ADHD in Academia: Research, Papers and Endless Revision

From the outside, academia looks tailor-made for someone with ADHD. You choose a question that interests you, you can give it years, and nobody tells you to be at your desk every morning at nine.

From the inside the same features turn into something else. The question has no end. The deadline is months away. Nobody tells you when to say "I have read enough." The answer to a text you send comes weeks, sometimes months later, and most of the time it begins with a list of corrections.

I run my own company and carry out academic work alongside it. In recent months, trying to keep up with everything at once, I wrote in my diary that I had burned out. This article was written partly from inside that exhaustion and partly from what the research says.

Hyperfocus starts, it does not guarantee finishing

The most enjoyable moments of research have always been beginnings for me: a new question, the first days when the sources to read are opened, looking at the data for the first time. The hour is forgotten, the meal is forgotten.

This experience has a name and now a scale too. Hupfeld and colleagues developed an adult questionnaire to measure hyperfocus and tested it in two samples of 251 and 372 people. Participants with high ADHD symptoms reported more hyperfocus in general and said they experienced hyperfocus more often at school, during hobbies and in front of a screen (Hupfeld et al., 2019). I described the concept itself in the article what is hyperfocus.

The problem in academia is this: hyperfocus carries the beginning of the work very well, but the last ten percent of the work is usually not interesting. Arranging the bibliography, following formatting rules, rewriting the same paragraph for the third time. The novelty has worn off, the reward is far away. The glossary calls this the ninety percent syndrome: most of the work is done, and the last part waits for months.

Starting is a matter of passion. Finishing is most often a matter of system.

Work without structure

At school there was a skeleton that came from outside. In academic writing you mostly have to build that skeleton yourself.

Boice's old but still widely cited study looks at exactly this point. He worked for a year with young academics who could not write productively and argued that procrastination in this kind of unstructured work has two basic components: constantly being busy and leaving writing to long, piled-up sessions. The intervention he tried was helping participants find short writing sessions during the day; this intervention was both effective and relatively little off-putting (Boice, 1989).

There is no ADHD sample in the study. But when I read the pair "busyness and bingeing," I saw a familiar cycle: being busy with everything for weeks without starting to write, then writing in the last few days before the deadline in sleepless hours. This is the academic version of the cycle in the article panic productivity.

Revision and reviewer comments

In academia a text is almost never accepted in its first form. Knowing this does not help much on the day the comments arrive.

Revision is hard for ADHD in two places. The first is that the novelty has completely worn off: you return to a text you wrote with excitement months ago, with someone else's list. The second is the emotional weight: written criticism, especially if written in a cold tone, can be carried for days. There is a concept describing oversensitivity to criticism that is not an official diagnosis; I discussed how well it fits and its limits in the article rejection sensitivity.

For me the hardest thing is not reading the comments but reopening the text after reading them. The file sits there, and every time I open it I know I will touch that feeling again.

Why ADHD among academics is talked about so little

There is a fair amount of research on university students with ADHD. On academics with ADHD there is very little.

Hoben and Hesson, as two academics, examined their own experiences with an autoethnographic method. Their starting point was this: while there is literature on how ADHD affects student outcomes, there are very few studies on how university teaching staff learn and think about mental disorders and learning difficulties. The authors treat this gap as a matter of adult learning (Hoben and Hesson, 2021).

The invisibility that this small number of studies points to feels familiar to me. Academia is an environment that rewards intelligence and independence; so saying you are struggling can feel like admitting you do not deserve to be there. This deepens masking.

Conditions tire everyone

I want to separate one thing too: not all of the difficulty of academic work comes from ADHD.

In a study with a representative sample of 3,659 doctoral students in the Flemish region of Belgium, 32 percent of participants were at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder, especially depression. This rate was higher than in comparison groups made up of the highly educated general population, highly educated employees and higher education students (Levecque et al., 2017).

This study does not look at ADHD and covers only doctoral students. But it shows that the structure of academic work can be heavy for many people. ADHD sits on top of that. Knowing this helps me, in the periods when I am burned out, not to put all the blame on my own brain.

If burnout has gone beyond a period of tiredness and begun to cover your life, you do not have to carry it alone. I gathered its signs in the article burnout in ADHD. If there is a moment when you do not feel safe, you can call 112 and reach the ALO 183 Social Support Line.

Carrying two jobs at the same time

In my case the academic work is not counted as a single job. On one side my company, brands' data, channels, content; on the other, long-haul academic work. Both are thinking work but their rhythms are very different.

On the company side feedback arrives fast: a strategy works or it does not, the answers come within days. On the academic side, nothing may happen for months. Because the ADHD mind is naturally drawn to fast feedback, when the two jobs sit side by side the academic work keeps falling into the "tomorrow" box. The urgent wins, the important waits.

And there is the switching itself. Coming out of a business meeting and returning to the discussion section of a paper is like changing rooms for the mind. The residue of the previous job wanders around in the head for a while, and fully entering the new job takes time. Going back and forth between the two jobs often within the same day leads me to do both with half my attention.

That is why what I find worth trying is dividing days. When possible, part of the day is set aside for academic work and part for the company. It does not always hold. But on the days it holds, the academic work does not queue behind urgent tasks and can find a time of its own.

The arrangement I find worth trying

A single stage line for each job. One line for each text I am working on: idea, reading, draft, feedback, revision, submission. The lines sit in one place. Instead of holding in my head where each job is stuck, I see it on the page.

A short, regular writing block. I adapted Boice's suggestion for myself: a short, fixed writing time on certain days of the week. When hyperfocus days come, I count them as a bonus; I do not build the plan on top of them.

Planning finishing as a separate job. Bibliography, formatting, the final read. Although these look like the tail of the writing, they are a job in themselves and should have their own place in the calendar.

Tying reading to a question. Reading sources is hyperfocus's favorite job and it never ends. Tying each reading session to a single question ("for this section I am looking for an answer to this question") and stopping when I find the answer keeps reading from postponing writing forever. Taking a one-sentence note from every source I read also saves me from rereading the same article later. Reading makes a person feel they are progressing; sometimes it is also the most respectable way of running from writing.

Interim dates with co-authors. Splitting a distant deadline into several near dates and telling someone else builds the missing skeleton from the outside. It is under external scaffolding in the glossary.

Turn reviewer comments into a table. When a revision arrives, do not open the text right away. First copy the comments into a three-column table: comment, what I will do, done or not. Let the only goal of the first session be this table. Once an emotionally heavy text has turned into a list that can be ticked off line by line, reopening it gets easier.

A large part of academic work is also invisible labor. Hundreds of pages read that never enter the bibliography, ideas discarded, sections written and deleted. From the outside only the result shows. A person sometimes hides this invisibility from their own eyes too. I try to keep the labor behind work whose result comes slowly visible, at least in my own stage lines.