Do I have ADHD, autism, or both? What nobody tells you about the overlap
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), or simply autism, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often don’t begin with a formal diagnosis, especially for adults who remain undiagnosed or cannot access affordable assessments and care.
It starts with a quiet, persistent feeling that something about how your mind works is different. You’re not less intelligent. You’re not lazy. But effort doesn’t always match performance. Social situations feel slightly “off” in ways you can’t explain. You build systems just to do things other people seem to do automatically.
For a lot of adults, especially those diagnosed late or still undiagnosed, the question “Do I have ADHD, autism, or both?” isn’t just clinical. It’s deeply personal. I know because I asked the same for years before officially getting a diagnosis.
My story: Why I said ADHD before autism
I started researching why I behaved the way I did back in 2020 during the pandemic. I had just finished my first degree that year, and I hated being at home doing nothing. So I decided to start a 100-day writing challenge focused on speaking to young adults about different life issues and how to navigate them. Somewhere along the line, my research slowly led me into learning more about neurodevelopmental conditions and learning disabilities.
Interestingly, the research came from patterns and behaviours I kept noticing in myself, especially things that felt completely outside my control. One major reason I started looking into it was that it affected my education. I could read and write — I mean, I wrote a book, Why Goats are Stubborn, in junior secondary school, class 7 — but I constantly struggled to retain what I read. That difficulty followed me into university and affected me badly. I still managed to graduate with a second-class upper degree, but the struggle didn’t suddenly begin there. It had been part of my life for as long as I could remember.
So, I kept researching, and by 2020, I began to suspect that I could either be autistic, have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), have both, or possibly even be dyslexic. At the time, dyslexia seemed like it could explain why information never seemed to stay in my head for long.
After the lockdown was lifted in August 2020, I started interning at a local company. One of the requirements was coming into the office regularly, and almost immediately, I found it overwhelming. The noise from the streets, the harsh morning sun hitting my eyes, the unsettling sounds the buses made, and the constant movement around me left me exhausted before the workday even properly began.
Back then, I didn’t even have the language for what sensory overload was; I only knew that everything felt too loud, too bright, and too intense. I tried explaining to my boss that I couldn’t cope with being physically present every day, but he insisted. So sometime that same month, I finally told him I thought I might be autistic.
His response came instantly, “How can you have autism? You know what that is, right? You can’t have it.” It wasn’t asked like a question, though. It felt like a verdict. What they really meant — even if they never said it directly — was that I didn’t look like their idea of what autism was supposed to look like. The stereotype. The version that ignores adults who have spent years learning how to appear functional.
After that, I stopped saying “autism” out loud and started saying ADHD instead because it felt safer, easier, and more socially acceptable. And to be fair, ADHD did explain a lot: the executive dysfunction, the inconsistency, and the way even simple tasks could suddenly feel impossible once my mind became overloaded. But it still didn’t explain everything.
Eventually, when I saw a clinical psychologist, the feedback was simple: “You could be autistic and have ADHD.” Not one or the other. Both. A combination that’s actually more common than many people realise. And honestly, that made a lot of things click into place. By September, just a month after starting the internship, I quit the job because I simply couldn’t cope anymore, not with the constant side conversations in the office, not with the sensory overload from commuting every day, and not with the exhaustion that came from trying to force myself through environments my body and mind were clearly struggling to handle.
ADHD vs Autism: What’s actually different?
Both ADHD and autism are neurodevelopmental conditions. Both affect how the brain processes information. But they’re not the same thing, and the distinction matters for understanding yourself.
ADHD is primarily about regulating attention and controlling impulses. Per the CDC, it involves persistent patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity that interfere with functioning. In adults, this often looks less like a hyperactive child and more like the following:
- Chronic difficulty starting or finishing tasks
- Time blindness. You genuinely cannot feel time passing
- Forgetting appointments, conversations, and commitments
- Bursts of intense focus followed by complete shutdown
- Emotional reactivity that feels outsized and hard to manage
Autism is primarily about how a person processes social information, sensory input, and patterns in the world. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) describes it through differences in social communication and restricted or repetitive behaviours. In real life, it often shows up as:
- Reading social situations as if following the rules everyone else learned before you arrived
- Needing recovery time after social interaction, even enjoyable interaction
- Sensory overwhelm — noise, light, texture, crowded spaces — that affects your ability to think
- Deep, structured interests that feel central to identity
- Preferring direct communication and struggling with implied meaning
The key difference, put simply:
- ADHD: “I struggle to regulate my attention and actions.”
- Autism: “I experience and process the world differently, especially socially and sensorially.”
