jan heinemeyer

Free self-check

ADHD or anxiety? Your nervous system may know.

Scattered focus. Unfinished projects. Time that slips away.

Those can come from how your attention is wired. They can also come from a body that never quite came down from high alert. From the inside, the two feel identical. That is why so many people spend years working on the wrong layer.

This self-check asks about both, separately.

12 questions, sometimes a few more · about 3 minutes · no email required

Answer for the last few months, not for today. And answer honestly rather than aspirationally. You will get a short reflection at the end. Not a diagnosis. Not a score.

The self-check

Question 1 of 12

Rarely — Almost always

Question 1 of 12

I lose the thread in the middle of a task and only notice much later that I drifted somewhere else.

What this measures, and what it does not

Six questions ask about attention and time. Losing the thread. Time that does not feel real until it is here. Momentum that only arrives with a deadline.

Six ask about nervous-system load. Focus that holds on calm days and collapses on hard ones. Tension in the body while concentrating. Attention quietly assigned to scanning.

Keeping them separate is the whole point. When both come back high, that is not noise. That is the loop most people are actually stuck in, and it says something about the order to work in.

What it is not: a validated instrument, a screening tool, or anything that can tell you what you have. There are no norms behind it and no clinical scoring. It is a structured way of noticing your own patterns. That is genuinely useful, and it is a different thing from an assessment.

Questions people ask

Can anxiety really look like ADHD?
Yes, and it does so often. A nervous system braced for threat spends part of its working memory monitoring for danger. What is left over is what you get to think with. From the inside that feels identical to an attention problem. You cannot concentrate, you lose the thread, you forget things. The mechanism underneath is different, and so is what helps.
Is this a diagnostic test?
No. There is no clinical validation behind it, and it cannot tell you whether you have ADHD, an anxiety disorder, both, or neither. Only a qualified clinician can assess that. What it can do is help you notice which patterns show up most in your own experience, so you start from a clearer place.
What should I do with my result?
Treat it as a question rather than an answer. If the attention patterns dominated and little load showed up anywhere, structure and making time visible are the natural place to start. If a quieter background load showed up underneath the attention patterns, or the nervous-system patterns dominated outright, the work is usually about settling the load before adding more systems. If both came back high, the order matters. That is the reflection worth sitting with.
Do you store my answers?
No. Everything happens in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and no email is required to see your result. Close the tab and it is gone.

Related reading

Written by

Jan Heinemeyer. Ten years of anxiety, panic, and nervous-system sensitization — and a Chief Product Officer career before that. I coach reflective high performers who can explain their patterns precisely and still repeat them.

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