed and punishes rest.
Which came first doesn’t matter because the chicken and the egg don’t cancel each other out; they form a loop. The mind creates the environment that keeps that mind in motion. The environment reinforces the mind that shaped the environment.
And somewhere in the middle, awareness cracks the shell.
The Takeaway
You can’t rewrite the blueprint, but you can redesign the habitat by:
choosing which loops to feed
letting curiosity lead without letting chaos rule
ADHD, in the end, isn’t a flaw to fix—it’s a rhythm to learn. The task is to stop asking which came first, and start learning how to lead the dance.
Food for Thought
When you experience hyperfocus, what kind of task or subject makes your brain finally lock on and quiet down? (What is your personal 'flow state'?)
In your own life, what is the clearest example of your ADHD brain building a storm—an external chaos you created to match your internal rhythm?
If you had to choose just one word to describe your ADHD, would it be 'Architecture' or 'Adaptation'?
What is one small change you are committing to this week to "let curiosity lead without letting chaos rule?"
Help this community grow; share your thoughts in the comments.
If you’re done wrestling with the glitch and ready to use the gift—tapping into that powerful flow state when you choose—it’s time to build a strategy. In The Algorithm of Flow, I’ll show you how to architect your own rhythm and take control of your attention.
