Overstimulated And Understimulated At The Same Time: The ADHD Mom Paradox

Overstimulated and understimulated at the same time? Why the ADHD mom paradox happens, and what helps when the noise is too loud and the day too dull.

Last updated: 20 October 2026

The noise is too much and the routine is too boring, and your brain is begging for both a quiet room and something interesting to do. If that sentence made you exhale, you are in the right place.

Being overstimulated and understimulated at the same time is not a contradiction, and it is not you being difficult. Research on adults with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a brain wiring difference in attention and regulation) found both oversensitivity and undersensitivity to sensory input, often in the same person (Bijlenga et al., European Psychiatry, 2017).

I am going to write this like we are sitting at my kitchen table, because that is where I figured most of it out. Coffee, half a snack, someone yelling about a missing sock in the background. 😅

Why Do I Feel Overstimulated And Bored At The Same Time?

Because your brain is not turning one volume knob. It is turning two. One knob controls how much input gets in, and the other controls how much interest it takes to keep you engaged.

For many ADHD brains, the sensory knob runs loud while the interest knob runs hungry. So the dishwasher beeping, three kids talking and a podcast all land at full volume, while the actual task in front of you feels like watching paint dry.

In the 2017 study of 116 adults with ADHD, 43 percent of the women reported hypersensitivity (too much sensation), hyposensitivity (too little) or both, compared with 22 percent of the men (Bijlenga et al., 2017). Moms are not imagining this. Nobody ever explained it to us, that is the only difference.

What Does Understimulated Actually Mean For An ADHD Mom?

Understimulated means your brain is not getting enough interest, novelty or reward to stay switched on, even while your day is packed. A full calendar is not the same as a stimulating one.

The Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA) describes understimulation as what happens when your environment lacks enough interesting activity, with signs like restlessness, low motivation and irritability (ADDA, 2023). It also notes that research points to differences in the dopamine pathway, the brain chemistry behind motivation and reward.

Now picture motherhood. Laundry, lunchboxes, the same three questions fifty times, school emails. Busy and bored are not opposites, they are roommates. 🫠

What Does Overstimulated Look Like When You Are The Mom?

Overstimulated is your senses running out of room, and it looks a lot like rage, tears or sudden silence. Noise, touch, light, questions and movement keep stacking, and your system has no shelf left.

A small study of 25 adults with ADHD found they scored higher than 29 controls on sensory craving and sensory under responsivity, with sensory over responsivity only marginally higher and closely tied to anxiety (Adra et al., Brain Imaging and Behavior, 2021). It is a pilot study, so I hold it loosely. What I love is that it names craving and overload as living in the same brain.

That is why you can crave noise cancelling headphones and a loud playlist in the same hour. If the overload part sounds familiar, I wrote about it in Overwhelmed And Overstimulated Are Not The Same Thing.

The Night I Cooked For Six And Lost It Over The Dishes

The paradox hit me hardest at a sink full of dishes. When my boyfriend and I first moved in together, we each had two kids, so cooking dinner meant cooking for six.

That evening the kids fought through the entire cooking process, loud, sharp and endless. My brain was so overstimulated I could feel my skin buzzing. Then everyone finished eating and disappeared outside to play, and I was left alone with every pot and plate. We had no dishwasher.

The silence should have been a gift. Instead, I stood there bored out of my mind by the most repetitive task on earth, while my nervous system was still ringing like a bell. Overstimulated and understimulated, in one kitchen, at the same time.

His older kids were old enough to help, but it was completely normal in their house that dinner just got handled. I lost it. My boyfriend suggested maybe we should not even try this living together thing. I told him very clearly I was not a quitter, and then I did all the dishes anyway. Seething. 😅

Why Does Quiet Not Fix It?

Quiet fixes the overstimulation but does nothing for the understimulation, which is why a silent house can still feel awful. Your senses get a break while your brain starves.

This is the part that confuses us. We beg for alone time, finally get it, and then scroll for two hours, snack standing at the fridge, or start seventeen tasks and finish none. That is not laziness. That is a brain hunting for dopamine after a day of too much input.

