Written by Fiona Alexander and Debbie Hirte
Little by little, change happens.
You know the feeling. One minute you’re fine, and the next, a snippy email or a last-minute change of plans has you flooded, heart racing, thoughts spinning, words spilling out before you’ve had a chance to choose them. If you’re an adult with ADHD, this isn’t a character flaw and it isn’t you “overreacting”. It’s your brain wiring at work.
Research into the ADHD brain has consistently found differences in how the amygdala (the brain’s alarm system) communicates with the prefrontal cortex (the brain’s thoughtful, big-picture thinker). In neurotypical brains, the prefrontal cortex steps in fairly quickly to calm the alarm down. In ADHD brains, that connection tends to be weaker, so the alarm can ring louder and longer before the thinking brain gets a say. This is sometimes described as an “amygdala hijack”, and it explains why emotional overwhelm with ADHD can feel so fast, so big, and so hard to talk yourself out of in the moment.
Here’s the empowering part. You can’t out-think a hijacked amygdala, but you can build a reliable pathway back to your thinking brain, and that’s exactly what the Power of the Pause model offers. It’s a five-step framework you can turn to whenever emotion is running the show, designed to work with your brain rather than against it.
Step One: Pay Attention
Notice your body, thoughts, and feelings.
Emotional overwhelm rarely arrives out of nowhere. It usually builds through physical signals first: a tight chest, a clenched jaw, a flush of heat, restless hands. For many ADHD adults, interoception (the ability to notice what’s happening inside the body) is less reliable, so these signals can be easy to miss until they’re already loud. Paying attention simply means running a quick, curious scan: what is my body doing right now, what thought just crossed my mind, what am I feeling? No judgement, just noticing. This single moment of awareness is what opens the door to everything that follows.
In the moment, try this: silently name what you notice. “Tight chest. Racing thoughts. I feel embarrassed.” Labelling activates the thinking brain and begins to loosen the amygdala’s grip, a finding well supported in emotion regulation research on “affect labelling”.
Step Two: Pause
Stop and breathe deeply.
This is the step the whole model is named for, and for good reason. Slow, deliberate breathing activates the vagus nerve and shifts the nervous system out of fight-or-flight and into a calmer, more regulated state. It’s not about pretending the feeling isn’t there. It’s about creating just enough physiological space for your prefrontal cortex to come back online.
In the moment, try this: a slow exhale that’s longer than your inhale, for example in for four counts, out for six, repeated three or four times. If you’re mid-conversation, even one sentence like “I need a moment before I respond” buys you the pause without you needing to disappear.
Step Three: Process
Discern your thoughts, feelings, and associated memories.
Once your nervous system has settled slightly, there’s room to get curious about what’s actually going on underneath the reaction. Big emotions often carry old memories or past experiences along with them. That flash of shame when a colleague questions your work might be about today, but it might also be echoing every school report that used the word “careless”. Untangling the present-day trigger from the memory it’s attached to helps you respond to what’s actually happening now, rather than to twenty years of accumulated history.
In the moment, try this: ask yourself, “Is this feeling entirely about right now, or is some of it older?” You don’t need a full answer. Just asking the question starts to separate the two.
Step Four: Pinpoint
Name the specific emotion.
“I’m upset” is a start, but it’s not specific enough to act on. Are you embarrassed, or are you actually disappointed? Anxious, or genuinely afraid? Frustrated, or exhausted? Precision matters here, because different emotions call for different responses. Naming the exact emotion, rather than a vague catch-all, is one of the most consistently supported strategies in emotion regulation research, and it tends to reduce the emotion’s intensity simply by giving it a clear shape.
In the moment, try this: keep a short list of “feeling words” on your phone (a quick search for a feelings wheel will give you a good one) and scan it until one word lands as true. Little by little, this builds your emotional vocabulary and makes the whole process faster over time.
Step Five: Plan and Pursue
Organise, prioritise, and take positive action.
With the storm settled and the emotion named, you’re in a genuine position to choose your next move rather than react on autopilot. This might be sending the email you paused on earlier, now reworded. It might be having the conversation you avoided. It might simply be deciding you need rest before you decide anything at all. The point isn’t to solve everything immediately. It’s to take one small, deliberate, values-aligned step, which is exactly the kind of activation energy that ADHD brains often need a hand with.
In the moment, try this: ask, “What’s one small thing I can do next that I’ll feel good about later?” Then do that one thing. The rest of the plan can wait.
Working With Your Brain, Not Against It
Emotional overwhelm isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s a predictable feature of ADHD brain wiring, and like any pattern, it responds to structure and practice. The Power of the Pause won’t stop big feelings from arriving. What it offers is a reliable, repeatable path back to yourself once they do, so that your response reflects your values and your intelligence rather than the intensity of the moment.
You don’t need to master all five steps at once. Start with noticing. Start with one slow breath. Little by little, change happens.
If emotional overwhelm is something you’d like support with, working with a specialised ADHD coach can help you practise this model in real situations until it becomes second nature. Get in touch with the REACH team to find out more.
