A look at “Stress and burnout in university students with ADHD-like symptoms: The role of memory bias and daily stress” by Kerstin Erdal, Gordon Adami, Petra Gelléri and Jan Dettmers (2025)
Picture a student juggling lectures, a part-time job and possibly a toddler, with a brain that has seventeen tabs open and one of them is playing music. You’d expect exam season to be the moment it all comes crashing down. This German study found something more surprising.
What they found
The researchers followed 149 students at a large distance-learning university, nearly all of whom were working alongside their studies and about a third of whom were parents. Using a short ADHD screening questionnaire, they split the students into those with higher and lower levels of ADHD-like traits.
Before exams, the higher-trait group reported clearly more stress and burnout than their peers, and remembered more stressful events over the previous months. They also leaned more on what researchers call “emotion-focused” coping, such as self-blame, distraction and switching off, and less on active problem-solving.
Then came a ten-day diary during exams. Here’s the twist: day by day, the two groups looked much the same. Students with ADHD-like traits didn’t report more daily stress, more stressful events or more burnout.
The authors offer two explanations. One is that exams simply aren’t the main stressor. When everyday life is already a high-wire act, an exam is just one more spinning plate. The other is that a “negative memory bias” means people with ADHD traits recall the past as worse than it felt at the time, perhaps shaped by years of criticism and setbacks.
A grain of glitter ✨
This is a well-designed study with an interesting idea, and the authors have shared their data openly, which deserves a gold star. But a few things are worth noting.
Nobody in the study necessarily had ADHD. Groups were based on a six-question screener, and 57% of the sample landed in the “ADHD-like” group, partly because the study was advertised to students with ADHD traits. The participants were mostly women and mostly psychology students, so the findings may not travel far.
The diary also lost a lot of people: only 44 of the 85 higher-trait students took part. If the most overwhelmed students were the ones who dropped out, the “no difference” result could be flattering the picture.
Most importantly, memory bias wasn’t actually measured. It’s the authors’ interpretation of the gap between the two sets of results. There’s a risk here. Telling ADHD folk their stress is “really” a memory distortion can sound a lot like “it’s all in your head”, which many have heard far too often already. An equally plausible reading is that chronic, cumulative strain is harder to capture in a ten-day snapshot.
Why this matters
If you’re a student (or anyone) with ADHD traits and you feel exhausted all the time, not just at crunch points, this study suggests you’re far from alone. The useful takeaways are practical. Burnout can build from the everyday load, not just the big events. Gentle work on how we cope and how we talk to ourselves about the past can help. And universities should be offering support year-round, not only at exam time.
Your stress is real. This study just suggests it might be wearing a cleverer disguise than we thought, like a unicorn hiding in a field of very tired horses.