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I'd modify the analogy slightly.

Imagine that the threads present themselves to the scheduler. They arise continuously and spontaneously. Most of them are not valuable and should be rejected wholesale.

Now take away the scheduler. The threads come and go as they please. They wrestle away the execution time from each other. They spontaneously explode or implode. Nothing corrals them, nothing gives a policy for deciding which one to devote time and effort to.

No matter how hard you lecture the CPUs for being lazy, it never changes the behaviour of unscheduled and unschedulable threads. But it sure can make you feel bad.

You say you've been lugging around the diagnosis since being a teenager. I was diagnosed at 32. Medication has been liberating. I am able to just be and do with exhaustion, failure, misery and self-loathing.

> I am able to just be and do with exhaustion, failure, misery and self-loathing.

I have a very dear friend who has grappled with ADHD his entire life. A few years ago, we were talking on the phone when I asked him what the most troubling aspect of ADHD is for him, and his response was far different than what I was anticipating. For him, the one aspect that has been most debilitating is the constant self-doubt, self-loathing, and feelings of worthlessness that accompany.

In a world where ADHD is viewed as a novelty disorder, stimulant abuse remains largely unchecked, and societal stigmas only serve to marginalize those afflicted, it's easy to understand why someone might feel this way.

I think part of the stigma is that ADHD is very hard to diagnose. And even people without ADHD can yield benefits from taking stimulants. For years, it was perpetuated that these drugs calm kids with ADHD down, but have a different effect on health people. Actually, the drugs do exactly the same thing in people whether they are hyperactive, have problems paying attention, or are healthy. They improve focus by increasing the levels of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain that regulates attention and behavior. Basically, light that up and everything else gets controlled. But your heart still races.

To get a little technical, here's an article from Neuropsychopharmacology:

"For years, it was assumed that stimulants had paradoxical calming effects in ADHD patients, whereas stimulating 'normal' individuals and producing locomotor activation in rats. It is now known that low doses of stimulants focus attention and improve executive function in both normal and ADHD subjects. Furthermore, the seminal work of Kuczenski and Segal showed that low, oral doses of methylphenidate reduce locomotor activity in rats as well."

Often you hear that if stimulants like Ritalin, Vyvanse, or Adderall help people stay calm, that means that they must have ADHD. This isn't true. These drugs will help anyone focus and pay attention. Giving stimulants to a kid with ADHD is more like giving a child with a learning disability more time on a test -- and advantage that might help anybody, but helps that child more -- than fixing his brain.

Non-stimulants also increase dopamine and norepinephrine in the prefrontal cortex, and not everyone sees a benefit.

In general though, yes dextroamphetamine is a powerful stimulant that enhances physical and mental performance in healthy individuals as well as those with ADHD.

> For him, the one aspect that has been most debilitating is the constant self-doubt, self-loathing, and feelings of worthlessness that accompany.

I have been diagnosed with ADD a year ago (with inattentiveness being the strongest aspect of it) and this is exactly what is on my mind the most as well, even before the diagnosis. I am constantly fighting the feeling that people only put up with me for as long as their patience lasts, and that I will inevitably screw up in a way that makes them roll their eyes one last time and be done with me. Which also causes a lot of avoidance-behaviour.

I fear seeing people close to me upset that I lost (for example) a gift they gave to me, or my colleagues annoyed at me for not be on time for meetings, those kinds of things. It hurts to be judged as someone not caring about how they have to put up with my quirks, and the fact that it genuinely is a struggle for me made me feel like an incompetent failure for years.

The diagnosis giving a grip on where these issues come from and how to handle them better (and also realising that my self-perception does not match that of the people around me). Even without medication, this awareness is already helping a lot in making me more productive. It also helps the people around me cope I guess, since I can explain to them that yes, I do care and I do try, and I want to come up with solutions to these frustrations together.

Apparently this is a very common, and easily overlooked anxiety among people with ADHD/ADD.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/6eq724/a_post_that_ta...

My mind gets tired. It’s very, very difficult to maintain my attention in an orderly fashion. I often start to read something and find I have to put it down from sheer frustration.

That tiredness makes me anxious, and I get even more badly distracted.

Somehow, I do make it through most days.

Can you describe some of your coping mechanisms? I've been really struggling w/ ADHD over the past year. It's hindered professional and personal goals but seems virtually impossible to fix.

