This is the question I keep coming back to, and I want to sit with it carefully because it matters. How similar are our brains’ responses to information and neurological overwhelm to the symptoms of ADHD?
ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental condition with real genetic and neurological components. People have always had it, long before iPhones existed. There’s real harm in dismissing it as a cultural invention.
But here’s the question worth asking: are we, through our digital environment, creating conditions that make ADHD-like symptoms essentially universal? Are we then diagnosing the symptom while ignoring the condition we’ve collectively created that is provoking them?
Some researchers describe a neurologically altered state they call ‘attention deficit trait’ — not a neurodevelopmental condition, but a learned one. The brain, in other words, can be trained toward distractibility. We are training our brains relentlessly, every time we pick up a phone.
There’s a meaningful difference between a brain that is wired differently and a brain that has been environmentally conditioned to struggle with focus and depth. Both deserve care. But they’re not the same thing.
The leaders I work with are not failing because they lack information, skill, or drive. They’re often struggling because their nervous systems are running a program that was never designed for this volume of input — and nobody told them that regulating that system is part of the job. That it may be most of the job.
Awareness is the beginning of choice. And choice — real, deliberate, values-aligned choice — is about how you engage with all of it.
