Rage quitting, constant tiny mistakes, and emotional regulation with ADHD (John Garden’s story)

What if the clue to an ADHD diagnosis was making a different tiny mistake every night on stage?

John Garden is a therapist and professional musician. He shares how years of strong emotional reactions, rage quitting, boredom with repetition, and feeling like a failure eventually led to an ADHD diagnosis.

The conversation explores emotional regulation, inattention to detail, perfectionism, and the hidden ways ADHD can show up. It also highlights how ADHD realizations are often not a single lightning-bolt moment. More often, they come from years of experiences that slowly add up until everything starts to make sense.

• Listen: Adult ADHD, perfectionism, and soft productivity

• Read: ADHD and perfectionism

• Watch: ADHD and emotional dysregulation

John Garden: As a session musician, you're playing the same song every night. Some of these songs I'd been playing for years with the same band, should have known them inside out. And every night without fail, I would always make a tiny mistake in a different area of the song, and I couldn't predict when it was going to happen.

So I brought this to my therapist and I said, "What do you think? I've never been able to make any sense of this." And she just said, "Do you think it might be to do with an ADHD thing?" And I was like, "What? What do you mean?"

Laura Key: Hi everyone, and welcome back to "ADHD Aha!", the show where people share the moment when it finally clicked that they had ADHD. Now, I know that the term "ADHD Aha!" can make it sound like it's always this sudden, light bulb moment that comes out of nowhere. But I've found that it's often more of a slow burn, life experiences that add up and converge over time into an "aha".

That's the case for my guest today, therapist and musician John Garden, and I'm excited for you to hear his story. Welcome, John, thanks for being here today.

John Garden: Thank you for having me.

Laura: I mentioned in the intro that you're both a musician and a therapist, and I know that you've had experiences in both of your professions that have kind of led to you realizing that maybe you had ADHD.

John: Yeah, so I was a musician for about 20 years, and then I retrained as a psychotherapist in 2019. The kind of "aha" moment for me was to do with being a musician though. I'd done a lot of work in therapy on the usual stuff to do with family and trauma and, you know, kind of big narrative events.

And I thought there was a lot that always bothered me about how I was a musician, how I felt about being a musician. And so I thought it'd be interesting to — now I've kind of cleared away a lot of the big stuff in therapy — to look at some of that, those things that have bugged me for my whole life.

We've been working together for quite a few years now, and it's like almost the last thing on the list that I got to. And I came in one day and we'd been talking about how a client of mine who has an ADHD diagnosis, they were talking about, "you know, I quit this job because it was too boring" or "I rage quit this job because the manager was treating people badly" and this kind of really checkered kind of history of work that I completely identified with.

And I was just mentioning it to my therapist and she said, "Oh, that's interesting." And then the next week I came in and I said, "Right, here's this thing that's really low on the list that I've always wanted to look at. As a performer, a lot of the time when I was working as a session musician in kind of pop music, you're playing the same song every night. But you know, you want to play it the same way almost every night."

And some of these songs I'd been playing for years with the same band and should have known them inside out. And every night without fail, I would always make a tiny mistake in a different area of the song, and I couldn't predict when it was going to happen.

It always upset me because I just thought, I know I could be that musician that just plays the thing flawlessly because I'm being paid to do a job. I'm not the front man, I'm the session guy. I never understood why it happened. And so I brought this to my therapist and I said, "What do you think? I've never been able to make any sense of this." And she just said, "Do you think it might be to do with an ADHD thing?" And I was like, "What? What do you mean?"

And she said, "Well, it's like inattention to detail, right? It's distraction."

Laura: Can you explain what a session musician is briefly?

John: It's otherwise known as a sideman. So you're not a member of the band, you're paid to come and play and not make mistakes. I mean, a classic one would be like, you know, Kylie Minogue has — she's the artist and then she has a band and they're all session musicians. And some bands will be a four-piece band and they'll hire a horn section as extra musicians, so that's a session musician.

