Anyone have a TLDR? Tried reading but the formatting on mobile didn’t work out for me.
Or maybe it’s my ADHD.
Or maybe it’s my ADHD.
Exercising seems to help people with ADHD perform better.
Anecdotal, I’ve found this out through years of living with it. I work better after working out in the mornings. If I don’t, I end up being productive in the afternoons when I finally get a bit tired.
The evaluation is simple. They gave me a questionnaire with ‘have you ever’ questions. You rank them (think “a lot”, “often”, “sometimes“, “no”). Then they score based on that.
And let me tell you, filling that out made me start crying. All the shit I had put my mom through while growing up, school, college, etc.
But hey, I got the diagnosis. I have meds I can take if I need them. I currently don’t do it everyday because I simply don’t have to for what I do day to day. But if I’m working on something that requires me to hold regular hours at work or on some projects that are more conceptual, I have to.
All this to say, the test is simple and pretty quick. If you are curious, you could take it.
Just to curb peoples expectations a bit, I started the process of getting diagnosed about two years ago, got the diagnosis less than a year ago, and I'm having the first meeting with a doctor who can actually prescribe meds next week. No part of it has been simple or quick. So I guess YMMV.
I’m actually near a big university and I’ve heard it’s hard to get diagnosed here. I however don’t attend the university so the doctors I went to are outside.
My experience is in Indiana.
Like @disiplus, that happened to me for a long time.
During high school, college and afterwards, it was just easier to work at night and just stay up until very late. Also having a deadline around the corner gave me the right amount of stress to finally code the solution.
It’s not like I didn’t try to work during the day or wasn’t thinking of trying to solve the problem. I actually thought of it and worked out things in my head, I just had trouble sitting and coding it during the day. At night, very late until early in the morning I would just sit and dump it all out.
Side projects can still be like that.
At work, I’ve learned to manage it. I really enjoy the position I’m in. I work on a lot of projects, have a set of tasks that maybe fill half my day during the week but I can be pulled into meetings, called to fix something else, review code, or help other devs.
It’s can be a lot, but it’s working right now.
My advices for people who didn’t run for years like I was:
- starting low (500m or 2min) is the key. Better run a little than not
- increment a bit each time
- an Apple Watch (or other tracker) is awesome to set a goal and track progression during running. You can export health data on a PC and then do geek stuff with it
A bit on the ironic side, the Conclusion section of this article is very hard to find (it's on page 36 of 86, depending on your zoom level) and this reading mode on the website doesn't work so well
But here it is
> In line with previous research, we find that exercise benefits executive functions and attentional control in children with ADHD. The beneficial effects are comparable to those reported in PBC with substantial and consistent improvement on test of several cognitive functions following particularly long-term exercise. An important notion is also that no study has reported negative or adverse effects of exercise.
I mean, I know there is a certain way to write research articles and that they aren’t exactly meant for people with attention problems, but without people like you I’d never see the conclusion. Hell I might even look for it and then not find it and forget all about it.
I kind of knew exercise was good for me though. I even like doing it. The real issue is to begin to exercising instead of just thinking about starting it for a whole day without actually getting started.
> The effects of acute exercise appear less robust. Of great interest, Chang et al., found that only exercise carried out during the first half of the day yielded positive outcomes [66]. This underlines the importance of timing exercise. This is supported by Hart who found that 15 min of exercise provided at the beginning of the day can reduce behaviors associated with ADHD and that while this effect dissipates over time, a short bout of 3–5 min. moderate-to-vigorous physical activity 90 m after the initial exercise, can maintain the benefits [375]
How much ADHD is ADHD and how much is humans and especially kids aren't supposed to sit still so damn much and one of the ways the universal ill effects of this manifest is as ADHD symptoms in a lot of people?