There’s a group of clients I see often who don’t fit the way ADHD is usually described. They’re capable. Very thoughtful and they’re often doing well professionally. Yet, they tell me that they’re completely stuck in the same place. Often they can explain exactly what’s getting in their way. They’ve thought about it, read about it, worked on it. On paper, nothing is unclear. What’s confusing—for them—is why that clarity doesn’t change anything. They still delay starting, rely on pressure to finish or have stretches where things feel harder than they should.

That’s usually the moment where I begin to shift the conversation as a psychotherapist. One way I frame this is through something often referred to as the “30% rule.”The idea, coming from Barkley’s work, is that ADHD involves a lag in executive functioning. Meaning it's not intelligence or lack of insight, it's a self egulation challenge (Barkley, 2012).Planning, initiating, sequencing, holding things in mind, managing emotion—those systems don’t show up consistently just because you understand what needs to happen.

So you get this split:

You know what to do.
You agree with what to do.
And you still can’t reliably do it without something pushing you.

For a lot of people, that gap turns into self-doubt pretty quickly.

“If I really understood this, I’d be doing it.”

But that’s not actually how this works.

ADHD has long been described as a performance issue more than a knowledge issue (Barkley, 1997). The difficulty isn’t based in learning: It’s executing consistently across time, especially when something is effortful, delayed, or not immediately rewarding. Which means insight, on its own, doesn’t solve the problem people think it should. Where this becomes more complex is with high achievers.Because they can perform. They have enough capacity to get things done, often at a high level. But the way they get there matters. They wait until the pressure is high enough and overoverthink before they act. They double-check, rework, hold things mentally instead of offloading them.And it works externally, but it comes at a huge cost.

But there’s usually something sitting underneath it:

A concern about being seen as inconsistent.
Or missing something.
Or not being as capable as people assume.

That concern doesn’t always show up as anxiety in an obvious way. It shows up as control and overcompensation. As staying just ahead of things so nothing slips.

I’m thinking of one leader I know in particular. They’re in a senior role, well respected, very good at what they do. From the outside, there’s no reason to question their capability. But their system is built on pressure. They don’t start tasks when they intend to. They start when the deadline becomes real. They keep most things in their head because writing it down feels like one more step. They revisit work multiple times before sending, not because it’s unclear, but because it needs to feel “solid.”

When we started teasing this apart, what stood out wasn’t difficulty focusing.

It was this:

“If I don’t stay on top of everything, people will start to see gaps.”

That’s the piece that tends to drive everything else. So the behaviour isn’t just about ADHD. It’s also about protecting against being perceived as incapable. And when those two things overlap, the system becomes expensive to maintain because you’re not just managing tasks. You’re managing perception. And that’s where burnout starts to show up.

Not always as exhaustion in the traditional sense, but as:

-needing pressure to get started
-never quite feeling caught up
-working at a high level but with a lot of internal effort
-needing downtime to recover from things that “shouldn’t” be that draining

It’s less about how much you’re doing, and more about how you have to do it. Another layer here is emotional regulation. ADHD isn’t just about attention. There’s a consistent link with emotional dysregulation, which increases reactivity and makes it harder to modulate internal states under stress (Shaw, Stringaris, Nigg, & Leibenluft, 2014).So when something feels uncertain or high stakes, it’s not neutral. It carries more weight. That makes avoidance more likely and overcorrection more likely. This keeps the cycle going.

Where the 30% idea becomes useful is in how it changes the question.

Instead of “why can’t I just do this,” we start looking at what conditions actually allow you to follow through without relying on stress to get there. Because right now, for a lot of high-functioning people with ADHD, pressure is doing most of the heavy lifting. And it works, until it doesn’t.

What tends to help is less about more effort and more about reducing how much you’re asking your system to hold.

-Offloading instead of tracking everything mentally.
-Shortening the gap between deciding and starting.
-Building in structure that doesn’t depend on motivation showing up.
-Handling emotional load before expecting yourself to execute.

None of that is about lowering expectations. Or about making performance less dependent on last-minute activation. The part I ask client's to pay attention to most isn’t the lag itself. It’s what people build on top of it to compensate. Because that’s usually where the real strain is. If you took away the pressure to constantly prove that you’re capable, the question becomes:

What would actually make this easier to do consistently?

That’s usually a better place to start.

If you’re seeing yourself in this, it might be worth looking at where you’re still relying on pressure to access your capacity. That’s usually where the work is. And if you want support in that process, that’s something we can explore together.

Book a Discovery Call

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Elaine Dickens, MA, RP is a Registered Psychotherapist and founder of Live Inspired Wellness in Uxbridge, Ontario. She works with high-achieving individuals who are used to figng things out on their own but want a more sustainable way forward. Her work focuses on ADHD, burnout, emotional regulation, and the gap between insight and follow-through.

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References

Barkley, R. A. (1997). ADHD and the nature of self-control. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Barkley, R. A. (2012). Executive functions: What they are, how they work, and why they evolved. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Castellanos, F. X., & Proal, E. (2012). Large-scale brain systems in ADHD: Beyond the prefrontal–striatal model. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(1), 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.11.007

Shaw, P., Stringaris, A., Nigg, J., & Leibenluft, E. (2014). Emotion dysregulation in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 171(3), 276–293. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2013.13070966

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