Lived Experience & Reflection

I Did My PhD in Bed: What I Understand Differently After My ADHD Diagnosis

I started my PhD in 2010. My daughters were four and six.

For that first year, I brought them with me and managed on my own, juggling doctoral research, part-time teaching work, and caring for two very young girls in a new routine. I wrote about that season from a parent’s side in another article. But this reflection is about the study itself: the physical act of trying to write, the unexpected friction of university offices, and what I only came to understand years later when looking back through the lens of an adult ADHD diagnosis.

At the time, I had no diagnosis. I had no clinical vocabulary for executive function, sensory thresholds, or task initiation. I simply knew that sitting upright at a university desk for hours left me feeling physically exhausted and mentally frozen, that I preferred working on my bed, and that I felt deeply embarrassed admitting this habit to anyone else.

I also loved the challenge of research. Completing my doctorate mattered to me immensely. I cared about early childhood pedagogy, I was fascinated by curriculum development, and I was genuinely invested in the data I was analysing. The problem was never a lack of ambition or a lack of interest. The problem was that the physical setting where serious intellectual work was supposed to happen felt like an obstacle course for my focus.

Three Demands at Once: A PhD, Part-Time Work, and Two Small Children

Looking back at that period plainly, my life was pulled across three immense demands. There was the doctoral candidature, which requires long stretches of deep conceptual synthesis. There was the part-time teaching work necessary to pay the bills. And there were my two small daughters, whose needs for connection, nourishment, school preparation, and emotional safety were constant and immediate.

None of those demands waited politely for the others. A PhD does not have clear daily edges. In an undergraduate degree, you are given weekly readings, set tutorial questions, and clear exam dates. In a doctorate, nobody taps you on the shoulder at four o’clock to tell you that you have written enough for the day. That open-ended, self-directed timeline is notoriously difficult for anyone. When you combine that ambiguity with an ADHD brain that struggles with internal timekeeping and task prioritization, the mental weight can be crushing.

I often found myself running on sheer adrenaline. I would drop the girls off, rush into the university, try to force six hours of academic synthesis into a tight morning window, rush back to school pick-up, manage the domestic rhythm of dinner, baths, and bedtime stories, and then sit in the quiet evening feeling completely depleted. Many neurodivergent mothers know this specific kind of exhaustion: navigating deep executive burnout and cognitive fatigue while trying to hold a steady presence for young children.

I share this context not to count hardships, but because life does not happen in a laboratory. Difficulty with studying or writing is rarely just about whether you have good self-control. It is shaped by the sheer volume of cognitive demands you are carrying simultaneously.

The Desk on the Fourth Floor: Why the Office Felt Paralyzing

When you start a doctoral program, the university usually allocates you a space. Mine was on the fourth floor of the education faculty building. It was a proper postgraduate office: a pod of four grey laminate desks divided by grey fabric acoustic screens, surrounded by metal filing cabinets, tall bookshelves, and a window overlooking the campus trees.

On paper, it was the gold standard of study spaces. It was designated strictly for intellectual work. There was no washing waiting to be folded, no children tugging at my sleeve, no domestic chores calling my name. Every traditional productivity guide I had ever read insisted that having a dedicated, clutter-free desk away from home was the foundation of good scholarship.

In practice, sitting in that chair was agonizing.

The first problem was the silence. In a shared academic office, people observe a polite, library-style quietness. But for me, that quiet was never restful; it was deafening. In absolute silence, every tiny, unpredictable sound felt magnified. The scrape of an office chair across commercial carpet three desks down, someone clicking the top of a pen while thinking, a colleague clearing their throat, or the distant hum of the communal photocopier in the hallway pulled my attention away instantly.

We understand in early childhood that unpredictable classroom noise creates sensory overload for young learners. What we talk about far less is how unpredictable sounds in a dead-silent room create that same hypervigilance in adults. My attention was constantly bracing for the next small interruption instead of sinking into the literature on curriculum theory.

Then there was the physical lighting. The fourth-floor office was lit by rows of long fluorescent tubes overhead. They cast a flat, relentless white glare over the desks. While other candidates seemed oblivious to it, I found the light visually abrasive. It felt as though a faint buzzing was happening right behind my forehead, making my eyes ache after twenty minutes. We know today that fluorescent flicker and harsh lighting can strain attention in neurodivergent individuals, but at the time, I just assumed I had weak eyes or poor stamina.

