I’m autistic with quite a few ADHD friends. What I’ve gathered from sharing our experiences is that we all encounter similar problems with everyday life, but our internal experiences (and thus probably also the underlying causes) differ so much. For example, I may go to the kitchen because it’s lunch time, but since that lunch time is interrupting my work, all of my mental energy is going towards trying to not forget the things I’m working on, which will often push out the reason I went to the kitchen in the first place. The experience I hear from all my ADHD friends is that they have new trains of thought entering and leaving their heads at all times, and those new thoughts are what make them forget their reason for being in the kitchen. Holding multiple thoughts is hard for me, while it seems to be the natural state of things for ADHD.
I’m autistic with quite a few ADHD friends. What I’ve gathered from sharing our experiences is that we all encounter similar problems with everyday life, but our internal experiences (and thus probably also the underlying causes) differ so much. For example, I may go to the kitchen because it’s lunch time, but since that lunch time is interrupting my work, all of my mental energy is going towards trying to not forget the things I’m working on, which will often push out the reason I went to the kitchen in the first place. The experience I hear from all my ADHD friends is that they have new trains of thought entering and leaving their heads at all times, and those new thoughts are what make them forget their reason for being in the kitchen. Holding multiple thoughts is hard for me, while it seems to be the natural state of things for ADHD.