Did ADHD affect my drinking?

This guest post is by Christchurch-based writer Anna Scaife. You can find her on Instagram @whatelseanna.

Anna stresses she is not a scientist or any kind of expert and the below is based on her personal experience and somewhat obsessive reading about neurodivergent brains. 

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I used to like a drink, and yes that’s a metaphor for alcohol addiction. I was a chronic binge drinker from my mid-teens, and later a single Mum with a daily habit. My story is included in Lotta Dann’s fantastic book The Wine O’Clock Myth, and I won’t repeat it here. I did give up, but one thing that always bothered me was why I could not simply cut down. Why it was impossible to drink sensibly like many people I knew. But now, finally, I think I have a big part of the explanation.

Having an alcoholic drink stimulates the mesolimbic pathway. This is our brain’s reward department; the one that makes us feel good when we achieve something. Once it’s humming, the mesolimbic pathway (I’m going to call it the MB from here on for reasons that will become clear shortly) releases dopamine (D), a feel-good neurotransmitter. We all have a baseline level in our system, and then we get a lovely warm flood of it when we do certain things. Here are the biggies:

⭐️ Eating something tasty
⭐️ Hanging out with friends
⭐️ Having sex

D is the shit! Dopamine tells your brain, “You’re doing the right stuff, do it again.” It’s the magic chemical which reinforces the behaviours that help humans to survive. See above: eat, form social bonds, reproduce.

When your newborn smiles at you for the first time, and you smile back, their system is flooded with glorious D. They also get a shot of oxytocin and endorphins. It’s a heady, happy combo. Tiny, helpless humans learn, if I smile, the big person with the milk smiles. It’s not because they like you (sorry). Your baby is forming a lifesaving bond with you (we also get the shot of chemicals), so you don’t pull over to the side of the road and leave them in a rest area.

Okay if D is so great why don’t they bottle it? Well, ‘they’ kinda did. The human race that is. They bottled alcohol.

As soon as we worked out what alcohol made us feel, we were totally into it. And that is so not surprising. The chemicals in alcohol trigger a reaction in our brains which we don’t just like, we need – for our survival as a species. 

We found the shortcut. Man, we are clever. For the purposes of this blog post I am not going to cover the other things alcohol does to our brain and our body which don’t feel so great because we all know about them, but suffice to say, maybe we're not so clever after all.

So how is this related to ADHD? Well, people diagnosed with ADHD just simply have less dopamine. Our baseline is much lower, and we have to try harder to get it. But I didn’t know that ADHD is about brain chemistry until very recently when I was diagnosed at age 50.  My lower dopamine levels affect E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. From my horror at the thought of writing out the full term for mesolimbic pathway repeatedly (ha, I did it – thank you ADHD medication for that and this completed blog post), to paying attention, to regulating emotion.

D is the task initiation chemical. It gets us going, and it gives us a reward when we do the right thing. Leave the cave, hunt the beast, forage the berries, talk with our friends, eat, have a cuddle with a special friend = feel good. Without it, motivation is simply another long word to type.

People who have ADHD are missing the chemical we ALL crave, so it’s not surprising that rates of problematic substance use in those diagnosed is high with a capital H. 

I am not saying all this to give those of us who struggle with alcohol consumption an out. What I am saying is that whatever rationalising we do about why we drink - stress, grief, tiredness, joy - those things are not always it. We are all searching for dopamine, and when we get it, we are hard wired to look for more. And people with ADHD are looking for it harder than most.

I don’t know if I would have become an alcoholic if I didn’t have ADHD. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. But I know now what I was looking for when I was drinking. I was taking a substance to medicate a deficit in my brain. I am told that people who are lost and starving sometimes eat the clothes they are wearing. The human body is one big, beautiful machine and it will get what it needs wherever it can. BUT it doesn’t know what the side effects will be, which is why writing my own prescription was a bad idea.

It helps to know that being an alcoholic was not because of who I am, it was because of what I am. Human. Mammal. Machine. But it’s also important to say that having ADHD does not mean you cannot give up the drink. As a parent of a neurodivergent child recently told me, a different kind of brain is a reason for behaviour, not an excuse. Whether we are card carrying ADHDers with a prescription, or have any other kind of brain, we all have the power to recognise that alcohol does not serve us and move on from it, because booze is not the only way for a brain to get dopamine, but it is one of the worst.

I gave up drinking more than 15 years ago, well before I knew any of the above. I was happy to have given up, but I also felt a huge amount of shame. Surprise, surprise – shame is chemical too. There are a few things going on when we feel what we know as shame. Adrenalin and cortisol can spike, and serotonin and dopamine can drop. And of course, the purpose of shame is to help us retain our social bonds, so we don’t become ostracised from the group who helps support us.

So, there we go. We are all just humans hard wired to survive, navigating and managing complex biological drivers and chemical reactions. It's a tricky, gritty dance, but one worth doing. Above all else,  be kind to yourself.

Anna Scaife: Instagram @whatelseanna