Hypermobility, ADHD, and the Whole-Body Connection

Amy Jones
17 hours ago
7 min read

Why joint instability, emotional regulation, and chronic pain are more connected than we think, and what it means for healing the body, not just the brain.

Close-up of a brown maple leaf against a bright bokeh background with soft pastel colors, conveying a serene autumn mood.

It’s fall. The season of fresh starts and second winds. The world picks up its pace again. Kids back in school. Routines snapping back into place. Everyone getting back in motion.

And somehow, I’m doing the opposite.

While everything speeds up, I’m learning to slow down. To let my body heal. To trade my running shoes for crutches for a while.

A single pair of crutches rests against a plain white wall on a wooden floor, evoking a serene, minimalist atmosphere.

After years of pain, patellar dislocations, and joints that never stay where they’re supposed to, it’s time. I’m preparing for a total hip replacement.

I know, not what you’d expect to hear from a 48-year-old, healthy and active woman, right?

It’s the result of hip dysplasia and years of hypermobility that left my joints working harder than they should have just to stay in place. I’ve become a bit of a pro with crutches by now. My body has always felt a little too elastic for its own good. Kneecaps that slip out of place. Elbows that bend too far. Hips that never seem to hold, especially after two children.

For years, I didn’t understand why this kept happening. Only recently was I diagnosed with both hip dysplasia and hypermobility, and finally, the years of evidence made sense. Two conditions that sound simple yet shape everything, from how joints move to how the body stabilizes and heals.

The Body’s Hidden Language

Once I started digging into the research, everything changed. Hypermobility isn’t just about “bendy joints.”

It’s about the connective tissue, the collagen, that holds everything together.

Microscopic image showing fibrous tissue strands in pink and red on a white background. No text visible, abstract and detailed.

That same tissue supports your ligaments, skin, gut, and even your blood vessels. When it’s a little too stretchy, the body loses some of its built-in stability. And your brain, always the problem-solver, steps in to try to keep things in order.

That constant micro-correcting, the body’s way of keeping you upright, doesn’t just make your muscles tired. It tires out your nervous system too.

The brain becomes hypervigilant, constantly predicting where your body is in space and trying to prevent you from falling, colliding, or overextending. This sense, known as proprioception, is your brain’s GPS for your body. In hypermobility, that GPS signal is fuzzy. So your brain works harder to find balance and control, which can show up as fatigue, dizziness, or that “floating outside yourself” feeling (Eccles, 2023).

It also affects emotional regulation. Unexpected, I know.

When the body is always on alert, trying to stabilize physically, the nervous system stays more reactive. That same physiological stress can make emotional swings feel bigger, faster, and harder to manage.

People with hypermobility are statistically more likely to have ADHD or anxiety. It’s not random, and it’s not coincidence. The same flexible connective tissue that makes joints extra mobile also affects the body’s wiring, the autonomic nervous system, which runs heart rate, digestion, and stress response behind the scenes. When that wiring is sensitive or overloaded, regulation gets harder across the board (Celletti et al., 2021).

This is why so many people with ADHD describe not just attention challenges, but emotional swings, gut issues, and exhaustion. It’s all part of the same story.

A body trying to create stability in a system that was built a little differently.

The Gut, Pain, and Why It Feels “Everywhere”

Once you start to see it, you can’t unsee it. The overlap between hypermobility, gut issues, anxiety, and fatigue is everywhere.

This is how it all works:

Your connective tissue, the body’s internal webbing, does more than hold your joints together. It lines your gut, supports blood vessels and nerves, and helps your digestive tract move. When that tissue is more flexible than average, as it often is in people with hypermobility, the system can lose some of its built-in tension. That might sound like a good thing, but for digestion it can mean slower movement, less coordination, and more mixed signals between the gut and the brain.

Some people experience this more severely in conditions such as Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder (HSD) or Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome (hEDS), where the connective tissue is especially lax. But even mild hypermobility can influence gut function in similar ways. It just shows up more subtly as bloating, irregularity, reflux, or that sense that your digestion never quite runs smoothly (The Ehlers Danlos Society, 2023).

Winding road with yellow lines amidst vibrant red and orange autumn trees. Serene and picturesque forest scene.

Picture it like this. You’re steering a car with soft suspension and loose steering. The ride looks normal to everyone else, but you’re constantly adjusting every bump and turn.

Every gurgle in your gut or flutter in your stomach is your nervous system overcompensating to keep things moving.

Because the tissue is looser, the gut’s contractions (motility) can slow down. That can look like bloating, constipation, or waves of nausea followed by sudden urgency. It’s why studies show up to 80 percent of people with hEDS or HSD also have IBS, gastroparesis, or other functional GI disorders (Fikree et al., 2021).

