I wore a headset that simulates ADHD – this is what I discovered

A new ‘mixed reality experience’ simulates what it’s like to have ADHD. Our writer tried it out

I’m experiencing 35 very stressful minutes: a “mixed reality” experience that you interact with through a headset that claims to show what it’s really like to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Impulse, narrated by Tilda Swinton, is “a story about the extremes of ADHD”. It won awards at Venice Film Festival and is about to premiere at London Film Festival. And the effect it has is shocking.
The ADHD Foundation reports a 400 per cent increase in the number of adults seeking a diagnosis since 2020. The jury is out on the causes, but these include genetic predisposition, trauma, birth complications, brain injury, exposure to toxins and other medical and lifestyle issues. According to the NHS website definition, ADHD is a condition that affects people’s behaviour. People with it “can seem restless, may have trouble concentrating and may act on impulse”. After experiencing Impulse I wonder if it’s understating the case.
Headset on, Impulse starts with a “game” about processing information. First you need to gather brightly coloured “information” by hoovering it up with your left hand, then with your right hand you have to shoot the shapes it creates (money, keys, food) towards a matching counterpart. If you aim true and shoot at the right moment you supposedly gain a point. 
“It’s down to you,” says Swinton in a calm voice laced with menace. “Suck up the information… Then match like with like and spit it out.” It seems simple enough. The colourful part representing the abstract information is garish yet beautiful. It’s up to me to turn it into something sensible. But electronic music is pumping like a heartbeat in the background and getting faster and faster and before long I’m really not doing very well.
The game moves up through four levels, from “Excite” to “Stress”, “Overwhelm” and finally “Panic”. The music gets faster and more ominous. Lights flash and confuse. The symbols start to include spiders and skulls. By Level 3 – “Overwhelm” –  I’m talking to myself. “I have to hoover up information and I have to process it and it’s moving really fast and it’s actually bloody stressful. And I’ve lost.”
I always lose. I’m a little nauseous. I feel angry and cheated as I realise it’s impossible to succeed. Swinton’s voice confirms this fact. “I can see you’re trying but it’s not quite enough,” she says, sounding patronising. “You’re letting frustration get the better of you.” Well, you try it, I want to say.
Level 4 – “Panic” – feels actually impossible. “Some games are impossible,” gloats Swinton. “I’d be lying if I said you really had a chance there.” 
I recognise the feelings of stress, overwhelm and panic from my own life. But afterwards, when I’ve calmed down, I realise that in my case, the times I’ve experienced these have been a rational response to the ups and downs of normal existence: having a full time demanding job, three children, and for 15 years, coping with ill parents.
For someone with ADHD, however, these feelings can be the response to having to find your keys. 
Joseph Aquilina, 46, an advisor to the producers, is a neurodiversity consultant and ADHD coach. He also has ADHD himself. What does he think of how the game represents the experience?
“Yes, that can be what it’s like just getting your keys to get out the door. It’s a really good metaphor for things like that, because one of the objects in there is a key… but then the other objects are, like a skull. What the hell has the skull got to do with it? Well, that’s our [people with ADHD] brain. I might think, Oh, I’ve got to get the key. And in the middle of my brain is, oh, the key is like, a key is connected to a trunk. And a trunk is like, coffin. Coffin is dead. Yes, there could be random things that just pop into your head that distract you from what you’re trying to do.”
It sounds frustrating.
“Absolutely, like everyday things that everyone takes for granted, you can have real difficulty doing, and that does lead to frustration… I’ve got clients who are doing advanced mathematics – [the kind of maths] that you just think, how do you do that? But they’ll constantly forget where they’ve put their shoes or their phone… just constantly. You could lose your keys four or five times in one hour.”
May Abdalla, the co-director of Impulse, which took two years to make and involved interviewing 200 people with ADHD, says: “The more you interview people, the more you realise [the expression] ‘attention deficit’ doesn’t make sense. When you speak to people, they are profoundly attending to their issues. But they don’t know what not to give attention to. They’re giving attention to the sounds of my earrings as I move left and right. So it’s hard for them to focus on what I’m saying.”
She explains: “It’s sort of like an ultra sensitivity”.
Meanwhile, back in my headset, the experience moves away from the game and on to a more documentary style section that charts the lives of four real case studies, Errol, Omar, Tara and Leanne. The majority of them have suffered trauma in their pasts – violence, bereavement and neglect – but the interviews reveal that they all share certain traits, including the chase for adrenaline, often wanting to climb buildings and get up high. Recounting their younger experiences the men describe having more swagger, the girls (now grown women) are more self-denigrating. 
Errol, now in his 60s and a performer, fitted the “naughty boy” trope of ADHD as a young man. He says: “I used to climb to the top [of buildings]. I used to get off on people being scared… that I was going to fall.”
Tara, now in her 20s, grew up in a middle class family in Carlisle. “I always spoil things,” says her voice. She recalls: “I would be more excitable [than other people]. If we were playing pretend swords I would go too far and accidentally hurt someone. It feels really good in the moment but then out of the moment you realise what you’ve done. It’s all gone horribly wrong.” There’s a sense of shame in her voice. We hear that before she got her diagnosis she made multiple suicide attempts and self-harmed.  
