How to show your psychologist what your ADHD actually looks like, day to day

Here is the problem in one line: ADHD happens every day, and you get fifty minutes every other week to describe it from memory. The fix is to stop describing and start showing. Thirty days of records, made in the moment, say more than any story you can reconstruct in the room. And you stay in charge of who sees them and for how long.

Why is it so hard to describe ADHD in a session?

Because the session is the one place your ADHD is least visible.

You arrive on time (you left an hour early to make sure). You've rehearsed what to say. You're masking, because that's what you do in rooms with professionals in them. And then the question comes: "How have the last two weeks been?"

Two weeks ago is a fog. You remember Tuesday was awful, but not why. You know you slept badly at some point. You have a feeling the week before your period was worse, but you can't say by how much. So you say "up and down", and you both move on.

None of that is a memory problem you should feel bad about. Retrospective recall is unreliable for everyone, and worse when the thing you're trying to recall is your own attention and energy. Clinicians know this. The DSM-5 asks for evidence across settings and over time precisely because a single conversation can't provide it. The trouble is that most of us have no evidence to bring. Just the fog.

What should I actually track?

Less than you think. The point is to see a pattern, and a pattern needs very little.

Energy, morning and evening, on a scale of 1 to 5. Ten seconds each. This is the backbone, because almost everything else in ADHD shows up as energy first: the crash after a day of masking, the flat morning after three hours of doomscrolling, the surprising good day that came out of nowhere.

Sleep, as a couple of taps in the morning: slept well, woke up several times, hard to fall asleep, racing mind. Not hours and minutes. Nobody with ADHD keeps that up for a month.

What you did, and whether it drained or restored you. A meeting, a walk, a family dinner, a deadline. Over a month this becomes a list of your real drains and your real restorers, which is a different list from the one you'd write from memory.

And if you have a cycle, when your period starts. Two dates a month. Lira works out the phases. If you've read ADHD, hormones and the menstrual cycle you already know why this matters; the luteal dip in ADHD is real and it's the thing most sessions never get to.

That's it. If you already use Lira, you're doing this. If you don't, the Start Here post explains why energy is the right thing to track in the first place.

Everything above applies the same way if you're autistic, or both. The words change (sensory overload instead of doomscrolling, a shutdown after a social day instead of a crash after a deadline), but the mechanism is identical: a month of records shows the cost of the things you're good at hiding. If anything, the drains list matters more for autism than for ADHD, because "socialising" and "bright, loud places" turning up as your top two drains is exactly the evidence that a composed fifty minutes in a quiet office never shows.

How much is enough before it means anything?

Thirty days. That covers a full cycle if you have one, four of every weekday, and enough mornings for a pattern to be a pattern rather than a coincidence.

The honest part: six check-ins in a month don't mean anything, and a good summary should say so rather than draw a pretty chart out of six dots. That's why the first thing your psychologist sees in Lira is how many days you actually logged. If it's 24 out of 30, the rest can be read. If it's 6, the summary says "not enough yet" and nobody draws conclusions from noise.

You don't need perfect adherence. You need enough that the shape is visible. Missing the evening check-in half the time is fine. Most people do.

What does my psychologist see, and what do they never see?

This is the part that decides whether you'd actually do it, so here it is in full.

What they see is a single read-only screen, for the last 30 or 90 days: how many days you logged; your energy day by day, with morning and evening side by side, plus the average for each weekday (Tuesdays at 1.8 when everything else is near 3 is the kind of thing that starts a useful conversation); your sleep, as counts ("woke up several times: 14 of 24 mornings"); your top four drains and top four restorers, with the number of records behind each one; if you track your cycle, the context you declared (contraception, PCOS, perimenopause) and your average energy by phase; and a few pattern flags, each with the rule written next to it. "Energy at 1 or 2 in 43% of logged mornings (threshold: 40%)." Nothing is interpreted by an AI, nothing is a score, and nothing is a diagnosis; the rule is written where you can read it.

What they never see: the notes you type, your Inner World answers, anything you've said to Lira. Those aren't an option you can switch on. They're just not part of it.

And you see exactly what they see. The same screen, the same numbers, from the app. You'll also see when they last opened it, which tells you whether it's being used. Most people find that more reassuring than unsettling.

Can I stop sharing?

Any time, with one tap, and it takes effect immediately. Your psychologist keeps their own notes (those are their clinical record, and they'd keep those if you'd told them the same things out loud), but the screen with your data is gone.

Sharing also has an end date you choose when you set it up. It doesn't quietly run forever. When it's about to end, Lira reminds you, and you decide whether to renew. We built it that way on purpose: consent to health data should be something you did, not something you forgot about.

What if I'm seeing a psychiatrist too?

Then share with both. Each professional gets their own link, their own scope and their own end date, and you can end either one without touching the other.

This is the case that made us build the feature in the first place. A Lira user with ADHD wanted to show her doctor what had happened to her sleep and energy in the weeks after a dose change, and had no way to do it beyond "I think it's a bit better?" Thirty days of morning and evening energy with the dose change marked on the calendar is the conversation she wanted to have.

How do I set it up?

In Lira, open Settings and choose "Share with my psychologist". You'll be asked for their email (write it twice, it matters), what you want to share, and for how long. Then you read a short consent text and confirm.

Your psychologist gets a link. If they already use Lira for Professionals, they accept and the summary appears in your file. If they don't, the link lets them create a free account; we verify their professional registration before they see anything, which is what protects you if you ever mistype an email. Either way, you'll see in the app who accepted, with their name and clinic, and you can revoke on the spot if it isn't who you meant.

If your psychologist wants to know what they're looking at, or how other clinicians use thirty days of records in an assessment, send them what your psychologist does with thirty days of records. It's written for them.

The session is still fifty minutes. But now it starts from what happened, not from what you can remember.