Laura: Were you feeling bored by playing the same songs over and over again? Do you think that was part of the inattention to detail?

John: I don't know what you're talking about. So the drummer that I worked with for a long time who became a really good friend, we would play a game called "Chase the Click" where you're playing to a click track, so the tempo's the same for the whole song.

And to combat the boredom, we would have three signals. One was to play ahead of the click a little bit, one was to play behind the click a little bit, and the other one was to play on the click. So and then that was "Hide the Click," so that you were so in time with the click you couldn't hear it. That's how we stayed interested in it.

Laura: As a non-musician I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I get the principle, I get the idea of what you're saying, yeah.

John: Yeah, you're just playing the whole song slightly faster than you should and then slightly slower than you should and then exactly right. That's how well we knew the material.

Laura: So just like bringing in some novelty, right? Yeah, it's so interesting because for folks who aren't musicians or who have never performed on stage, one would think that, oh, this is the perfect ADHD job. You're on stage, you're in front of people, you're moving, there is excitement, so you would imagine that there's this novelty all the time. But it's interesting, like in any type of job, it can get so rote and repetitive that someone with ADHD can really struggle with that.

John: I think you're right. I guess if you're more on the front of the stage and you have more of that interaction with the audience, it's going to feel much more different every night maybe. But I think the travel and being in a different town every day, working with a lot of different people — you know, you've got local crew who are different every day — that really worked for me.

On the one hand, it's very structured because you have to be in Rome on Tuesday and Berlin on Wednesday or whatever, like that almost militarized organization. But also you can then go home and you're off work for six weeks and nothing happens, and then the phone rings and you've got to go to the airport. I can see now how that does work for an ADHD brain.

Laura: Yeah. So you bring this experience to your therapist, but you had this other experience in your other job as a therapist, right? Where you really identified with this client was talking about rage quitting.

(06:16) Identifying with a client's "rage quitting" and how the need for immediate feedback influenced career choices.

John Garden: Yeah.

Laura Key: Can you describe what rage quitting is?

John: It's, you know, the Bulldog Drummond character from "Frasier" when he goes, "This is total BS!" That's it, basically. And it's, you know, the ADHD huge emotional reaction to a very perceivably small kind of slight or injustice. And I've seen myself do it. Before I started really touring and I used to do lots of bar work, you know, as you do.

Laura: Wait, bar work like as a bartender?

John: Yeah. And actually interestingly, I was really good at that because you're meeting new people every day, it's always different, it's like immediate. Oh yeah. You know, one of the things about performing and bar work that really worked for me was the immediate feedback.

I stopped — I'm going to go off on a tangent.

Laura: No, I love it, and relevant to the podcast to go off on a tangent.

John: I started doing mixing — like mixing records for people. What happens is someone sends you a song or three songs or an album, whatever, you mix it, you send it back to them, and then nothing happens. And you feel like your career's over, they hate you, everything's awful.

And then a week later they go, "Oh, sorry, I've been a bit busy. I love it! It's great, brilliant, don't change anything." Took me a long time to realize what's going on here is that I'm not in front of an audience who are going, "Yeah, great, well done," you know? And like in bar work, you've got somebody going "thank you very much for my drink" and also they leave at the end of the night and they're happy.

Laura: I was a waitress all through college and into my mid-20s and I loved it, it really suited me. I really, really enjoyed it. Okay, so you — so rage quitting.

John: I have rage quit, yeah. But just something came to mind that I was — I'd gone to visit family for the weekend and I was driving back to where I was working in two separate bars. And I took a wrong turn and ended up heading back in the wrong direction.

And then I pulled over and looked at the map and I was like — and I just remember having such a huge reaction to it that I called into work and I was like, "I don't think I'm going to be in this week. Not even today." I was like, "I don't even think I'm going to be able to recover from this." Like, and it was really freaked me out.

Laura: Wow.

