I Thought I Had ADHD. It Was Grief.
I took a lot of psychological profile tests over the years. Myers-Briggs, DISC, the whole rotation. There were subtleties between them but the results always came back the same. Off the charts in competitiveness. Driver personality. Comfortable with conflict. Decisive to a fault.
It became my badge of honour through my 20s, 30s and 40s.
I remember asking once whether the results could ever change significantly. I was told there were only three circumstances that would do it. A lobotomy. Heavy drug or alcohol addiction. Traumatic loss.
Then I lost Maddie. And I watched my characteristics change overnight.
The decisive guy could no longer make a decision if his life depended on it. I lost my competitive edge. My concentration disappeared. My memory got fried. I would sit in front of a login screen and struggle to recall a four-digit passcode I had used for years. Things I used to love, I suddenly felt indifferent towards. Your brain literally gets hijacked, and the ransom demands are heavy.
Here is the part nobody warns you about. You grieve the person you lost. Then you start grieving the person you used to be.
I looked everywhere except at the grief
I tried to rationalize my way through my changed brain, because that was what the old version of me did. He solved problems.
I went to my GP convinced I had adult ADHD. When that theory ran out, I blamed the antidepressants for wrecking my memory. Then I decided it was early onset dementia. At one point I genuinely believed mould in certain foods and coffee was impacting my thinking.
My doctor listened to all of it. Then he said, Chris, you live under constant stress, you don't sleep well, and you have experienced severe traumatic loss.
And there I had it. I wasn't going crazy. My brain was failing me because of grief.
There was relief in that sentence, strange as it sounds. Every wrong theory I chased had one thing in common. Each one was easier to face than the truth, which was that loss had physically changed how my brain worked.
The experiments
I stopped drinking three years ago. Partly because of the meds, but mostly because I finally understood what people meant when they called alcohol a depressant. One or two drinks would leave me sad for days. The math stopped working.
Then I experimented with THC, because the marketing promised all sorts of health benefits. It just made the effects of my grief worse. Thoughts would come into my head and be gone in seconds. So I quit that too, a year ago, because I was building The MentorWell and I needed my brain working as well as it could. Pot turned out to be anything but a performance enhancing drug.
I have tried every life hack going to clear the brain fog. Some help at the margins. Sleep helps more than anything. None of it brings back the old operating system.
If you know someone in this
If someone in your life has lost a person who mattered, and they seem like they are not quite themselves, there is a good reason for it. They are forgetting things. Cancelling plans. Staring past you mid-conversation. That is grief doing exactly what grief does to a brain. They don't need advice. They mostly need you to stop being surprised by it.
The results
I have never retaken those tests. Part of me is curious what the profile would say now. The competitiveness, the drive, the comfort with conflict, I honestly don't know how much of it survived April 2015.
But I was warned, years before it happened. Only three things could change the results. I got one of them.
FAQ Section
Does grief cause memory loss?
Yes, commonly. Grief keeps your body under sustained stress, and sustained stress interferes with how the brain stores and retrieves information. Forgetting passwords, names, appointments and words mid-sentence is one of the most reported experiences among grieving people. It is usually temporary, though "temporary" can mean months or longer.
How long does grief brain fog last?
There is no fixed timeline, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. For many people the sharpest fog eases within the first year. For traumatic loss, it can stretch much longer. Sleep, reduced alcohol, and lowering overall stress load tend to help. Comparing your timeline to someone else's tends to hurt.
Can grief change your personality?
It can change how your traits show up, sometimes dramatically. Decisive people become hesitant. Driven people go flat. Whether that's a permanent change or a long season varies by person. What I can tell you is the shift is real, measurable, and not a character failure.
Why does alcohol make grief feel worse?
Alcohol is a depressant. A grieving brain is already running low. In my experience, one or two drinks could flatten me for days afterward. If you've noticed the same pattern, that's not weakness or coincidence. It's chemistry.
When should I see a doctor about grief symptoms?
If your memory, sleep, motivation or mood are interfering with daily life, go. Not because something is necessarily wrong beyond grief, but because ruling things out is exactly what a GP is for, and because saying it out loud to someone qualified matters. Mine gave me the single most clarifying sentence of those years.
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