The mental load makes it worse, because your head is still running the family calendar in the background. I untangle that in Why The Mental Load Feels Impossible When Your Own Brain Will Not Cooperate Either.

The Battery Check is a free way to see where your capacity really sits when this happens. You can find out where your battery is right now and what your own warning signs look like.

Overstimulated Versus Understimulated: How To Tell Which One You Are In

You can usually tell by what your body wants in the moment. The two states pull in opposite directions, and naming the right one saves you a lot of wrong guesses.

Many days you are both, and that is the whole point of this post. In that case you need a low input but interesting thing, which is a very specific genre of relief.

What Actually Helps When You Are Both?

The goal is low input and high interest, not just low input. Think of it as quiet with a hook.

Here is what has worked in my house, and I make no promises about yours:

• Put on a podcast or audiobook with headphones while doing dishes, so the boring task has a story attached.
• Do the repetitive chore in a different room, a different order or with a timer, because novelty counts as fuel.
• Take five minutes alone in the car or bathroom with a puzzle, a drawing app or a word game instead of pure scrolling.
• Move your body in a way that gives input you choose, like a walk, stretching or a loud song, before the input you did not choose piles up.
• Say out loud to your family “I need ten minutes of quiet with something to do,” so it stops being a secret mission.

A few extra notes, because the list above is the easy part. Pick one item, not all five, because a plan with five steps is just a new mental load wearing a cute outfit. 🫠

Also watch the order. Lower the input first, then add the hook, since a podcast on top of a screaming kitchen is just more noise with a better voice.

My daughter once found me folding laundry with headphones on, dancing very badly, and asked if I was okay. I told her I was having the best time of my life, which was only slightly a lie. That is the whole trick: boring task, loud joy, nobody touching me.

None of this is wellness homework. It is just feeding the right need at the right time. For the daily version of the pile up, Your House Is A Sensory Minefield And That Is Why You Are Fried By Noon has more.

The Dinner Table Moment, When I Realised I Was Running On Empty

Both states, left alone long enough, drain you completely. I did not understand that until an ordinary evening at the dinner table.

My boyfriend came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I pulled away before I even knew I was doing it. We both froze, shocked.

I love him. My body just had nothing left to give, and the touch landed on a system that was already full of noise and starved of anything good. That was when I knew how empty I really was. 💛

If that is close to home, Why The Constant Noise Hits Your Body Like Too Much Touch will make you feel less alone.

Is This Why ADHD Moms Burn Out So Fast?

Yes, it is a big part of it, because living in constant mismatch costs energy that nobody counts. You spend your day masking, adjusting and pretending the volume is fine.

I wrote about that cost in ADHD Mom Burnout: Why Faking Easygoing Is Wearing You Out. Faking calm while your senses are screaming and your brain is bored is exhausting.

Here is the math nobody does. When your senses are overloaded, you spend energy blocking input, and when you are understimulated, you spend energy forcing yourself to stay on task. Do both for twelve hours and of course the tank is empty by four.

Then comes the guilt, because from the outside it looks like you had a normal day. Nobody sees the two jobs your brain did at once, and that includes you most of the time. If you have ever wondered why a day with no big events left you wrecked, this is a big part of the answer.

This is not a diagnosis, and I would never tell you what your brain is. If this sounds like you, it might be worth talking to a professional who understands ADHD in women. In the meantime, you are allowed to notice your own patterns and respond kindly to them.

FAQ

You Are Not Broken, You Are Mismatched

Wanting a quiet room and something interesting to do at the same time makes sense once you see the two dials. Too much input and too little interest can live in the same day, the same hour and the same kitchen.

You do not have to fix yourself. You just have to feed the right need at the right moment, and stop calling the contradiction a character flaw.

If you want a gentle starting point, The Battery Check is a free way to see your own warning signs. I will be at the kitchen table with my coffee, probably ignoring the dishes. 🪷

Written by

Wendy Venema

A late-realized AuDHD mom in a blended family of seven. I write the posts I needed when I was crying on the bathroom floor.

Read my story