Podcast Episode 44 - ADHD and Human Design

I have a slightly controversial topic that I’m going to talk about. I've been wanting to talk about ADHD and human design for almost two years, but I've had this hesitation to talk about my opinions because I have really strong opinions on this. I will remind you I have the 17-62 channel with lots and lots of heavy placements there, so I'm a very opinionated person. 

What I am talking about here is my perspective. This is coming from somebody who has a brother that was diagnosed with ADHD and was medicated his entire life, childhood until adulthood. I've seen this from that perspective. I'm also somebody who has a little bit of a background. I do have a nursing degree, even though I'm not using it, so I kind of understand some of this from a medical perspective. I've done a lot of my own research, and I know human design pretty well, so I have this energetic perspective that I'm going to be adding on top of this. 

I think I need to talk about my brother's design. My brother is a 5/2 sacral generator, and he has every single center undefined in his chart except for two, his sacral center and root center. He has the 60-3 channel, this channel of mutation. The consistent thing that he brings to the situation is breaking through limitations. Gate 3 has this energy of chaos, and gate 60 is about breaking through, so what he consistently does is breaks things apart, breaks down limitations, challenges the rules, challenges the status quo, creates chaos to innovate. He's an incredibly innovative, incredibly driven individual. But growing up he was amplifying all the other people in our house. 

I have mentioned before, but I have seven siblings. Before my parents divorced, there were 10 people in this house. Of those 10 people, three are not emotionally defined. So, my brother was around seven emotionally defined individuals, a lot of emotional manifesting generators, a lot of manifesting generators to begin with, and then two projectors. There is just a lot of definition in our family.

Looking at his chart, looking back, it makes so much sense that he didn't know when to stop. He would just go, go, go, go, go. Push the boundaries, push the boundaries, push the boundaries. Push the rules. See if he could get other people involved in creating some chaos, creating some excitement. He has root center pressure, this movement, this hyperactivity, this internal drive to do things, and then a sacral response that says, "I gotta do it now. Even if it's chaotic, I gotta do it now. Let's do this. Let's move. Let's bump and grind. Let's go." It makes so much sense that he was diagnosed with ADHD because his design is very pressurized, very motorized, very active, but also this undefinition creates chaos. We can get lost in the undefined energy. It can feel overwhelming and amplified. 

This is just what he did: he amplified, picked up on the feelings of all the people, the identity of all the people in that throat center, the inspiration, and what's safe for other people. He was picking up on and amplifying so much freaking energy from seven siblings, from all of these energetic people around him, and because his throat center's undefined and he has six mental conditioning gates in his throat center, so there's a lot of this energy around him wanting to be heard and be the center of attention.

He was always trying to attract attention through words, through actions, and the consistent action that he has access to in that sacral center and root center is breaking through limitations, breaking down the chaos, doing things differently. It's individual circuitry. “I'm going to empower people to move through stress, to do something chaotic, but just go, go, go.” 

My brother has trained himself to do backflips on a bike. He is fearless in every single way. Currently, he's in college and he's getting these two major, super science-y degrees. He's working with teeny tiny proteins in a lab. He is incredibly intelligent, has a 4.0, but when he was a child, we were not sure if he would even graduate high school. This boy was chaotic. He was so immature. He was just destruction in an individual, and so he was medicated for his entire life.

That is what I experienced with my brother growing up. I have also had the internet trying to convince me that I have ADHD, but it was just describing things that I easily associate with my human design chart. It's simple things like you have a lot of energy, or you fidget, or you have anxiety. So, fidgeting for me, anxiety for me, I'm a triple split definition, and so my energy, it's bouncing all over the place in three different ways. I have four motor centers. I have a defined root center. I'm a fidgety person. I physically have a lot of energy that needs to bounce around and needs to move around. I do really well when I have multiple things going on.

This executive functioning, I feel like people don't understand that when we leave home for the first time, we are leaving a Penta. We are leaving a lot of the conditioning that we have literally grown up our entire lives around. I see a lot of people who are saying they were diagnosed later in life with ADHD, and what I think is really happening for a lot of these people is they're used to borrowing the energy of people around them. They're used to having access to whatever channels, whatever gates, whatever centers they had access to around their family in their home life, but then we associate those traits as ours. We assume that because we've had access to it for 18 years for our entire life, that it is a part of who we are, when really, and when you move out for the first time, you can't do this thing that you always could do.

