ADHD and Dyslexia: What’s the Difference and Can You Have Both?

• OVERVIEW
• SYMPTOMS
• ADULTS
• CHILDREN
• WOMEN
• DIAGNOSIS
• TREATMENT
• MEDICATION

When someone struggles with reading, it’s not always clear what is causing the difficulty. A child who avoids books, loses their place, or seems to switch off in class could be living with ADHD, dyslexia, or both. Similar questions often come up in adulthood, when long emails, reports, or study materials feel much harder than spoken tasks or ideas.

Both ADHD and dyslexia are neurodevelopmental, lifelong differences that change how people focus, organise, and work with written language. ADHD affects attention and self-management; dyslexia affects word-level reading and spelling.

At AuDHD Psychiatry, our work in evidence-based neurodivergence assessment means we see these patterns every day. We created this guide to explain how ADHD and dyslexia overlap, how they differ, and what to do if you recognise yourself or someone you support. Our aim is to provide you with a clear, balanced overview and to highlight when a specialist assessment may help you move from uncertainty to practical support.

Key Takeaways

• ADHD and dyslexia are different conditions, but they often overlap and affect reading, organisation, and confidence.
• ADHD mainly affects attention and executive function, while dyslexia mainly affects word-level reading and spelling.
• A comprehensive assessment that looks at attention and literacy together can clarify whether ADHD, dyslexia, or both are present.
• Targeted teaching, practical adjustments, and strengths-based ADHD support can reduce barriers at school, work, and home.

How Dyslexia and ADHDCan Look Similar

Dyslexia and ADHD can lead to very similar day-to-day struggles. Both can involve:

• Difficulty concentrating
• A short attention span
• Forgetfulness
• Problems with organisation and time management

People with either condition may also feel they’re always behind, miss details, and experience low self-esteem or anxiety as a result.

When it comes to reading and writing, the overlap is especially easy to miss. Both neurodevelopmental conditions can lead to slow, effortful reading, losing your place on the page, skipping words, and feeling mentally drained by text-heavy tasks.

In dyslexia, this is usually because sounding out words, recognising them quickly, and spelling are genuinely harder. In ADHD, reading is often technically accurate, but symptoms like inattention and impulsivity mean you rush, skim, skip punctuation or endings, or drift off mid-paragraph.

On the surface, a child in class who “can’t sit and focus on reading” may look the same whether the main issue is ADHD in children, dyslexia, or both together.

At work or university, the similarities continue. Adults with ADHD or dyslexia may find long emails, reports, and forms unusually tiring, make spelling or grammar errors, or struggle to organise their writing and meet deadlines.

For girls, the picture is even more blurred. Signs of ADHD in women often centre on quieter, inattentive traits such as distraction, disorganisation, and mental “fog,” which are easily misread as stress, anxiety, or “just not being on top of things.”

Because both ADHD and dyslexia can affect attention, reading, memory, and confidence, you can’t reliably tell them apart just by watching how someone behaves. Careful assessment helps untangle whether the main difficulty is attention, reading skills, or both.

ADHD vs. Dyslexia: What’s the Difference?

Dyslexia and ADHD may look similar from the outside, but they affect learning in different ways. ADHD affects attention and executive function (planning, working memory, self-organisation), while dyslexia impacts word-level reading and spelling (decoding, fluency, phonological processing).

Here’s a quick guide to help you tell the two apart:

What’s Hard About Reading: Common Challenges
	ADHD	Dyslexia
Reading accuracy	Often accurate at the single-word level, but may rush, skip words or punctuation, or lose place on the page.	Inaccurate or slow word reading; misreads or guesses words, struggles with sounding out (decoding).
Reading speed and fluency	Can be slow due to focus drift, or fast and “skimming,” with missed details; pace is affected by attention and motivation.	Typically slow, effortful, dysfluent reading; has to work hard to lift each word off the page.
Comprehension	Often weaker comprehension of what’s read, especially longer or dense text, due to inattention and working-memory limits.	Comprehension may be better when material is heard than when reading alone, because so much effort goes into decoding the words.
Mental effort	Reading can feel boring, hard to stick with, or mentally “foggy” because sustaining focus is difficult.	Reading can feel exhausting because decoding and spelling are genuinely harder, leading to fatigue and frustration.
What Tests Look For
	ADHD	Dyslexia
Core Focus	Patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity and their impact across settings (home, school, work).	Persistent difficulties in word reading accuracy, reading fluency, decoding and spelling, sometimes with reading comprehension.
How It’s Assessed	Clinical interview, history, and behaviour rating scales completed by the person and people who know them (e.g., parents, teachers, partner).	Standardised reading and spelling tests, phonological awareness tasks, and sometimes working-memory / processing-speed measures.
Main Questions	Are ADHD symptoms present from childhood, in more than one setting, and causing a significant impact on daily life?	Are reading and spelling skills significantly below what would be expected for age, education and overall ability, despite appropriate teaching?

