The Hijacking of ADHD: How We Confused Neurodivergence with Hyperfocus Culture

6 Minute Read

Scroll through TikTok, Instagram, or X for long enough, and you’ll see ADHD everywhere. It’s not a neurodevelopmental condition anymore, it’s a whole vibe. Hyper-organized planners, color-coded calendars, and task-switching to a chaotic level are memes … ADHD isn’t a clinical diagnosis anymore; it’s cultural shorthand for a personality characterized by inconsistency and borne of an inability to properly attend to all the stimulation you experience.

We love normalizing and reclaiming a diagnosis; stigmas are trash. But when does normalization become misinformation? When does equating a clinical condition with a cultural feeling become detrimental to both those who do and do not have it?

The Evolution of ADHD as an Aesthetic

The hijacking of ADHD began innocuously enough. Like most of the US lexicon, it was an efficient, if not hyperbolic, way to communicate you were feeling frazzled and forgetful, or to explain why you spent 8 hours organizing your closet instead of writing a paper. A reel of a girl wrapped in 4 blankets watching Netflix with “ADHDers after the most minor inconvenience” pasted across the screen comes through your algorithm. You laugh and you double tap. Scroll. Another ADHD reel, this time about someone’s endless doom piles with that messed up flute playing My Heart Goes On in the background. You laugh and double tap. Scroll.

You don’t have ADHD, but they’re funny and relatable, and that’s a cornerstone of social media and meme culture. ADHD’s mix of hyperfocus, distractibility, and quirky energy is a framework most people can see some of themselves in. But then the line between experience and identity gets fuzzy.

ADHD has been confounded with burnout. Hyperfocus is romanticized as creative passion, the productivity-procrastination axis is rebranded as cutesy chaos, and the inability to regulate emotion and impulse becomes a mood. Now we’ve obscured acknowledgement and compassion for the condition and its challenges in favor of a palatable explanation for how pervasive chronic stress has just totally messed us up.

Normalization vs Romanticization: Untangling Relatability from Reality

Normalization of neurodivergence has been invaluable not just for kids, who now grow up with way less ostracization than a couple of decades ago, but to adults who have never understood why they can’t just fit in and why things that are so easy for others have always been so hard for them. Normalization crushes stigma; the more you talk about it, the less “othered” those with ADHD begin to feel. And isn’t the feeling of belonging one of the foundational levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

Romanticization of neurodivergence, however, has almost taken it too far. Too much normalization makes it seem like ADHD — the actual medical condition — isn’t a big deal. You’re quirky. Ot’s not, like, a struggle, yeah? Where neurodivergence used to be minimized as an outlier, it’s now minimized as a meme. People have adopted it as a personality trait and completely obscured the reality real ADHDers live with.

We Don’t Have Collective ADHD; We Have Collective Burnout

You don’t need to wear the name tag of a diagnosis you don’t have in order to name the thing that’s driving your inability to be a coherent person who’s not struggling with everything all the time every day. It’s chronic stress. What we should really be double tapping are the reels with “This is your reminder to unclench your jaw.” pasted across the screen. While there are many parallels between ADHD and unrelenting stress, they’re completely different:

Chronic mental fatigue

ADHDers: Chemical imbalances that drive chronic mental hyperactivity deplete energy and cause persistent difficulties with focus.
Neurotypicals: Too many things to do and too many choices to make can leave you feeling zapped and unable to form a consistent line of thought.

Sleep dysfunction

ADHDers: Hyperarousal and hypersensitivity to stimuli can result in racing thoughts and anxious discomfort, preventing quality sleep.
Neurotypicals: Too much caffeine and a list of to-dos that requires more hours than there are in a day cause racing thoughts, preventing quality sleep.

Inability to sustain attention

ADHDers: Dopamine deficiencies and dysregulation results in segmented, stilted focus, or the complete opposite side of the spectrum — hyperfocus topped with time blindness. On top of that, while neurotypical people sustain importance-based task attention, task attention for those with ADHD is often interest-based.
Neurotypicals: The daily demand to multitask is actually horrible for focus. People weren’t made to half-ass several things at once; we were meant to focus on doing something well, then move to another task. Fragmenting attention fragments focus.