John: But on tour, what's interesting is it's a big deal to rage quit because you then have to book your own flight home often on another continent. And I remember starting one tour — so I live in the UK and it started on the East Coast of America. And the first day we got there, this new person showed up and said, "Oh, hi, I'm the tour accountant."

And we were like, "We didn't know anything about you." And he was a nice guy, there was nothing wrong with him as a person, but what he wanted to do essentially was like shave off some dollars and cents on the tour budget. And it was all not anything that we'd agreed or negotiated before leaving home.

And it tickled that kind of justice sensitivity part of my brain because it felt very unfair. And I just didn't engage with it at all. And I was the only person in the kind of touring party that was just like, "No. Whatever you guys decide is what you decide, but I can't be involved in this." And I remember calling a friend almost in tears, like so angry that this had happened.

And thinking I could just get on a plane and go home. When I think about it now, it's like realistically it was just a money-saving exercise and it's just the industry changed a lot over the time that I worked in it.

Laura: Yeah, yeah. How did people react to you?

John: I think they knew me, they knew that was what I did. I did it on another tour where we had somebody who was in a managerial kind of position and they were treating the musicians in a way that I didn't like.

And I wrote this huge email to the record label complaining about this person and again, kind of almost wrote myself out of the job because it turned out that the person I was complaining about was friends with the person that ran the record label, so they shared my email.

But I think it was just this everybody around me was seeing me explode and they all agreed with me but they're like, "Yeah, but you know, you could write that email." Because they knew I would. So yeah.

Laura: I've done so many things like what you just mentioned. I don't think I've actually rage quit, but I've like just impulsivity out of frustration and not putting the brakes on things, things that I'm really embarrassed about. I think it's just really helpful to speak them out loud for our listeners so that they know that it's part of it, you know?

John: I and I think when you feel that embarrassed it becomes very private, so it's hard to share, so then it just kind of gets stuck.

Laura: Is that part of the reason that it was last on your list with your therapist?

John: Do you know what? The making little mistakes thing, as a mainly as a pianist, I think I've had since I started when I was like 11, 12 years old. And I always felt embarrassed about it. It always felt shameful that I couldn't absolutely get it right ever.

And in a way I kind of developed a style of playing that's a little bit Elton John kind of, you know, like honky-tonk kind of, sounds a little bit fumbled, you know, like stylish kind of stylish woolly kind of way of playing as my kind of house style, right? It almost was to cover up the fact that I just was — I wasn't that neat and tidy in the way that I played. Yeah, so I suppose that that's maybe why it felt like I'll get to that eventually.

(12:15) Inattentiveness, justice sensitivity, and time blindness.

Laura Key: So how did you feel when the therapist said, "Have you thought about ADHD?" What was your immediate reaction?

John Garden: A friend had said it to me maybe the year before and had just floated it as an idea. "You might be ADHD." And I didn't know enough about it then in terms of what it meant for me to kind of really let it sink in.

And when my therapist said it, I was like, "Oh, there's that suggestion again." Initially I was like, "I don't recognize that in myself," you know, because I feel like I kind of get along okay with life. But then when I kind of really laid out the traits and looked at them one by one, I could see, "No, yeah, okay, a lot of it does fit." What doesn't really — well, because I have been diagnosed with inattentive type.

Laura: Mm-hmm.

John: I was going to say it, the hyperactivity doesn't fit me. But when I'm on a kind of, you know, those days where I will get everything done, I do look hyperactive.

Laura: How so?

John: I would just — excuse my language — I would just get shit done. I'll do like five days' worth of tasks in one day. You know, like my house will be a tip for five days and then on the sixth day it'll — I'll not only tidy it, but I'll be putting up shelves or whatever, you know? It kind of looks like that.

Laura: What were some of those things on the list of ADHD behaviors? What resonated with you the most?

John: Well, inattention to detail is what we've just been talking about, right? Of course, yeah. Big emotional reactions, justice sensitivity — the big emotional reactions come in with that — the hyperfocus, hyperfixation definitely, time blindness for sure.

