Self-discipline is also more costly. You can brute-force your way through tasks with ADHD, but it is more taxing on your overall energy. Those with ADHD typically experience impulses often and it's harder for them to ignore. Forcing yourself to ignore them requires extra energy. It's not sustainable to do all the time. It's hard for those without ADHD to truly understand what that's like.
In addition to impulsivity, executive dysfunction affecting starting tasks or work is also a big challenge.
My hunch is that for a lot of people, ADD is a result of growing up in a home that felt unstable so they never gained a basic internal sense of stability that you need for things like task switching or staying focused.
I think people lean into the personality traits, 'neurotype', cognitive styles, talents, and inherent tendencies they have as kids when it comes to coping with trauma. You use the tools you have. If you have ADHD and a situation is unbearable, hyperfocus is a tool you have— or at least a pattern you can fall into— that can prevent you from being overwhelmed by the feelings that weigh on you when that situation is on your mind. It would be shocking to me if ADHDers didn't often end up relying on features of ADHD to adapt to traumatic situations.
These things are interrelated in people who have both, and I don't think it's generally easy (or necessary) to pick apart 'which is which' when it comes to a specific behavior or experience.
What parts were the most useful?
Any recommended resources or books?
There's a lot of videos with Richard Schwartz on Youtube explaining IFS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdZZ7sTX840
There's also a book called "Self-Therapy" by Jay Earley that gives an approach for doing IFS on your own.
Derek Scott has a great channel called IFSCA where he explains different IFS concepts - https://www.youtube.com/@IFSCA
https://www.amazon.com/No-Bad-Parts-Restoring-Wholeness/dp/1...
This is sort of non-descriptive. Every time you are happy, sad, angry, afraid, bored, tired; that's brain chemistry at play. Brains are electrochemical computers.
I am diagnosed with ADHD, and the best skill I've learned is putting myself into situations where I have no choice but to do the thing I need to do.
I refuse to be a person who offloads all responsibility to something that can be dealt with, with some effort.
It's like you are missing the drive to get that thing done to the point that your brain just tricks you into thinking that anything remotely productive seems more important and better to get started on now than the actual task. To me this is a rare occurrence, hence why I think I am not a ADHD person.
The problem to me is that this difficulty is hard to differentiate from self-discipline.
I suspect you will be less likely to feel that inability to get around to do the tasks that you know to be important to do it if you fail in a way that life itself, the universe, hurts you for the failure, as opposed to your boss saying "you're fired for showing up late".
I also suspect that some people use religion to fix this: Like picturing a higher being looking down and saying "Wherefore dost thou not now do that which thou must? Else, I shall smite thee from the heavens or cause thee great trouble in the afterlife."
This happened on a much larger scale when I was in university. I had 18 months for my dissertation. Each week that went by I planned to write a small chunk of it, just to get going. In the end I wrote the entire thing a week before the deadline with my professor literally sitting next to me making me do it.
> I suspect you will be less likely to feel that inability to get around to do the tasks that you know to be important to do it if you fail in a way that life itself, the universe, hurts you for the failure, as opposed to your boss saying "you're fired for showing up late".
This is true up to a point. What ADHD people need is consequences ASAP. Your boss checking in on you every hour and providing constant pressure is much more effective than a meeting at the end of the month where your boss blows his top and fires you because you've done very little.
To the ADHD sufferers out there ... would you say this describes one of the most predominant symptoms? Would you say someone who reads this and says, "That's me," likely has ADHD?
My thing is mostly that there is SO MUCH i want to do. I need to read this book, I need to practice this guitar, I need to respond to this email, I need to schedule an appointment.
Its not a matter of singular things that cause me issues, I just want to do so many things that I just kinda shut off.
Stoicism tends to be a difficult way to live but it does compensate in the long term.