Is It ADHD, Anxiety, or Trauma? Understanding the Overlap in Neurodivergent Brains

Posted: August 18, 2025

If you’ve ever wondered whether your constant restlessness, difficulty focusing, or chronic overwhelm is a sign of ADHD, anxiety, or unresolved trauma, you’re not alone. These three experiences—Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), anxiety disorders, and trauma responses—often present with overlapping symptoms. This can make it challenging to pinpoint the root cause and find the right treatment.

The truth is, human beings are complex, and symptoms are rarely the result of one simple label. Neurodivergent brains, in particular, are often navigating a unique interplay of nervous system sensitivities, developmental history, and environmental stressors. To truly understand what’s going on, we need to look at the whole person—not just the diagnosis. And to make matters even more complicated for some people there are more than one diagnosis affecting them simultaneously.

The Symptom Overlap: ADHD, Anxiety, and Trauma

Let’s start by identifying some of the shared symptoms that can occur in all three conditions:

Difficulty focusing or maintaining attention
Feeling easily overwhelmed
Restlessness or trouble sitting still
Irritability or mood swings
Sleep disturbances
Sensitivity to noise or other sensory input
Trouble with organization or executive functioning
Perfectionism or fear of failure
Emotional dysregulation

These symptoms can appear across all three domains—which is why people are often misdiagnosed or given a diagnosis that only captures part of the picture.

Understanding Each Experience on Its Own

ADHD: A Brain Wired for Stimulation and Movement

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects executive function, attention regulation, and impulse control. It's not about laziness or lack of intelligence—it’s about how the brain filters information, responds to stimuli, and regulates internal states.

Common features include:

Distractibility or difficulty staying focused
Forgetfulness or frequent task-switching
Impulsivity or talking out of turn
Difficulty following through on tasks
Hyperactivity or mental restlessness
Emotion regulation issues

ADHD brains often seek novelty and stimulation. Without it, they may become understimulated, leading to daydreaming, procrastination, or fidgeting.

Anxiety: A Brain on High Alert

Anxiety is the body’s alarm system, activated in response to perceived threat. In anxiety disorders, this system becomes overactive—often firing even when no real danger is present.

Key symptoms include:

Excessive worry or rumination
Muscle tension, headaches, or stomach issues
Difficulty relaxing or "shutting off"
Sleep disturbances or insomnia
Avoidance of certain situations or activities
In some cases panic attacks or physical symptoms of anxiety

People with anxiety may have trouble focusing because their mind is preoccupied with future-based fears or what-ifs. Their nervous system may be stuck in a state of fight-or-flight.

Trauma: A Nervous System Shaped by Survival

Trauma isn’t just about what happened—it’s about how the nervous system responded to overwhelming or unsafe experiences. Traumatic stress can reorganize brain circuitry, making it harder to regulate emotions, stay present, or feel safe in the body.

Common symptoms of trauma include:

Hypervigilance or exaggerated startle response
Emotional numbness or disconnection
Flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts
Avoidance of reminders of the trauma
Chronic tension or dissociation

While trauma can sometimes look like anxiety or ADHD, the root is often in unprocessed memories and nervous system dysregulation.

Why It’s So Easy to Confuse Them

Here’s a simple example: A child with undiagnosed ADHD may struggle to sit still or pay attention in school. Over time, they may be punished, shamed, or told they’re lazy. These experiences can be traumatic. The child might begin to feel anxious about school, develop perfectionism, or fear failure.

Or consider a trauma survivor who was constantly on edge growing up. Their nervous system learned to scan for threat, leaving them jumpy, distracted, and hyperaware—all of which can look like ADHD.

Similarly, a person with anxiety might feel so overstimulated by internal worry that they can’t focus, appear restless, or have difficulty starting tasks—again, mimicking ADHD.

These feedback loops can make it difficult to parse out where one condition ends and another begins. In reality sometimes people have more than one of these conditions.

Nervous System Functioning: The Common Thread

At the core of all three conditions lies the nervous system. Whether it’s ADHD, anxiety, or trauma, each involves some degree of dysregulation:

Sympathetic overactivation (fight/flight)
Parasympathetic collapse (freeze/shutdown)
Difficulty achieving a state of calm alertness

Understanding this shared biology helps move us away from blame or shame and toward a more compassionate framework. Instead of asking, "What’s wrong with me?" we can ask, "What’s my nervous system trying to tell me?"

Therapy that incorporates polyvagal theory, somatic tools, and trauma-informed care can help regulate the nervous system and restore a sense of internal safety—regardless of the diagnosis.

The Importance of Looking at the Whole Person

Because of the symptom overlap, it’s essential to approach assessment and treatment holistically. Here’s what that might include:

1. Developmental History

Understanding early attachment, learning environments, and behavior patterns can reveal whether ADHD traits were present in childhood (a core diagnostic feature) or developed later as a trauma response.