For me, how that happened is related to my mother. She's a quad left, and she has a defined head center and G center. She's a major conditioner for me and I'm a major conditioner for her just based on our designs. Love that for us; it's been a great relationship. But I have three of my arrows pointing right, so I'm a very passive person. I am not designed to do things step A, step B, step C. She's a 4/1; I'm a 6/2. For the longest time, my identity was very much a reflection of my mother's identity.

My conditioning was: I know who I am, I know where I'm going. When I moved out, I felt like I didn't know who I was anymore. I didn't know what I wanted to do anymore. I didn't feel like I was as structured or as organized or as intelligent. My mom always said I was such a smart person, but maybe I'm not because I was struggling in school. I was struggling to test well. I was struggling to study. I was struggling to recall and remember things, but around my family's energy, I had access to different things, and I was playing with different energy.

With ADHD, I feel like most of the symptoms can be described and can be managed through your human design. I see a lot of shadows in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. We have things like having a short attention span and being easily distracted. If you have an undefined head center, you're easily distracted. If I am on a call and somebody sends a question in the chat and the chat pops up while I'm in the flow, I can completely lose my train of thought because it's this new piece of inspiration that's coming into my aura and my world, and that can easily be distracting. There are certain things that if I am not excited about it, if my sacral energy is not in it, I cannot for the life of me stay interactive. In nursing school, there were certain things that I could not, for the life of me, make myself study.

I was telling myself that I was struggling with executive dysfunction. “I can't do the things that I have to do in order to be successful. I'm not going to be a good student. This isn't working for me.” I was thinking that I was not doing enough, but really it was that my sacral energy wasn't in it, and I was trying to make a decision from my mind. I was trying to say, “I have to study this if I'm going to do well on the test,” but my body was saying, “Ehh, you don't actually have to study that. We have our own methods of becoming successful. We have our own process of doing things.”

I love that we are recognizing our mental health and recognizing being neurodivergent, but I don't think that it is a disorder. I don't think that it means that something's wrong with you. I genuinely think that it's just differentiation. I know that my brother was put on medication because of the people around him. He was medicated because my parents had a lot of kids, and they had a lot going on. They didn't know how to take care of him. They didn't know how to give him his own space and give him the ability to clear out and let go of our energy. 

From my perspective, he was amplifying the energy of others. He would feed off the energy of other people. He would get stuck in that energy, and my parents needed to just give him other things to respond to. I'm not a parenting expert. I do not have kids. This is just the information that's coming into my brain from this perspective. 

I don't believe anyone actually knows the truth. I believe that we all kind of have to figure it out for ourselves because the smartest people in the world are fighting and starting wars and killing each other, arguing over what to believe in and what is true and what is right and what is wrong. If the smartest people in the world are still debating on facts and still trying to make sure that they know for certain around certain things, why am I doing it? Why am I trying to come up with the ultimate truth? I don't know it. I'm not going to know it because there isn't one. There is not an ultimate truth. There are versions of the truth. We all get to choose our versions of the truth. This is my version of the truth, and that's what I'm sharing with you. If this works for you, if this resonates, you can borrow it, you can stick with it, and if it doesn't, you don't have to accept it, and that's completely fine.

I feel like a lot of the ADHD symptoms are coming from the non-self of having this awareness of something that we think we should be able to do, but we can't do consistently. Just think about the undefined centers. If you have an undefined head, undefined ajna, you are in this space where you get a lot of inspiration. You don't always know exactly what's true. You see things from multiple perspectives, and you don't have a specific way of organizing information in your brain. It's very passive. You pick up on and borrow things from other people, but sometimes that makes recall hard. Sometimes it feels like you don't remember things. Sometimes that makes you feel forgetful. 

An undefined head center is very much like if I'm tidying up, suddenly I'm looking around and I have piles all over the place, but I haven't actually put anything away. Or if I'm cleaning up my house, I find myself reorganizing my closet when I still haven't put the rest of the laundry away. Although, that's not necessarily a distraction; that's me just following my energy. 

I actually want to read through a list of symptoms of ADHD that can be found in adults, and I'm just going to tell you, from my perspective, if I saw that, what would I be looking at in their chart, and how would I be encouraging them to work through this and fix this.

Carelessness or lack of attention to detail: If you have a lack of attention to detail, it's possible that you just have a peripheral view perspective. There are some people that take in the big picture, but don't take in the details. But then there's people like me, I'm a focused view perspective. 

I see only the details, but I miss a lot of other things. I was on a walk with my husband the other day, we were hiking and 45 minutes into this hike, I noticed really pretty, super colorful little birdhouses. My husband was shocked that I had not seen the other like 30 of them on the trail so far. I was looking at something over here, and I was focused on something over there. I was looking at the sky. I was just feeling into my vibe. I was missing these very, very brightly colored birdhouses that were directly on the path because I was focused on different things. 