I have ADHD. Here's some stuff I do to cope:

- I try to get myself to do recurring things at a specific time. It's too hard to wake up at say 7:00 a.m. The reason it's hard it because I forget to set an alarm clark. Instead I'd cope by just making sure I get a job where I don't have to be there before a certain time, and that time is after I'd naturally wake up.

- When I need to do something I on a recurring basis, I try to make the task visible. Like living a toothbrush lying by the sink, putting vitamins in a 7-day pill thing for the week, etc.

- I have have 11 bank accounts, each with a single purpose, and I have automatic transfers set up between all of them (it's not perfect, but it's pretty good). I prevent overdrawing a checking account by using a pre-paid debit card that won't let me take the balance below zero. When I have to buy something that requires a tip, where the tip will be subtracted from the bill later, I pay with a credit card and then immediately send a payment from the debit card to the credit card. I pay all my bills on the day I get paid, so I don't have to remember to do it later.

- I embrace trying new things, because if I'm wired to be attracted to shiny objects, I might as well find a way to enjoy them!

- lately I've been exercising a lot, and that seems to help

- medication, which may or may not help, but it doesn't seem to be hurting

- I plan as few things as possible, so I have less to remember

- I archive or delete my email as fast as I can

> It's too hard to wake up at say 7:00 a.m. The reason it's hard it because I forget to set an alarm clark.

That's only true if waking up at 7am is the exception rather than the rule. I've found that morning is by FAR my most productive hours, so I need to wake up early.

I bought a cheap, battery powered alarm clock[1]. Opened it up and cut the part of plastic pieces of the snooze buttons (on top) so they can't push the actual button underneath. Set alarm for 7am while it's open (the minute and hour buttons double as snooze, so we need to disable them, too).

This provides the three essentials of a functional alarm clock:

1. It's hard to change the time.

It's hard to enforce an early bedtime if you know you can always push back your alarm a bit. And it's hard to resist doing that when you know how tired you'll be in the morning.

Enforcing a wake-up time puts the right incentives in place. When I don't get enough sleep, my thought becomes "Why did I stay up so late, again?" instead of "Why didn't I let myself sleep in?". Making it a pain to change the time of the alarm provides enough time delay to ask yourself whether this is really what you want to be doing.

2. It can't be snoozed

Snoozing is terrible. It makes your body temperature drop back to sleeping levels, which makes it even harder to get out of bed next time. It also lets you waste away the morning with the assurance that you won't fall asleep and miss the time sensitive thing in a few hours. No snooze forces you to start your day immediately.

3. It's not on your phone[2]

Charge your phone away from your bed to avoid mindless browsing when you wake up. Better to start your day thinking about what you will actually do. A proactive start sets you up for fewer reactive distractions.

---

[1] It's a generic model that can be purchased through many brands. I did a quick Amazon search to find the model; this was the first result I found: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B015MDVZI0/

[2] If you insist on a phone alarm, Talalarmo for android is the next best thing: https://f-droid.org/app/trikita.talalarmo

>> This provides the three essentials of a functional alarm clock...

All good points. In my case, I left out the part about how I don't want a regular bedtime. When I have tried to sell myself on the idea of a bed time, I found it too hard to commit to the idea. Instead I usually just go to bed when I start feeling sleepy, which in typically in the 9p to 12a range.

I have several bank accounts but 11 seems like it would add complexity.

It's easier than trying to manager the details in an app like Quicken.

If you want to cope without medication, you need to exercise a lot. The theory is that your dopamine levels are too low, and you need to boost them somehow. That's why medication tends to work for a lot of people.

Try to get exercise every day. Try to get intense exercise 2-3 times a week. Work your body to exhaustion, and your quality of sleep will improve as well.

Eat lots of protein and fat, and treat sugar like a toxin.

Other people report meditation helps, I suspect it probably would.

When things are going well in my life, meditation works. It makes it better. I am able to calm myself down deliberately, I am able to focus deliberately.

When ADD is acting up, I am not able to meditate.

Going to second the exercise advice. If I can get it started (just get out the door) I am always greatly rewarded.

I've found that simple stuff helps. For example:

* Have a calendar at hand everywhere -- on your computer, on your phone, everywhere. Enter stuff into it immediately. Live and die by the calendar, because you will never remember things on your own.

