Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. And number three,

and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug, because experiencing

anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, let's go. Have you ever wondered if what you've been calling anxiety might actually be something else

like maybe ADHD?

If so, you're not alone.

So many of you have shared how confusing and overwhelming it feels to untangle these two

experiences.

And that's exactly what we're here to have a conversation about today. Welcome to

your anxiety toolkit, your go-to podcast for learning how to manage anxiety, panic, and OCD through

compassionate science-based strategies. I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan, and I am so thrilled you are

here. I am joined today by a licensed therapist and beloved mental health educator Katie Morton to

explore the overlap between anxiety and ADHD. We'll talk about how similar they can feel,

why misdiagnosis is so common, and how to start understanding your brain with more clarity,

kindness and hope. So let's get started. Thank you so much for being here, Katie.

Of course, thanks for having me. I'm actually really excited. As I said to you before, you were being on my list of someone I wanted to have on the show for quite a while, so I'm thrilled to have you here. Yeah, thanks for reaching out. Excited to chat about this. Such an important topic. Yeah, and I think it's important for us too because I feel really specialized in anxiety, but

not so much in ADHD. And as I have clients who exhibit similar symptoms, we are often

sort of using that word untangling the two. Just let's just get straight to it. Can you maybe help

us to understand the differences between anxiety and ADHD? Go as deep

as you want to get started and if we can go deeper and deeper as we go. Yeah, of course. I mean,

the first thing that I want to like validate everybody is there's a ton of overlapping symptoms.

I think that's the problem is that like people with ADHD do have a lot of similarities with people who have anxiety. For example, like feeling really restless or having tough time sitting still. If you're feeling really anxious, you can be very fidgety. You can find yourself with your legs across and that foot is shaking like a whole chair, you know, and it can be very similar if we have ADHD if we have that hyperactivity piece of it. And so because of all of these

symptoms, and there are probably, I don't know, 10 that I could list that overlap, it's really

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