Finally, there was the posture. The chair was an ergonomic task chair with adjustable lumbar support, yet keeping my body upright and still required continuous, conscious effort. My shoulders crept toward my ears. My legs felt restless. I would tuck one leg underneath me until my foot went numb, then switch to the other side, then lean heavily on my elbows until my neck cramped. More of my mental energy was being consumed by trying to keep my body seated in a respectable position than by thinking about early childhood education.

I would sit before a blinking cursor on a blank Word document for an hour, write forty words, delete thirty of them, and feel a heavy, leaden dread settle over my chest. I felt frozen. By two o’clock in the afternoon, feeling humiliated and fraudulent, I would pack my bag, slip quietly out of the building, and catch the tram home.

ADHD Work Environment: Study in Bed

Once home, my routine looked entirely different.

I would walk into my bedroom, take off my work shoes, climb straight into bed, pull the quilt up over my legs, prop three pillows behind my lower back, and open my laptop on a tray across my lap.

Almost immediately, the physical tension that had locked my shoulders in the faculty office began to ease.

In bed, my body felt supported. The weight of the doona across my lap provided deep, even pressure that seemed to quiet the physical restlessness in my limbs. I did not have to spend cognitive bandwidth balancing on a swivel chair or worrying about maintaining correct posture. If I needed to shift onto my stomach and lean on my elbows for a paragraph, I did. If I needed to pull my knees up to my chest and type with the keyboard balanced on my shins, nobody was there to see it.

The acoustic environment was entirely under my control. Instead of the tense silence of the university office, I introduced steady, low-stakes sound. I would turn on an old, familiar comfort film on my bedside screen—often an adaptation of *Pride and Prejudice* or a familiar period drama I had seen ten times before.

Because I already knew every line of dialogue, my brain felt no urge to actively follow the plot. The spoken words and steady orchestral soundtrack created a predictable auditory floor. It filled the background space, preventing stray domestic noises or passing traffic from jarring my attention. With that gentle, rhythmic audio running beside me, the deeper, analytical part of my mind could finally settle into reading journal articles, analysing field notes, and drafting chapters.

In that unmade bed, surrounded by reference books spread across the duvet, I could write two thousand words in an afternoon. Ideas that felt hopelessly tangled at my university desk suddenly organized themselves into paragraphs.

The Shame of Working Differently in Academia

Yet despite getting the work done, I felt an intense, persistent shame about my process.

Academia has a deeply entrenched aesthetic. Real intellectual labour is traditionally pictured in grand libraries, behind heavy oak desks, or in crisp, orderly study pods lined with neatly filed journals. It is associated with upright posture, clear surfaces, and quiet self-control. It is definitely not associated with an adult woman writing about educational policy while propped up against a floral pillow in her pajamas with tea mugs cluttering the bedside table.

Whenever my doctoral supervisors or fellow candidates asked where I did my best writing, I lied. I gave vague, socially acceptable answers. I nodded along when people spoke about booking private carrels in the university library or staying late in the faculty hub. I never once admitted that ninety percent of my thesis was being typed in bed with a movie playing in the background.

I felt like an impostor. I assumed that capable, disciplined academics were able to sit at an office desk and produce work through sheer professionalism. The fact that I needed blankets, soft lighting, and background dialogue felt like proof that I was undisciplined, immature, or secretly lazy.

I did not realize then that embarrassment often arises not because our methods are ineffective, but because they fail to conform to arbitrary social expectations of what work is supposed to look like.

What Early Childhood Education Taught Me (And What I Missed in Myself)

The great paradox of this shame was my professional field. My doctoral research was in early childhood education.

In early childhood, we are explicitly trained to see the physical environment as a powerful context for learning. We know that young children do not thrive when they are forced to sit on hard chairs at formal tables for long hours. A thoughtfully arranged preschool room provides varied physical options: soft floor cushions, a quiet book corner with draped fabric to soften overhead lighting, rugs where children can lie on their stomachs to draw, and open spaces that accommodate movement.

