Your alarm goes off. You yell "no" at your phone. Sound familiar? There's a name for what's happening when your ADHD brain resists demands - even totally reasonable ones, even ones YOU created. It's called Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA). And a lot of researchers are moving away from the word "pathological" because it implies something is broken. It's not. A reframe I love: PDA also stands for Persistent Drive for Autonomy. Because that's the core of it. Your brain has a deep, wired-in need to feel in control of its own choices. When that feels threatened, it pushes back. Hard. A 2020 study by O'Connor and colleagues found ADHD traits were more strongly linked to demand avoidance than autism traits were. This is not rare. This is not random. This is how your brain is built. And knowing that? Changes things. Full episode is linked in my bio. Go listen or watch on YouTube. * O'Connor et al. (2020). Individual differences, ADHD, adult pathological demand avoidance, and delinqu...