Anger is not always a feature of ADHD, but the relationship between ADHD and feelings of anger is significant. People with ADHD often struggle to regulate their emotions, leading to more impulsive, less inhibited emotional responses. ADHD symptoms often result in lower frustration tolerance, so ADHD and outbursts of anger are not uncommon.
What Is ADHD?
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that describes a pattern of excessive activity or inability to sustain attention. Difficulty inhibiting emotional responses and physical reactions or resisting distractions are hallmarks of ADHD.
Signs of Anger & ADHD in Children
Kids are already prone to difficulty handling or regulating emotions since their brains aren’t fully developed. The last part of your brain to develop is the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of higher reasoning abilities such as problem-solving and regulating emotions. When a child has ADHD, they have even more difficulty managing emotions, such as anger, to the intensity required by the situation. They may also have trouble articulating their frustrations, making them appear angry more often than they may seem normal.
Signs your child may be dealing with ADHD and anger include:
- Difficulty switching tasks when told
- Appearing overly sensitive or emotional
- Resistance or defiance to following instructions
- Yelling
- Hiding
- Shutting down or stonewalling
- More movement than usual
- Overreacting
- Physical outbursts such as hitting
- Difficulty coping with stress
- Frustration in various areas – school, home, sports, etc.
Signs of ADHD & Anger in Adults
Anger generally looks different in adults because they are, in many ways, their own boss. While children are often told what to do or guided on how to feel, adults typically have to manage their daily lives and emotions. However, an adult with ADHD symptoms and anger problems may still exhibit similar responses as a child – temper tantrums, emotional outbursts, and aggression can all be features of adult ADHD.
Signs an adult may be dealing with ADHD and anger include:
- Difficulty concentrating at work
- Angry outbursts towards loved ones
- Mood swings
- Outsized responses to seemingly innocuous events
- Speaking without thinking first
- Shutting down or withdrawing
- Giving up on their pursuit of a goal
- Impatience
The Link Between ADHD & Anger
ADHD has been described as being fundamentally a disorder of emotion regulation.1 One of the underlying causes of many ADHD symptoms is difficulty regulating one’s emotions. In fact, 70% of adults and 70-80% of children with ADHD report experiencing problems regulating their emotions.2
Researchers speculate that one aspect of impulsive reactions of ADHD is poor inhibition of emotional responses, which he calls deficient emotional self-regulation.1 This difficulty inhibiting emotional reactions can look like impulsively overreacting in a situation due to a weakened ability to suppress emotions.
While emotional dysregulation is not a criterion for an ADHD diagnosis, it seems plausible that it would be an everyday experience with difficulty managing daily tasks, such as:
- Constantly feeling behind or out of the loop due to a lack of focus on instructions
- Losing track of a conversation
- Interpersonal interactions with friends or family being continually interrupted by your and the communication patterns
- Feeling constantly forgetful with items such as losing keys or remembering tasks like completing homework
The impatience aspect of ADHD is a function of reduced frustration tolerance, leading to a “short fuse” in people with ADHD. There is also a difficulty in down-regulating emotions (from high emotions back to baselines) and up-regulating emotions (from baseline to activating oneself to support “goal-directed action”).1
Recent research also indicates that people with ADHD may have abnormal brain activity, which contributes to disinhibited emotions and difficulty matching their responses to the situation’s seriousness or intensity.3 Weak correspondence or coherence in emotion regulation, where one’s facial affect and physiological response are mismatched, can lead to ADHD’s internal signals causing confusing external reactions to others.4 For example, children and adolescents with ADHD show difficulties processing emotional information in visual scenes, likely due to difficulty inferring emotions from body language and contextual information.4
Can ADHD Make Your Child More Aggressive?
ADHD symptoms can make your child appear more aggressive, but it does not necessarily carry the malicious intent that typically characterizes proactive, aggressive behavior. Aggression in ADHD is reactive, a manifestation of uncontrollable and quick shifts in emotions combined with a mismatch in emotional intensity between a child’s reaction and the situation at hand.5
Is Anger a Symptom of ADHD?
Anger is not technically or officially a symptom of ADHD, but it can certainly be a featured experience with the disorder. It’s essential to remember that people with ADHD have a higher-than-average number of comorbidities, such as mood and anxiety disorders, which can make classifying symptoms and diagnosing each condition more challenging.6
One reason anger is not explicitly considered a sign of ADHD is that deficits in the ability to control frustration can present in other disorders, such as anxiety and depression, rather than externalized problems like common feelings of anger alone.5
Impacts of ADHD & Anger
ADHD and anger problems can affect functioning across several domains of life. Anger can present as irritability and lability with rapid and intense emotional shifts, leading people to walk on eggshells around you. Since people with ADHD also have difficulty processing emotional stimuli, recognizing others’ emotions and responding in a socially appropriate way may be challenging. Inappropriate responses can mean that you react aggressively to a neutral situation. Finally, difficulty adapting emotional responses can more easily lead to anger in people with ADHD due to issues processing external events.7
ADHD & Anger At Work
People with ADHD may find themselves consistently frustrated in a poor work environment, as symptoms of ADHD, including anger, can increase or decrease based on context.8 This inability to function in stressful environments can create cycles that perpetuate chronic workplace dysfunction, leading to higher unemployment rates among the ADHD population.9
Even when adults with ADHD are highly engaged in their work, their job performance remains the same as those without ADHD with lower engagement.10 Lower job performance despite high participation and effort in one’s work can increase frustration leading to anger.
