Rajat Kukreja, 37, dreads one monthly task more than any deadline. As an ecosystem builder in climate technology, he travels constantly, and the reimbursements pile up with every trip. Each expense must then be entered into a rigid Excel format his institution insists on. His five teammates get through it in an hour or two.
Rajat never could. “Everyone in the team would just do it in one or two hours, and I would almost cry when I did it. I used to breathe very heavily and tell them it feels like somebody is taking my soul away. Everyone thought I was joking, and I really used to feel it. At that point, I used to wonder why I was not able to do this,” he says.
For most of his life, Rajat had a ready answer to that question. He was simply a restless, impulsive person, he told himself, who lost things and moved on quickly. It took a project failure at work, a marriage, and a stretch of sleepless months to show him that this answer was incomplete. That story begins with the years when he still believed it.
The man who kept hopping
Rajat has always felt out of step with others, and he explained the feeling away as personality. “I always had a sense that I am differently wired, and I attributed that to my personality,” he says.
For years, Rajat thought his restlessness, impulsiveness and tendency to lose things were simply part of his personality.
Even a business he named ‘Cuckoo’, which did well, came from that instinct. “It was just my ADHD traits expressing themselves. I wanted to create a space which was non-neurotypical, but back then I did not have the right words for it,” he says.
That instinct shaped his career too. He spent two years in a small village as part of the Gandhi Fellowship, stayed in rural development for a long time, moved into environmental work, and later joined a sustainability-focused travel company.
Each new field pulled him in completely, and each one lost its hold just as quickly. “I could hyperfocus and saturate myself with everything I could learn about a domain in a very short period of time, unlike others around me. But I was also feeling satiated very soon,” he says.
That speed did not go unnoticed. Others saw someone who kept hopping from jobs to cities and, in many eyes, relationships too, so Rajat surveyed those close to him and wrote down what they thought. “I knew there was something, but I did not have the word,” he says.
Meanwhile, he was arranging his life around his senses without quite realising it, staying away from big cities for over a decade and moving between Goa, which he calls home, Himachal and places like rural Thailand.
“I hypothesize that it came from being too sensitive to stimulation all the time. When I lived next to the beach and felt a little low, I would just go for a swim and come back,” he says.
The same logic led him to minimalism. “I knew that I lost everything all the time, so I would just not own anything.”
The first crack
That way of living kept the problem manageable until it stopped doing so. Around 2021 or 2022, when Rajat was 32 or 33, something finally surfaced. “It was a professional failure, and along with it a strong sense of overwhelm,” he says.
Rajat’s ADHD diagnosis helped him rethink the systems he had built to navigate work and everyday life.
ADHD did not cross his mind, so he did what he knew how to do, which was to learn, and he studied project management and executive functioning as if the problem were technique.
Better technique helped for a while, but the question returned. In 2025, the word ADHD began to appear in his thinking, and he told a therapist he suspected it after a few sessions. She never ran a proper assessment, so he stopped going because, as he puts it, “I wanted a proper diagnosis.”
When the quirks stopped being private
Rajat’s suspicion sharpened as his life changed shape. Two to three years ago, he moved to Mumbai, where his now-wife is based, and the two got married, which made habits he had managed alone visible to someone else.
“When you are by yourself, a lot of the quirks that you have, like losing things, do not matter because you have got used to it. I often lose my wife’s phone charger,” he explains. His wife grew frustrated, and Rajat could not understand why.
Soon the pressure multiplied. He had taken on a leadership role at work, and his wife was a lead on a major film project that left her sleeping only two to three hours a night.
As a light sleeper, Rajat found his own rest matching hers, and the exhaustion fed the overwhelm he had felt years earlier. “I started feeling extremely overwhelmed with everything. We thought maybe it was relationship stress,” he says.
Rajat spent years moving between careers, cities and interests, often wondering why he could not settle like others around him.