So, carelessness and this lack of attention to detail, some people aren't detail-oriented. I'm a very detail-oriented person, but I can get so stuck in the tiny, tiny details that I miss bigger things, and that's not necessarily a dysfunction. That is just how my brain operates.

Continuously starting new tasks before finishing others: This could be undefined head center, or it could be a shadowy expression of sacral energy. If you're always starting new things but not finishing old ones, you might be a manifestor. You might be a manifesting generator. You might be someone with an undefined head center where you're just like, "Oh, that's a cool idea. Let me jump into this," and then you realize that it's not actually something for you, but you let it go because the energy isn't there anymore and you shouldn't have jumped into it in the first place. That's fine! There are so many projects that I have not finished because it hasn't been the right time. I haven't had the energy for it. It has not been correct for me to finish them yet. That's absolutely fine. 

Poor organizational skills: I feel like I am both a very organized and a very chaotic person at the same time. I have the channel of the organized being, and I still feel like I'm not organized all the time. I feel like organizational skills come from having a defined ajna center. If you have a specific perspective of how you see things and organize information, that's probably going to translate into other things in your life and around your house. 

When I was in school, I had the most detailed planner. I had all my assignments. I was so organized with all that information because I needed to be in order to get my thoughts outside of myself. In order to make myself feel less anxious, I had to organize everything in detail. With my business, I'm the complete opposite. I don't have anything organized. Absolutely nothing is organized in the backend of my business, and that's fine. 

Looking at poor organizational skills, you might have an undefined ajna center. You may not have a specific way that you organize information in your brain. That's fine, and that's not something you have to fix.

Inability to focus or prioritize: Sometimes I don't know what's a priority. Sometimes I don't know what's valuable and what's not valuable. The inability to prioritize is really about seeing what's more valuable than others. That's ego energy to me. That is undefined ego energy for me. If you have this ability of "I don't know what's valuable. I don't know what's not valuable," that's really just ego center energy where you're questioning because you can see the value in everything. You’re getting lost because you don't have a specific structure for it. 

This can be easily labeled as ADHD, but you're looking at what is most valuable? What's the value of getting this done? You get into this state of everything is valuable. Everything is important; everything needs to be done. If you're in that state, it doesn't matter what you start with. It doesn't matter what you start with, but if you're in a spiral around you don’t know how to focus or prioritize, you can't organize yourself, you're in introspection and you're in a stuckness, but that's not a problem that you have that you maybe need medication for. 

If medication is what works for you and that's what your intuition has led you to, please continue to follow your journey! Please continue to live your life. I'm just a random girl on the internet sharing my opinions. You know way more about your situation and your experience in your life than I do. This is just an optional perspective. 

Continually losing or misplacing things: Undefined head center. 

Forgetfulness: Undefined head center. Undefined ajna center. Easy.

Restlessness and edginess: That restlessness to me is root center energy. I have a defined root center, and I get antsy if I haven't done enough. If I haven't let that energy move through me, I have this internal sense of urgency that I have to get out. I will get restless, and I will be on edge, and really what I need is to release that pressure. There are very specific ways that I do that. But if you have an undefined root center, that's inconsistent. Sometimes working out moves that energy. Sometimes coming up with a plan moves that energy. Sometimes just caring about yourself and seeing how you feel moves that energy. It's going to be a little bit different, so it's easy to say, "Oh, I'm super restless and I'm on edge, and I don't know how to manage all of this energy." When really in this moment the solution from a human design perspective would be looking at if that is your energy or are you picking that up from someone else, and then deciding how you would like to move it or let it go. There are many options for you, but it's not going to be one thing consistently over and over that's going to relieve that stress and pressure for you. You'll be able to use different things.

Difficulty keeping quiet and speaking out of turn: Throat center energy all over the place. I see the difficulty keeping quiet in undefined throat centers. You just have to say things. It's in your mind, and it has to come out of you. You're amplifying the voice of other people. I sometimes have difficulty. I will have to consciously hold myself back and say, "Woo, okay. You are talking over someone. Please just let them listen," and for me that's because if I'm passionate about something, I have a motorized throat center. I have a lot of energy coming behind my throat center, and on top of that I have a projected channel there as well, so I have these unsolicited opinions that sometimes want to come through but don't necessarily need to come through all the time. So, the difficulty keeping quiet, speaking out of turn, even blurting out responses and often interrupting others, is just throat center energy. 

