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Comment by Void_ | Hacker News Reader

Well actually I think people should first try getting off social media - and not just that - getting off Internet.

If you have ADHD it’s not so simple. When I’m off my pills — which is to say every day of my life before I was diagnosed — I don’t really make conscious decisions about such things. I open my computer to work and find myself on Twitter or Facebook or HN or whatever 20min later without thinking about it.

I mean that literally with no hyperbole. ADHD manifests from an under developed or under stimulated prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for such task prioritization and decision making. Without stimulants I’m not really making conscious decisions about most things. Much like how you’ve probably driven your commute sometimes and arrived without really much memory of how you got there (“driving on autopilot”). That’s every moment of every day in the most extreme ADHD case (it’s a spectrum of course and you should seek treatment if you think you’re anywhere on it, even if the above sounds more extreme than you).

I absolutely don't want to be rude, but the 'inventor' of ADHD (Eisenberg), when he died, said that ADHD is a pharmaceutical dease and the cause is social. Wrong food, bad sleeping habits, wrong teaching methods all influence the way we get stimulated. Studies agree with this.

I am not saying you don't have a problem, because I also feel like someone who has ADHD and feel a lot like the author of the article.

But I also think that, just like the author, you can change your 'ADHD' by changing your behaviour.

Again: I dont want to put anyone down that is labelled with ADHD, but I think this culture is on it's way to create an ADHDer of everyone.

> Wrong food, bad sleeping habits, wrong teaching methods all influence the way we get stimulated. Studies agree with this.

This part is severely misunderstood. If I don't sleep, eat, and exercise reasonably I completely lose focus. Taking adderall will help, but it treating the symptom rather than the cause. This looks like ADHD, but isn't.

If my children lack sleep and are overburden (thanks modern school system), it looks like ADHD, but it isn't.

Now, some people, children and adults, do have ADHD no matter how well they sleep, meditate, eat, and exercise. With our current understanding, their best bet is medication. But for the vast majority, they simply need to slow down.

You may both be right. There is an increasing amount of scientific evidence that screens (TV in particular) and junk food (sugar and saturated fat in particular) are severely impairing brain development in children, leading among other issues to difficulty to focus and ADHD. So yes, keeping children off screens as much as possible (+ healthy food + sport) looks like a good advice.

However, when you have this condition as an adult... well, there is some level of plasticity in the brain, but it looks harder than just "change your behavior", it may be required to also treat the symptoms.

The same argument can be made about user's of cholesterol and blood pressure medicine, as well.

Exercise more, eat 'better'.

> I absolutely don't want to be rude, but the 'inventor' of ADHD (Eisenberg), when he died, said that ADHD is a pharmaceutical dease and the cause is social. Wrong food, bad sleeping habits, wrong teaching methods all influence the way we get stimulated. Studies agree with this.

Do you know anyone with ADHD? When you talk with them and something happens, like a phone rings, their minds completely zoom out and they instead become focused on something else. It is not possible to continue the original conversation because they have forgot everything about it. It can be incredibly frustrating because it is like talking to a human gold fish. Although they can't do anything about it because it is just the way they are.

My point is that it is incredibly obviously a clinical condition and not something "behavior change" can fix.

It is very likely to be a combination of innate predisposition and behavioral effects. Like almost all diseases that are not caused by external bodies, or extremely hereditary. So ADHD is not really a condition, rather, it is an axis on which you can fit somewhere. In extreme cases, I can imagine it's very hard to manage without pills. In most cases, one can probably work through it without pills.

FMRI Brain scans tell a different story. If Dr. Eisenberg really believed that in the end, he was wrong.

I don't understand how what you described is ADHD and not average human behavior. If people were not easily distracted by Twitter and Facebook, they wouldn't have a functioning business. There are entire business models that rely on the truism that a huge fraction of the population will procrastinate on a trivial task that will clearly and unambiguously benefit them. Mail in rebates for instance. When does this become ADHD?

Were there things on the other hand that you could focus on very well, were you dived in deeply? Or did your autopilot drive you away from everything you were focused on after a while?

thanks for sharing your experience

This is anti-advice.

This is like telling depressed people to be happy or victims of violence with PTSD to 'grow a pair' and 'snap out of it'.

This is the kind of simplistic, unhelpful, shaming advice that keeps mental illness taboo.

I think you misrepresent the parent post. Suppose you had insomnia. Wouldn't it be a fair suggestion to cut back on coffee and other stimulants first, before trying sleeping pills?

I think the point is that by the nature of ADHD telling people to "get off the internet" as a solution to the problem would be more akin to telling the insomniac "just stop staying awake all the time!"

Not really. Leaving a phone at home and taking a notebook or book with you while sitting outside is not like "stop staying awake". It will, in fact, get you off the Internet and is unlikely to result in withdrawal symptoms for most people.

Unlike "stop staying awake" which is not actionable.

A book might not be a good suggestion for everyone, and finding the right "off internet thinking environment" is not easy for some, but it's doable for most.

> Unlike "stop staying awake" which is not actionable.

That's the problem: you think "stop staying awake" is not actionable, while "leave your phone at home" is actionable for a person with ADHD.