I think I said to you the other day, like my house looks like Doc Brown's house in "Back to the Future," there's clocks on every surface. If I turn around in the morning and there isn't a clock in front of me, I kind of panic and I'm like, "I'm not quite sure how much time's just elapsed."

Laura: Obviously you weren't diagnosed until you were an adult, and we never actually said when you were diagnosed, but I think it was in the last year or so, is that right?

John: This summer.

Laura: Yeah, so this is relatively new. Have you done any reflecting on — I know you're a therapist and you have been in therapy for a while, so I imagine the answer is yes, but as a child — sorry, that sounded like it was shade but it's not, it's respect.

John: You may be a reflective person, I don't know.

Laura: But have you, like, reflections of you as a child with undiagnosed ADHD?

John: Yeah, yeah. The classic story about me, age five, moving to a new school after a divorce, so maybe I'm a little bit unsettled, had to write some story in the morning, which I obviously didn't want to do because I wasn't interested in it.

And they said, "Oh, well, that's all right, John, you can stay at your desk until the end of lunchtime until you've finished the story, and then you can hand it in, put it in your tray, the little tray where you put your work, and then you can go and have your lunch." And I sat there for the whole of lunchtime, and right at the end of lunchtime I put the story in my tray and they went, "Well done, John. See, wasn't so difficult, was it?"

And they opened the tray and they took out the story and the story said, "I will not write this story."

Laura: That's kind of badass.

John: That's the beginning of my school career and it kind of carried on like that. And then my secondary school, I would essentially just every day was like, "I'm sorry, I forgot. I'm sorry, I forgot to do that homework" or "I don't have my book" or "I don't have my PE kit" and just consistently.

I was on report, which is a kind of like, you know, the thing before they suspend you and ask you to not come to school is like on report. So I was just consistently on report. And not because I was naughty, but because I just wasn't doing what they wanted me to do.

And then I started doing my exams and having to hand in essays and things as you get older. I remember I just would do nothing and the night before I'd be like, "Oh, I suppose I should do that English essay." And do it, hand it in, get an A grade.

And it to the point where people would come to me the morning that the thing was due and say, "Can we see so that we can get some copy some of what you've done?" Because they knew I was going to get high marks. But I wouldn't do any other work.

(18:41) How finding community helps navigate the challenges of undiagnosed ADHD.

Laura Key: Did teachers and others, did they think that that was like willful behavior, laziness, and what was the reality?

John Garden: I guess they viewed it as me being useless, probably.

Laura: Useless is such a strong word. How did that experience as a kid affect your self-esteem as you got older?

John: There's something about those kind of recurring scripts about ourselves — not to sound like a therapist, sorry — that it's like, oh yeah, that's me, that's what I do, that's the thing that they said about me at school, so I'm just doing that again.

That feels true. To be fair, my experience of school was that I always remembered that each teacher treated me differently because you have a different relationship with each teacher. And I think as I got older, I started to enjoy working with teachers who saw me and kind of got me a bit more, and other teachers you would just like give up on the relationship with each other because they're never going to understand where you're coming from and you don't see eye to eye.

I remember there was a biology teacher called Mr. Hammett who was really well liked and I really liked his lessons. I sat right at the front and he was really energetic, but so structured and ordered and he knew his subject inside out.

And he would do worksheets on — like, I remember we did a lesson on genetics. He would make a worksheet about a pupil in the class and like make up a kind of disease based on their name and say, "Well, if they have kids, then their kids are going to have a 50 percent chance of inheriting this." And it was really just like brilliant teaching.

But what I think I responded to was the structure, the depth of knowledge, and the fact that he knew who I was. So he knew that I was going to lose attention really quickly if I was bored, so he kept everything super interesting. Not just for me, but that's why it worked for me.