I see a lot of people struggle with this when they have a defined ajna center to throat center connection. It’s this, "Oh, I have the answer. Here's my unsolicited advice," when really the solution is like waiting for invitations. When you learn how to tune into that energy and wait for the invitation, then you're mastering your energy a little bit more instead of being in a shadow where you have to get that opinion out because you're looking for success, and you're looking for recognition. 

Mood swings, irritability, and a quick temper: I see manifestors here. I see emotional authorities here. I see undefined emotional centers here. Lots of energy. Manifestors, they have that shadow of anger. That's the non-self theme. If things are not going well, people are not understanding them, anger's going to come through and that can come through in outbursts if the manifestor is not being regulated or if the manifestor is not learning how to regulate their energy. 

If you're an emotional person, of course you're going to have mood swings. I have 10, 15 mood swings easily every day. If I don't have a mood swing, if I feel the same every day, I feel like something is wrong. If you're bottling up your emotions, if you're repressing your emotions, at some point they're just going to come out. At some point, there's going to be so much emotionality in your body that it's just going to come out, and that can be mood swings and irritability. 

Based on the channels you have defined in your emotional center, you can just be a mood swing person. The individual wave is steady, steady, steady, steady, up big spike in energy, steady, steady, steady, steady, down big depressive energy. The tribal wave is like a rollercoaster. It's up a little bit, down a little bit, up even more, down a little bit, up a little bit more, really, really, really high, drop, big drop. It goes up and down, up and down, up and down, then big down. 

That's a big mood swing that I experience on a regular basis. In my early teen years, I thought I had bipolar. I thought I was this super moody, irritable, hormonal person because sometimes I felt great and sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I would feel really, really good, and then immediately I'd feel really bad afterwards, or the next day, it would be a big drop. But that's just emotionality. 

If you have an undefined emotional center and you're around people who are emotionally defined, their emotionality can get to you. Your actions and your feelings, if you don't know how to be that sieve, that screen, and you're just absorbing and taking on the emotions of other people, of course you're going to be stressed, and of course you're going to have outbursts. Suddenly, you're like, "Ahh, there's too much. I have to let this go," and it just comes out of you because you're in a stress response and your energy wants the quickest way to get this out. Let it go. 

Emotionally, if you're building up all of these big feelings, you might have an outburst. It might be tears; it may be words. If you have a lot of words that you've wanted to say, but you're holding them back, of course they're going to come out at some point if you're not regulating that, and you're just holding on to it and keeping that tab open. 

So much of ADHD symptoms and what we are associating as symptoms of ADHD is really just dysregulation. My issue and what makes me angry about this whole ADHD wave is that we're using it to find comfort in our limitations. We are using the label of, "Oh, I'm ADHD" to just assume we have this problem. It's a label, but it's holding us back. It's a sign of stuckness. We are associating the label with our identity, and then we are identifying as the problem. We are identifying as something being wrong with you.

What I don't like, what I really, really, really don't like, is that this ADHD movement is so focused on women. There are so many women right now who are noticing their differences, noticing their neurodivergence, noticing these intuitive skills that are popping up for them, and noticing their energetic exchange with other people in their mental awareness and their health, and they're raising their consciousness, and then the world is throwing a diagnosis at them. They're saying, "Oh, that's not intuition. That's a problem. That's not your intuition. That's not a gift. That's an issue. You have to fix yourself." 

But then as soon as we have this label of ADHD, we don't try and fix the problem as much. We try to cope with the problem. It can ruin your self-confidence sometimes. What I don't like about ADHD is when people use it as an excuse, and they use it as a way to just justify behavior that could potentially be regulated. 

Using an example of continually starting new tasks before you finish old ones. If you say, "Oh, well, that's just my ADHD," then you'll probably just allow yourself to continue to jump into things that are not aligned for you, and then feel bad about not finishing it. But then you'll be like, "Oh, well that's just my ADHD. That's just who I am." I can see how sometimes it can be beneficial. Sometimes that diagnosis of this is why you feel the way that you feel, creates the sensation of relief for us. It can create the sensation of feeling understood and that you are not alone. However, as soon as it is witnessed, it can also be transformed. You can learn to work with your energy and not necessarily identify as having a disorder, as being wrong, as having something wrong about you. 

That forgetfulness can put you into a repressive shadow. It can put you into this energy of “I have ADHD. I start a bunch of things. I'm never going to finish it," but then that big idea, the life-changing idea, the project that is your soul wanting to come through you, comes to you, and you're like, "It's probably just going to be another project that I start and don't finish." It can put you into the shadow when you're labeling yourself as ADHD, when you're labeling yourself as there's this thing wrong with you.

