Adult ADHD is lasting trouble with focus, restlessness or impulses, often with feelings that are hard to steady. This free screen asks 20 questions on those three areas and gives your overall score, its band and your pattern; it is a screen, not a diagnosis; read what adult ADHD looks like and how it is diagnosed.
How does your brain regulate attention, energy, and emotion? A 20-item self-reflection inventory across the three dimensions current research uses to describe adult ADHD — attention & executive function, hyperactivity & impulsivity, and emotional self-regulation. Free, you get your overall score with its severity band, one of seven rule-based archetypes and the next steps that point to a clinician; your three domain scores, your profile and the rest of its evidence-based next steps open with your report. LBL-original; a reflective screen, not a diagnosis.
Twenty questions across three domains. As you answer, the panel beside you fills in real time, so you can see how each dimension is building. Rate each item for how often the pattern shows up in your adult life over the past six months — there are no right answers, only honest ones.
Answer all 20 items to see your result.
Each bar fills as you answer that domain's questions. Your result comes when all 20 are answered.
A structured reflection of how attention, activity, and emotion regulation show up for you. A screen to think with — not a diagnosis.
Your archetype will appear here after you answer all 20 items.
Your archetype will appear here after you answer all 20 items.
These are drawn from the adult-ADHD intervention literature, matched to your dominant pattern. They are starting points for reflection and conversation, not prescriptions.
Adult ADHD rarely appears alone. Depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders each co-occur in a substantial share of adults with ADHD — and several of them produce ADHD-like symptoms on their own. If your profile is elevated, an evaluation that screens these too gives the truest picture. These LBL tools give a first look at your sleep schedule, anxiety, and depression:
This inventory does not diagnose ADHD. It organizes self-reported patterns into the three dimensions that contemporary research uses to describe adult ADHD — then maps your pattern to evidence-based next steps. Everything below documents exactly how it is built, where each piece comes from, and what it can and cannot tell you.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that begins in childhood and, in roughly half of cases, persists into adulthood. But it does not look the same across the lifespan. The childhood picture — built largely on studies of hyperactive boys — is dominated by visible restlessness. The adult picture is quieter and broader: the overt hyperactivity tends to recede, while difficulties with sustained attention, executive function, and emotional regulation move to the foreground. Contemporary reviews increasingly describe adult ADHD not as a narrow “attention deficit” but as a broader self-regulation syndrome spanning cognitive and emotional control. This inventory is built around that modern understanding rather than the childhood stereotype.
The 20 items are grouped into three domains. The first two correspond to the DSM-5's two diagnostic dimensions; the third is a research-supported dimension the DSM-5 leaves out of its core criteria.
Covers sustained attention and the executive-function machinery beneath it: holding focus on un-stimulating tasks, task initiation (the “wall of starting”), working memory, organization and planning, time estimation, distractibility, and follow-through. Contemporary reviews increasingly frame adult ADHD as fundamentally a disorder of executive self-regulation rather than a simple attention deficit (Barkley's model). Inattentive and executive difficulties are the most persistent features of adult ADHD — they tend to remain even as overt hyperactivity fades with age, which is why this is the largest domain in the inventory.
Covers the classic hyperactive-impulsive dimension as it appears in adults: physical and internal restlessness, verbal impulsivity (interrupting, over-talking), acting before the pause, and difficulty waiting. Biederman and colleagues (2000) documented that overt hyperactivity reliably declines with age while inattention persists — so in adults this domain often shows up as an internal “can't settle” restlessness rather than the visible motor activity of childhood. The items are written to capture both the overt and the internal forms, so an adult whose hyperactivity has gone inward is still represented.
The third domain is the one the DSM-5 leaves out of its core criteria — and the one current research increasingly treats as central. Deficient emotional self-regulation (emotional intensity and flooding, low frustration tolerance, slow recovery, mood lability, rejection sensitivity, and negative urgency) is present in up to roughly 70% of adults with ADHD and is linked to greater impairment (Barkley 2015; Soler-Gutiérrez et al. 2023 systematic review; Beheshti et al. 2020 meta-analysis, where emotional lability showed the strongest effect versus controls). We measure it as a clearly-labeled, research-supported dimension — not as a diagnostic criterion — because leaving it out would give an incomplete picture of how adult ADHD actually presents, and because it is the pattern most often mistaken for a primary mood or anxiety disorder.
Two facts about the lifespan course shape how this inventory should be read. First, hyperactivity attenuates with age. Biederman et al. (2000) followed children with ADHD into adulthood and documented a reliable decline in overt hyperactive-impulsive symptoms while inattention persisted — so the most common adult presentation is inattentive, the reverse of the childhood pattern. Second, the childhood-onset requirement is preserved. DSM-5 diagnoses adult ADHD only when several symptoms can be traced to before age 12. This is why a high score here is necessary but not sufficient for a diagnosis: conditions that emerge in adulthood (depression, anxiety, sleep loss, thyroid dysfunction, perimenopause, head injury, chronic stress) can produce ADHD-like patterns without any childhood history. The current consensus (Faraone et al. 2021) is that genuine adult-onset ADHD without childhood symptoms is rare. If you score high but cannot recall childhood symptoms, the alternative explanations are worth investigating first.
