ADHD and Creativity: Another View

Survival of the Fittest

You've heard of this term, but what does it mean? Survival of the fittest is the concept that the strongest survive.

But for people with ADHD, it means that in order to fit in this non-ADD world, we need to figure out ways to adapt in ways that others know how to do so intuitively. How do we stay connected with people when our minds are racing in all different, interesting directions? How do we get our work done in time? How do we begin, let alone finish our chores? Often times, we need to dance 10 times faster in order to stay in step with our non ADHD counterparts. The amount of energy expended is enormous, which is why we have a tendency to be extremely stressed out and exhausted at the end of each day. Additionally, to compensate for our lack of innate abilities to be organized, on time, etc., we come up with our own strategies which often happen to be...creative. So in a sense, folks with ADHD, in order to survive in this world, *need* to be creative.

ADHD or Creativity?

To complicate matters, highly creative people often *look* like they have ADHD. They tend to be unconventional, distracted, lost in ideas and often are hyperactive/impulsive either motorically, mentally or both. In fact, leading ADHD expert Dr. Ned Hallowell, co-author of Driven to Distraction and author of other books on ADHD, has defined creativity as "impulsivity gone right."

I have yet to meet a young child who is not creative. In the context of learning about their world, children use new experiences, materials, thoughts, relationships, feelings, etc in order to create an understanding of their world. Similarly, my experience has been that many if not most adults with ADHD tend to have a childlike playfulness to their personality. Is it because we delight in the novelty of things that others take for granted? Is it a creative way of seeing the world because we're always needing to figure out things that others innately seem to understand? I'm not sure.

On the other hand, almost all children "look" like they have ADHD. They are active, impulsive, distracted and often disorganized. To further complicate things, every adult with ADHD that I personally know, were unusually creative as children and teens. Is there a study showing this correlation? I don't believe so.

All in all, it is an interesting topic worthy of further discussion and research; so little is known about the connection- if any- between ADHD and creativity.