If someone can read aloud smoothly but often can’t remember or make sense of what they’ve read, attention and working-memory difficulties (as in ADHD) may be playing a larger role. If sounding out words and recognising common words are hard from the start, that points more towards dyslexia.

Can You Have ADHD and DyslexiaTogether?

Yes. ADHD and dyslexia can occur on their own, but they also frequently appear together. Research suggests that around 15 to 40 per cent of people diagnosed with one condition also meet criteria for the other, and some studies report even higher overlap in school-age children.

When these neurodevelopmental conditions co-occur, difficulties with reading, organisation, and focus can compound. Children and adults may need significantly more time and effort to manage reading-intensive tasks, follow instructions, and keep up with written work, which can increase fatigue, school or work stress, and a sense of always “falling behind” in environments that rely on fast, accurate reading.

The emotional impact is often greater as well. Both conditions are associated with higher rates of anxiety, low self-esteem, and sometimes school avoidance or disengagement—especially when struggles are misunderstood as laziness or lack of effort. Recognising when both conditions are present means these difficulties can be named accurately and supported, rather than blamed on the person.

Alongside these challenges, many people with ADHD and dyslexia also show real strengths in creativity, problem-solving, verbal communication, big-picture thinking, and empathy. With a clear understanding of both conditions, support can focus on reducing barriers through targeted interventions and accommodations, while actively building on these strengths and encouraging self-advocacy at school, work, and home.

How ADHD and Dyslexia Are Assessed

Many clinicians now use a comprehensive ADHD assessment to consider co-occurring conditions. Instead of testing attention or reading in isolation, they take a detailed history, ask about school or work performance, and screen for executive function difficulties and for reading and spelling problems simultaneously.

The goal is to understand whether ADHD, dyslexia, or both are present, and to rule out other explanations for the person’s difficulties.

A combined assessment often includes clinical interviews and behaviour rating scales (to understand ADHD-type symptoms across home, school, and work), alongside standardised tests of reading, spelling, and related skills such as decoding, reading fluency, and phonological awareness. Looking at these results side by side helps clinicians see whether attention problems, reading difficulties, or both are driving the person’s struggles, and then recommend a tailored mix of supports and accommodations.

Living With ADHD, Dyslexiaor Both

Getting the right mix of literacy teaching, practical adjustments, and ADHD support an make day-to-day life much more manageable. Support works best when it shows up across all settings (school, work, and home) rather than relying on the person to try harder on their own.

At School

Teachers and support staff can reduce barriers by:

• Adjusting how pupils access text: For example, using audiobooks, text-to-speech tools, or read-aloud support so learners can work at their understanding level, even if reading is slower.
• Changing how information is presented: Giving printed notes or slides instead of long copying tasks, using clear step-by-step instructions, and breaking assignments into smaller chunks.
• Building skills directly: Providing evidence-based reading intervention (such as structured literacy approaches) for dyslexia, alongside classroom strategies that support attention and organisation.

These adjustments help children take part in lessons, show what they know, and experience success, not just effort.

At Work

Adults with ADHD and/or dyslexia often benefit from formal reasonable adjustments. Helpful changes can include:

• Tools and technology: Text-to-speech, speech-to-text, spell-check and proofreading software, or screen readers to reduce the load of long documents.
• Tweaks to the work environment: Quieter spaces, permission to wear headphones, written follow-up after meetings, and clear task priorities.
• Access to Work for ADHD and similar schemes: In the UK, Access to Work can fund specialist equipment, coaching, and other support for people with ADHD or dyslexia to help them stay in employment.

These adjustments don’t lower expectations; they change the conditions so people can use their abilities more effectively.

At Home

Families can create routines that reduce pressure and build confidence. Here are a few examples:

• Short, predictable study blocks with regular movement breaks, instead of long, late-night sessions that end in overwhelm.
• Audiobooks or shared reading time so children and adults can enjoy stories, build vocabulary, and learn content, even when independent reading is slow.
• Supportive communication also helps. This includes acknowledging the effort involved, separating a person’s worth from their school or work performance, and celebrating strengths such as creativity, problem-solving, spoken communication, or empathy.

Taken together, these forms of support can ease the load of ADHD and dyslexia, while giving people more chances to lean into the ways they naturally think and learn.

Frequently Asked Questions

When to Seek Support and What to Do Next

Does reading or written work feel much harder than you’d expect? Is focus or reading avoidance affecting your confidence? It may be time to seek support. You don’t need to be sure whether it’s ADHD, dyslexia, or both before asking for help.

A structured ADHD assessment and, where needed, a dyslexia or literacy evaluation can clarify what’s going on and what might help. At AuDHD Psychiatry, our clinicians focus on identifying the underlying patterns linked to ADHD and dyslexia and recommending practical next steps, so you have a clear plan rather than trying to piece things together on your own.

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