Why Does It Feel Like Everyone Has ADHD Now?

I have ADHD. I was diagnosed as an adult - you can read more about my experience here. But lately, whenever I mention it, people say some version of the same thing. "Oh, everyone has that now." Or "we are all on a spectrum." Or "I saw a video and honestly it describes most people."

I also don't think it's quite as simple as the algorithm would have you believe. So let me give you the honest version of why ADHD feels like it's everywhere right now.

🧠 The numbers are real

Recording of ADHD among adult women aged 31 to 49 has risen by 694% over five years in the UK. That is not a typo! In March 2025 alone, 20,000 new referrals for ADHD assessment were recorded, a 13.5% increase from the same month the year before.

But here's the statistic that puts all of that in context. Analysis of 9 million UK GP records found that only 0.32% had a recorded ADHD diagnosis, while NHS England estimates that approximately 3.7% of the English population has ADHD. That means roughly only 1 in 9 people with ADHD have a formal diagnosis on their GP record.

So we are not in the middle of an epidemic of people suddenly developing ADHD. We are in the middle of people finally getting diagnosed with something they have always had, and that is a very different story.

The women who were missed

For decades, ADHD research was conducted almost entirely on young boys. The hyperactive, impulsive, climbing-the-walls presentation. Girls, who more often present with inattentiveness, daydreaming, disorganisation, and emotional dysregulation, were largely invisible to the diagnostic criteria. They weren't hyperactive (although I can present like that), they were just "scatty," "oversensitive," or "not applying themselves." 

So they learned to mask. They developed elaborate coping strategies, and worked twice as hard to appear competent. You can read more about the common misconceptions about ADHD here.

One survey of more than 3,000 women with ADHD found the vast majority had been diagnosed for the first time during the menopausal years. This is not coincidence, as oestrogen supports dopamine function in the brain, and when oestrogen starts dropping during perimenopause, the coping strategies that just about held things together for thirty years stop working. Women who had compensated brilliantly their whole lives suddenly find they can't. And that's often the moment someone finally looks at the full picture and says: actually, I think this has been there all along!

I see this constantly in clinic, and I lived it myself.

📱 Social media: the complicated bit

Now for the part that requires a bit of nuance.

Social media, TikTok and Instagram in particular, has genuinely helped a lot of people recognise themselves in a way they never had before. For women who spent their whole childhood being told they were fine, seeing someone describe their exact internal experience and name it as ADHD can be the first time they feel properly understood. That is not nothing.

But.. Research from 2024-2025 found that among popular ADHD TikToks, between 50 and 89% contained misleading content, with only 20 to 45% showing content consistent with actual diagnostic criteria. A lot of what gets presented as ADHD on social media is "relatable content," things like forgetting why you walked into a room, having a to-do list you don't look at, or finding it hard to concentrate when you're tired. These are also just things that happen to people who are overworked, sleep-deprived, chronically stressed, or staring at screens for twelve hours a day.

The honest answer is that some of the people currently convinced they have ADHD probably do. And some of them are experiencing something that looks similar but has a different root cause entirely, such as burnout, anxiety, sleep deprivation, blood sugar instability, thyroid issues, or a gut-brain axis that isn't functioning well. The symptoms can overlap significantly.

🌿 Why modern life is making all of this harder

Even if you don't have ADHD, the environment most of us are living in is deeply unfriendly to the human brain. Constant notifications, fragmented sleep, ultra-processed food that destabilises blood sugar and drives inflammation, chronic stress, very little time outdoors, no real rest, etc - the list goes on endlessly.

For someone with ADHD, that environment is particularly hard, because an ADHD brain is already working hard to regulate dopamine, and those lifestyle factors make that significantly harder. But even a neurotypical brain starts to look a lot like an ADHD brain when it is chronically underslept, undernourished, and overstimulated.

This is why I think the conversation needs to go beyond "do I have ADHD or not" and toward "what does my brain actually need to function well." 

Because whether the answer is ADHD, perimenopause, burnout, or some combination of all three, the nutritional and lifestyle foundations are remarkably similar. Blood sugar stability, omega-3 fatty acids, magnesium, B vitamins, iron, proper sleep, and reducing the inflammatory load on the brain. These things support dopamine function, regulate mood, and improve cognitive performance across the board.

A formal assessment matters if you're really struggling, and I would always encourage pursuing one rather than diagnosing yourself from a short video. But while you're waiting, and NHS waiting lists are long enough that this is genuinely a relevant consideration, looking at what your brain is being fed is never wasted time.

The bottom line

It isn't that everyone suddenly has ADHD. It's that a condition which was systematically under-researched, under-recognised especially in women, and culturally dismissed for decades is finally being taken seriously. That's mostly a good thing, even if the TikTok version of it might need a large pinch of salt!

If you're wondering what you're experiencing is and how to best support it- whether ADHD, perimenopause, burnout, a mixture or something else entirely, that's exactly the kind of thing I can help with. 

Click here to book a chat.