An unexpected conversation gave him another explanation. A professor in his network mentioned that she had felt something similar and had gone to get a diagnosis. This pushed Rajat to do the same, and this time he went straight to a psychiatrist.
Before the appointment, he spent about a month and a half reading books, listening to podcasts and taking every test he could find. “By the time I landed there, I was pretty sure I had ADHD, because I had looked at my life in retrospect and everything matched,” he says.
In early September 2026, at 37, the psychiatrist confirmed it. Preparation did not soften what followed. “When he said it, I was pretty shaken, and there were a lot of emotions. Suddenly it made sense what my life had been, and whatever I was attributing to my personality was not my personality. So who am I?” Rajat says.
That question has since softened. “I am very excited now, and liberated. I look at it as a gift.”
Telling the people around him
Much of his childhood was spent hearing what was wrong with him. Parents, relatives, teachers, all sang the same refrain: be more organised, stop being lazy, why can’t you be like the others. It often arrived as an aside, a “by the way” tacked onto an otherwise ordinary conversation, which somehow made it sting more. So he grew up treating it as a character flaw to be fixed, not as the wiring it would turn out to be.
He once coped with losing things by simply owning less, turning minimalism into an accidental coping strategy.
Having absorbed the news himself, Rajat began with his mother without blaming anyone. “It was an interesting breakthrough in the relationship, because there was nobody to blame, and we learned something about just being human,” he says.
Following psychiatrist Ed Hallowell’s advice that nobody should manage ADHD alone, he then told a small circle of friends, and that openness reached his workplace.
At work, Rajat planned no formal disclosure, and there was no sit-down with his boss or the team. Within a few weeks of the diagnosis, the subject came up over lunches and commutes, and he spoke about the parts of his job he struggled with whenever it felt natural.
Some of his team members have worked in the health space and had supported neurodivergent people, so nothing serious was made of it, and one colleague had already joked that he had an ADHD problem.
The casual approach worked because it led to a practical change. “I have gone from just being diagnosed to becoming the face of ADHD in public, and we joked about it. They even offered to take reimbursement filing off my plate. I am now hopefully in a better position to design my work around my own strengths,” he says, laughing.
That response matters because adult ADHD in India is barely measured. A systematic review of Indian studies, paired with a survey of 1,665 young adults in Delhi-NCR, found adult prevalence ranging from 5.48% to 25.7% across different populations. Meanwhile, a 2020 study, cited in a 2026 paper by AIIMS researchers in Cureus, put it at just 0.3% of the population. The spread shows how unsettled the data is.
Building an exoskeleton
A supportive team is only one layer of what Rajat calls his exoskeleton. Its core is a life operating system in Notion, built over several years from Tiago Forte’s Second Brain method. “I have basically built a tech system for my working memory. If I say something, it will happen,” he says.
From sleep and exercise to leaving 30% of his schedule unscheduled, Rajat has redesigned his routine around his needs.
Claude now connects that system to his Gmail, office email and WhatsApp. “My WhatsApp will extract it and say, you had 20 conversations, and here are the five things you need to do about them today.”
Software covers only half of it. “ADHD is like the diabetes of the brain. If you do not manage it, you will have negative consequences. So for me, this is the management protocol,” he says.
That is why he treats seven hours of sleep as non-negotiable, aims for 30% unscheduled time and exercises regularly. “Earlier it was, oh, you have to do this to be healthy. I have shifted it to a survival thing.”
He is also testing whether a prescribed medication belongs in this routine, with a psychiatrist follow-up scheduled.
With these systems in place, he can look further ahead. For the rest of 2026, Rajat has dropped two projects so that he can follow a three-phase plan: learn about ADHD, strengthen his systems, and then shape his environment around his strengths, ideally with an ADHD coach.
That plan also answers the question he asked in the psychiatrist’s office. “I do not need to design my life like other people. I will find my own unique path, which represents my past, my inner wiring, and my biology,” he says.