There is still hope of finding meaningful employment for adults with ADHD and anger. Research shows that entrepreneurship can be a good alternative, as it allows someone to match their environment with their strengths. Those with ADHD are almost twice as likely as the general population to initiate business ventures due to higher risk tolerance.11
In the case entrepreneurship is not for you, it’s also possible to:9
- Re-evaluate career goals to find an appropriate contextual fit
- Increase self-regulating strategies
- Channel abilities to hyper-focus on interests into positive occupational changes
Anger & ADHD At School
Untreated ADHD can lead to academic difficulties, primarily due to difficulty adjusting to school rules and the inability to regulate emotions and behaviors around others.12 Children with ADHD and externalizing behaviors, including anger and aggression, often exhibit negative relationships with their teachers, leaving them more vulnerable to social isolation and rejection than their peers.12 Although the association is unknown, children with ADHD also show more math and language skills problems, leading to a risk of dropping out of school.12
Parents can counteract the negative implications of childhood ADHD in school settings by:
- Increasing social skills
- Implementing behavioral management strategies
- Treating emotional dysregulation
ADHD & Anger At Home
Parents with difficulty regulating their emotions can often have difficulty disciplining their children and teaching them how to modulate their emotions appropriately.1 Parents of children with ADHD also exhibit higher stress levels than their peers, which leads to lower life satisfaction, happiness in intimate relationships, and mental well-being.6
In romantic partnerships, the inability to suppress emotional lability and impulsive actions often lead to interpersonal difficulties in adults.13 Like any other mental health concern, each partner must be willing to contribute to creating positive changes in a shared living environment, as both are part of the dynamic house system.
Anger & ADHD In Relationships
Individuals with ADHD and difficulties regulating emotions experience higher rates of relationship conflict and dissatisfaction, which is further increased if there’s violence in the home.1 The inability to recognize specific social cues and respond appropriately with ADHD often leads to interpersonal discord.
Being able to maintain positive and healthy interpersonal interactions can be a challenge for a variety of reasons, such as:
- Difficulty maintaining eye contact
- Being easily distracted by environmental noise
- Trouble retaining trains of thoughts and tracking conversations
- Diminished ability to process interactions in the same way as neurotypical peers
Treatment for ADHD & Anger
Anger outbursts connected with ADHD symptoms don’t have to dictate or ruin your life. Evidence-based child and adult ADHD treatments are available, and research indicates several valuable methods you can try to find one that fits your unique symptom profile. Mental health counseling and medication for anger are options, although the best outcomes occur when combined as treatment strategies.
Therapy
Treatment targets for ADHD and emotional outbursts in children will likely include increasing frustration tolerance and teaching alternative ways to interpret events and social interactions.
Parents should be involved in treatment for their ADHD child, as they can learn how to:2
- Avoid accidentally rewarding their child’s temper tantrums
- Regulate their parental stress in the face of their child’s anger outburst
- Implement healthy consequences in structured feedback systems from which their child can internalize appropriate behaviors through social and emotional learning
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) effectively treats emotion dysregulation associated with ADHD-related anger problems in adults.14 CBT helps by teaching and practicing adaptive coping strategies, learning new ways of interpreting events and self-beliefs, and increasing awareness of your own emotions.14
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is currently under investigation for:15
- Improving behavioral symptoms of ADHD
- Increasing emotional coherence
- Increasing awareness to modulate their emotional reactions with their physiological responses
There are other types of ADHD treatments available as well. If you decide to engage in therapy to help manage anger and ADHD symptoms when they occur together, look for a neurodiverse-affirming therapist, as they will be familiar with the clinical aspects of your unique needs. If you need a place to begin searching for a counselor, an online therapist directory can help you get started.
Medication
ADHD medications are also beneficial to get symptoms, including feelings of anger, under better control. Your primary care doctor or a psychiatrist can help you decide which pharmacological treatments could help you and adjust medications as needed to find the most optimal outcome. Currently, most ADHD medications have only partial effectiveness on emotional dysregulation symptoms.16
ADHD medications can be supplements, stimulants, or non-stimulants, such as:2
- Stimulants* will only partially help the emotion dysregulation symptoms in children. However, adding a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)** may mitigate the remaining ADHD medication side efects. The stimulants most effective in treating emotion dysregulation and anger outbursts as an adult ADHD medication are lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse)* and methylphenidate*.
- Non-stimulant cognition-enhancing medications, such as Atomoxetine**, are sometimes used to treat ADHD and increase emotion regulation.
- Natural remedies such as Omega-3s also have a small but significant effect on enhancing emotion regulation in children.
*These stimulant medications carry a black box warning, the most severe kind of warning from the FDA for abuse or misuse.
**These medications in the SSRI and SNRI drug class have a black box warning, the most severe kind of warning from the FDA for the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in certain people. You should talk with your doctor about these risks before starting these medications.
Final Thoughts
The way your ADHD symptoms show up may be unique, as in the case of anger outbursts or temper tantrums in ADHD, but you’re not alone. Talking to a therapist or reaching out to a trusted friend or family member can make a big difference in how you feel.
ADHD & Anger Infographics