* Know what you're aiming to do on a day. Maybe you can cope with a to-do list, but speaking for myself they feel oppressive, like I am judging myself for all the things I've failed to do. But you can keep one thing in mind.

* Email yourself! I bat tasks back and forth between my home and work emails, based on where I can act on them.

* Exercise. It helps with a lot of things and research suggests it helps with ADHD as well.

* It's the morning. You've made coffee. You should be preparing to do some exercise. Don't open the laptop or phone. I know you're going to "just check". Don't. Don't start, you won't stop.

* When you learn about something that distracts you easily, either give up the addiction or accept the cost. I've pissed away thousands of hours of my life on websites like this one. I have mixed feelings about what I gained and lost. Right now I am noticing that Slack is becoming a problem for me.

* Read books. Physical books lack the ability to open tabs or follow links.

* Have times of day when you ignore things. At work I generally ignore messages on my phone. At home I ignore emails from work. In particular, there is no way for my work to reach me on my phone. No email, no slack, nothing.

* Work in pairs! This has been phenomenal for me.

* Do you take shorter-acting medication, like I do? Set an alarm for the doses you need later in the day. Left to my own devices I can easily sail past 2pm and then at 4pm wonder why the hellSQUIRREL I can't conCLANGcentrate on my wWIKIPEDIAork.

* You will struggle with impulse buys. Rehearse in your mind what it will be like when you get the thing. Think about the regret of having given into the impulse. Even a few seconds of delay can break it.

There are probably other coping mechanisms I don't realise are coping mechanisms.

These are not enough by themselves. Not even close. Almost every one of these is only possible because I am taking ritalin, and every one of them is necessary because ritalin can't do everything by itself.

Some other things I remembered in the meantime:

* Routine! Having a reliable routine means I am never lost for what I should be doing or where I should be. I don't organise because I am prone to perfectly planning everything -- I organise because I'm dysfunctional without it. For example: every Friday is laundry day. Anything that misses the Friday slot has to wait for next Friday.

* Don't stock your favourite foods. Everyone lives with temptations, but ADHD makes it that much harder to resist. I have a number of foods which I love and which I simply do not have in my home. No chocolate, no peanut butter, no bread, no pasta. I have these occasionally and as a treat. But if they are around they will get eaten. So I just don't keep them.

* Don't know your passwords. Use a program like keepass. If you know the passwords for sites and apps, you will log into them from more places.

* Go to an office to work, whatever "office" means to you. Make the hours regular. Try to create a distinct physical separation. The difference makes it easier to enforce rules about what you can do when.

* You see a topic on reddit, hackernews etc that you deeply care about. Don't open it. Don't read the comments. You'll struggle to stay out and -- as you can see from my comments elsewhere under this post -- struggle to control your emotions. Just stay away. That's what I should've done with this one.

* Don't take breaks if you're making forward progress. People say to take breaks, but in my experience it pretty much ensures you will derail the rest of your time. Right now, for example, I'm in about the 4th hour of a 5 minute break.

* Do your best on sleep hygiene. Being tired weakens your ability to resist impulse still further. You will say and do more things you'll wish you hadn't.

* Get a filing cabinet. Add folders. Get stuff off your desk as fast as you can. Empty your email inbox as completely as you can.

* Subject to your finances, pay your bills ASAP. You will forget them. Or worse: forget them, remember them, feel stressed about forgetting them, then forget them, over and over until they're paid.

Between ADHD, anxiety and depression, just being alive is exhausting. But I have gotten better at playing through the basic levels over time.

WRT emptying the inbox as completely as you can: Unsubscribing everything you can that you receive e-mail is a big deal. I don't even care if you're a fan of the product or blog, unsubscribe from the mailing lists. Just do it. You won't appreciate it initially, but give it about two weeks. It's like the TiVo effect: you don't realize how nice it is until you have let the process incubate for a period of time.

Combined with how well anti-spam has been working for e-mail I am amazed at how useful e-mail has become again. There was a time when I would have received 30-50 "extra" e-mails a week that I would have to spend micro-calories ignoring until I decided to clean the inbox. If you can keep them out of the inbox to begin with, do it.

What's wrong with eating chocolate and peanut butter regularly? They are healthy foods.

