Check the Facts
Worksheet
ADHD Executive Function Tools
Separate emotional reactions from the facts driving them.
ADHD Executive Function Tools
Separate emotional reactions from the facts driving them.
ADHD amplifies the speed of emotional reactions. A tone in someone's voice, an unanswered email, a shifted deadline - the interpretation arrives before the analysis does. The brain fills in the story before the facts are in, and the story almost always skews negative.
The problem is not that you feel things strongly. The problem is that the feeling becomes the evidence. A flash of frustration becomes proof that someone acted in bad faith. Anxiety about a meeting becomes certainty that you are about to be blindsided. By the time the rational mind catches up, you have already responded - or already built a case that feels airtight because it was never tested.
This worksheet slows the sequence down. It puts space between the trigger and your response by routing the reaction through five specific questions, each designed to surface a different assumption. The first few times, it will feel mechanical. That is the point. You are building a habit of checking before concluding.
Three questions to ground yourself before working through the prompts below.
What triggered my emotional reaction?
Name the specific event, not your interpretation of it.
What assumptions am I making about the situation?
Separate what you know from what you have filled in.
Is my emotional response proportionate to the actual facts, or is it based on my assumptions?
Rate: entirely fact-based / mostly fact-based / mostly assumption-based / entirely assumption-based
Five prompts to test the story your emotions are telling. Each one approaches the situation from a different angle.
Look for concrete evidence that either supports or challenges your initial interpretation. Name specific things that were said, done, or observed - not how they made you feel.
Notice whether this type of trigger has produced the same reaction before. If you have been here before, the pattern itself is information - it points to something worth examining outside this single event.
Consider how a person with no stake in the outcome would read the same facts. Not to dismiss your reaction, but to calibrate it against a perspective that does not carry the same emotional charge.
Before settling on the most threatening interpretation, name at least two other explanations. Factors you are not aware of - workload, personal stress, miscommunication - account for most of what initially reads as intentional.
If you act on the emotion without checking the facts, what happens in a week? In a month? Consider what responding impulsively costs you versus what waiting 24 hours costs you.
Look at what you wrote across all five prompts. Where did you find the widest gap between your initial assumption and the evidence? That gap is worth bringing to your next coaching conversation - not to fix, but to understand what it protects.
If a pattern showed up in Prompt 2, name it in one sentence. Patterns that repeat across situations rarely resolve through the situations themselves.
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