If you’re navigating life with ADHD, anxiety, or both, you’re not alone. The challenges are common and well documented. Anxiety is one of the most common conditions to occur alongside ADHD. This means that many people are managing not only a restless, distracted mind but also one that worries, anticipates problems, and struggles to wind down after stress.
You may have heard advice to “just change your perspective.” But when your thoughts are racing, your focus is scattered, or your emotions are overwhelming, it rarely feels that simple.
The good news is that while you can’t change how your brain is wired, you can learn how to work with it. The right strategies can interrupt the patterns that make ADHD and anxiety feed off each other. With practice, you can create space to respond more clearly and calmly.
Two practical, science-backed tools, called Perspective Levers, can help shift how your brain handles everyday stress.
When we feel overwhelmed, our brain’s natural response is to turn inward. Most of us experience anxiety through the lens of “me” and “my problems.” This happens because of a specific part of the brain known as the medial frontal gyrus (MFG).
Take a look at the red wedge in the image below—that’s the MFG. It plays a big role in creating your sense of self and makes you feel like “you.” Unfortunately, this same region sits right next to areas that process negative emotions, evaluations, and attention. These parts of the brain are constantly interacting.
So when something stressful happens, your brain reacts in a way that makes the experience feel highly personal. And our attention is repeatedly directed to the stress, which creates an emotionally charged neural feedback loop. This is particularly challenging if you live with ADHD and anxiety, because both conditions make the brain more reactive to stress, more prone to self-focus, and less able to shift attention once something upsetting grabs hold.
The thoughts can spiral quickly:
This loop of egocentric stress can hinder our daily functioning and make anxiety feel inescapable. We don’t just feel stress. We become the stress. Studies have shown that people who experience depression show increased activation in these brain areas. This causes their focus to be on the potentially negative situations and to see them as emotional and particularly relevant to themselves.
But there’s good news. Even if your brain is wired to zoom in on stress, you can learn to zoom out. With practice, you can quiet the feedback loop between ADHD and anxiety. You can learn to direct your attention in ways that help you feel more grounded and in control.
Changing your perspective doesn’t mean ignoring real problems. It means learning how to step outside the emotional storm, even briefly, so you can see your situation with more clarity and response more skillfully.
Creating this kind of distance helps interrupt the cycle that ADHD and anxiety often reinforce. It eases urgency, quiets emotional noise, and gives you more room to choose how you want to respond.
Two practical tools, called Perspective Levers (PL), can help you build this skill:
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Our brains are naturally good at something called mental time travel—thinking about the past and imagining the future. How far we go in either direction affects how personally we experience a situation.
When we think about events close to the present, we experience them more intensely and personally. But when we mentally place ourselves further away in time, we tend to see things more objectively and calmly.
For example:
The same is true for the future:
This is powerful for people experiencing ADHD and anxiety, because both conditions can trap the brain in a “now bubble”—where everything feels immediate and overwhelming. Mental time travel gives you the ability to break out of that bubble, allowing you to see your situation with more clarity and compassion.
Here’s the key: when you imagine something from far away in time, your brain tends to take on an observer’s perspective, rather than a first-person, emotionally reactive one. That mental shift makes it easier to regulate emotions, plan effectively, and reduce the intense self-focus that anxiety thrives on.
Here are three tools to help you apply this shift in everyday life:
Imagine yourself one year from now. Picture that version of you looking back at what’s happening today. Ask yourself:
Writing out your answers can bring calm and clarity. Your future self knows you’ve been through hard things before and you’ve come out more resilient.
Write a letter to your future self describing how you’re feeling right now. Be honest. Share what’s bothering you, what you’re afraid of, and what you hope will change.
Then, read the letter as if you are your future self. What stands out? What do you understand now that your past self didn’t? This small shift can bring a big emotional reset.
Recall a time—at least a year ago—when you felt similarly overwhelmed. Maybe it was a messy family conflict, a tough exam period, or a stressful time at work.
Ask yourself:
Being specific helps. Think about:
Whether it was organizing your calendar, asking for help, or simply taking a break—these moments remind you that stress passes. And so will this.
For all of the above techniques, try to be as specific as possible. During mental time travel, being specific and using concrete details triggers episodic memory, which helps increase our sense of self-efficacy and better supports social problem solving.
Pulling yourself out of the present when you’re stressed can be an effective strategy. These techniques aren’t just comforting. They actually help your brain create emotional distance from the current stress, making it easier to respond with perspective rather than panic.
Anxiety often takes shape in the stories we tell ourselves, especially when our thoughts spiral into what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. For those experiencing ADHD and anxiety, this can feel like a mental tug-of-war. ADHD pulls your focus in different directions, while anxiety locks onto the most self-critical or threatening thoughts.
One of the most effective ways to calm this mental storm is by noticing how you're thinking, not just what you're thinking. We tend to use two styles of thought: concrete and abstract. Both have value, but when stress is high, one is usually more helpful.
When anxiety combines with ADHD, abstract thinking can become especially intense. You might leap from a small mistake to a sweeping self-judgment like, “If I missed this deadline, maybe I’m just not cut out for this at all.” Or, “I forgot again—this is who I am, and I’ll never change.” These are examples of overgeneralizing and over-stabilizing, two patterns that keep anxious thoughts feeling true, even when they aren’t helpful or accurate.
ADHD adds to this by making it harder to pause, reflect, or shift away from those thoughts once they take hold. The combination can make you feel stuck in a mental loop that’s hard to exit.
When you intentionally move toward concrete thinking, you help your brain return to a more centered and grounded state. This shift allows you to reconnect with what is specific, doable, and true in the present moment. Here are four ways to train your brain to think more concretely:
Use a random word generator or just look around you. For each object or idea you encounter, come up with similar examples.
Example: If the word is “fruit,” list: apple, banana, pear, mango.
As you go about your day, try to do this mentally: “A chair is like… a stool, a bench, a recliner.”
This practice eases mental noise and brings you into a more concrete construal state where your attention is directed towards the specific instead of the vague.
Think back to something you did yesterday—maybe you cleaned the kitchen or worked on a school project.
Now, write down the steps:
The point is to focus on how something was done. The more you do this, the more your brain shifts into a more concrete and calm mindset.
Choose something simple that you do quite often in your daily life. For example, how to make a smoothie, how your morning routine works, or how to get your kids ready for school.
Now explain it—either in writing or out loud—in as much detail as possible. Describe what happens first, what comes next, and what tools are involved.
Avoid topics you don’t fully understand, as your brain will default to vague, abstract thinking (which is what we’re trying to avoid!).
Mind wandering is linked to increased stress and negative emotions. Try these simple ways to stay present:
Changing how you experience anxiety or ADHD isn’t about pushing away your feelings. It’s about shifting how your brain engages with stress so that it feels less personal and overwhelming.
Here’s a quick recap of your two main tools:
These are learnable skills. They take practice, but over time they can rewire how your brain responds to stress. That red wedge in the brain (the MFG)? It can get quieter. And with that, your anxiety may no longer feel quite so tied to “you.”
To return to our initial point, it is true that changing perspective doesn’t have a simple on-off-switch solution. But with the right tools, and applied with consistency over time, you’ll learn that it can be done.
You’re not alone in this. And you’re not stuck. With the right tools and support, change is possible—and you can start today.