Nothing, but it's difficult to buy them in single servings.

If I buy a block of chocolate or a jar of peanut butter, I won't be eating them regularly. I'll be eating them that day. I will feel shitty afterwards, I will berate my lack of willpower, blah blah blah, none of which changes that it did happen.

The easiest way to win is not to play.

Here's what helps me cope:

- Having some constant amount of structure in my life. Always having some activity schedule for 945 am and attending it without exception has forced discipline on my day as early as possible. In college, I chose one class to attend per quarter and always showed up. If I can fixate on one thing to center a schedule around, I find keeping plans much easier.

- Exercising for 30 minutes or more everyday, as early in the day as possible. This is key to calming me down and also gives me measurable goals that I can pursue and achieve

- Medication. As much as I hate admitting to myself that I need to be medicated, I think staying on my prescription has served me well

- Automating as many important things as possible. Credit card payments are the biggest thing here for me, I don't trust myself to remember recurring events on a horizon longer than a week so being able to automate utility bill pay (could backfire, but better than slipping up) and credit card balance pay off has been a relief

- If you're a developer, pair program as much as possible. The pressure of needing to show someone else that you're competent gets to you. You have someone else to call you out when you're going on a tangent that you'd walk back a few hours later.

All of these strategies that everyone has listed in response are making me wonder if I might be a bit ADHD. I've implemented a lot of these myself without any diagnosis, just because they seemed to help me with things I found difficult. Lots of other people, including coworkers and my spouse, don't seem to understand that I seriously can't handle certain things without these mechanisms.

That's how I found out.

Disclaimer: don’t self diagnose based on things you read on the Internet. Ask a real doctor.

Scheduling an appointment!

Its only been alluded to, a time or too, but never explicitly stated (unless I missed it). But, sleep. Getting >=7 (preferably 8+) hours is paramount. (Also, just about everything else listed in this thread).

Do an Amazon search for "add success stories", there's a couple of books on this topic.

This really resonates with me, especially the constant context switching and only being able to do tasks that provide immediate reward. That said, I've always gotten the impression that this is something that a lot of people, with or without ADD, suffer from, probably exacerbated by the constant amount of information we are exposed to.

Like most mental health 'disorders', it's often a matter of degree more than some clearly defined difference. That said, it's quite possible that 'we' as a society are becoming less capable of sustained focus and delayed gratification, and our constant mobile phone use, among other things, might play a role in that.

It truly fascinates me how much phones in particular have changed our day to day behavior. I don't know if this is true, but I recall reading that many people check their phone, on average, every five minutes. While I hesitate to call that unhealthy, it's bound to have some kind of noticeable effect.

Dyslexic and ADD. I used to agree with the kind of theories that the article presents, but I started to seriously wonder whether it is these coping mechanisms that are the advantage. We are forced to overcompensate with perfect strategies.

This sounds a lot like me. After my inefficiency even drove me to a burnout. I redesigned my life to something that works for me. As software developer there are always more passive options that allow you to set your own schedule. It also allows to work remotely what keeps my head out of further depressive holes (not exactly ADD but often linked) by beeing able to experience new things and environments regularly.

It's not perfect but it works better for me than any medication / job combination I tried so far.

>Luckily, I've been able to develop enough coping techniques to at least take care of myself.

I haven't unfortunately. Oh I've tried, in spurts and bursts, but I can never seem to make it stick. I always go back to that immediate reward cycle. It's really frustrating but I often feel simply incapable. I think it's co-morbid with an internet/computer/gaming addiction, which sucks because this is my job and hobby as well, but it's hard to pull myself away and do "maintenance tasks" as I call them.

I also have problems with falling into what I call “pleasure traps”... I like to envision my agency as movement along a landscape of discomfort, and I have a tendency to get sucked into steep local minima and have trouble getting out. I find it to be a very rich and evocative concept, and I’m curious if anyone else looks at human agency this way.

And yes, I also was diagnosed with ADD and given stimulants as a child (and more recently, as an adult).

Very good explanation. I liken the scheduler to an auto-pilot that takes over with irrelevant tasks and which needs to be interrupted and guided.

That's a really good analogy to use, and resonates with me a lot (ADHD-PI). Thanks for this, I'm going to use it.

Thank you for posting this, this is very much like my ADD head works.