I was nervous but on the surface…
…. I looked even more nervous.
One of the very first dinners I had with my now husband’s family was Thanksgiving dinner. I was in my early 20s, we were newly dating, and I was heckin’ nervous.
I already struggle with anxiety, now add to this meeting my partner’s large, happy family during a fairly major holiday dinner. Yikes.
How did it go, you might ask?
Welp.
During dinner, I noticed a big salad bowl near my right elbow and was trying to keep my elbows in so that I didn’t knock it over. Unfortunately, in doing so, I was cutting my turkey at an awkward angle. My hand slipped, and I somehow ended up with a little mashed potato…. In. My. Hair.
I am not sure if anyone else noticed, but my partner subtly pointed it out to me, so I excused myself to the bathroom and tried not to cry as I nearly had a panic attack over my clumsiness.
Or at least that’s what I used to call it.
It turns out that people with ADHD are not “clumsy” after all. In fact, there’s a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for these types of issues: people with ADHD often have difficulties with fine and gross motor skills, as well as proprioception and interoception (Kutscheidt et al., 2019).
Interoception
Interoception is defined as the sense of the physiological condition of the body, such as conscious awareness, emotional processes, and behaviour related to afferent physiological information arising from the body (Schleip & Jäger, 2012).
In other words, interoception helps you understand and feel what’s going on inside your body, it is our felt experience of the internal workings of the body. Interoception can refer to experiences such as thirst and hunger, or feeling the need to go to the bathroom.
The prefix, inter, also comes from Latin, meaning interior, inside, or in between (Ceunen et al., 2016).
Individual Differences
Not everyone with ADHD has difficulties with these, but many of us do — and not everyone experiences these in the same way. Just as not everyone with ADHD experiences these issues, not everyone who experiences these issues has ADHD.
People with a sensory processing disorder and developmental coordination disorder (DCD, sometimes referred to as dyspraxia), for example, also may experience some of these difficulties. If you’re reading this and don’t have ADHD, we may still share a number of common symptoms.
We Got Gross Skills
I’ve always been an athlete and a pretty good one too. I’m never going to make a living at it, but I’ve played competitive sports my entire life, including hockey and soccer. My son is only 8, but he’s already quite skilled at baseball and basketball.
I never would have thought that either of us had issues with proprioception or interoception, but now that I better understand these concepts, I see where they do impact our lives.
It’s funny how I can be agile and coordinated while playing sports, yet I bump into walls and the edges of counters and stub my toe on a daily basis. Part of this is because there’s a major difference between gross motor skills and proprioception.
Gross motor skills are abilities that allow us to perform tasks involving large muscle groups. While some people with ADHD experience challenges with gross motor skills (Pila-Nemutandani et al., 2018), many others may be able to use their hyperactivity, energy, and hyper-focus to become great athletes.
Many professional athletes have come out in the media as having ADHD: Simone Biles, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Terry Bradshaw, Carl Lewis, André Torres, and Cammi Granato, to name just a few.
I’m no Olympian, but my son and I can both climb trees like nobody’s business, so there’s that…
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