2. Current Environment

Stressors such as an overwhelming job, lack of support, or a sensory-intense living space can exacerbate symptoms. We need to ask: Is this person supported in a way that aligns with how their brain and body function best?

3. Trauma and Attachment Patterns

Exploring relational history—particularly around safety, consistency, and emotional attunement—can uncover whether behaviors stem from trauma, neglect, or chronic stress.

4. Nervous System Profile

Some people are more biologically sensitive than others. Sensory sensitivity, interoceptive awareness, and emotional intensity can all shape how a person responds to stimulation, structure, and stress.

Misdiagnosis and Its Consequences

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for people to receive one diagnosis while the root cause goes unaddressed. Some common examples:

A woman with undiagnosed ADHD is told she’s just anxious or overwhelmed from parenting.
A trauma survivor is misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder due to emotional dysregulation.
A child with sensory processing difficulties is labeled as oppositional or defiant.

Misdiagnosis can delay healing and lead to inappropriate treatments. It can also reinforce shame or self-blame when standard interventions don’t work.

This is why therapists, psychologists, and even medical providers must take the time to understand context, history, and neurobiology—not just check off symptom lists.

Co-Occurrence: What If It’s All Three?

It’s also possible (and common) for someone to have more than one of these experiences at the same time. For example:

Someone with ADHD who develops anxiety from years of negative feedback or underperformance.
Someone with complex trauma who also meets criteria for ADHD.
A person with anxiety who later experiences a traumatic event that further dysregulates their nervous system.

In these cases, treatment needs to be layered, nuanced, and responsive. One-size-fits-all approaches often fall short.

How Therapy Can Help

A skilled therapist can help differentiate between ADHD, anxiety, and trauma—but more importantly, they can help you understand how you function and what you need.

Therapy might include:

Psychoeducation on brain functioning and nervous system regulation
Somatic techniques to calm physiological arousal
Skill-building for executive function challenges
Exposure and response prevention for anxiety
Trauma-informed processing of past experiences
Nervous system tracking and mapping using polyvagal-informed tools

Ultimately, therapy becomes less about finding the "right" label and more about building a relationship with yourself.

Psychological Evaluation: When and Why to Consider It

If you're feeling confused or curious about whether your symptoms point to ADHD, anxiety, trauma, or all of the above, a comprehensive psychological evaluation can be incredibly helpful.

A proper assessment doesn’t just identify diagnoses—it can also:

Clarify overlapping symptoms
Differentiate between similar presentations
Identify co-occurring conditions
Offer insight into cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns
Guide treatment planning in a more individualized way

For adults who have gone their whole lives feeling "off" but not knowing why, testing can be a deeply validating experience. It provides language, context, and relief.

For those wondering wanting to gain more clarity and specificity to help guide their treatment, a comprehensive psychological evaluation can be a great starting place. Psychological testing is about gaining self understanding and clarity, rather than labeling or pathologizing—it helps ground and drive treatment planning.

Evaluations can assess for conditions such as ADHD, Anxiety, PTSD and rule other other disorders and other cognitive or emotional profiles. These types of evaluations often include: clinical interviews, Standardized testing, continuous performance cognitive tests, Behavioral observations and Self-report and collateral-report questionnaires.

Self-Compassion: The Most Important Piece

Whether you’re navigating ADHD, anxiety, trauma, or some combination of the three, the most important thing is this: It’s not your fault. Your brain and body adapted in the ways they needed to survive, cope, or function.

Healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken—it’s about understanding what you needed, what you didn’t get, and how you can now meet those needs with compassion and care.

You are not lazy. You are not crazy. You are not broken. You are a whole human being with a story that makes sense.When we step back from the symptom checklist and start seeing people in the full context of their lives, a clearer picture emerges. That restless energy, emotional reactivity, or scattered thinking might be ADHD. Or anxiety. Or trauma. Or maybe all three, woven together in a unique nervous system story.

The good news is: You don’t have to untangle it alone. With the right support, you can build awareness, regulate your nervous system, and create a life that actually works for you—not against you.

REACH OUT TO WELLNESS PSYCHOLOGICAL SERVICES IN TAMPA & ST. PETE FLORIDA

If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. And you deserve to be understood. If you’re struggling to make sense of your symptoms or experiences, consider reaching out for support. Therapy, evaluation, and education can help you put the pieces together—not to limit you with labels, but to empower you with insight. Understanding your brain is the first step to healing it. If you are looking for testing or therapeutic support for ADHD, Anxiety or trauma, Wellness Psychological Services is proud to offer both in-person and online therapy for the residents of tampa, and St. Pete Florida.

Other services offered include anxiety treatment, trauma therapy, depression counseling, OCD treatment, stress management, and testing and evaluation services for individuals as well! Additionally, we are happy to offer, PCIT therapy, DBT, child therapy, therapy for professionals, and health psychology. We also offer couples counseling, and discernment counseling. Feel free to learn more by visiting our blog or contact page!