One the other hand, people who feel like their engines are firing on all cylinders all the time (ie ADHD and friends) might find some relief in a drug that allows them to slow down and switch of their head radio while firing on only one cylinder...
Cannabis certainly has a calming effect that could lower the hyperactivity component, but it doesn't address the attention deficit part.
The reason the most common treatment are stimulants like Ritalin, is because it "wakes us up" and brings us ADHD people to an alertness level similar to what our peers have by default.
Often low dopamine and noradrenaline levels are to blame. (L-Tyrosine on an empty stomach can help, if you're looking for a natural solution.)
Relaxing is overrated. It deprives you of powers you have developed or will develop, only to make you a more powerless person.
And a powerless person can never and should never relax.
I still of course work extra some times or do productive things in my time off, but yeah unless there's a deadline I'm not gonna worry about some work problem on off hours when I can't even make progress until I get back to my work computer anyways.
Fear/worry/anxiety is the mind killer and often helps nothing.
Relaxing is not overrated at all, it improves your ability to focus, and even makes you more productive. Far from depriving you of any powers or skills.
I get it now. Sort of.
But the problem doesn't go away.
My experience is that there is not a linear relationship between effort invested and output. It's a diminishing returns problem after 8-10 hours per day, so it's not even productive for me to spend all day and night churning on a work problem, even if I wanted to do that.
Be social, happy, energetic, hungry, incapable of succeeding in the education system of the 90s, 00s. (default me)
Be quiet, jittery, never eat, anti-social, depressed at times, but kick ass at school.
Tried a lot of different ADHD medications and generally found success in simply selectively switching that knob when I wanted to be a human or when I wanted to be a learning machine.
I wonder what pot would have done... never really thought about it.
I havent noticed any difference in how fast I recognize changes between me and coworkers. If at all, I seem to miss changes more often, as my mind usually goes "was that allways like that? I guess so", since recall of memories can be pretty flaky
Average seems to be 0.25 seconds, if I remember correctly a online test I did at home put me at 0.28, just sliightly over average
1. Hyperfocus. It has been tremendous for programming or even reading. There's sort of an ADD threshold that I break through after ~30 minutes of self discipline and pain. Then I'm suddenly in the zone, some kind unshakeable state, for hours on end. Most people I know seem to need a break after 30-60 minutes, right when I'm just getting into it.
2. Fun and physical activity. I use extreme difficulty of maintaining attention as an indicator that what I'm doing is just not stimulating or interesting enough. Of course this might not be good when you're with other humans, but I find I'm often able to focus on things better when my body is moving. That means when I take someone out on a date somewhere, it's usually very interesting and unusual.
3. Fast context switching. This may be more of a coping mechanism than a benefit, but often times rather than focusing on a single task, I'll "procrastinate" by switching between multiple important tasks repeatedly or working on things that are peripherally related. As a result, I have a breadth of knowledge that helps me think creatively and still get work done as needed.
4. Creative thinking. I believe (anecdotally, no evidence) that people with ADD are less likely to get stuck in a rut, or get bogged down with repetitive, boring, familiar things, because we simply don't have the attention span for it.
My study strategy in college was to review my notes for about an hour, take a bong hit, and watch a movie. Then I would get a great night sleep.
Otherwise, test anxiety would keep me awake and do more harm than good.
This topic is more complex than simple HN comments are going to cover. There are different types of ADHD and though ADHD is good for software development (because of hyperfocus) it's also correlated with having a lower IQ. So high functioning ADHD people are a rarity and they're often in software or something similar for a multitude of reasons.
What you read here is how smart people with ADHD feel about their condition. It's dangerous to extrapolate to the broader public. You're also going to miss much of the conversation because most people that have tried pot once or twice aren't going to comment on it because they know how it's going to end up in a database somewhere. So you're going to see more pro-pot arguments than "I tried it and it didn't work for me" arguments.
I would argue that hyperfocus vs inattention is a net-loss for my employee
So it's not just the loss of productivity from inattention that's a problem for most jobs, but the lack of consistency in your output.
> Neurotypicals can hyperfocus as well, and personally for me (ADHD-PI) I hyperfocus very few times at work, but more frequently at home.
Yes, neurotypicals can hyperfocus as well, but I've found that ADHD coders are way more likely to hyperfocus. The key is setting up the environment around them. I'm also ADHD-PI if it matters, though my specific situation is more complicated so it went undiagnosed for decades.
> So it's not just the loss of productivity from inattention that's a problem for most jobs, but the lack of consistency in your output.
Agree here too; especially for the unmedicated.
That said, very few neurotypicals hit the performance I see from high functioning ADHD coders (~2000-3000 commits a year and completely ridiculous learning rate with new technology).
Neurotypicals are also less pissed off with minor annoyances than ADHDers and ASDers, so they don't code up solutions to little problems that cost them 5 seconds a day, when in the long run that it is worth it to do so.[0]
But you're right that the bigger the team, the worse they do. Especially if the project is a tarball of uninterestingness and wrought with pointless, unscheduled meetings and other interruptions.
The stimulants generally used allow the brain to get a reward for the current activity, pushing it over the threshold and allowing it to focus on an activity and pay attention to a situation.
On the inverse, simply making the brain slower would yield similar results, IMO. It likely wouldn't fix it overall, you would still suffer from an attention deficit but the overall condition would slow down a bit. That might help a lot.