I recently had a fever, and the constant rumination reminded me of my worst ADHD days when there's never a moment of silence.
Sometimes bright children are mistaken for having "attention" issues because they are underchallenged and bored.
Unidentified health issues can look like "ants in the pants" and be mistaken for attention issues.
Sadly, drugs are all too often advocated for as a convenience for adults dealing with the child. This can cause permanent impairment because they impact the still developing brain.
1: as someone that got diagnosed in adult age, I am now aware of my talents and shortcomings, and all the things I have struggled with. I keep reading of kids on Ritalin that grow to hate their parents for having put them on medication, quit it, and find themselves completely lost in life. They have no idea how dysfunctional they are. They've never had a chance to experience how debilitating it can be.
Personally I mostly do better without the drugs even though my mind is also in an always on state. But I do have them here and rarely (last time over a year ago) take them, if my very easily distracted mind collides with some very important and immovable deadline.
I also feel though that my brain sometimes kicks me in a hyperproductive mode (like being in the zone on steroids) and I just get a shitton of difficult work done and I felt the meds prevented that too.
- imagine watching tv at a bar where everyone had a remote control. That’s the attention model in my head, i can start to form ideas and concepts then suddenly realize I’m thinking about something else
- add 3-4 more tvs. That’s the distraction model, external stimuli drag my attention
- the ‘hyperfocus’ you hear about would be similar to the bar handing you a pair of noise canceling headphones and dedicating the tv directly in front of you to binging on an amazing new series. It’s not just focus as much as it’s a temporary obsession.
Some ways it seems to manifest in my life:
- i never ever ever finish a discretionary project, 80% at best. i completely lose interest and have zero drive. Projects for work require me to procrastinate to the point where my attention is fueled by adrenaline.
- i can’t read anything that requires more than one sitting. I’ll read for three hours but the next time i have an opportunity to read i find i have no interest
- i constantly lose shit
- i constantly pack more and more activity into the period before i need to get ready for something, causing me to always be lateish and running in the airport
- i think of great gifts for people but always end up last-minute scrambling for garbage
- i can be a bit of an airhead at times
- at work I’m a generalist. I’ve been at this a long time but i don’t know anyone in my personal sphere that knows a bit about more domains than i do. On the other hand there isn’t a single domain that i don’t know someone that knows more than i do.
The first time i had a ‘quiet mind’ was probably a week after i was prescribed Adderall. It was like a flashing cursor in my head and I became so overpowered with emotion that i just started crying. Like those videos where someone with color blindness tries on those glasses. It was incredible.
This is the exact thing I said that had my therapist wonder whether I have ADHD.
I am a brilliant software engineer, my employers have always been pleased with my performance, yet my hard disk is full of hundreds of great ideas I have started and never finished. I have never in my life been able to stay on the same idea for more than 3 coding session. The last side project I worked on that I am proud of has been written 19 years ago, as a teenager, while pumped full of alcohol, cigarettes and weed.
I have started medication, and I am slowly starting to pick up the pieces, writing some code in my spare time (I just finished writing my first Emacs config) but unlearning that I am a failure at motivation will not be easy.
- Growing up, it took me longer than the average to pick up social rules and customs "by mere contact". As a result I didn't make any friends at all during school, and only 3 at highschool. I only started "growing out of it" when I reached University. I still struggle with some social norms. I am a bit of a people pleaser, and I avoid conflict too much.
- Keeping in touch with those few friends and even my own family is something I struggle with a lot - "Out of sight, out of mind" is more literal. I have to "plan" keeping in contact with people, including my mum.
- I have "Time blindness". Time has an immaterial quality for everyone, but in my case it is quite literal. I was often late, and never can tell how much time things take. I need to use a physical object, like an agenda, to transform daily planning into "a puzzle", something I can "solve" with spatial skills. I must have my agenda open in front of me all the time.
Everything else is the same as me. I have unconsciously learned to use anxiety to be on time. Any time I have something major planned the next day, I can't sleep. I am anxious all day until the moment comes, and then I ease up.
The inattentive aspect, which is the one I predominantly have, seems to have "missing social cues" on its list of symptoms.
There's also the indirect problem of children avoiding ADHD children and them getting less social practice as a result.
This might be relevant https://www.foothillsacademy.org/community/articles/adhd-soc...
A system discussed a few weeks ago:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475
Doing a search for "personal CRM" also brings up a number of results.
The way I things I usually end up binging through the entire book (or series) over several days. If, however, my reading spree is interrupted for whatever reason, I can just forget about what I was reading to the point where I return to it a year or two later to realize that I don't remember anything about it and have to restart.
The same effect tends to happen with any other project or habit I have. Painstakingly form a swimming habit and stick to it religiously for half a year? Doable, though extremely vexing. Then skip swimming for a week for some reason and the routine is just gone. I've had the opposite happen too though, where I just started doing workouts one day and consistently stuck to it for over 2 months with 0 effort (by which I mean I didn't have to struggle with choosing to do it. The actual physical exercise itself is a minor hurdle in comparison). Unfortunately, this habit also evaporated at some point.
The book Delivered From Distraction has helped a few people I know understand that they are not neurotypical.
This podcast opened my eyes: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/nov/13/adrian-ch...
For example, long term (drug) addiction presents itself as ADHD. To make confusion worse, plenty ADHD sufferers tend to abuse and get addicted to pleasurable activities (drugs, food, porn, etc.), worsening their condition. [1] It feels a bit like a chicken and egg situation but the point is: ADHD is a measurable difference in the pre frontal cortex that _needs_ to have been present since birth. There is no such thing as adult onset ADHD.
1: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/545e77cae4b0719cb5ad4...
The point of this book is to emphathize how many conditions result in ADHD-like symptoms and how easily ADHD is diagnosed nowadays, often wrongly, resulting in heavy non-required treatments easily prescribed to people in need for something else.
I'm still learning to live with it, but I've managed to understand how my brain ticks, why I'm in a constant search for pleasure, and now I have a theory why my life got so bad lately: I've quit my marijuana habit 8 years ago, I quit my smoking habit 2 years ago, and I've quit coffee because it doesn't play very nice with my anxiety and heart, and the more stimulants I've removed from my life, the less functional I've become, and even at my peak "drug" usage my motivation and focus was always outside my control, anyway. But at least I had the mental energy to do _things_. I was self medicating without knowing it.
I did suspect, when I started using Reddit 15 years ago the ADHD thing was a meme everybody said "yeah, I have that." It remained a meme for me, until, guess what, I actually have a problem and I shouldn't be struggling that much. The medication doesn't turn me into that Limitless movie, it gives me the chemicals needed to pick up trash off the floor, make boring phone calls and be a productive member of society. What's ordinary for most people, for me is absolutely mind blowing.