Where autism and ADHD overlap
Autism and ADHD conditions can involve executive dysfunction, social fatigue, sensory overwhelm, and intense focus on interests. From the outside, they can look identical. Even clinicians miss this.
What they don’t see is why. The surface behaviour might be the same — a person zoning out in a conversation, forgetting to reply, struggling to be consistent — but the underlying cause is different, and that matters for how you support yourself.
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) notes that ADHD and autism frequently co-occur. Research suggests that 50–70% of autistic individuals also meet criteria for ADHD, and vice versa. It’s not a rarity. It’s actually more common than having either condition alone.
Interestingly, in my case, after several sessions, the clinical psychologist told me I could have both ADHD and autism. But at the same time, I became very aware of the power labels can have, especially when people only understand them through stereotypes. A label can help someone understand themselves, but it can also shape and sometimes limit how others see them when viewed through a narrow lens.
So from that moment, in the clinician’s room, I decided I wanted to talk about autism differently and present a more honest, human picture of it, using my own experiences to challenge the stereotypes people often associate with autism. That decision eventually led me to openly include that I am autistic in my online bio, as a way of creating a different narrative around what autism can look like.
What is AuDHD?
AuDHD isn’t an official diagnosis, but it’s a widely used term in neurodivergent communities to describe the lived experience of having both autism and ADHD simultaneously.
And the experience can feel genuinely contradictory:
- You need routine, but you can’t maintain one
- You crave structure, but rigid systems frustrate you
- You have intense interests, but struggle with everyday follow-through
- You’re hyperfocused sometimes and completely unable to start other times
One moment that captured this for me: I could sit with a topic I was interested in for hours without noticing time pass, and then fail to respond to a single chat for three weeks. Not because I didn’t care. Because starting that particular thing felt like lifting something I couldn’t see.
This combination can make life feel unpredictable from the inside, especially when, from the outside, you look like you’re managing fine.
The hyperfocus question: Is that ADHD or autism?
Both, actually. Hyperfocus, that state of being so absorbed in something that time disappears and basic needs get ignored, appears in both ADHD and autism, but the patterns differ:
In ADHD, hyperfocus is typically interest-driven and inconsistent. The brain locks in when something is novel, urgent, or high-stimulation. When dopamine is high, everything else fades. Then interest drops, and it stops suddenly.
In autism, it tends to be deeper and more stable, closer to what researchers call monotropic attention, a tendency to channel focus intensely into one system or interest at a time (Murray et al., 2005). It’s not novelty-seeking. It’s depth-seeking. And interrupting it can cause real distress.
In AuDHD, you can get both: deep, sustained interest that’s also unpredictable and hard to exit.
Neither version is purely a superpower. Both can mean missed meals, disrupted sleep, and burnout from over-immersion. Understanding which pattern you have, or that you have both, is genuinely useful.
Why are so many people diagnosed late, especially women?
Diagnosis gets missed for several interconnected reasons.
One is masking: the learned ability to perform “normal” in social settings. Many autistic and ADHD individuals, especially girls, develop sophisticated coping systems that make their struggles invisible to others. The internal experience can be completely different from the external presentation. For me, I mask a lot, even long before I knew what masking was.
Recently, I realised that the version of myself that shows up at the gym is probably masking too. I unconsciously put on a different face and energy while I’m there, almost like I switch into another mode without meaning to. But once I leave and get back home, I’m usually extremely tired. It’s something I only recently began to understand, but looking back now, I realise it has always been a part of me.
Another reason is stereotype. Autism is still widely imagined as a young, nonverbal boy. ADHD is still imagined as a hyperactive child who can’t sit still. Neither of those images accounts for the adult who manages to hold a job, maintain friendships, and still come home and completely fall apart from the effort of it.
Research published in an autism journal has consistently found that women and girls are diagnosed later, misdiagnosed more often, and under-represented in diagnostic research that still skews heavily male.
I remember writing once about how I was initially diagnosed with an anxiety disorder even though, deep down, I knew that wasn’t what I was experiencing. Looking back now, I can’t help but wonder whether that diagnosis was influenced, at least in part, by the fact that I am a female.
Women with autism are frequently labelled as the following:
- Shy or introverted
- Overly sensitive or emotionally intense
- Anxious (which they often also are, secondary to the unrecognised autism)
Women with ADHD often receive their first diagnoses of:
The ADHD itself goes unrecognised because inattentive presentations, especially without visible hyperactivity, don’t match what people expect.
Cultural context: Why this gets even more complicated
I want to be honest about something that doesn’t get enough attention in these conversations.
In many parts of Africa, neurodivergence is still misunderstood in ways that are more cultural than clinical. When I eventually began identifying openly as autistic, a religious friend confronted me at her wedding. She told me I should stop “claiming” it, remove it from my social media, and see myself as healed.