When an educator sees a child squirming, kicking the legs of a chair, or struggling to engage with a fine motor task at a table, we do not immediately brand that child defiant or incapable. We ask questions about the setting: Is the chair supporting their feet? Is the room too noisy? Would they be more comfortable working on a clipboard on the carpet?

Yet in higher education and adult professional life, that developmental wisdom is completely discarded.

We assume that adulthood means your nervous system should become indifferent to sensory inputs. We expect adults to sit under buzzing fluorescent tubes in rigid chairs for eight hours at a stretch without squirming, producing steady intellectual output on command. When our bodies and brains push back against those unnatural conditions, we turn the blame inward. We call ourselves deficient rather than questioning the environment we have placed ourselves in.

Watching the Same Friction in My Child

The true turning point in my thinking did not happen while writing my thesis. It happened years later, watching one of my daughters struggle with the early years of primary school.

At home, she was curious, articulate, and capable of spending hours building elaborate miniature worlds out of cardboard and drawing detailed visual stories. But when she brought home simple homework sheets from school, the kitchen table became an emotional battleground.

She would sit on a wooden dining chair, pick up her pencil, look at three sentences, and immediately slump across the table. Her shoulders tightened. Tears would gather in her eyes. Within five minutes, she was crying, complaining that her hand hurt, or sliding off the chair entirely to hide under the table.

Before I recognized neurodivergence in our family, my initial reaction was a mixture of worry and frustration. I was tired after a long day of teaching, and I thought: *It is only four lines of writing. Why does it take an hour of tears to begin?*

Then one afternoon, I stopped pushing the worksheet and looked at what was happening around her.

The kitchen was brightly lit by harsh downlights. The refrigerator had an intermittent, low mechanical hum. The dining chair offered zero postural support for her small frame, leaving her feet dangling in mid-air. She was trying to perform a challenging cognitive task—translating thoughts into handwriting—while her body was working overtime just to cope with physical discomfort.

I took the worksheet off the dining table. I gathered several large cushions from the living room sofa and piled them into a corner of the carpet, away from the kitchen lights. I turned on a warm side lamp, handed her a sturdy wooden clipboard, and put on an instrumental soundtrack she loved. I sat down next to her on the rug with my own notebook to do some quiet planning.

She leaned her chest against the cushions, kicked her feet gently in the air, and finished the entire worksheet in ten minutes without a single complaint.

Watching her work on that rug brought a profound sense of recognition. Her resistance had never been about defiance, laziness, or an inability to understand the schoolwork. It was a reaction to sensory friction and task initiation paralysis. In early childhood, we often see that children resist starting tasks when the sensory or executive threshold is too high. By changing the physical setup and using a supportive start-together approach, the invisible wall simply dissolved.

Seeing her settle on that floor helped heal the embarrassment I had carried about my own study habits. I realized that my need to work propped up in bed with background noise was not a shameful secret. It was an intuitive effort to find the exact same kind of sensory relief.

Looking Back From a Later Diagnosis

I received my ADHD diagnosis in my forties, well after my PhD had been submitted, examined, and conferred.

Receiving a diagnosis in mid-life is a strange, bittersweet experience. It provides an entirely new framework for understanding decades of lived history. Experiences that you previously coded as personal character flaws—procrastination, difficulty initiating tasks, restlessness, sensory irritability—suddenly become visible as differences in executive functioning and nervous system regulation.

At the same time, I want to be careful with hindsight. It is tempting to look back on your past and tell a neat, tidy narrative where every single challenge was an obvious symptom of ADHD. Life is rarely that simple. A doctoral candidature is hard for everyone. Balancing research with parenting two small children and working part-time would strain anyone’s capacity, neurotypical or neurodivergent alike.

I cannot say that ADHD explains every obstacle I encountered, nor can I claim that studying in bed is a formal medical intervention. What I can say is that having this understanding allows me to look back at my younger self with gentleness rather than judgment. I no longer need to see my inability to sit still at a university desk as a moral failure.

Asking a Kinder Question: What Makes This Difficult?

When people find themselves struggling to concentrate or initiate work, the instinctive response is usually self-criticism. We tell ourselves: *Why can’t I just sit down and do this like an adult? What is wrong with me?*

That question closes down curiosity. It assumes that there is only one acceptable way to work, that everyone else has mastered it, and that you are failing at basic life skills.