Many brief online ADHD screeners use as few as six items, optimized for a yes/no detection. This inventory uses 20 across three domains for three reasons. It preserves the sub-dimension structure — attention, hyperactivity, and emotional regulation have distinct patterns, distinct treatment implications, and distinct cross-tool referrals that a single collapsed score hides. It gives the inattentive and emotional patterns equal weight — brief screeners that lean on hyperactive items under-represent how ADHD presents in adults, and especially in women. And the added time cost is small — 20 items takes about 6–7 minutes, a reasonable trade for a far richer profile on an instrument you take once or rarely.
Each item is rated 0–6 on a 7-point frequency scale with explicit behavioral anchors (Never, Very Rarely, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, Very Often, Almost Always). Two items — one in Attention and one in Hyperactivity — are reverse-keyed: they describe the absence of a symptom, so a high answer indicates lower symptom load, and they are scored by inverting the value (6 minus your answer). Reverse items vary the direction of the questions; this version scores them but does not use them to flag inattentive or automatic responding. Each domain's raw sum is normalized to a 0–100 scale so the three domains are directly comparable despite having different item counts; your overall score is the normalized sum across all three. The whole calculation runs in your browser — nothing is sent to score your answers.
Unlike depression (PHQ-9) or anxiety (GAD-7) instruments, adult-ADHD self-reports generally do not have officially validated severity bands — they are usually built for binary screening, not severity grading. The four bands here — Low (0–40), Moderate-low (41–55), Moderate-high (56–75), High (76–100) — are an explicitly-disclosed LBL author choice, anchored proportionally to the 4-stratum classification Kessler and colleagues (2007) published for the ASRS Part A, then mapped onto this inventory's 0–100 normalized scale. They organize the result pedagogically — to give you a “where do I sit” intuition — not to imply diagnostic certainty. They are not validated clinical thresholds, and the same bands apply to the total and to each domain.
Your pattern across the three domains is matched to one of seven archetypes using a transparent, rule-based logic (first-match-wins, most-specific-first). A domain counts as “elevated” when it reaches the Moderate-high band. Three archetypes mirror the DSM-5 presentation specifiers: the Drifter (attention/executive dominant — the inattentive presentation), the Dynamo (hyperactive-impulsive dominant), and the Kinetic Mind (attention and hyperactivity both elevated — combined presentation). Two are introduced by the third domain and have no DSM equivalent: the Stormrider (emotional self-regulation is the leading dimension) and the Tempest (all three elevated together). The Grounded profile reflects a low overall score with no dimension elevated, and the Searching profile captures present-but-undifferentiated symptoms with no dominant dimension — the pattern where alternative explanations are worth ruling out first. Each archetype carries its own evidence-based pathway set, drawn from the treatment literature for that specific pattern.
The childhood ADHD literature was built primarily on hyperactive boys, and the adult picture differs by sex in ways that matter for self-screening. Women are more likely to present with the inattentive and emotional-regulation patterns than with overt hyperactivity, and are correspondingly more likely to be missed, or mis-attributed to anxiety or depression, because the diagnostic criteria were calibrated on a more hyperactive, more male sample (Quinn & Madhoo 2014). Many women are not identified until adulthood — often after a child is diagnosed and the pattern is recognized in themselves. Hormonal transitions (postpartum, perimenopause, menstrual-cycle phase) can also unmask or worsen symptoms. A moderate-to-high inattentive or emotional score is worth taking seriously even when the hyperactivity score is low, and giving those two domains equal weight is part of why this inventory uses three domains rather than leaning on hyperactivity.
Adult ADHD rarely appears in isolation. Depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders each co-occur in a substantial share of adults with ADHD, and several of them produce ADHD-like symptoms on their own — chronic sleep loss can mimic inattentive ADHD, depressive slowing reads as inattention, and anxiety produces restlessness and racing thoughts. This matters in two directions: if your profile is elevated, a useful evaluation should screen for these conditions too, not just ADHD; and if your profile is present but undifferentiated (the Searching pattern), an alternative explanation is worth ruling out first. The results page links the LBL Sleep Schedule Calculator and the Anxiety and Depression screens as a first look at these; none of them can rule a condition in or out.