She meant well, I think. But that moment made something clear: the stigma around autism is still very real, and it is particularly entangled, in some communities, with moral, spiritual, or behavioural frameworks that aren’t equipped to hold neurodevelopmental complexity.
If you’re in a situation like that, know this: autism was never something I chose. It’s simply something I came to understand about myself. And understanding it has made me kinder to myself, not harder on myself. In many ways, that self-understanding has genuinely improved my overall productivity and quality of life.
Looking back now, I realise one of the reasons I quit my internship in 2020 was because I didn’t yet understand what was happening with me. I wasn’t sure about my diagnosis, so I also didn’t know how to cope with the sensory overload, exhaustion, and constant overwhelm I experienced.
But the following year, I got another job, and more than five years later, I’m still there. The difference is that I now understand why I behave the way I do, and that understanding has given me the context and tools to better manage myself and my environment. That’s why I believe knowing whether you’re autistic, have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or both — often referred to as AuDHD — can actually be a good thing.
Labels are complicated. They can shape how people see you and sometimes even how they treat you. But they can also give language to experiences that were always there, long before you had words for them.
What diagnosis actually involves
Neither autism nor ADHD is diagnosed through a blood test or brain scan. Both are assessed through clinical evaluation, a detailed look at behavioural patterns, developmental history, and how symptoms affect daily life across multiple settings over time.
For ADHD, clinicians look at sustained attention, impulsivity, executive function, and whether symptoms have been present since childhood (even if unrecognised).
For autism, the focus shifts to social communication differences, sensory processing, behavioural patterns, and the presence of traits from early development.
The American Psychological Association and most current clinical guidelines now fully recognise that both diagnoses can coexist in the same person. If you’ve only been assessed for one, it’s worth asking whether the other was considered.
What intelligence has to do with autism or ADHD
One of the most persistent misconceptions I run into is the idea that intelligence and neurodivergence somehow cancel each other out. They don’t.
I was always described as smart. Even in secondary school, people constantly saw me as intelligent and capable. I can’t remember much from my earlier years in primary school, so most of my earliest clear memories begin around class 7 in junior secondary school — or what Americans would call middle or high school.
In many ways, my intelligence helped me mask my struggles. People saw the results, the writing, the grades, the things I could do well. What they didn’t see was the exhaustion that followed me home every single day. And because they never saw that part, it rarely seemed to matter.
What people also didn’t see was how much work was happening underneath the surface just for me to keep up. I practically had to rebuild my own learning systems from scratch to retain information. I could read a sentence and lose it almost immediately, so I would reread it repeatedly, fragment by fragment, sometimes two words at a time, until something finally stayed in my head. Over time, I created workarounds for almost everything. But people only saw the final output and called it intelligence, without understanding the effort, exhaustion, and adaptation behind it.
Neurodivergence doesn’t erase intelligence. And intelligence doesn’t eliminate the need for support. Being high-functioning on the surface doesn’t mean nothing difficult is happening underneath.
So what do you actually do with this?
If you’re reading this and something is landing — if you’re recognising patterns you’ve never had language for — here’s what I’d suggest:
Start with curiosity, not conclusions. The goal isn’t to self-diagnose; it’s to take your own experience seriously enough to seek proper assessment. Tools like the RAADS-R or Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) can be useful starting points for a conversation with a clinician, not as diagnostic tools on their own but as ways to articulate what you’re experiencing.
Find community. Spaces like /r/AutisticAdults or /r/ADHD are full of people navigating exactly these questions. Firsthand experience from people who’ve been through formal assessment can be grounding, especially when the medical system feels inaccessible.
Be patient with the process. Diagnosis is a starting point, not a conclusion. What matters most is understanding how your brain actually works so you can build systems and environments that work with it, not against it.
So, do you have ADHD, autism, or both?
Having both autism and ADHD doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means your brain is doing a lot of complex things at once — things most systems were not designed to accommodate.
The question “Do I have ADHD, autism, or both?” is worth asking. Not because a label fixes anything. But because understanding yourself, finally and clearly, is its own form of relief.
I spent years shrinking what I knew about my own mind to make other people more comfortable. It didn’t help me, and it didn’t help them understand me better either.
What actually helped was this: being willing to sit with the complexity, find people who understood it, and stop expecting my experience to match a stereotype that was never designed with people like me in mind.
Note: This article reflects personal experience alongside publicly available clinical and research sources. It is not a substitute for professional diagnosis or clinical advice. If you’re exploring this for yourself, a psychologist or psychiatrist with experience in adult ADHD and autism is the right next step.