Maybe that carried on after school that other people that influenced me were the people who knew what they were doing inside out, who were really, really impressive and had a kind of real depth of knowledge and I just would latch onto it. So as a musician I would go to jam sessions and there was someone there and I would just be like, "You're great, can I come and hang out with you at your house tomorrow and just ask you questions?" And they'd be like, "Yeah, sure."

And I would just literally like sit at people's feet and just kind of just absorb their knowledge. But normal learning? No, couldn't do that.

Laura: You know, so many of us with ADHD can feel like failures. We grew up feeling like failures because especially if we weren't diagnosed and people didn't know what was going on with us that it just seemed like — I mean you used the word "useless" before. So I find it interesting that you sought out people who you viewed as the best at what they did.

John: I think yes, definitely. It felt like how am I going to — how am I going to be an adult? Not knowing what it was, but just that sense of like there's a part of me that always seems to be useless and not to do things the proper way, and how is this going to work, you know?

The time in my 20s doing bar work, not being very focused, knowing that I wanted to be a musician, but again going to college and dropping out of college because I wasn't a very good student, but I was DJing every night and going to jam sessions, which is great for being a musician, but not great for being a university student.

And kind of bumbling through my 20s and then a saying that I absolutely detest is "finding your tribe" — I cannot stand that — but the experience of it is really powerful. And finding people in my mid-to-late 20s who saw me and got me and understood that I was a kind of musician that they could work with was incredible, because it feels for so long like the world doesn't make sense and you're falling through the cracks and I don't do things the way that everybody else does things.

Laura: John, when we last connected you mentioned that your ADHD diagnosis was life-changing for you. Describe why. Why was it life-changing for you?

John: One of the themes of my personal therapy is like personal integration, which is like this ongoing project for me about on lots of different layers and levels. One of them is like, I'm a musician and I'm a therapist and I kind of kept them separate for a while.

Even sitting talking to you now is like how am I bringing those parts of myself together and integrating them into me? And the me that's always been there, that I've always been me, and there was always that kind of interest in philosophy and helping people from being a child as much as music, you know?

And the ADHD part is the other part that's being integrated now, right? And so that's how do I see that part of myself that's ADHD initially as like a separate bubble that's like, "Oh, there's the new view of me." And then the work is I want to bring that into the rest of me so that it feels integrated and blended into all of the other stuff.

I think the reason it's kind of felt life-changing was because a lot of the suffering that has come about from not being diagnosed is because it makes me feel so bad about myself because of the way that I exist in the world as a person who's neurodivergent in a neurotypical — majority neurotypical world, right? So that creates an emotional suffering for me that I didn't understand. And a lot of the time it was like, "It must be me, it's my fault."

So the life-changing aspect of it is that I can look at it and go, "It's actually a mismatch between me and the world and the people in the world who are not like me." Then when I have the justice sensitivity or the hyperfocus that people don't understand or the inattention to detail or the task paralysis or the executive dysfunction, all whatever those things are, I can notice those negative feelings and kind of reframe them a bit more where it's not my fault. It's not because I'm useless. And I think that's the big change.

Laura: That's so beautiful. Thank you for listening to the show and just thank you for the work that you're doing and for your candor.

John: It's a pleasure, thank you. Thank you. And I just want to say if it's all right that there's a lot of podcasts out there, but your podcast in particular in terms of neurodivergence really strikes me as like it's sane, it's balanced, it's sober, and I really like that. And I really appreciate the depth of your interviews as well.

Laura: That means so much to me. Thank you so much, John.

Thanks for listening today. As always, if you want to share your own aha moment, email us at ADHDaha@understood.org or send a message to our voicemail inbox. You'll find a link in the show notes along with resources and links to anything we mentioned in the episode.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give.

"ADHD Aha!" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli. Say hi, Jessamine.

Jessamine Molli: Hi everyone.

Laura: And edited by Alyssa Shea. Video is produced by Calvin Knie. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright. Production support provided by Andrew Rector. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. From Understood.org, our executive producers are Scott Cocchiere and Jordan Davidson. And I'm your host, Laura Key. Thanks so much for listening.