For a long time, I have felt like Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is not the right name to call what I have. I do not have a deficit of attention. On the contrary, I have attention in spades. I just don’t apply it to the things that society thinks I should. And, as someone who is capable of hyperfocusing on a single interest for multiple hours (I remember nights in college where I played video games until six in the morning, then turned around and got ready to be at school at 9:00 AM because I knew that if I went to sleep at that point, I would not make it to class) so clearly, there is no deficit there.

And what may be perceived as a deficit to the people on the outside of my brain is generally just me being unable to focus because I’m on the inside, thinking about things that actually interest me or worrying about things that have either already happened or have yet to happen. Alas, a person with ADHD has a very difficult time being ‘in the moment.’

Instead of calling it Attention Deficit Disorder, I used to think it should be called Attention Displacement Disorder, and I still believe that would be a satisfactory name for it, as our attention is often displaced onto something that we find more important. But after learning a great deal more about ADHD over these past few years, I thought about what the struggle was in having ADHD as it applies to the executive function (or in our case, the “executive dysfunction”) of the brain, and I realized– the things we struggle with mostly have to do with the inability to regulate things. We have a hard time regulating emotions so that we can be happy one moment and seemingly flip into anger in the next. We have difficulty regulating productivity. I mean people with ADHD do not lack motivation on all days, there are some days in which we can be massively productive all on our own, even without medication, but we can’t tell ahead of time when those days are going to come. Even the hyperactivity is a dysregulation. It is a difficulty in regulating the movement of our bodies (or in the inattentive type, difficulty in regulating the movement of the mind).

So if we can have other types of dysregulation, why not attention dysregulation?

This is why I decided that a better name for ADHD might actually be Attention Dysregulation/Hyperactivity Disorder. Or maybe even Executive Function Dysregulation Disorder. Either of those would be much closer to what we actually experience, having ADHD. And then maybe people would understand that having ADHD is not having a conversation and then noticing a squirrel in the middle of your sentence. Or maybe that is expecting too much.