Why Emotions Hijack Your Brain (Part 2 of 3)
ADHD in 5-Minutes: From Frustration to Understanding [#010]
Quick Recap: Your Body-Mind's Guidance System
In Part 1, we established that emotions aren't random feelings that happen to you—they're your body-mind's guidance system trying to help you navigate what's happening right now. They're contextually-constructed, which means they're built from what's going on around you mixed with your personal history, and they come with action potential—that urge to do something about the situation.
For ADHD brains, this guidance system runs hot. We're hypersensitive to context, so our emotional guidance fires off more frequently and intensely than most people's. The result? We often feel like we're drowning in emotional information while simultaneously struggling to figure out what to actually do with it all.
Today, we're diving into the brutal reality of how this emotional chaos directly fuels your ADHD symptoms. This isn't about lacking self-control.
How Emotions Hijack Your Attention
Let's start with something you've definitely experienced: you're trying to focus on something important when suddenly your brain gets yanked away by...what exactly? Sometimes it's obvious—you're stressed about a deadline so you can't concentrate on anything else. But often it's more subtle and confusing.
Here's what's actually happening: emotions are designed to grab and redirect your attention.
From an evolutionary perspective, if your body-mind detects something significant in your environment (danger, opportunity, social threat, whatever), it needs to get your attention fast so you can respond appropriately. Emotions, in part, are responsible for hijacking your focused attention so you can re-orient towards what your system believes is more significant.
For neurotypical brains, this works reasonably well. Their emotional guidance has a decent filter: it can quickly discern if a 'distraction' is "likely important" or "probably fine to ignore for now."
Unfortunately, for ADHD brains, that filter is full of holes.
Remember, we're hypersensitive to context. That means our emotional guidance system is constantly detecting "significant" information that might not actually require immediate attention. For instance, your brain picks up on:
The slight tension in your coworker's voice during a meeting
The fact that you haven't heard back from that friend you texted recently
The way the light is hitting your desk differently than usual
The vague memory of something you might have forgotten to do last week
Each of these is a shift in context, which means there are now extra variables to consider: Do I need to talk with my coworker, or what if they didn't receive my email last week? Is my friend OK or are they mad at me? My head hurts at my desk…maybe I'm stressed, or dehydrated? And what if that thing I forgot is crucial to what I'm doing right now?
These variables might be very significant, so your attention tries to investigate further to see if action is needed. Even if the emotional response is subtle, say like mild anxiety, it's enough to pull your focus away from whatever you were trying to concentrate on.
The Attention-Emotion Feedback Loop
Here's where it gets particularly cruel: once your attention gets hijacked by emotions, you often end up with more emotions about having lost focus, which hijacks your attention further. The loop can look like this:
Trying to focus on Task A when your brain detects a minor shift in context around you, causing it to hijack your attention to discern what's shifted and if it's truly significant
Now you're not focused on Task A…and end up realizing 15 minutes later that you've made no progress on Task A…
A cocktail of emotions surfaces (shame/frustration/anxiety) about "being distracted again"
These new emotions hijack your attention even more, trying to figure out why you lost focus for so long. At which point, an urge to numb those emotions arises because they're becoming overwhelming.
A Driving Force Behind Hyperactivity and Impulsivity
Now let's talk about that restless, "wired but tired" feeling, or those moments when you say or do something without much thought but then immediately think, “Why the hell did I just do that?”
Remember from Part 1: emotions come with action potential. They're literally designed to prep your body for action. When you feel something, your body-mind is saying, "Something significant is happening: let's get ready to move!"
For ADHD brains, this action potential often gets stuck or misdirected, just like attention.
Here's the problem: a hypersensitive emotional guidance system is constantly generating action potential (urges to move, speak, act, escape, approach, fight, connect), but the signals are often unclear, contradictory, or there are too many of them!
You have all this energy to do something, but no clear direction for where to channel it. For most ADHDers, there's a regular experience of the following:
Physical restlessness: fidgeting, needing to move, feeling uncomfortable (without a known cause)
Mental hyperactivity: racing thoughts, jumping between ideas, starting multiple tasks then abandoning them
Impulsive actions: interrupting people, making purchases you can't afford, sending texts you immediately regret
Emotional impulsivity: snapping at people, crying over small things, getting disproportionately excited
Living with ADHD means emotional action potential arises more frequently, builds up fast, and too easily gets "expressed" or gets stuck.