Again, this is not different than saying "just be happy" to a depressed person. To that person, in that moment, "stop wasting time on the internet" is not actionable just as much, otherwise it would not be a problem in the first place.

Going with your examples, I think "leave your phone at home" is more actionable than "stop wasting time on the internet", and both are vastly more actionable than "stop staying awake" and "just be happy".

Right, and his point is that actionability of advice depends on brain configuration. I have no problem lifting my mood, or falling asleep. So those actually seem more actionable to me. However, I have empathy for people whose brains work differently, who struggle with different things, and who might need intense therapy and medication just to stay afloat at these kinds of mental tasks.

> you think "stop staying awake" is not actionable, while "leave your phone at home" is actionable for a person with ADHD.

I'm not an insomniac; nor do I have ADHD, as far I know.

I assure you that I cannot action an instruction to 'stop staying awake'. I certainly can 'leave [my] phone at home', and frequently do.

It's more like telling a person with symptoms of depression or PTSD that they should see a therapist to get to the bottom of things rather than just popping pills. In fact, PTSD suffers really should be in therapy instead of on a drug regimen. Many people are wrongly diagnosed with a depressive illness when they have psychological problems better addressed by therapy, so it's actually good advice and can avoid a lifetime of drug dependance that doesn't solve the actual problem.

>This is like telling depressed people to be happy or victims of violence with PTSD to 'grow a pair' and 'snap out of it'.

It might go against the "just feed them drugs" mentality, but lots of times it totally works.

They had plenty of "traumatic stress" before the 21st century, in all parts of the world -- huge wars, conflicts, disasters, even genocide. But those involved (like older friends and relatives that have survived bombings and wars and dictatorship) also could grow a pair and snap out of it, and even thrive afterwards. I don't believe they had a different DNA or mental wiring back then.

  At an FDA hearing on March 23, 2006, I testified: “Saying any 
  psychiatric diagnosis ‘is a brain-based problem and that the medications 
  are normalizing function’ is an anti-scientific, pro-drug lie” [ 14]. 
  Yet this has become standard practice throughout medicine, for example,   at the American Psychiatric Association [ 15], American Medical 
  Association [ 16], American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 
  American Academy of Pediatrics, Child Neurology Society, American 
  Academy of Family Physicians [ 17], FDA [ 13], and virtually all US 
  government health-care agencies.

  Journal articles [ 6], press releases, ads [ 18], drug inserts, and 
  research informed consent documents say, or infer, that psychological 
  diagnoses are abnormalities/diseases. All patients and research 
  participants with psychological problems are led to believe they have an 
  abnormality/disease, biasing them in favor of medical interventions, and 
  against nonmedical interventions (e.g., love, will power, or talk 
  therapy), which presume, as is the case, that the individual is 
  physically and medically normal and without need of a 
  medical/pharmaceutical intervention.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1518691/

  Currently, depression is not diagnosed via objective chemical
  tests, nor is treatment guided by any such tests. If depression did
  result primarily from a known chemical imbalance, such tests
  would likely be available and in widespread use, and depression
  would be easily and quickly resolved for most patients.

  Luckily, a number of effective interventions are available for
  treating depression. Such interventions include a variety of 
  pharmacological as well as nonpharmacological approaches, sometimes
  used alone and sometimes in combination with one another

http://www.brown.uk.com/brownlibrary/france.pdf

> They had plenty of "traumatic stress" before the 21st century, in all parts of the world -- huge wars, conflicts, disasters, even genocide. But those involved (like older friends and relatives that have survived bombings and wars and dictatorship) also could grow a pair and snap out of it, and even thrive afterwards.

To the contrary, I think the past generations of my family who have survived WW2 and Stalinism were, till the end of their days, heavily impaired by it. They "snapped out of it" to the degree that was required for not starving, but I would not say they had developed nearly up to their full potential.

As someone growing up in rural Austria in the 80s, when lots of grandfathers had been Wermacht soldiers, I firmly agree.

In hindsight, it was painfully obvious with so many of them. And the number of functional alcoholics (with often a rather loose definition of "functional") was huge.

Dunno, we have had huge WWII impact, dictatorship, civil war, and other such things in my parts, and they didn't impact much the generations involved in everyday life. I know tons of people that survived those events. Speaking to friends and relatives it was just things that happened. So it goes, etc.

Maybe they were more lucky. In case of my grandparents, they were children whose parents were executed by Nazis or sent to Auschwitz to die, or who themselves were sent, as teenagers, to a Stalinist prison.

Yes, both kinds of concentration camps are very extreme experiences.

I'm talking more general war and civil war scenarios (e.g. having your city bombed, being in a war, having family members die in such scenarios, etc -- which have been common in many places in the developing world (and Europe).

But the constant terror of a concentration camp for months or years on end is another thing.

I think this is why we need to get back to using books for our resources, looking on the internet is too distracting.

The books still exist. I still use books as a crash course or refresher from time to time. And I've gotten back into reading more on my Kindle or phone while walking my dog in the mornings.

I wrote about this last year. I called it the "social loop of death":

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/schedules-arent-a-constraint-...

It's super distracting, but you can easily break out of it with being accountable for your time.

Nowadays I've found a healthy balance and am more productive / happy / successful than ever.

A lot of it had to due with following these 3 things too: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-overcome-procrastinati....

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