Living with OCD and ADHD is like carrying two warring generals in your head. One demands ruthless perfection and the other scatters every thought like confetti in the wind. I have lived with both for years, and no polite language can capture the chaos. Living with OCD and ADHD means surviving a cognitive civil war every single day.
OCD fills me with an unshakable fear that if I don’t fix something, something terrible will happen or that I am something terrible. Meanwhile, ADHD pulls me away before I even finish. I have started ten projects at once, convinced I had to perfect them, only to abandon them midstream, overwhelmed. When people ask for ADHD and OCD tips, I wish I could give a perfect answer, but the truth is this: every moment feels like negotiating with my own mind, even sharing this had me quarrel with my mind in between.
It is, quite literally, a mind tearing itself apart.
Clinical researchers have called this “a cognitive paradox” — ADHD disables focus, while OCD chains you to obsessive detail (as explained in work by Abramovitch and colleagues in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders). That paradox is my daily battlefield. These aren’t just personality quirks; they’re deeply rooted neurological conflicts that insights for OCD and ADHD can only begin to unpack.
What It Feels Like
The world does not see this war. To them, I look lazy, inconsistent, or flaky. They don’t see the hours spent re-checking whether I locked the door, only to leave the house without my keys. They don’t see me rereading a sentence for the fifteenth time, terrified it’s “wrong,” while simultaneously forgetting the point I was trying to make. These patterns show why living with OCD and ADHD can become so exhausting.
The emotional exhaustion is brutal. According to mental health studies, people with both conditions show high rates of emotional dysregulation — that’s a cold, clinical term for feeling like you are constantly on the verge of collapse. It feels like shame made visible. Sometimes, the shame becomes so thick it feels physical. I’ve cried over a crumpled grocery list because I couldn’t decide if the letters were neat enough, then forgot half the list anyway. That is the cruel irony of ADHD and OCD tips: perfectionism without completion.
Finding Tiny Islands of Peace
Managing life with these conditions has forced me to break a thousand rules I used to cling to. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helped me realize that thoughts are not facts, a phrase so simple yet so radically freeing that it still makes me tear up. That lesson is grounded in the research supporting CBT as a frontline treatment for OCD, something I have to remind myself of daily.
I also had to build external systems because ADHD erases things from my mind as if they never existed. Calendars, alarms, sticky notes, these are my prosthetics for a missing sense of time. Behavioral science demonstrates that “external scaffolding” is effective (Russell Barkley has written extensively about this topic), offering insights for OCD and ADHD that actually help me function. And they do, if I remember to use them.
Another key has been redefining what “good enough” looks like. OCD screams that “good enough” is a failure. But ADHD guarantees perfection is impossible. Accepting a made bed with a crooked blanket has been, genuinely, one of my biggest wins.
Read More: https://peonymagazine.com/wellness/ocd-and-adhd-living-with-both/
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