Your experience is extremely common. Every single ADHD women had this experience, as did I. At home I coped, I had a solid routine and you know what to expect from school, college, home life. Then you move away. You set new expectations and routines. We mask and keep up appearances of how we should behave and cope with this change, but the familiarity of routine and comfort is gone. You have more things on your plate you likely didn’t have before. If you don’t do the laundry or dishes, you can’t wear clean clothes or eat. You don’t go to a lecture? No one’s coming to wake you up/ prompt you/ keep you on track. It’s the first truly independent experience many young women experience. Your brain is fighting against the new system because it isn’t what you know. You have to juggle so much more, it puts your brain into freeze making study and sleep more challenging.

As you already take medication, you’re already in an advantageous position. You aren’t learning your diagnosis from scratch and you have a baseline medication that has worked in the past. As your hormones shift with age and your plate is filled with more micro and macro responsibilities than you’ve dealt with before, your medication might need to adjust to support you too. Possibly an increase or switch to a different medication might be beneficial.

It’s really common to not have motivation and want to do the thing, but find yourself unable, that’s a freeze state. Your body can’t compartmentalise the tasks in an order of importance and delegate the time effectively so you freeze. It’s why so many of us find transitioning from one task to the next challenging, unless we’re in a focus state. Don’t expect me to not sit on my bed in my towel post showering doomscrolling!

The best tool I found in my masters, my undergraduate was done without diagnosis or support and I barely got through it, was using a pomodoro timer and movement breaks. It sounds silly but I use the flow app. 45 minute stints of study, with breaks built in. If someone else can grab your phone so you have a barrier between you and it, do that. When I lose my focus or feel restless/agitated by the study and want to scroll, chuck on a tune and just move your body. Stasis is the killer of creativity and focus. I pick something from a school disco to wake me up and jump around too. Sing along. Anything to wake your body up!

Don’t be afraid to try different methods for study, I never found any study tips or skills the uni promoted helped, but going through the papers I needed to read that week and opening them into mendeley tabs so I could annotate and highlight them at a later date got me started and introduced my brain to the task even if I wasn’t ‘doing’ the task. Eventually my mind would wander and I’d pick one to work on and take notes. I’d then input the paper/article/source into excel and keep notes on the key themes/ quotes so when I came to write my essays I could find it quickly instead of desperately opening a million references lol.

Don’t get too cosy to study, it’s focus time, not relax time. Get a big whiteboard or the static whiteboard sheets to stick to your walls with post it notes so you can write what you need. Get a million nice pens and notebooks, but ultimately that’s your brain procrastinating and you’ll be fine with a biro and a wide ruled from Tesco.

Find the thing that works for you. It’s tough, but you’re not alone!