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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure you don't have ADHD? Because that sounds a lot like what you're describing.

ADHD is an addiction to procrastination in a sense. It could be that you missed diagnoses at a young age due to being intelligent enough to cruise through school and university with little effort, so your problem was never picked up as you never suffered any serious negative effects from ADHD due to your intelligence and ability to get tasks done quickly.

That's basically what happened to me. I'd be able to do an assignment that would take people several days, in half a day. So I'd be able to procrastinate and delay up to the last minute and still manage to pull through, usually not with great grades, but I'd pass. I always thought I was lazy, and never considered the fact that it could be a deeper neurological problem.

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It’s true that this is consistent with ADHD, but it’s not nearly enough information to diagnose because it’s also a common experience to many people (really). ADHD is basically defined as the bottom of a bell curve in a number of areas (depending on how you look at it, executive functions or behaviors) that are normal to the human experience, just so extreme and frequent that they are impairing to functioning in life. It is a real disorder, but it’s challenging to understand and diagnose because it’s basically an extreme version of experiences and troubles that most people have. Books and lectures about procrastination are extremely popular for a reason. Procrastination, to some extent, on work and school projects is almost a universal experience. Apart from a few outliers, most people I know waited until the day or two before to work on on week or month long assignments.

Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.

> Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.

The flip side is that in some cases, such possibility can be relieving. For me, the idea of having undiagnosed ADHD (which I plan on verifying soon) means there may be a better solution to the problem available than endless talks about pomodoros, bullet journals and getting one's shit together. In general, given symptoms which aren't going to disappear on their own, it's probably universally better if it turns out to be a medically recognized condition, as it gives a way forward.

Pomodoro and journals are part of ADHD treatment and that's OK. (There may be better behavioral therapies, like setting alarms and writing plans). The presence of a drug for a condition is not the same as the existence of a condition, and drugs are not always superior to behavior therapy. If you had low muscle mass, you wouldn't say "thank heavens it's a recognized condition that I can treat with steroid injections, so I can stop messing around with weightlifting!"

Pomodoro actually works quite OK for me. It doesn't solve the problem, but it's one of the more effective strategies to get some work done.

I'm not saying there are magic pills. But most articles about procrastination seem to target regular people, for whom this is not that big of a problem.

If you had low muscle mass, and weightlifting and diet didn't help, you'd sure be grateful if it turned out to be a recognized condition. Even if there was no effective remedy, you could at least tell the people saying "you're doing dieting/sports wrong" to shut up.

ADHD is a label, not a disease.

You can't really be diagnosed with symptom (although of course your money will be cheerfully taken to do just this).

Attention and focus and other related ADHD-type issues are bell curve.

It can feel good, for sure, to externalize our weakness and failings into one of these labels, like ADD. If that is helpful to get over the psychic weight of past failures, then that is helpful and useful.

Taking stimulants definitely helps most people with ability to work and focus, regardless of where they are on the attention-ability curve. There are also drawbacks and side-effects, at least I have observed.

It is pretty well understood that people with true ADD and ADHD have dopamine deficiency and issues with dopamine regulation and re-uptake in the brain. This has been highlighted in many studies. While I understand that there is an epidemic of over-diagnosis of ADHD, it does not make it any less of a legitimate medical condition in which the only treatment for it, is to increase the usable dopamine in the brain. One of the tell tail signs of ADD/HD is that the first time one with dopamine deficiency takes an amphetamine or one of it's derivatives, they realize that they are completely clear and it's like they come out of a fog in their brain, it's more profound than just the feeling of I can get stuff done. Again that alone is not effective as a single point to diagnose attention disorders but it is a strong indicator that there could be a dopamine deficiency.

TLDR it is a true disorder, it is over-diagnosed but that does not make it any less a chemical disorder of the brain.

Human psychology is on a spectrum. Mental disorders are extremely common, as are minor physical disorders. We aren't ashamed of seeking remedies for high blood pressure or low muscle mass or high fat, all of which are extremely common physical disorders. We shouldn't be ashamed of seeking remedies for mental disorders either.

I agree with you that most of human psychology is on a spectrum and that there is no shame in having a mental disorder or in seeking treatment for it, so I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or adding more information. At the same time, I think we should be cautious about suggesting to someone that they have a particular mental disorder for a behavior that is common.

A psychiatrist or neurologist would want to know significantly more about the original commenter than "Procrastination is an addiction [for me]... I've been praised for my excellent work and rewarded with raises and bonuses, even though I often procrastinate until the very last minute" before deciding that they had ADHD. That experience exists well beyond the 5% of the population that has ADHD and in my opinion is not nearly close to sufficient in the DSM-5 to suggest ADHD, particularly as even extremely severe procrastination can explained by a number of other causes.

On the other hand, I went over 20 years with an undiagnosed condition because nobody ever suggested to me that I might in fact have a problem that isn't me just being lazy.

> Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.

Thanks for someone telling me that I may have this problem, I felt relieved a lot. I am not a failure and some things that many people struggle with are harder for me.

Later I got a diagnosis (I, well, procrastinated for 2 years with seeking professional help), at 33. I wish I knew that 15 years earlier, it would impact some of my career choices, and very likely - stress would have caused less harm.

Sounds a lot like my experience getting diagnosed, but with miserably failing out of university, twice.

Did you do anything about it?

Not to mention that the pressure/anxiety of being late actually makes you able to focus on the task at hand.

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