It does not diagnose ADHD — only a clinician can, through a comprehensive evaluation that documents childhood onset, rules out alternatives, and meets full DSM-5 criteria. It does not measure your cognitive function directly — it captures self-reported experience over the past six months, not performance on attention or memory tasks; neuropsychological testing measures those, and the two are complementary. It does not establish childhood onset — it asks only about the present, so a high score without childhood history points to alternatives first. And it is not yet independently validated — the items are LBL-original and grounded in the research literature, but formal psychometric validation (internal consistency, factor structure, convergent validity against established instruments) is planned, not complete. Until then, treat your result as a structured self-reflection prompt and a starting point for conversation, not a clinical screening result.
If you reference this tool in a paper, presentation, journalism, or educational setting, please use one of the standard citation formats below. The inventory is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 — free for educational and non-commercial use with attribution. For commercial licensing or research collaboration, contact LifeByLogic directly. The construct foundation (DSM-5; Faraone et al. 2021; Barkley; Soler-Gutiérrez et al. 2023) and the band-anchoring framework (Kessler 2007) should be cited separately where directly relevant.
The domains, thresholds, and pathways in this tool synthesize the following sources. The full methodology documents the construct and band-anchoring sources.
Items are LBL-original and were written from the experiential angle, grounded in the constructs described in this literature rather than reproducing any specific instrument (such as the ASRS, CAARS, Conners, or Brown scales). The inventory has not yet undergone independent psychometric validation; results are a structured self-reflection prompt, not a clinical screening result.
No. This is a structured self-reflection tool, not a diagnostic instrument. A high score is a meaningful signal that ADHD-related patterns are worth a clinical conversation, but only a qualified clinician can diagnose ADHD through a comprehensive evaluation that documents childhood-onset symptoms, rules out alternative explanations, and meets full DSM-5 criteria.
The DSM-5 defines ADHD by two dimensions — inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity. But contemporary research increasingly treats emotional self-regulation as a third core feature of adult ADHD: deficient emotional self-regulation is present in up to roughly 70% of adults with ADHD and is linked to greater impairment (Barkley 2015; Soler-Gutiérrez 2023). Measuring it gives a fuller, more current picture.
No — and we are explicit about that. Emotional dysregulation is not in the DSM-5's core diagnostic criteria; the DSM lists it only as an associated feature. We include it as a separate, clearly-labeled research-supported domain because the adult-ADHD literature consistently identifies it as central to the adult presentation. We do not treat it as diagnostic on its own.
About 6 to 7 minutes. There are 20 items rated on a 7-point frequency scale with concrete adult-context examples for each one to help you calibrate your answers.
No. The items are LBL-original. They are written from the experiential angle — how a pattern shows up in everyday adult life — and grounded in the research literature on adult ADHD rather than reproducing any specific instrument such as the ASRS, CAARS, Conners, or Brown scales. For clinical screening, ask a clinician about validated instruments; for structured self-reflection, this inventory gives your overall score, its band and your pattern free, and its report opens the three-domain profile and every pathway.
DSM-5 requires evidence of ADHD symptoms before age 12 for an adult diagnosis. A high adult score without any childhood history points to alternative explanations first: depression, anxiety, chronic sleep deprivation, thyroid dysfunction, perimenopause, head injury, or chronic stress can all produce ADHD-like symptoms in adulthood. Current scientific consensus (Faraone 2021) is that adult-onset ADHD without childhood symptoms is rare. A clinical evaluation is the right next step.
Often, yes. Women are more likely to present with the inattentive and emotional-regulation patterns than overt hyperactivity, and are correspondingly more likely to be missed or mis-attributed to anxiety or depression, because the diagnostic criteria were calibrated largely on hyperactive boys. Hormonal transitions (postpartum, perimenopause, cycle phase) can also unmask or worsen symptoms. A moderate-to-high inattentive or emotional score is worth taking seriously even when the hyperactivity score is low.
Yes, and it is common. Adult ADHD rarely appears alone — depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders each co-occur in a substantial share of adults with ADHD. If you score high here, an evaluation that screens for these comorbidities is more useful than focusing on ADHD alone. The LBL Depression Test, Anxiety Test, and Sleep Schedule Calculator are useful complements.
Only in this browser, unless you choose to save it or open the report's checkout. All computation runs in your browser, and your responses are never sent to LifeByLogic or any third party. If you choose to save your result to a free LifeGraph+ account, your overall score, your three domain scores, their bands and your archetype are kept there with the date; until you buy the report for that result, a free account shows only its overall score, band and archetype. If you open the report's checkout, your three domain scores, your total, their bands, your leading domain and your archetype go to checkout, to write it, and this tab keeps your answers until you close it, so a canceled checkout comes back to your result and a paid one opens your whole result on this page. This browser also keeps your latest scores and archetype in its own storage, so the report page can find them, until you clear your browsing data. We use Google Analytics 4 in a privacy-respecting way for aggregate page-view tracking; this never includes your individual responses.