Difficulty concentrating. Restlessness. Trouble finishing tasks. Racing thoughts. These symptoms show up in both anxiety and ADHD, and the overlap is substantial enough that the two are frequently mistaken for each other — or missed entirely because one is masking the other.
Why the Overlap Is So Significant
Research estimates a substantial proportion of adults with ADHD also meet criteria for an anxiety disorder — considerably higher than the rate in the general population. Part of this is coincidental co-occurrence, but part of it is mechanistic: living with unmanaged ADHD tends to generate anxiety on its own.
Missed deadlines, forgotten commitments, and the chronic sense of falling behind that untreated ADHD often produces create real, recurring situations to be anxious about. Over time, this can develop into a secondary anxiety disorder layered on top of the original ADHD — one that responds partially to anxiety treatment, but won't fully resolve unless the underlying ADHD is also addressed.
Where the Symptoms Diverge
Difficulty concentrating. In anxiety, this usually comes from intrusive, worry-driven thoughts crowding out focus — the mind is occupied by something specific, often threat-related. In ADHD, difficulty concentrating is more often driven by an attention system that struggles to sustain focus on anything, worry-related or not, including things the person genuinely wants to focus on.
Restlessness. Anxious restlessness tends to have an anticipatory, on-edge quality tied to a feared outcome. ADHD-related restlessness is often more constant and less tied to a specific worry — a baseline need for stimulation or movement rather than a response to threat.
Task avoidance. Anxious avoidance is usually driven by fear of a specific negative outcome — judgment, failure, embarrassment. ADHD-related task avoidance is more often driven by difficulty initiating tasks that aren't immediately engaging, regardless of the emotional stakes attached to them.
Racing thoughts. Anxious racing thoughts tend to loop around a theme, often catastrophic. ADHD-related racing thoughts are more often rapid and tangential, jumping between unrelated ideas rather than circling one worry.
Why Getting This Right Matters
Treating ADHD-driven difficulty as if it were purely anxiety-driven — or the reverse — tends to produce limited results, because the interventions that work for one don't fully address the other. Reframing an anxious thought doesn't help much if the actual barrier is difficulty initiating a task. Structuring an environment for attention support doesn't resolve a catastrophic thought that's driving genuine dread.
Many people with both conditions describe years of frustration trying anxiety-focused strategies for what turned out to be a significant ADHD component, or vice versa — underscoring why an accurate read on what's driving a given symptom matters as much as recognizing the symptom itself.
A Useful Starting Point
Notice what precedes the symptom. Does the difficulty concentrating follow a specific worried thought, or does it happen regardless of what's on your mind? That distinction alone often points toward which mechanism is more dominant in a given moment.
Track patterns across different contexts. Anxiety-driven symptoms tend to spike around specific triggers or evaluative situations. ADHD-driven symptoms tend to appear more consistently across contexts, including low-stakes, low-pressure ones.
Journaling the specific circumstances around difficulty focusing or restlessness — what preceded it, what it actually felt like, whether a specific worry was present — builds the kind of detailed record that makes this distinction clearer over time than trying to sort it out from memory.
Both Deserve a Proper Evaluation
If this overlap resonates, a formal evaluation from a professional familiar with both conditions is worth pursuing rather than guessing. The two conditions respond to meaningfully different interventions, and knowing which is driving a given symptom — or whether both are present — changes what's actually likely to help.