Body: I’m tired, let’s go to bed
Brain: Nah, I think I’ll stay up super late instead and be tired tomorrow for no reason.
There’s also:
Brain: Okay, time to do things!
Body: Ehh… Later, let’s just lay here and have anxiety about not doing the things
You forgot my favorite of sleep-hating-brain internal dialogue!
"Why would you need to sleep until your alarm goes off when I can wake you early and you can be anxious about not sleeping! Or all the stuff you feel you should now start but are too tired to do even though you know I won’t let you sleep!
Wouldn’t want to sleep through that! Why do you think I kept you up so late??"
Even ADHD-oriented media is often being dishonest with people who suspect themselves to have this condition, being toxicly positive and showing ADHD as a “superpower” as if you can hyperfocus your way to success. It is neither a gift nor even an equal exchange between advantages and drawbacks like “you’ll be always late but also always creative!” It’s a crippling thing that may ruin career or end a relationship. There is nothing good with ADHD.
Absolutely. People want there to be a fair trade-off, but life just doesn’t work that way. I’ve seen similar romanticization of autism too, especially with the “savants”.
Life is 3d6, not point buy.
I’m beginning to suspect “superfocus” is just what normal people do when they focus.
Nah, super focus is totally a thing, just not everyone does it.
My wife can’t sit in a computer chair for 8 hours straight playing a game/editing a video/writing something/reading Wikipedia really hard, but I can.
And no, I can’t control it so it’s not a superpower, it’s random enforced focus and it’s only sometimes a helpful thing. Usually the work I do when doing it gets worse much faster and it does major damage to your body to sit in 1 position for that long not peeing.
My brother in law has ADHD. He lives next door to me.
He has a car he parks on the street. In my city you’re required to get a registration sticker for your car, it’s like $100 or something, good for a year. Every day you don’t have a valid sticker you can get a new ticket on your car. It takes two minutes to go online and order a new one.
For the last three years, hes been racking up tickets on his car for an expired sticker. One a week roughly, $60 per ticket I think. He usually lets them pile up until he gets final notices then pays them all online at double the cost.
Twice now he’s has his car booted, then impounded, due to unpaid tickets. He even includes tickets on his car as part of budgeting. I’ve offered a couple times if he’d hand me his license to go online and order the sticker for him. I’ve stopped offering since that offer is met with intense anger.
It takes TWO MINUTES to go online and order a new one. Poor guy
The intense anger is probably something he could work on.
I sometimes can’t order food for my cat online for months and feed him with some local shop one when it runs out at the last minute
Or litter same story.
It would be cheaper, more choice, maybe healthier but I can’t force myself to sit click on site, choose one, find credit card, type it etc.
So I always wait till last drop of cat food runs out and then full of guilt hurry outside to search for open shop. At least there is less choice in local shops.
Choices paralyse me. I will spent hours thinking which one to choose even if it’s completely minor and especially online as IRL I simply can’t stand too long I have to grab something.
Also one shopkeeper I think thought I was into her I think but now after a while she just looks sad and annoyed when I come instead of joyous and kind of eee weird but I have no idea to be honest it all may be just overthinking which is also a problem. I am fucking clueless and I don’t even know if I was/am interested. Probably not right I would know if I was I hope it would be obvious like idk heart pounding or whatever. Right? Right?
Does it help if someone forces you to do the thing or is is better to give time and space until you decide to do it? Asking for a friend.
Depends on the thing.
Super high level, ADHD is an issue with the reward system of the brain failing to deliver reward when it’s supposed to. Your brain is supposed to try to find a new task when it’s not getting it’s reward anymore; it’s how that frontal cortex problem solving engine gets driven around by all the parts that handle motivation, wants and desires.
Sometimes no reward is being given, so you keep slipping off to a different task, and sometimes too much reward is being given and so you stay on a task way too long.
And, to be clear: these are not huge rewards we’re talking about like a wave of pleasure or noticable feeling, just the baseline steering signals.Sometimes the task you need to do provides no “normal” reward but neither does what you’re doing right now, so your problem solver sees no reason to switch. Sometimes a nudge can help because fulfilling a request or suggestion can come with some reward, or at least you’re just swapping out neutral tasks with some minor effort.
Sometimes the task is unpleasant to some minor degree, so not only is the reward not there, it’s also a punishment. Or the thing you’re currently doing is providing some degree of reward.
In either case, switching means actively going against everything your problem solver uses to decide what to do. Needless to say, that’s really hard, and being nudged often feels more like being nagged, or like they’re upset with you, because your problem solver (also known as your conscious self) knows this is all going on, but knowing how the engine is working doesn’t make it work differently.
So you’ve been sitting there trying to push a granite block up a hill for an hour, and then someone comes up and starts pushing on your back. They haven’t removed the part that made it hard, but they added something uncomfortable to your current situation.Before I got on medication following my diagnosis, me and my partner handled it by just being really cognizant of what our mental states are, and communicating clearly. “You asked me to remind you”, “I need to do it, but I’m stuck”, and effectively asking for permission before annoying someone to the point where the current blocker is less desirable than doing the thing. Requires a lot of trust and good communication though.
It’s difficult to describe subjective feelings, but what can sometimes look like “sitting on the couch watching short YouTube videos about sheep dogs instead of brushing your teeth and going to bed” is actually: sitting on the couch bored out of your mind and desperately wanting to go to bed, but the sheepdogs are providing short bursts of novelty and cute. Removing your lap blanket provides no joy and makes you cold. Standing up provides no joy and makes you less comfortable. Walking to the bathroom provides no joy and now you’re in the dark bathroom. Brushing your teeth provides no joy, tastes bad, and is intensely boring. Walking to the bedroom provides no joy. Getting into bed and snuggling up provides joy.
Summed up: sheep dogs provide continuous minor joy, and only costs the physical misery of staying awake, the confused guilt of paralysis, and the promise of future misery. Going to bed is a promise of some joy, but it comes with a bunch of steps that are at best neutral and often entail anti-joy. It just doesn’t add up. Other people get a tiny hit of joy from each substep, which is why they can say “I’m done looking at sheepdogs, I’m going to bed” and then just magically do it.“Before you go to bed, you need to slowly press your bare foot into this fresh dog poop, toes spread of course” isn’t often made better by someone saying “it’s not that bad, come on, you can do it, I believe in you, then you can get some rest for once”.
I feel this applies to more than just adhd, for example things like burn-out and depression.
ADHD is just a bunch of symptoms in a trench coat.
Yeah everyone pees, but if you do it 60 times a day, you should probably ask why, no?
Is this really ADHD. I might have to get tested. Everything people are posting here sounds like me.
I often wonder as well. Then I think: is this not just the human condition. In any case I seem to score pretty high on those online questionnaires.
It’s a matter of scale, not a binary.
Having a thing that you need to do but just “don’t” is perfectly common.
Having it happen so regularly that you reliably spend a measurable part of your day wondering why you can’t just “do the thing”, or it starts to have measurable negative impacts on your job, life and relationships isn’t normal.Everyone feels down sometimes, but not everyone has a serotonin balance problem.
Everyone feels difficulty focusing sometimes, but not everyone has a dopamine balance problem.