Executive dysfunction

ADHDers: People with ADHD have different connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the striatum than neurotypical people. Couple that with the dopamine deficiency, and it explains difficulties with emotional regulation, chronic forgetfulness, and periodic dissociation.
Neurotypicals: Chronic stress and lack of sleep wear down on your immune system, mood, innate energy cycles, and mental clarity, eroding your ability to regulate affect, reactivity, and impulse.

Social Stress

ADHDers: The differences in brain connectivity and chemistry also result in slower processing speed of social cues, less ability to interpret non-verbal social cues, difficulty keeping attention to conversations, and habits like interrupting, oversharing, and interpreting neutral cues as negative.
Neurotypicals: Chronic exhaustion causes low mood, and being overscheduled causes feelings of inadequacy, which is further exacerbated by social media’s obsession with no-days-off hustle culture. When you’re tired, annoyed, and feeling crap about yourself, social situations become just another thing that piles on to all that.

Check out our deep dive: Adderall Brain: Double Entendre or Double-Edged Sword?

At the end of the day and for both groups, these things add up to a shared experience: burnout. Burnout is what you’re relating to with those double taps and lols. Burnout is what you’re feeling when you grab a couple pills from your friend with ADHD so you can actually get some stuff done this weekend. And it’s why there’s no need to hijack ADHD to connect about these pervasive problems. We should be talking about chronic stress. We should be talking about the importance of sleep and self-care. We should be talking about alternatives to Adderall and caffeine that help us out of this cycle, instead of commiserating inside of it.

Touching the Grass: Using Adaptogens & Nootropics as Natural Adderall

First of all, sleep is life. Seriously. Like, so many bad things come from lack of sleep, both short-term and long-term. Prioritizing rest and recovery helps everyone — neurotypical or not — improve energy, focus, mood, and stress resilience. But the reality of being overscheduled and overstimulated is just how things are, and Adderall is an effective stimulant, which is why it’s so widely used off-label.

However, there are risks to using it if you don’t need it — ADHD meds are meant to compensate for imbalances and structural differences in the brain. If you don’t have those differences and use it anyway, it can cause addiction, insomnia, mood problems, and even permanent suppression of the dopaminergic system. Neurotypicals use it to get a leg up on the day; ADHDers need it to get a hold of the day. There’s a difference.

All of us can benefit from a bit of a boost; your fatigue is not your fault. And while healthy habits can go a long way for sleep and mood, they can’t magic your 80-hour work week into 40 or make your 4-month kitchen renovation happen in 2. And the chronic stress that caused the fatigue that then feeds back into stress because you’re tired and not as productive as you think you should be isn’t sustainable in the long run.

Adaptogens and nootropics are non-addictive, non-pharmaceutical consumables that boost energy, focus, mood, and stress resilience without overstimulation, sleep disruption, or neurotoxicity. Adaptogen stacks promote calm energy and dampen stress reactivity by modulating HPA activity and supporting dopaminergic activity. Nootropic compounds promote mood and focus by stimulating energy production and streamlining communication loops (also by promoting dopamine). The right combination distilled into a daily energy powder supplement makes for a kind of “natural Adderall” that’s convenient, and something everyone can benefit from.

Check out our deep dive: How to Zone In: Understanding Adderall vs Nootropics for Focus

MTE is a paraxanthine supplement formulated with 10 research-backed adaptogens, nootropics, and superfoods that work synergistically to support innate energy, focus, and mood on a systemic level. As a daily wellness drink, consistent support from adaptogens and nootropics transforms the daily grind into something you wake up rested and ready for. Without caffeine or other common stimulants, no sugars — real or fake — and no artificial flavors or colors, it’s a great tool that provides daily support for holistic wellness and vitality.

There’s more to life than stress and restlessness, so it’s worth trying something new: an Adderall alternative, productivity supplement, pre-workout energy drink, and stress-relief drink all at once, without the Rx or the risks.