10 Signs Your Dyslexia Might Also Be ADHD

Did you get told you were dyslexic as a kid and then that was kind of it? Like, can't spell, good luck with life, off you go. And now you're an adult and you've got about 17 projects on the go that you haven't finished, and you catch yourself interrupting people, and you can't really sit through a whole movie without picking up your phone at some point. Yeah. There might be a second thing going on. I found mine at 32.

It's Stephen from the Truth About Dyslexia. Let's get into it. Okay, so before I get into the list, I want to tell you how I found out, because this one's pretty personal for me. I got diagnosed with dyslexia when I was 10. We were living in Saudi Arabia at the time. I was at a British school over there, which is a whole other story.

And I was lucky they even picked it up, because if I'd been back home in New Zealand back then, I don't think anyone would have noticed. And then that was sort of it. I was the dyslexic kid, bad at spelling, struggled reading off the board, and anything else about me that was a bit odd or a bit all over the place. Well, that was just me being me. And then fast forward 22 years, and I'm sitting in a meeting with a friend of mine who'd just been through his own ADHD journey, and he's telling me all about it. And at some point he looks down at the floor at my foot, and my foot is going tap, tap, tap, tap, tap under the table.

And it had been going the whole time and I hadn't even noticed. And he goes, Mate, you know that's a thing, right? And I genuinely didn't know that was a thing. So I went and got checked, and yep, ADHD at 32. And I remember lying back on some pillows after I got told, just kind of letting it sink in because suddenly about half my life made a lot more sense. And here's the bit that I think gets a lot of us.

Dyslexia tends to get caught because it shows up on a spelling test or when you're reading out loud in class and everyone can see you struggling. But ADHD kind of hides in behind it. So you can walk around for years, decades even, thinking all the restlessness and the rabbit holes and that weird burst of energy you get at 11 o'clock at night is just your dyslexia being a bit weird. And sometimes it is, but sometimes there's a second thing in there as well. So I've put together 10 signs, and I want you to keep count as we go because I'll tell you at the end what I do with the number. And look, I'm not a doctor.

I'm just a bloke who's lived with both of these for a long time and talked to heaps of people who have too. So take this as a starting point, not a diagnosis. Does that make sense? Okay, let's go. So number one, you can actually read fine now. You just can't seem to finish anything.

A lot of us got the reading sorted out by the time we were adults. Not perfect, but good enough. But you'll pick up a book and you'll get maybe 60 pages in and you're loving it. You're telling people about it, and then you just never pick it up again. And it wasn't because it was hard to read. It was because something shinier came along.

The way I think about it is dyslexia makes the reading itself take effort, and ADHD makes the finishing take effort, and they're quite different things when you sit with them. Number two, your energy kind of has a Monday version and a Thursday version. Some days you're an absolute machine. You're up early, you've fixed the gate, you've planned the holiday, you've cleared your inbox, you feel amazing. And then three days later you're on the couch and you couldn't organize a cup of tea if your life depended on it. Same person, same week, same everything.

And if your partner has ever looked at you and said, Where did Monday you go? Yeah, that's one to count. Number three, you interrupt people, and you hate that you interrupt people. Let me paint you a picture. There's a woman called Kelly, and Kelly's a florist, and she's one of those people who cares about everyone more than she cares about herself. Like she'll remember your kid's birthday and what flowers your mum likes and all of that.

But Kelly interrupts people, like all the time, everybody. Someone's halfway through a sentence and in she comes, and then afterwards she's driving home in the car going over it, and she's mortified. She's like, Why did I do that again? They must think I'm so rude. And what's actually going on for Kelly is that when a thought arrives in her head, it arrives at full volume. And she knows from years of experience that if she doesn't say it right now, it's gone.

Like properly gone, she won't get it back. So her brain grabs it and throws it out before it disappears. She's tried biting her lip. She's tried counting to three in her head. She's tried writing little notes. None of it really sticks.

And I think that's working memory and impulse control, which is much more of an ADHD thing than a dyslexia thing. So Kelly's not being rude at all. She's just trying to hang on to something before it slips away. Number four, time is either now or it's not now. There's no in between. And this one's huge for me.

If you ask an ADHD brain how long it is until Friday, it'll feel about the same distance as next year. It's just not now, so it doesn't really exist yet. And then Thursday night comes along and suddenly it's very real, and you do a whole week's worth of work in about four hours. I've got a quick one on this. There's a vet called Mahra, and she's brilliant with animals, like properly gifted, but she's not great with paperwork. And she's got a report she has to do for the practice every month, and every single month for six years now, it's done at about ten to midnight on the last day.

She's never once been late with it. But she's also never once started it before the last day either, and her boss thinks she's cutting it a bit fine. But in Mayree's head, the last day is kind of the first day the job actually exists. Number five, your brain's got 40 tabs open and you can't work out where the music's coming from. The way I describe it is the dyslexic part of my brain gives me pictures, and they're big, and they're clear, and they're kind of beautiful. And then the ADHD part opens about 12 more pictures before I've even finished looking at the first one.

