ADHD: I Am Listening, but I Look Like I Am Not

Someone is telling me something. I look at their face. I nod. I even say "mm-hm" now and then.

Then a question comes and I realize: I did not hear the last two sentences.

I do not quite know where I went, either. One word called another word, that word got tied to tomorrow's plan, and that plan to something else. When I come back, the person in front of me is waiting for an answer and I am in the middle of a question that has no answer.

Sometimes a person seems not to be listening even though they are. For someone who lives this, the most tiring part is how much the explanation sounds like an excuse.

It is even in the diagnostic manual

This behavior is so typical that it appears in the DSM-5-TR as one of the inattention symptoms: often seeming not to listen when spoken to directly. The description of the criterion speaks of the mind seeming elsewhere even when there is no obvious distraction (APA, 2022).

When I first read this I felt a strange relief. What I had heard for years as "you're not interested" had been written into a diagnostic criterion because it is seen in the same way in millions of people.

But right behind the relief came this question: if it is known, why is it still taken so personally?

I think the answer is this: listening is one of the most visible forms of love in a relationship. No one is talking to a brain mechanism; they are talking to a person. When that person drifts away, what they see is not a mechanism; it is the drifting itself.

Where the mind goes

For years I called these moments "zoning out." In the research its name is mind wandering.

Everyone has mind wandering. But it is known that people with ADHD describe an excessive kind of mind wandering that starts spontaneously, disrupts daily life and often continues without being noticed. A review on this subject suggests that the default mode network, which is active at rest, does not quiet down enough when it should in ADHD, and that its interaction with the executive control network is faulty. The same review discusses how the processes that normally adjust mind wandering to the context, that is, the processes that decide when to turn inward and when to listen to the outside, remain weak in ADHD (Bozhilova et al., 2018).

There is also something I noticed in myself: the moments when my mind leaves most easily are the most familiar moments of a conversation. A new piece of information, a question or the surprising part of a story holds me. But the repetition of a worry I have heard before, a long list of details or a sentence whose ending I can predict opens the door a crack. This makes things harder in close relationships, because most of the talk with someone close is made up of familiar things. So I think the conversations in which the people close to me feel least listened to may be the repeating worries that matter most to them.

This is a hypothesis and it is still debated in the field. But it describes the experience very well: the mind does not decide to go, it has already gone. And you only find out it went when you come back.

Zoning out looks like a choice, but from the inside it is more like a door opening by itself.

Holding and preparing a reply at the same time

The second mechanism is talked about less, but I think in relationships it is at least as decisive as the first.

Listening is not a passive job. While holding the first sentence of the person in front of you, you take in the second, you combine the two and extract the meaning, and meanwhile you are preparing your own reply. This is exactly the job that working memory does.

A meta-analysis that brought together 38 studies in adults found moderate-sized differences between adults with ADHD and healthy controls in both verbal and visuospatial working memory. So this difficulty does not stay in childhood; it continues into adulthood (Alderson et al., 2013).

In daily life it looks like this: a reply comes to my mind and I hold on to it so as not to lose it. While I hold it, the person in front of me goes on talking. While I am protecting my reply, I miss the new sentences coming in. In the end I either interrupt or give an answer that has already become irrelevant.

In the glossary this is called missing what you hear. I described the interrupting side of it in more detail in the article why do people with ADHD talk so much and the memory side in the article working memory and forgetfulness.

What the other side sees

I want to think about this a little from the point of view of the one who wants to be listened to.

You are telling something. Maybe it is important, maybe it is just the tiredness of the day. The eyes of the person in front of you slip away for a moment. Then they ask, "What did you say?" Once, nothing happens. When it happens five times a week, you start to feel that the things you tell are worthless.

Here, explaining the mechanism is not enough on its own. Because the pain of not being listened to is independent of the mechanism. The good news is this: to feel listened to, perfect attention is not needed.

What makes you feel understood

In an experiment with 115 participants talking with someone they did not know, the person across from them responded in three different ways: active listening (reflecting back what was heard in their own words and asking questions), giving advice, or only short acknowledgments ("I see," "mm-hm"). Those who got the active listening response felt more understood than the other two groups (Weger et al., 2014).

This study was done in first-meeting conversations; it does not measure close relationships. But it resonated with me a great deal, because the thing a person with ADHD most often does is exactly the short acknowledgment: nodding and saying "mm-hm." And it turned out to be the response that gave the other person the least feeling of being understood.

A small routine I found worth trying

Reflect back. When the person in front of you tells you something, before answering, say in one sentence what you heard: "So what wore you out today was not the meeting running long, it was that no one warned you beforehand." This both shows the other person that they were heard and ties your mind back to the conversation. If you understood it wrong, there is also a chance to correct it right away.

Say what you missed without hiding it. What does the most damage is not zoning out, it is trying to hide the zoning out. Saying "Sorry, my mind went away for a moment in that last part, could you repeat it?" feels embarrassing. But it wears things down far less than giving a wrong answer or pretending you understood.

Put the reply you are holding somewhere. If the fear of losing your reply is blocking your listening, write one word on your phone or on a piece of paper. That way you can empty your working memory and go back to listening.

Choose the time of the conversation. When an important conversation happens with a screen on, when you are tired or in the middle of something, the capacity to listen is already low. Saying "I want to hear this, can I close the computer in five minutes and listen fully?" is more respectful than half listening.

Give your hands something. For some people with ADHD, moving does not make listening harder, it makes it easier. Talking on a walk or holding an object in your hand can work. It is good to tell your partner in advance that this is not disinterest.

A sentence of agreement. In a calm moment, try saying this to your partner: "If you notice that I have drifted off, could you give me a gentle signal? When you do, I will ask where we left off." If the signal is a word or a touch, it stops a new argument from opening each time.

None of these suggestions will work every day. On days when I am tired, short of sleep or my head is full of work, my capacity to listen drops noticeably. On those days the most honest thing is to state your capacity from the start: "My head is very full today, if it is something important, could we talk tomorrow morning?" This sentence may look like an escape, but it prevents the hurt that a half-listened conversation would leave.

What you might want to tell your partner

I collected suggestions aimed at the other side in the article how to communicate with someone with ADHD. Here I only want to add one thing.

When I want to explain my moments of not being able to listen, as someone with ADHD, I think the sentence that works best is this: "I want to hear you, and sometimes my mind goes anyway. When it goes, your telling me does not catch me out, it brings me back."

Listening is a skill

For many years I told myself "I am not a good listener." Then I realized that this sentence leaves nothing that I can do.

Now I think about it another way: for me listening does not happen by itself, it is something that has to be built. And because it is something that can be built, I am a little hopeful.

Zoning out will always be there in me. But there is a way to come back, to say that I have come back and to show the person in front of me that I heard.