The Sunday spiral that wasn't about money: what ADHD coaching actually looks like
A client gave full consent for her session to be shared here. Details that aren't load-bearing have been left out. The sentences she said about herself are hers.
A client messaged me on a Sunday morning. Anxious. Money, she thought. Always money.
By the end of our session 30 minutes later, we'd worked out it wasn't money. It wasn't really anxiety in the way she'd been told to understand it. It was stillness. And a missing swing chair. And a Sunday with no outside in it.
If you've ever had a Sunday, (or any day tbh), where the anxiety arrived fat your door for no reason you could name, where you went looking through your bank account or your inbox or your relationship trying to find the thing that justified the feeling — and didn't find it, but the feeling stayed — this post is for you.
Particularly if you're starting to suspect the anxiety story you've been carrying for years might not be the whole story.
The money story didn't hold up
We walked through it. Week three of her monthly income cycle. Regulars don't cover everything by that point, which is normal for her business — week four and week one bring the workshops and house sits that bridge the gap. She knows this. She's been running her business long enough to know this.
She had £500 in her savings pot, which is more than she's ever held before. She's moving house and had decided, for the first time, that the pot was untouchable.
So the money story didn't hold up. She had the financial structure. She had a brilliant plan. She was doing better than any month before, by every objective measure. She was nailing it.
Then she mentioned the ducks.
She'd been duck-sitting that weekend at a manor house. She'd messaged the owner Saturday morning with photos. The owner hadn't replied. By Sunday evening this had become a spiraling story that was nuking her brain.
That's not money anxiety. That's the body asking for something else, and the brain handing it the nearest available story.
"I'm not an anxious person"
She said it herself, halfway through the session: "I'm not an anxious person. I'm not even a depressive person. Nothing depresses me. I'm a glass-completely-overflowing person. It's the ADHD."
I know that sentence from the inside.
I took an overdose at eighteen. I was diagnosed with ADHD, dyscalculia, and auditory processing disorder at twenty. That was 1998. The ADHD label existed in the diagnostic manual by then. What didn't exist — not in any clinic room I sat in — was the understanding that women with ADHD often look like anxious or depressed people, and that treating them as such misses the underlying wiring entirely.
So I had the label. I just didn't have a system around me that knew what to do with the label when it was attached to a young woman who was internalising rather than bouncing off the walls. The anxiety and depression frame stayed put for years afterwards. The medication I was on was framed as anxiety medication. The conversations I had with doctors were anxiety conversations. The label was on my file. The treatment was for something else.
I take medication now too. It's the same medication. What's changed is the meaning of it. It is ADHD medication. Not anxiety medication for an anxious person who needs fixing.
If you are reading this and you have been carrying an anxiety or depression label since you were a teenager — or if you have an ADHD diagnosis now but still feel like everyone in your life, including the professionals, is treating you as an anxious person who happens to have ADHD, rather than the other way around — you are not alone in that feeling. And you are not making it up.
The research on how ADHD actually presents in women is genuinely recent. The clinical guidance, the awareness in GP surgeries, the way the diagnosis is held and treated when it lands on a woman rather than an eight-year-old boy — that has only really shifted in the last decade or so. If you're in your thirties or forties now, the medical system that met you when you were younger was not equipped to see you clearly. That's not your fault, and it's not in your head.
A book can tell you ADHD is often mislabelled or mishandled in women. A podcast can explain the science. But until someone sits across from you who has lived it — who knows what it's like to be handed the right name and still be managed as the wrong thing — the old story doesn't loosen its grip.
When my client said I'm not an anxious person, I didn't need to reassure her. I needed to make sure she heard her own sentence.
What I do differently
A few things this session shows that matter if you're trying to work out what coaching with me would actually be.
I don't take the presenting problem at face value.
She came in talking about money. The money wasn't the issue. A coach who took the brief at face value would have spent forty minutes on spreadsheets and budgeting apps. We did book a separate session for the following Monday to go through her finances — but as a follow-up, after we'd done the actual work. The actual work was finding out what the money story was carrying.
For ADHD brains in particular, the presenting problem is almost never the problem. The brain is good at finding plausible explanations for unsettled feelings. Working with someone who knows that, and who is willing to gently set the explanation aside and look underneath, is a different kind of session.
I catch the body.
She'd had Sunday off. She'd done yoga. She'd taught yoga. She'd finished a project she'd been avoiding instead of starting a shiny new one — which, if you have ADHD, you'll know is a quiet, enormous win.
By every measure she would have given me, it was a good day.
I asked her what she hadn't done. She'd been inside almost all of it. No real outdoor time. And being outside is not a hobby for her — it's regulation. It's how her nervous system finds its baseline.
She landed on it herself, near the end: "Mental space and stillness make me anxious. Well actually, I think it's more the stillness. The mental space doesn't really make me anxious. It's the stillness."
That's the whole session in one sentence. The thing she'd been calling Sunday anxiety, and before that money anxiety, was a body that hadn't moved enough being asked to sit still indoors with no Wi-Fi in the garden and a phone full of unanswered messages.
The reframe isn't don't be anxious. The reframe is your body needs to move, and when it can't, the brain will find something to be afraid of.
Most coaching is neck-up. ADHD doesn't work neck-up.
I send people away with no more than they can carry.
Earlier in the session she'd told me a story about that morning at the manor house. She'd planned, the night before, to take her yoga mat down by the ducks at 7am and journal. The mat got dirty. A train went past. Then a helicopter. The river was freezing and shaded. The picture in her head fell apart.
She gave up on the picture. Went to use the loo. Came back out. And found a hanging basket swing chair in a tree, looking out over the grass. Sat in it. A squirrel ran over her feet.
We talked about expectations — how the picture you build the night before is often the thing that ruins the morning. But what I noticed was the chair itself. A swing. Movement. Her body had walked her, via three failed plans, to the exact piece of furniture her nervous system was asking for.
She left the session with three things, no more. Try working outside on a 5G hotspot when the garden Wi-Fi doesn't reach. Manifest a basket swing chair — Freecycle, a friend, an unexpected find. Bring her finance spreadsheet to next Monday's session so we can look at it properly, after we'd done the deeper work.
Three. Not twelve. Three is the cap. Three is what a tired ADHD brain can actually carry into the week.
If any of this is landing
A 1:1 coaching session with me is £85. It's an hour. It's neurodivergent-led, which means the person across from you has done her own work and isn't trying to fit you into a framework built for a different brain.
You don't book one of these because you want generic life advice. You book one because something is looping and you can't see why. Or because the anxiety label you've been carrying since your teens has started to feel like it doesn't fit anymore, and you want to talk to someone who's been on the other side of that.
If you're not ready for a paid session yet, I also offer a free 30-minute call. No agenda, no assessment, nowhere to be afterward. Just hello.
Notice which bit of her Sunday you recognised yourself in. That's probably where we'd start.
Book a 30-minute call → tidycal.com/nici/chat-with-nici
From the desk of Nici Foote · Unbarrier Education Ltd · Companies House 16603630
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