That same flexibility also affects the tight junctions in the gut wall, the microscopic “zip ties” that hold cells together. When those ties loosen, food particles or bacteria can pass through too easily, contributing to inflammation because of increased intestinal permeability, or, what many call “leaky gut,” and a hypersensitive immune response.

The nerves in the gut also behave differently. Some become hyper-reactive, firing pain messages even when nothing’s wrong. Others under-respond, leaving you disconnected until the discomfort becomes impossible to ignore.

And those nerves talk directly to your brain.

When your gut feels unsafe or unstable, the brain flags it as stress. Cue the anxiety, nausea, and that all-too-familiar sense that your body’s betraying you.

Add in the autonomic nervous system, the one juggling “rest and digest” and “fight or flight,” and it’s no wonder digestion and stress feel like old friends. When the body is overextended, blood flow can get diverted from digestion toward survival, and meals become one more thing your system can’t keep up with.

None of this is imagined. It’s connective tissue science meeting nervous system reality. And once you understand it, the body stops feeling like a mystery and starts feeling like a map.

Gymnast in white leotard performs a backflip against a black background, hair flowing, conveying grace and dynamic motion.

Hypermobility in the World Around Us

Once I started recognizing this pattern in myself, I began seeing it everywhere. Hypermobility often hides in plain sight, especially in athletes, dancers, and performers.

The same traits that create instability in one person can translate into exceptional performance in another when there’s enough support and awareness.

This is what some researchers call the athlete paradox. The same collagen differences that make certain joints unstable also create the flexibility, range, and spatial awareness that fuel elite performance (To et al., 2021). Think of swimmers like Michael Phelps or gymnasts like Simone Biles, both of whom also live with ADHD. Their connective tissue gives them extraordinary range, proprioception, and fluidity. But it comes from the same wiring that, for others, can mean chronic pain, fatigue, or anxiety.

I see it in my youngest child, too. He has hypermobility, yet golf, hockey and swimming have become has become regulation tools. The rhythm, the control, the steady feedback: they give his brain what it needs to feel settled. The same traits that once caused struggle have become strengths.

The Whole-Body Connection

As a functional nutrition practitioner, I’ve always understood that ADHD, gut health, and chronic pain are deeply connected. This research didn’t change that understanding. It expanded it. It revealed another layer, another piece of the puzzle that helps explain what so many of us already feel in our bodies. The connective tissue, the nervous system, and the body’s ability to regulate are all part of the same story.

Your body is not a collection of parts. It’s a conversation between your gut, your joints, your hormones, your sleep, your breath. Every message is connected to every other.

When we view ADHD as a full-body pattern of regulation, not just something that lives in the brain, everything starts to make sense. We can stop chasing symptoms and start supporting systems: metabolism, movement, sleep, stress, recovery, and connection.

Nutrition becomes one of the tools that brings the system back into rhythm. Stable glucose stabilizes energy and focus. Micronutrients support connective tissue repair. Movement builds proprioceptive trust between brain and body.

It’s all one ecosystem.

Coming Home to the Body

Hands in a white sweater hold a red heart-shaped object against a white wooden background, conveying a sense of care and warmth.

Every time I learn something new about this, I find myself coming home to my body in a new way.

Understanding turns judgment into compassion. It replaces “What’s wrong with me?” with “What does my body need?”

When we understand the why behind how our bodies work, we can build our lives around support, not struggle. We can stop contorting ourselves to fit into systems that were never designed for us.

It’s like someone finally lifted a 300-pound weight off my shoulders. And I never want my kids, or my clients, to go through life carrying that same weight without knowing there’s another way.

When we start listening to what the body’s been saying all along, healing stops being about control and becomes about connection.

As I recover from hip surgery and continue this work from both sides of the experience, practitioner and patient, I’m reminded daily that healing isn’t linear. It’s layered.

Sometimes slow, but always worth it. The more I understand my body, the less I fight it. And that’s the space I want to help others find, too.

Thank you for reading, for being curious, and for caring enough to understand your body a little more deeply.

If you want to dig deeper into the science and stories behind this:

Dr. Jessica Eccles: Research on hypermobility, anxiety, and neurodivergence
Dr. Alan Pocinki: Work on dysautonomia and fatigue in hypermobility spectrum disorders
Dr. Emma Reinhold (Bendy Bodies Podcast): Integrative approaches to hypermobility and chronic pain
Fikree, A. et al. (2021): Gastrointestinal manifestations of hypermobility spectrum disorders and Ehlers–Danlos syndrome
Woolf, C. (2022): Central sensitization and chronic pain
The Hypermobility Syndromes Association (HMSA): Practical guides and lived experience resources