A far more productive approach is to ask a kinder, practical question:

“What is making this specific task difficult for me right now, and what small environmental adjustment might help?”

When you reframe the problem around friction rather than motivation, you open up practical avenues for experimentation. You can evaluate the room, the noise level, the lighting, the body position, and the size of the first step. You stop fighting your own mind and start adjusting the conditions around it.

Practical Adjustments to Try (Without Overhauling Your Life)

If you find yourself stuck at a conventional desk, you do not need to rebuild your whole life or buy expensive ergonomic furniture. You can run small, low-stakes experiments to discover what conditions help your mind settle into work.

Here is a framework of adjustments to consider testing over a week or two:

The goal is not to find a single perfect setup that works forever. Neurodivergent brains often thrive on novelty. An arrangement that works beautifully for three weeks might stop working in month four, and that is completely normal. Having a menu of varied study spots—a bed, a kitchen stool, a floor corner, a local library reading room—allows you to match your environment to your sensory state on any given day.

Telling Other People How You Work

One of the hardest parts of working differently is explaining your choices to colleagues, supervisors, or family members.

When you are unsure of your own reasons, you might feel defensive, as if you have to justify your character. But you do not owe anyone an exhaustive psychological explanation of your sensory preferences. A brief, practical statement focused on output rather than process is almost always sufficient.

For example:

• “I find I draft long pieces of writing with much better focus when I work from home in the mornings. Could we set a quick check-in at two o’clock to review the draft?”
• “I am experimenting with working in a quieter space over the next couple of weeks to see if it helps my writing turnaround time.”
• “I do my best conceptual thinking when I can pace or sketch ideas on paper rather than sitting at my desk. I’ll have the outline ready for our afternoon meeting.”

Asking for flexibility in where and how you work is not asking for permission to lower your standards. It is asking to achieve those standards in a setting that does not deplete your energy before you even begin.

If You Are Studying Now: University Support and Healthcare

If you are currently enrolled in tertiary study and suspect that ADHD, sensory differences, or executive function difficulties are significantly impacting your capacity, there are formal pathways available.

A consultation with a general practitioner is the appropriate starting point in Australia. The national health service healthdirect provides evidence-based information on adult ADHD, outlining how doctors evaluate persistent difficulties that have spanned childhood, schooling, and adult working life. A GP can provide an initial screening and refer you to a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist for a formal diagnostic assessment if warranted.

If you are studying at an Australian university or TAFE, you do not always need a finalized medical diagnosis to access initial accessibility advice. Most tertiary institutions have a student disability and accessibility service. The Australian Disability Clearinghouse on Education and Training (ADCET) details the types of reasonable adjustments institutions can implement for neurodivergent students. These may include:

• Flexible assignment deadlines negotiated in advance with unit coordinators.
• Access to lecture recordings, transcripts, and shared note-taking services.
• Alternative exam arrangements, such as private rooms with reduced sensory distractions, ergonomic seating, and additional movement breaks.
• Dedicated quiet study rooms or assistive software for task organization and speech-to-text drafting.

Reaching out to these services early in your degree can make a substantial difference. Accommodations are not unfair advantages; they are structural levelers designed to remove unnecessary barriers so your academic work can be judged on its intellectual merits.

Judging the Thinking, Not the Posture

I eventually finished my doctoral dissertation. It was bound in black buckram cloth with gold lettering on the spine, passed by external academic examiners, and cataloged in the university repository.

Not a single examiner who read those pages knew whether the chapters were drafted under the fluorescent lights of the fourth-floor faculty office or propped up against three soft pillows in an unmade bed with *Pride and Prejudice* murmuring quietly on a bedside screen.

The rigor of the ideas was not determined by the firmness of my chair.

If you are a student, a researcher, or a parent sitting among the laundry trying to initiate a difficult piece of work, give yourself permission to drop the performance of traditional productivity. You do not need to prove your worth by suffering through spaces that drain your focus.

Notice what environments help you start. Pull the blanket over your knees, put on the music that settles your thoughts, find a comfortable corner, and let yourself work the way your mind was designed to work.