If you've ever walked out of a university lecture wondering what on earth you just spent the last 90 minutes doing, you're not alone. You showed up. You tried to pay attention. You even filled several pages with notes. Yet by the time you leave the lecture hall, you can barely remember what was said. For many university students with ADHD, lectures are one of the most frustrating parts of higher education because the traditional lecture format demands exactly the skills that ADHD makes most difficult. But if you are an international student, lectures can be even more challenging.

You used to care. Maybe you were the student who always pulled things together at the last minute. The one who somehow survived on adrenaline, all-nighters, and sheer determination. Maybe you worked twice as hard as everyone else just to keep up even though nobody realized how much effort it took. But then one day, it stopped working.

I remember sitting next to one of my clients, a bright, thoughtful teenager, as she stared at a page of English text. Her highlighter had done its job. Almost every second sentence was marked in careful neon yellow. There were notes in the margins. Arrows. Underlines. She had done everything she was told to do. And yet, when I asked her what the text was about, she looked at me and said quietly, “I don’t know. I read it. But it didn’t stay.”

Many of us with ADHD know this experience intimately: on paper, we know what would help us. Pomodoro. Body doubling. Active recall. Spaced repetition. Flashcards. Apps. Timers. Routines. And the list goes on and on. We’ve done our homework, watched all the videos, saved the posts, listened to the podcasts. In theory, we are extremely well informed.

If there’s one sentence I’ve heard most often from my clients with ADHD, it’s this: “I just can’t focus.” If you’re a student, sitting in class or a lecture hall, staring at your instructor who’s been talking for what feels like hours about something you couldn’t care less about, you know exactly what I mean. Your body is there, but your mind? It’s already gone. Somewhere between planning your weekend, worrying about an email you forgot to send, and wondering if your desk neighbor’s pen click is actually a form of psychological warfare.

Procrastination, or, as I like to call it, “chronic postponing,” is probably one of the biggest struggles I see as an ADHD coach. And let’s be honest: who among us with ADHD doesn’t know that feeling? We want to start, desperately even, but something inside us just won’t let us. The reasons vary: lack of motivation, boredom, overwhelm, perfectionism, or fear of falling short of our own expectations.

For the longest time I thought the theory of learning styles was based in legitimate research. I had encountered the theory during my time as a graduate student and now as a professor I knew some of my colleagues promoted it in their classes. It was not until a student of mine during some random discussion piped up and said: Learning styles have been debunked! I was stunned. And a little skeptical.

When people come to me for coaching, they often arrive with a sense of urgency. “I just need a few tips,” they say. “Something to help me stop procrastinating,” or “Maybe if I had the right calendar system, I’d finally get things done.” And I understand. I've been there myself, convinced that if I just found the perfect method, everything would fall into place.

When I was a student, I hated oral performance grades. They always seemed to be somewhat unfair. I was a natural talker and participated quite a bit. But I was also easily bored and liked to chat with my classmates. Consequently, my teachers wouldn’t give me the high grade I thought I’d definitely deserved because they felt I was a distraction to my peers and disrespected my teachers by not paying enough attention.

Test-taking anxiety is a common struggle for many students. When I was a professor, I saw it again and again: the fear in students’ eyes, the nervousness before an exam, the trembling of their voices when they had to give a presentation. Ultimately, I tried to eliminate as many tests as possible and had students do projects instead. Or I gave them a choice between several possible test modalities they could choose from.

When you are in school, college or working a job, you often encounter tasks or projects that overwhelm you, especially when they are complex and stretch over a long time. You can feel like you are standing in front of a mountain with no idea how to scale it.

Like so many times before, you find yourself in a pickle: You have to read an important text for class, but you’re unable to do so. The topic is so boring you can barely stay awake. The length of the text frightens you.

Maybe you already have a calendar. Perhaps it's even a beautifully color-coded Google Calendar. Your appointments are in there. Your meetings are in there. You know when your next dentist appointment is and when that report is due. And yet, somehow, you still regularly reach the end of the day wondering: Where did all my time go? The problem isn't necessarily that we don't plan. Many of us plan quite a lot. We make lists, buy planners, download productivity apps and create elaborate schedules.

I know quite a lot about perfectionism. Sometimes it shows up in my projects, such as writing an article. I'll sit in front of an empty document knowing roughly what I want to say, but get stuck trying to find exactly the right opening sentence. I write something, delete it, try again and suddenly half an hour has passed and I have almost nothing to show for it. But perfectionism also appears in much more mundane parts of my life. Take cleaning up a room. You might think this is a fairly straightforward task: pick things up, put them where they belong, get rid of what you no longer need.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to make ambitious plans and how much harder it is to keep them? Maybe you've decided that this is the week you'll finally start studying every day. Or perhaps you've promised yourself you'll exercise regularly, keep your home organized, learn a new language, or stop leaving everything until the last minute. For a few days, everything goes beautifully. You're motivated. You have a color-coded schedule.