By the end of the headset experience I felt sympathy, a degree of recognition and a wish to understand more about this condition which affects so many people. It’s easy to look at a list of symptoms, far harder to experience the intensity and intrusiveness of the feelings they provoke. 
Apart from Tara the case studies chosen for Impulse share a traumatised and primarily working class background. Yet ADHD does not discriminate with class, explains Aquilina, who has over 15 years experience in the workplace and in all levels of education, working with individuals and groups from primary school pupils to PhD researchers. 
“It will manifest differently in people and in environments. If you’ve grown up in a privileged environment, you’re more likely to do OK in education, because you’ll get the educational support.”
But that doesn’t mean that your ADHD won’t affect you. I ask, if you are relatively privileged but have ADHD, does this mean you don’t “act out”? Quite the opposite, says Aquilina. “They’d still act out. You’ll take risks in a different scenario.” In fact, he says, it’s not unthinkable that among high rolling city traders, living on adrenaline, there could be a prevalence of people with ADHD. “If you think about the stock exchange,” he says, “a lot of people would have come from private education. But the stock exchange is just gambling. It’s just taking risk with other people’s money. The financial system, as we know, is all about taking risks.”
Another high octane profession, the law, is known to attract people with ADHD. In a 2016 study, 12.5 per cent of lawyers reported having the condition. And successful high earners who seek out extreme sports – skiers on black runs, for example. 
It is believed by charity ADHD UK that four out of five adults with ADHD are undiagnosed; over two million people. Aquilina was diagnosed first with dyslexia, at 21, then with ADHD at aged 38 when he sought out a diagnosis after becoming a parent for the first time. Why was it so important and how did it feel?
“There’s a mixture of anger, relief and grieving. You grieve for the stuff that you weren’t able to do because of all the difficulties that you had, and for missed opportunities. I’m lucky, but for example, if I had a diagnosis of ADHD and dyslexia at school, I might have not failed all my GCSEs? I failed at everything… Yet now I help people write their PhDs, masters and undergraduates. I’ve got six people with ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia. They get special support with the disabled students, and I help coach people in the workplace as well.”
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Abdalla agrees that diagnosis is vital. She explains that people can then say, “I’m not a stupid failure. And so there’s almost a pattern of a kind of absolute relief that they finally can let themselves get off the hook after a whole life of just self flagellation. Then there’s anger with it happening so late, and all the people who didn’t help them. You know, their parents, [for example], never having a kind word.”
Which brings us back to the importance of showing how it actually feels on behalf of the people she interviewed. 
“A lot of their lives had been miserable, trying either to repress those feelings or knowing that those feelings were unacceptable or wrong, and not knowing how to explain why they were happening.”
So what is the role of society? Abdalla says: “It’s not necessarily that it causes it, but it means that maybe the people who could have helped them [didn’t]. It just ends up kind of ruining their lives meaning that they don’t have a job.”
The one thing that can change the fate of people with ADHD is a wider understanding, she believes. “Once you recognise those qualities in someone, and you think, oh, that’s ADHD. You can be more patient and more kind. And that kindness and that patience affects what happens to them next.” Instead of dismissing someone at stupid when they can’t answer a small question because they’ve just thought of a bigger question they have to answer first, for example.
“So the fact that you felt stressed and sick is part of the story. If I’m talking to somebody, and they’re feeling stressed and sick, what should I do? You’re going to have better instincts, like saying let’s get away from the traffic, maybe go to a quiet cafe. Let’s drink some water first, before I ask you questions about where your homework is, or whatever. You know, it’s about sharing what that moment felt like for them? And then you kind of have a visceral understanding, which isn’t about language. You kind of have an intuitive understanding of what you can do.”
I think of the people I know, or have known, who fit the ADHD description and wonder how different their lives would be if everyone thought this way. 
But Aquilina, who is also an artist, is keen to point out that a diagnosis doesn’t mean you will change – it just means you will change how you cope.
“So for me, because I can paint and play different musical instruments, why can’t I fill in the form? Because I’m not an administrator or a bureaucrat, I’m an artist. Could be one answer, yeah. Or is it because I’m ADHD and dyslexic, depends what way you want to look at it, right?”
But what of people who’ve got no sympathy for it, because they just think it’s ridiculous not to be able to do these things, that you are making excuses?
“I say, why don’t you play the music that I play? Why don’t you paint the paintings that I paint? Why don’t you do the mathematical equations that a lot of my clients do? Finding your keys is such a simple task, right? And, you know, we find that frustrating. You do that fine. But you do the stuff that we find different and we find easy.”
In the end, he’s defiant, in a way that may inspire others.
“I’m happy to be weird – deal with it.”
Impulse: Playing With Reality will run at the Southbank Centre’s Undercroft, Queen Elizabeth Hall from October 12-27 as part of LFF Expanded. Tickets: £12/£10 at www.bfi.org.uk premiering at London Film Festival