Your ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression Might Be the Same Thing

If you've ever:

• Opened four browser tabs to pay one bill, then ended up researching the history of late fees instead
• Walked into a room and immediately forgotten why, but remembered a conversation from 2009 with perfect clarity
• Needed three apps, a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, and another human being just to track your week

...then congratulations. You're already living the question a massive new study just answered.

The Paper That Dropped Today

A paper published this morning in Nature analyzed genetic data from over a million people across 14 psychiatric conditions—ADHD, autism, depression, anxiety, PTSD, schizophrenia, bipolar, OCD, eating disorders, and several substance use disorders.

Instead of treating these as separate boxes, the researchers asked: What if there are only a few underlying genetic dimensions that show up as many different diagnoses on the surface?

Their answer: five genomic factors explain roughly two-thirds of the genetic variance across all 14 conditions. Not fourteen separate disorders. Five overlapping dimensions.

And one of those dimensions—the Neurodevelopmental factor—clusters ADHD and autism together at the genetic level, confirming what many of us have suspected: these aren't just occasionally co-occurring conditions. They share fundamental architecture.

Why This Matters to Me Personally

Three years ago, I was a product manager with 700+ browser tabs open, a trail of abandoned projects, and a growing suspicion that the way my brain worked wasn't a series of character flaws but a different operating system entirely.

I spent those three years using AI as a thinking partner to systematically map my own cognition. What emerged wasn't a list of deficits. It was a framework I call working memory fragility—the idea that certain brains are built to assume external scaffolding exists rather than holding everything internally.

When I read this Nature paper this morning, I felt something I rarely feel: genetic validation of a lived experience I've been trying to articulate for years.

The Framework: Architecture, Stress, and Reward

Here's the model I've been using, in plain terms:

Layer 1: Architecture (How Your Brain Is Wired)

This is your cognitive foundation:

• How you handle attention and filtering
• How much you rely on working memory versus pattern-recognition
• Whether your brain expects to do everything internally or assumes external systems are part of the equation

ADHD and autism, in this view, aren't "broken normal brains." They're alternative architectures—less reliable on-board RAM, but often more powerful pattern engines when the environment cooperates.

If a neurotypical brain is a self-contained laptop, the ADHD/autistic brain is more like a cloud-native workstation: weak offline, absurdly powerful when connected to the right ecosystem.

Layer 2: Affect/Stress (Your Emotional Climate)

On top of architecture sits your emotional operating system:

• How easily your nervous system tips into threat mode
• How you respond to chronic invalidation, rejection, and trauma
• Your baseline anxiety and mood regulation

Two people with identical architecture can have radically different lives depending on this layer. One gets "high-octane creative chaos but functional." The other collects diagnoses like Pokémon.

Layer 3: Reward/Dopamine (How You Chase "Oomph")

Then there's your reward circuitry:

• How strongly you're pulled toward novelty, substances, risk
• How sticky habits become once they work
• How well you regulate impulses

This explains why some ADHD folks are highly susceptible to addiction while others channel the same wiring into intense creative obsessions.

The thesis: ADHD isn't a deficit. It's a cognitive architecture engineered to work with external scaffolding, whose outcomes depend heavily on its stress climate and reward wiring.

How the Nature Findings Map to This Framework

The five genomic factors they identified align remarkably well:

They also identified a p-factor—a general psychopathology dimension that cuts across all five factors and correlates strongly with stress sensitivity, loneliness, neuroticism, and suicidality. This maps to what I'd call the "chronic suffering load" that accumulates when your architecture isn't supported.

The critical insight: ADHD and autism share a common genetic backbone. The Neurodevelopmental factor isn't just statistical convenience. It reflects shared early brain wiring—exactly what an "architecture" model would predict.

The Kicker: Very Few Disorder-Specific Genes

Here's what floored me most:

For pairs like schizophrenia/bipolar and depression/anxiety/PTSD, the researchers found that most genetic signal is shared, not separate. Disorders that load on the same factor are "largely indistinguishable at the level of individual genetic variants."

Translation: our diagnostic categories are leaky. What looks like "ADHD plus anxiety plus depression" might actually be a single coordinate in multi-dimensional genetic space, manifesting as different symptoms depending on environment and life circumstances.

Your lived experience of "my working memory is trash, now I'm behind, now I'm anxious about being behind, now I'm depressed about being anxious"—that's not three separate conditions stacking up. It's one architecture interacting with stress and reward layers in predictable ways.

What This Means If Your Brain Runs on External Scaffolding

If you recognize yourself in the "too many tabs, not enough RAM" experience:

1. Treat your architecture as real, not as moral failure.

The genetic data says there's a stable, heritable architecture underlying ADHD-ish and autistic-ish traits. It doesn't vanish because you "try harder."

Working memory offloads—notes, apps, AI, routines, other people's brains—aren't crutches. They're prosthetics for a real difference. You're not cheating. You're using tools your architecture requires.

2. Separate architecture pain from stress-climate pain.

If your Internalizing load is high, you're dealing with:

• Pain from your architecture not being supported, AND
• Pain from chronic invalidation layered on top

The first needs scaffolding and design. The second needs relief, repair, sometimes treatment. Mixing them leads to self-blame: "If I weren't such a mess, I wouldn't be anxious." When the reality is: your brain needs a different operational setup, and you've been punished for that difference.

3. Take your reward wiring seriously.

Even if you don't have "an addiction problem," your architecture + stress layers can make certain substances or behaviors dangerous. If you rely heavily on caffeine, THC, doomscrolling, or chaos to get through the day, treat that as a system design problem, not a willpower problem.

Why This Gives Me Hope

The paper isn't saying "you are your genes" or "everything is predetermined."

It's saying our old diagnostic boxes are leaky, there are coherent genetic patterns underneath them, and ADHD + autism share an architecture-like factor that's distinct from (but interacts with) your emotional and reward systems.

For those of us with fragile working memory and "cloud-native" brains, this is deeply validating:

• We're not imagining a different architectural feel to our experience
• We're not just people who haven't tried hard enough to be normal
• Our best lives will be built by engineering ecosystems that match the brain we actually have

What I'm Building Because of This

This framework isn't just intellectual for me. I founded a company called AIs & Shine specifically to build the scaffolding that brains like ours need—AI-powered systems that serve as external working memory, context reconstruction, and personalized support.

The thesis of that company just got validated by a million-person genetic study. I'm still processing that.

If your brain feels like it's too big to fit in your skull and too small to hold a grocery list—welcome. You're not broken. You're running a different stack.

And increasingly, the science is catching up to what your lived experience has been telling you all along.

If you want to follow this work, I write about neurocomplexity, AI-assisted cognition, and building scaffolding for minds that work differently. You can also check out what we're building at AIs & Shine.