So I'll sit down to do one thing and my head goes, Oh, what about that email? And did I lock the car? And I should really learn Spanish. And why do cats purr anyway? And 40 minutes later, I've done, well, none of it really. Number six, sitting still is actually physically uncomfortable, so this is my foot, basically.

But it's also the pen clicking and standing up in meetings for no real reason, and getting to the end of a movie and realizing you've been on your phone for half of it. And it's not that the movie was boring, it's that your body needed something to do while your brain was busy with the movie. Dyslexia on its own doesn't really do that to you. That's more like an engine that's running and hasn't got anywhere to go. Number seven, you've had a lot of hobbies. I love this one.

There's a bus driver called Sanjay, great bloke, the kind of guy who'll wave at every kid on the route. And in the last five years, Sanjay has done home brewing and drone photography, and he trained for a half marathon, and then there was sourdough, and then the ukulele, and then he did a beekeeping course, and he's got all the gear for every single one of them, and it's all just stacked up in the garage. And every one of those was the thing, like the thing for about six weeks, and then it wasn't. And the people around him probably think he's a bit flaky, but I don't think Sanjay's flaky at all. I think his brain is chasing new, and the second it stops being new, the fuel just runs out. And then he's off to find the next thing.

Does that ring any bells for you? Because it rings a few for me. Number eight, you're a bit of an apology machine. Sorry I'm late. Sorry I forgot. Sorry I cut you off there.

Sorry I said yes to that and then didn't do it. And it's sort of sorry, sorry, sorry all day long. And the thing I noticed when I started paying attention was that dyslexics tend to apologize about the spelling and the reading stuff, but ADHD brains apologize for pretty much everything else. So if sorry is one of the most common words coming out of your mouth in a day, that's worth having a look at. Number nine, your emotions can go from zero to a hundred and back again in about ten minutes. You might have heard me tell the FIFA story before.

I was playing the game, I love that game, and my partner at the time walked in front of the telly and I just went off, like properly lost it over nothing. And then ten minutes later, I'm sitting there going, What on earth was that? Why did I do that? And what I've worked out since is the dyslexia gave me the really fast pictures, all the stories of why this was happening to me and what it meant, and the ADHD gave me the really fast reaction to those pictures. So it's kind of a spicy mix. And the tricky bit is that the people around you only ever see the angry part.

They don't see the twelve pictures that went off in your head before it. So you can come across like someone with a short temper when really you've got a very fast brain and, I don't know, a bit of a slow brake. And number ten, and this is the big one, so stick with me. You've always had this feeling that there's one more thing that nobody told you. And this one isn't really a symptom. It's more of a feeling.

You've done all the dyslexia stuff. You've read the books. You've built your workarounds. You've got your tricks for getting through emails and meetings and all of that. And still, somewhere in the back of your head, there's this quiet little voice going, Yeah, but that doesn't quite explain all of it, does it? For me, that voice was right, and it might be right for you too.

So how many did you get? If you got two or three, you're probably just a normal human with a dyslexic brain. Everyone does a few of these. Carry on, you're fine. But if you're sitting on five or more, I'd really think about going and having a chat with someone, a GP, a psychologist, whoever does it where you live. And not because there's something wrong with you.

It's because there might be a name for the thing you've been fighting against with no map for 20 years. And when something has a name, it usually comes with tools. And I want to be really clear about this because I know it can feel a bit heavy. Getting that second diagnosis was not a downer for me. It was a relief, honestly. It was kind of the day I stopped thinking I was a broken dyslexic and started understanding I'm just running a different kind of engine.

And I want to tell you a little bit about what changed afterwards. So you know there's good stuff on the other side. The first thing was I stopped calling myself lazy. 32 years of being told to just try harder. And it turns out I'd actually been trying harder than most people. I just had fewer of the right tools.

Then I started building my day around the brain I actually have instead of the one I thought I was supposed to have. So for me, that's things like getting my walk in, meditating in the morning when I can, and the 80 plus one thing I've talked about before, where most of my day is boring on purpose, but I sneak a bit of new and shiny in to keep myself going. I also sat down with my wife and explained how it all works for me. And not in the middle of a fight on a good day when we were both calm, and a lot of the arguments we used to have just kind of eased off. Not all of them. We're still human, but heaps.

And I looked at the medication side with proper information instead of fear. I've talked about that on here before, and I'll keep talking about it because it's different for everyone, and it should be. None of that was really open to me, while I thought the whole story was just, You're bad at spelling. Awareness is the thing. I say it pretty much every week, I know, but it turns out you might need to be aware of two things, not just one. If you counted five or more and you want to talk about it with people who actually get it, come and join us in Right Brain Resetters.

A lot of the people in there have the spicy mix too, so you'll feel right at home. That's rightbrainresetters. com. And honestly, this is a big part of what my book is about. It's called Dyslexia and ADHD Explained from the Inside: What I Wish They'd Told Me. A lot of the first half is the stuff nobody told me at 10 and the stuff nobody told me at 32 either.

It's out now on Amazon. And if this one landed for you, send it to that mate whose foot is always going under the table. You know the one. Have an epic rest of your day, and I'll be back next week.