The Two Executive Circuits
This brings us to one of the most important concepts for understanding ADHD: your brain doesn't have just one executive control center. It has two distinct circuits ("cold" and "hot") that handle different types of situations and sometimes they can be at odds with each other.
The "Cold" Circuit
This is your logical, analytical, planning-oriented circuit. It handles:
Abstract thinking, long-term planning, and thinking about options
Following multi-step instructions
Considering consequences/costs before acting
Staying engaged with tasks that offer delayed returns
This system works best when you're calm, well-rested, and dealing with situations that don't provoke emotions. For most people, when they're in the "cold" circuit, they consider this their "wise mind." This is the part of them that takes long-term consequences into account and makes thoughtful decisions relative to distant goals.
The "Hot" Circuit
This is your emotional, immediate, socially-sensitive brain. It handles:
Emotionally-charged decisions
Responding to urgent or high-stakes situations
Social situations and interpersonal dynamics
Reward-seeking, and following impulses
This system activates when emotions are involved, when there's social pressure, or when immediate rewards are available. For most people, when they're in the "hot" circuit, they are able to quickly adapt to changing circumstances and often forgo long-term planning to ensure short-term survival or success.
ADHD: A Brain That Runs “Hot”
In neurotypical brains, these two systems generally work together reasonably well. When emotions are low, the "cold" system handles things. When emotions run high or quick decisions are needed, the "hot" system takes over temporarily, then hands control back.
In ADHD brains, this handoff is usually fumbled or chaotic.
Because ADHDers experience emotional activation more often, our "hot" circuit is grabbing attention more often than it should. Meanwhile, our "cold" circuit (the one we need for sustained effort and thoughtful decision-making) keeps getting knocked offline. This is one of the reasons why:
You can handle a crisis like a champion but completely freeze up when trying to plan a simple schedule
You have brilliant plans at midnight, but they seem impossible whenever the day starts and other demands compete for your time
You make impulsive decisions that you immediately regret, even though you "knew better"
The Avoidance Trap: When Emotions Become the Enemy
Here's where things get particularly sneaky. Because intense emotions feel overwhelming and often lead to problems (hijacked attention, impulsive actions, the exhausting hot/cold executive switching), many ADHDers develop strategies to avoid feeling emotions altogether. This makes perfect sense as a survival strategy: If emotions consistently cause problems, why not just...not feel them?
Emotional avoidance often looks like distraction (e.g., endless scrolling, binge-watching, gaming, shopping, work), numbing (e.g., alcohol, drugs, food, sex), dissociating (e.g., spacing out, feeling disconnected or isolated, going through the motions), and intellectualizing (e.g., analyzing feelings instead of experiencing them, coming up with theories about why life is hard without taking action).
And the cruel irony of all this avoidance?
It just makes the emotional experience more intense and disruptive.
When you don't allow yourself to feel and process emotions, they don't just disappear. They build up…until all that pressure finds a way out, usually through physical symptoms, emotional meltdowns, or complete shutdowns.
Plus, remember that emotions are contextually-constructed guidance. When you avoid them, you are essentially flying blind. You're likely to miss crucial information about what's happening in your environment and what you might need to do about it.
Eventually, you end up far more dysregulated, not less…
The very thing you were trying to avoid becomes unavoidable (and far worse than before).
Wrapping Up (to Setup for Part 3)
Here's what we've established so far:
If you live with ADHD, your emotional guidance system is hypersensitive to shifts in context
This hypersensitivity means slight changes in context hijack your attention and often generate more action potential that builds up
Your "cold" executive circuit (the slow thinking, planning one) keeps getting knocked offline by the "hot" circuit (the emotional, reactionary one) which often leads to hyperactivity/impulsivity
Finally, avoiding emotions leads to more intense emotions
When your "hot" executive circuit is online, your "cold," more logical circuit literally doesn't have access to the controls. Trying to think your way out of an emotional state is like trying to reason with a car alarm: the part doing the reasoning isn't the same part that's making the noise.
Coming Next: What Actually Works
In Part 3, I'll show you why and how ADHDers can regain control when they're dysregulated. Here's what's coming up:
Why ADHD brains need "bottom-up" regulation strategies to return "top-down" control
How to more easily work with your emotions (rather than avoid them)
Easy to learn, quick-to-master techniques that can calm your body-mind when it's hijacked
A free downloadable guide with these techniques for all subscribers
Keep an eye out for Part 3 coming later this week! Until then, take care.
Cheers,
Michael