It can ruin your self-confidence and hold you back from taking the actions that you could take, because you have this conception of if I was neurotypical, if my brain worked a certain way, I would have executive functioning, and I would be able to see a plan, make a to-do list, never forget anything, be super organized, build a perfect business, have a perfect launch strategy, do the same thing for the rest of my life, force myself to do everything perfectly, and then my life would be great. But that's not reality. That's not how 99% of us function. Instead of labeling all of these differences and all these just nuances in our energetic experiences as a problem, we could just learn to work with our gift.

You can be successful without needing this “executive functioning,” which is the ability to do a task when you say you want to do it. Maybe it's the wrong time. Maybe that executive function and the rules of wanting to do this because logically it needs to be done now, maybe the universe is saying, "Hey, actually, if you wait three hours, you're going to get this inspiration. You're going to get this hit. You're going to have this conversation that's going to give you all of this extra information to add to that thing. I actually want you to wait on this. You're not going to have the ability to do it right now. You're going to struggle with it right now because it's not the time." You could just be in a space where you have this idea of being neurotypical, and you're just pushing yourself against yourself. 

There's this thing around ADHD and where you have food phases and you want to eat one thing, and you get obsessed with that one thing, and you eat that one thing over and over and over and over and over again, and then you're sick of it. That's me as a manifesting generator with closed taste. I get in moods where for three weeks to four weeks, this is all I want to eat, and I will not touch anything else, and then it passes, and then I cannot touch it anymore. That's just my cognition. That's just how I understand my relationship to nutrition. 

I realize that I'm a phase person, and it doesn't necessarily have to be labeled as a hyper fixation. It doesn't have to be labeled as this is something I'm obsessed with right now. I'm hyper fixated on it. I'm stuck on this loop. I'm in a phase of my life where this is what's lighting me up. I'm in a phase in my life where these are the nutrients that I need. This is what my body is craving right now, and I'm going to give that to myself. That's a much more empowering perspective in my opinion. 

Let me just kind of recap. I see ADHD in a lot of ways as potentially being just dysregulated energy. I see a lot of incredibly intelligent and incredibly gifted women specifically, but just people in general, finding comfort in the labels of neurodivergent or ADHD. I think that it might be holding you back a little bit. It might be dampening your self-confidence just a little bit to be labeling yourself as ADHD.

Instead of ADHD and thinking that there's something wrong with you, why don't we just look at it from a science of differentiated perspective, and see that everyone is designed uniquely? Everyone's brain functioning is unique. Everyone's internal wiring is completely different and unique, and if you think that you have to make yourself do something in order to get where you want to go, you're in a pattern of stuckness, and you actually could just trust your intuition and trust your natural processing because you're designed a very specific way. You're designed with intention. You're designed perfectly. You can be the perfect version of success in your life based on the gifts that you have. You wouldn't have a desire if it wasn't possible for you. 

Use discernment. If labeling yourself as ADHD and self-diagnosing as ADHD feels good to you, then use that. Resonate with your neurodivergent group of people. Wear it as a badge of honor, and use it as the permission slip to do things your way. But I really highly encourage you to try and avoid using these labels as restrictions, or using these labels as excuses, or using these labels to hold yourself back, or using them as I have to fix this problem. You don't have to cope with being yourself. 

That is such a big point there. You do not have to cope with being yourself. Maybe you're wired differently than you think you should be. That's okay. You can accept the wiring that you have. You can accept the process that you have. You can accept what does work for you, and you don't have to try and be anyone else except for who you are. So, discernment. 

If this resonated with you, please let me know. I'd love to know your experience. If you have a diagnosis of ADHD or you have self-diagnosed of ADHD, I'm curious if you're able to see the symptoms that you resonate with around your ADHD diagnosis in your human design chart. If you can see it, does that offer a more empowering perspective? Does that feel a little bit better? Do you like that energy? Do you like how you feel from that new perspective?

If you are interested in learning more in a masterclass centered about what it means to be magnetic in human design and how to harness that, check out Magnetism. Join live February 28, 2023 or catch the replay after: Magnetism

If you are interested in a beginners guide to interpreting the details of your human design chart, check out DECODED! This guide is composed of the outlines Eden has created for the Energetic Resumes, SSCC, and a few of her most saved Instagram posts. These are notes that Eden regularly references that provide a clear breakdown of the details of your human design chart. Learn more here: DECODED