Nobody prepares you for the specific arithmetic of ADHD emotional aftermath.

Ninety seconds of being sharp with a colleague. Three days of replay.

Thirty seconds for him to forgive you. Seventy-two hours of apologising to yourself for something he'd already let go.

The numbers are almost always this disproportionate, and the disproportionality is almost always experienced as evidence of something wrong with the person rather than something specific about the neurology.

What's happening is more precise than emotional sensitivity. After an episode, the brain's internal narrative system: the one that runs during rest and self-reflection, fails to deactivate properly. It keeps feeding the emotionally charged memory back into the threat-detection system. The threat-detection system responds as if the event is still occurring. The person is not choosing to replay the meeting. The architecture is doing it, and it's working exactly as it does in ADHD.

The loop doesn't close when the social repair is made, because the social repair and the neurological event are two different things. Understanding that distinction doesn't stop the loop. But it changes what you do with the energy the loop is consuming.

The numbers are almost always disproportionate in this specific direction. If you have yours, the length of the episode versus the length of the loop, I'd be interested to hear them.