By ADHD, I mean attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
By hypermobility, I mean the genetically determined existence of being loose jointed.
By anxiety, I am referring to the subconscious state of worry and unrest that places a person in an activated state.
By pain, I mean physical discomfort.
I have been a physiotherapist working with people in physical discomfort for twenty two years. I have been hypermobile for my forty six years; aware that was a thing for about twenty of them, and in physical discomfort one way or another for large portions of my life. I fall somewhere on the spectrums of both ADHD and Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, undiagnosed.
Anxiety is something I have been surrounded by due to the nature of my work and the experience of raising three teenagers (13, 15, 16). I see others’ trauma, and have lived through my own. Anxiety takes many forms. It is a cognitive and physical experience that can take over how you think, feel, act, and react.
ADHD is one of the many drivers of anxiety. It broadly categorizes people that have a busy brain. People that have the capacity to hold many trains of thought at the same time and the tendency to bounce around between them. It can be a super power if you learn how to harness it and channel it for good, but it can also be exhausting, distracting and anxiety provoking because you rarely have access to a state of calm. You can accomplish a lot but rarely finish things on time, or at all, unless you have found a structure that works for you. More thoughts equals more opportunity to worry. More worries, and the feeling of being scattered living in a world with a structure not built for you, breeds anxiety. Anxiety is experienced as a variety of tensions in your muscles, organs and connective tissue that make you physically uncomfortable and emotionally taxed.
Genetic hypermobility, in my experience, is closely associated with ADHD, anxiety and pain. They are not a cause-effect relationship, but as a physiotherapist that works with a lot of people experiencing chronic and resistant pain issues, I can tell you that they frequently are a package deal.
Being hypermobile means that all of your soft tissues have relatively more of a protein called elastin which makes them stretchier than your average person. All of your muscles, ligaments, fascia, joint capsules and blood vessels have a bit too much give to them. You are loosely held together. You will have a hard time staying still because it is a challenging task just to stack up all your bones to deal with gravity. You can sprain ligaments rolling over in bed. Your blood pressure will probably be low so you will get dizzy bending over and standing up. Little things can be hard, but it is easy to hurt yourself. You are built to move, not to stay still.
ADHD is a mind that is programmed to move and has trouble staying still. Hypermobility is a body that is biomechanically built to move and has trouble staying still. Anxiety and pains are the common product when these two states manifest in the same person, and they commonly do. Just talk to dancers and the adolescent boys that are driving their teachers nuts. They are built to move, but we ask them to stay still, and shockingly they start getting anxious and uncomfortable.
Anxiety and hypermobility create tension in people’s bodies for different reasons. Anxiety heightens your nervous system and can result in localized areas of increased tone in your muscles and the fascia around your organs. The result can be be stiffness, pain and issues like acid reflux or extra heart beats. Hypermobility makes it challenging to efficiently stack the twenty four vertebrae of your spine on top of each other, so you will tend to create subconscious bracing strategies to hold everything together. These strategies can be compressive and cause a person that is very flexible to feel very stiff. Feeling stiff causes you to want to move. Feeling anxious causes you to want to move. Thinking about four things at once keeps your brain moving. You have very little to no calm and your body starts talking to you in the form of discomfort and dysfunction.
Author and physician Gabor Mate discusses how stress is the root of many of our physical problems in his book When The Body Says No. He provides context to the experience and development of ADHD in Scattered Minds, and he illustrates how our culture is driving us to ill health in The Myth of Normal.
In my first book, Why Things Hurt, I explain the physical factors that contribute to pain. In my second book, Why We Hurt, I discuss the physical manifestations of our emotional experiences. Now I have created a video based course to help hypermobile people learn to control their posture and movement patterns, and exercise without hurting themselves.
People with ADHD innately need to move, but also need some structure in how they move because they are typically stuck in their head and ignore their body. There is a section in Why We Hurt titled "Your Body: More Than A Vehicle To Walk Your Head Around" that discusses why very cerebral people hurt themselves all the time.
It is a complex task to help people with ADHD, hypermobility, anxiety and pain because they are scattered, worried, and most of their symptoms don’t show up on any medical tests, making them more anxious and commonly depressed. I have found the best success by treating the tension they hold with IMS dry needling and visceral manipulation, teaching them about their hypermobility and the importance of posture, and directing them to learn about the use of either ADHD medications or microdosing psilocybin as a tool in finding some calm.
A knowledgeable physiotherapist, a cooperative family physician, a supportive counsellor, and a willingness to read and learn about how your body actually works is how you learn to feel good in your body. It is not as intuitive as you think it should be.
Below is a video about my new posture course and links to books, courses and articles I referenced above.
Click here for my new course: Making Life Your Workout: A Practical Guide To Posture
Click here for my book Why Things Hurt: Life Lessons From An Injury Prone Physical Therapist
Click here for my book Why We Hurt: Understanding How To Be Comfortable In Your Own Body
Click here for my course IMS Dry Needling for Health Professionals