ADHD and Emotional Overwhelm: Understanding Rejection Sensitivity and Intense Feelings

Do your emotions ever feel a little “louder” than other people’s seem to?

One comment, one tone of voice, or one moment of misunderstanding and suddenly, your whole nervous system feels activated. It’s like you know you’re reacting strongly, but it’s almost impossible to turn the feeling down.

Many adults with ADHD describe this experience.

For some, emotions rise fast, hit hard, and linger long after the moment has passed. You might call it overreacting or too sensitive, but what’s really happening is emotional overwhelm; a common part of ADHD that’s rarely spoken about with enough context. It’s not technically part of the diagnostic criteria, but it’s become increasingly recognised as something that often overlaps with ADHD traits.

So what does emotional overwhelm really mean?

When you live with ADHD traits, your emotional responses often feel bigger, faster, and more consuming. It’s not that you choose to feel more, it’s that emotions register in the body before your brain has time to process them.

Imagine your emotional experience like a volume dial. For many people, it moves gradually from 1 to 10. For those with ADHD, that dial can jump straight from 2 to 10 in a second, often before you’ve realised it’s turning.

It’s not that you lack regulation; it’s that your system notices and feels stimuli intensely. The brain’s emotional centre (the amygdala) reacts first, and the logical part (the prefrontal cortex) takes a little longer to catch up.

You might find you feel everything vividly; joy, sadness, frustration, excitement and that this can be both a strength and a challenge. Overwhelm isn’t a character flaw. It’s a nervous system asking for space, time, and understanding.

One of the most common emotional experiences for people with ADHD is rejection sensitivity, sometimes called RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria).

It describes the intense emotional pain that can come from perceived rejection, criticism, or even subtle disapproval. Again, this isn’t part of the ADHD criteria, but it’s often reported by individuals with ADHD traits. It doesn’t mean everyone with ADHD experiences it, nor that those without ADHD never do. It shows up differently for everyone.

You might find yourself replaying a short comment from your boss, a friend’s slow reply, or a facial expression that seemed “off.” Your logical mind might know it’s probably nothing, but your emotional system reacts as if it’s everything.

This response is not overdramatic. It’s often shaped by years of feeling misunderstood, overlooked, or criticised for behaviours others didn’t recognise as ADHD traits such as being late, forgetting something, daydreaming, zoning out.

When those moments build up, the nervous system learns to expect rejection, to brace for it before it happens.

Rejection sensitivity can look like:

• Avoiding feedback or perceived judgment.

• People-pleasing to prevent disapproval.

• Emotional crashes after small misunderstandings.

• Deep self-criticism or guilt after conflict.

  
  

It’s not that you are too sensitive - it’s that your emotional radar is highly tuned to connection and safety. Terms like emotional overwhelm and rejection sensitivity are incredibly helpful in naming experiences that once felt unexplainable. But this is also where we need balance, because these emotional experiences often overlap with stress and anxiety, which everyone experiences to varying degrees.

You don’t need to have diagnosed ADHD to experience rejection sensitivity, and you don’t need rejection sensitivity to feel emotionally overwhelmed. These are human experiences that sometimes interweave with ADHD.

Emotional intensity can sometimes blur into anxiety. When you’ve experienced rejection or overwhelm repeatedly, your body begins to anticipate it, scanning for it before it even happens. That’s where anxiety often begins: the constant alertness, the worry about how you’ll feel if it happens again.

For many with ADHD, anxiety isn’t always about what might go wrong in the future, it’s about how it might feel if it does. The fear isn’t always of the event itself, but of the emotional pain that might follow.

That emotional alertness can make the world feel unpredictable, relationships uncertain, and daily life a little too stimulating. Understanding this link between emotion and anxiety is powerful, because it helps you see that your worry is often your brain’s way of saying, “I’m trying to protect you from feeling hurt again.”

You don’t need to silence or shrink your emotions.The goal isn’t to feel less, it’s to create space to notice what you feel before it takes over.

In therapy, I often help clients strengthen what I call “overlapping the rational brain with the emotional brain.” It’s not about getting rid of emotion, but about limiting its impact and strengthening your rational mind so it can hold you when things feel intense.

Here are a few gentle ways to support emotional balance:

1. Name it early. When you notice emotions rising, pause and name what’s happening: “I’m feeling activated,” “This feels like rejection,” “I need to slow down before I respond.”Naming creates distance without detachment (and writing it down can be an especially powerful tool.)

2. Ground in the body. Regulation begins physiologically. Try slow breathing, sensory grounding (five things you see, four you touch, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste), or simply stepping outside for a few deep breaths. Sometimes, grounding is just a quick distraction; touching four nearby objects or naming five things around you.

3. Revisit the story later. Strong feelings often bring strong thoughts. Give yourself time to return to the situation once the emotion has settled. What felt like rejection in the moment may, with space, look like a misunderstanding.One exercise I often suggest is what I call “letting the bee out the window” - writing it down, acknowledging it, and telling your brain you’ll revisit it later when it feels calmer.

4. Build emotional tolerance. In therapy, we work on sitting with uncomfortable emotions rather than trying to eliminate them. Over time, you learn that intensity doesn’t equal danger, it’s simply your system doing its best to care.Therapy isn’t the only way to do this, but it can be a powerful space to learn and practise it with guidance.

Emotional intensity in ADHD is often portrayed as chaos. But really, it’s connection.It’s feeling deeply, caring profoundly, and responding quickly. These qualities bring creativity, empathy, and drive. They just need understanding and pacing.

If emotional overwhelm or rejection sensitivity feels familiar, therapy can help you make sense of these experiences; not to change who you are, but to make your emotional world feel safer, steadier, and more navigable.

(If you’d like to explore this further, I offer confidential online ADHD assessments and therapy for adults across the UK. Book a consultation to start the conversation.)