Why People with ADHD Often Feel Relief Instead of Accomplishment

Does anyone else with ADHD struggle to feel accomplished?

Because I definitely do.

You would assume that when you finally finish something difficult you would feel proud of yourself, or at least some sense of satisfaction that the effort was worth it. For many people with ADHD it does not work like that. Tasks that are not naturally interesting can take a huge amount of effort just to start and even more effort to finish, yet when we finally get to the end the feeling you expect to have simply does not appear.

What I, and many others with ADHD, feel instead is relief. Relief that the struggle has stopped and we do not have to keep fighting with the task any more.

It can show up in small everyday moments, such as finally handing in a piece of work that took ages to complete and instead of feeling proud, the thought in your head is something like “that should have been done weeks ago”.

Or perhaps you clean the whole house and rather than feeling satisfied, your mind immediately jumps to the fact that it will all need doing again tomorrow.

You clear the emails you have been putting off, finish a report that took all your focus, or deal with a piece of life admin that had been weighing on you for days, and the main feeling afterwards is simply that the pressure has lifted for a while.

Sometimes I think I do not really know what accomplishment is supposed to feel like, and if I am honest that makes me a little sad.

Why ADHD can make accomplishment feel different

When every task feels like pushing yourself uphill, finishing it does not always create a sense of achievement; often it simply means the fight with it has ended.

If your brain does not give you that internal reward after the effort you put in, it also becomes much harder to start the next difficult thing. That is one of the reasons procrastination can become such a familiar pattern for people with ADHD - when the finish line rarely feels good, finding the motivation to begin the race can be incredibly hard.

A simple way to think about ADHD and effort

One way to picture it is like this -

Imagine you and a friend are both driving to the same place.

Your friend has a clear road for the whole journey.

Your journey looks very different. There are obstacles in the road, heavy traffic slowing everything down, and part way through you run out of fuel and have to stop to fill up before you can continue.

Eventually you both arrive at the same place, but the journey you took to get there required far more effort.

That is often what it feels like to achieve something with ADHD. The effort it takes to keep going is far greater than anyone else can see, even when the end result looks the same from the outside.

So even if your brain refuses to give you the feeling of accomplishment you expected, the fact that you kept going still matters.

Never give up!