ADHD and Indoor Air

What if we are looking in the wrong place?

ADHD is usually seen as a neurological condition, often thought to be partly genetic and rooted in the brain. But what if environmental factors play a bigger role than previously assumed? What if the air in indoor spaces affects concentration, sensory processing, impulsivity, and exhaustion more strongly than we realize?

In Dicke Luft, we do not just tell our personal story. We also pursue a disturbing question: could indoor air be an underestimated trigger or amplifying factor in ADHD?

When suddenly everything has a name

When we first came into contact with the subject of ADHD, it was not an abstract medical term for us. It was a shock. Suddenly there were words for something that had accompanied us all our lives: forgetfulness, sensory openness, emotional overwhelm, concentration problems, inner restlessness, exhaustion, the feeling of not functioning properly.

For the first time, there seemed to be an explanation.

The diagnosis fit. The descriptions fit. Even many accompanying disorders fit. And when medication showed a clear effect, the case seemed obvious: at last, our lives made sense.

Concentration, Irritability, Brain Fog

Many symptoms that we now automatically classify as psychological or neurological can overlap strikingly with the effects of poor indoor air.

These include, among other things:

concentration problems, memory disturbances, mental exhaustion, irritability, inner restlessness, reduced resilience, emotional overreactions, and the feeling of a fog in the head.

That was exactly what made our own search so unsettling. Much of what we had understood for years as ADHD, exhaustion, or part of our personality also seemed to change when the air quality changed.

Not abruptly, not magically, but clearly enough to call the previous explanation into question.

Indoor Air as a Possible Amplifying Factor

We are not claiming that ADHD is generally caused by poor indoor air. It is not that simple. But we consider it possible that air pollutants and poorly ventilated indoor spaces may play a much bigger role than has been assumed so far, as an amplifying factor, as a trigger, or in individual cases perhaps even as a contributing cause.

A Question We Cannot Let Go Of

What especially concerns us about this topic is not just our own story. It is its possible scope.

How many children sit day after day in classrooms where concentration is required while the air has long since gone stale?

How many adults experience exhaustion, irritability, or mental cloudiness in offices, meeting rooms, or at home and think of it as a personal problem?

How often do we look for the cause exclusively in the head, in the psyche, or in the genes, even though the room itself may also play a role?

Why We Are Writing About This

Dicke Luft is not an attempt to give easy answers. It is a personal search for clues. A story about diagnoses, symptoms, despair, self-doubt, and the gradual realization that we may have been looking in the wrong place.

The book connects our experiences with scientific indications of the health relevance of indoor air. It raises questions that are rarely asked in everyday life. And it invites readers to view seemingly familiar diagnoses from a new perspective.

Perhaps the Search Begins Somewhere Else

Perhaps ADHD is in many cases exactly what medicine currently understands it to be: a disorder with typical symptom patterns whose causes are considered multifactorial and cannot be clearly explained.

But perhaps there are also cases in which environmental factors play a larger role than we currently see. Perhaps indoor air is not the whole explanation. But perhaps it is a missing piece of the puzzle.

And perhaps the crucial question begins not only in the brain, but in the room where that brain breathes day after day.