Very On Trend

What happens when a diagnosis becomes a trend?

A confession before we start: this one is personal. You’ve probably heard the word in question more times this year than you’d like, and you may already be rolling your eyes. I understand. Bear with me anyway, because I think this is a story about what happens to a label once it lives on a feed. Read it, research it, argue with me. Just engage with it.

With that, let’s begin.

The report calls me “the test taker.”

The test taker, it informs me, had a total symptom score of 98. Anything above 50 represents a high likelihood of ADHD. Ninety-ninth percentile on nearly every measure. About 7% of the population lands at that level. Age: 24 years, 9 months.

When I told LinkedIn about it, I couldn’t help adding a disclaimer. (I know. Very on trend.)

I made the joke because I know the eye-roll. You might be doing it right now (I won’t take it personally). Everyone and their mother seems to have ADHD these days, if you believe the feed. Some wear it like a personality. Some hand it over like a doctor’s note. Some post it like a medal. I wanted to be none of the above, so I got to the punchline before anyone else could.

And the eye-roll has receipts. In a 2025 study, two clinical psychologists reviewed the 100 most popular #ADHD videos on TikTok, and fewer than half of the claims in them matched the clinical criteria. The same study surveyed 843 college students: 421 had diagnosed themselves, more than twice the 198 who were diagnosed by a professional. One in four adults suspects they have ADHD. Somewhere around 6% of us do. The researchers also noticed that many of the videos took the ordinary, messy parts of being human and rebranded them as symptoms.

So the label is everywhere. But why does it fit so many people so easily?

~~~

My best guess is this: we’ve built a world that makes everyone restless, and then handed everyone a word for restlessness.

Daniel Kahneman split our thinking into two speeds. System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional. System 2 is slow and deliberate, the part of you that does complex thinking. Almost everything on your phone is designed for System 1. It’s the speed that scrolls, reacts and shares before the slower part of you has finished its sentence.

Buddhist psychology has a word for one of the states a feed runs on: uddhacca. Restlessness. The mind that can’t settle, always reaching for the next thing.

Pause for a moment and think about the last time you opened an app for one thing and surfaced twenty minutes later staring at video of a dancing cat. An app paid in attention has every reason to keep you there, so it keeps you moving, reacting, reaching. Then, somewhere between the fourth and fifth video, a stranger lists the signs of a restless mind. Of course you recognize yourself. The feed manufactured the feeling, then sold you the explanation.

A label is a fast answer, and fast answers are exactly what System 1 craves. You see it, you feel seen, and you can wear it by lunch. Understanding it is slow. It requires the unglamorous parts: testing, history, and a proper look at which parts are one’s wiring and which parts are the phone.

I watched the phone part happen to the students I tutored over six years. Their capacity to stay with challenging problems wore down, a little at a time, under constant small interruptions. Nobody seemed to notice it happening (sound familiar?).

My theory is that this is an almost artificial ADHD, one that we choose to label instead of addressing the root cause.

~~~

My wiring was there long before any of that.

I learned through stories, and through how each teacher saw the thing they were teaching. I would space out completely while someone talked… and weeks later, recall every word. I’d run at full speed, then crash, with no idea how to manage either end. I cruised through school paying attention to patterns and almost nothing else. Then a horse stepped on my head, which complicated the picture for a while (a story for another day, or for LinkedIn, if you missed it).

So what do you do with a label you spent 24 years not having?

I’m choosing to treat it like a manual. A manual tells you how the machine runs, where it overheats and what it needs to keep going. What you build with it is still your call.

The alternative is tempting, I’ll admit. “Sorry, ADHD” is a wonderfully efficient sentence. It ends the conversation. It also ends the learning, and the learning is the part I live for. As I’ve said before, our ACTIONS make us who we are. The label doesn’t.

~~~

In early 2025 I ran an experiment on myself: twelve hours of work and research a day, four hours of meditation, one hour of physical training. I wanted to break my own patterns before I went looking at anyone else’s. Then I traveled to communities, isolated and urban, to watch how they use ritual.

What I kept finding was friction. Slow, repetitive, deliberately inconvenient practices that keep meaning from wearing away. I started calling it generative friction.

A feed removes friction. Ritual adds it back. For a brain like mine, the friction is the part that works, and it is incredibly important.

These days, the form of friction that I choose to implement is fairly simple (in theory). I sit in complete silence before the daily chaos begins (some mornings longer than others… I’m working on it). And I choose people. I go out and meet them, sit with them, ask questions and listen to the stories behind the faces. As I watch them, I can feel the emotions that come up as they speak, and catch glimpses of so much more. A profile or a concept on a screen will only ever give you the summary. Sitting across from someone gives you the actual human.

Maybe that’s the work for all of us, diagnosis or not. Choosing what we let in, and building back a little resistance where the world has sanded it all away.

The report still calls me the test taker.

Fair enough… I’m still taking it.

Jess

Poking Points for the Brain:

Labels as Tools

Restlessness for Profit

System 1 Living

Generative Friction

The Self-Diagnosis Economy

---

Sources

• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow.
• Karasavva, V. et al. (2025). A double-edged hashtag: Evaluation of #ADHD-related TikTok content and its associations with perceptions of ADHD. PLOS One. Article
• Petrie-Flom Center, Harvard Law School (2025). Dr. TikTok: the impacts of misinformation on mental health self-diagnosis. Article