Cognitive AI for ADHD
comigo.ai
comigo.ai
My first response to this is that it solves problems that I don't have, and ignores the ones I do have.
Organizing my day on paper is trivial. I'm also married to someone with a good partnership, and we offload different types of tasks to each other. She might enjoy having software assistants to be more productive, but I don't need that. I have her.
The trick for me is that it is important that my life be organized around engaging with things that I want to do. And thereby having my wants reinforce executive control so that I can do what I think that I should. This involves a lot of managing of my emotional state, and a lot of REJECTING of outside demands by the world that I conform to how the world wants me to be. I see nothing about this app that helps me do either thing.
Yes, yes, I know the idea of eliminating distractions so that I can focus. Honestly, that's crap that leads to disasters every time I try it. If I have positive motivations to do X, distractions are easy to set aside. If motivations are negative, I will be unable to resist creating distractions. And a straightjacket that prevents that leads to insanity.
Which returns me to my point. The key, for me, in handling ADHD is emotional tools to find positive motivations, and social tools to resist the world attempting to load me with tasks through negative motivations.
I can ramble on for ages about it. But it is also a highly personal journey - what works for me won't for the next person and vice versa. However KNOWING that it is important is huge.
Dr. Sabrina Schuck is where I really learned the importance of tying shoulds to wants.
I will say that it isn't easy. But the flexibility that can come with being a programmer really helps.
My problems are loss of appetite, trouble sleeping (leading to sleep deprivation that itself causes loss of executive control), and irritability. This is in addition to the fact that I have high blood pressure, and would rather not have to increase the cocktail of medications that I'm taking for that.
Believe one of the brands is called Intuniv.
It certainly seems better for me than a stimulant.
Can you elaborate which ADHD symptoms it has helped the most? I'm currently not taking any meds but I can't focus or concentrate to save my life which makes a demanding IT job difficult at times.
I had already achieved quite a lot in the way of symptom management through cognitive behavioral tools and physical exercise, but consistent application of tools and discipline broadly are exactly what ADHDrs often struggle with. Clearly, it's problematic to rely on a treatment for unreliability which is itself unreliable. So good results, but inconsistent.
The guanfacine has been much more stably effective at reducing the general baseline tendencies. For me, like I said, it was a miracle, since like you, but for a different reason, I can't take simulants.
I've noticed that stimulants can make me hyper-fixate, which often times, can be very beneficial. I relied on hyperfocus prior to being medicated, and it seems like medication is just a on switch for hyperfocusing. At least, some of the time...
Guanfacine is approved to treat ADHD in the United States and several other countries.
Technically, extended-release Guanfacine is approved because that's what was used in the trials. The brand name is Intuniv and the generic is Guanfacine ER.
The generic guanfacine (non-ER) can also be used, though technically off label. The only difference is that it must be dosed twice a day instead of once a day and the absorption is different so you can't do a 1:1 translation of your dose to the ER.
Now that Guanfacine ER is generic and cheap, you might want to consider it for once daily dosing.
The non-stimulant medications are very good, but require some patience to get started with. Too many people give up in the first week or month because the side effects haven't settled yet. Straterra (Atomoxetine) is another one that can take 1-2 months for good efficacy. Clinical trials show the positive effects continue to build over the course of a year. Surprisingly, Atomoxetine has a lower relapse rate after discontinuation too, suggesting it might be making some long-term positive changes to the brain. This is a nice contrast to stimulants, where the patient becomes essentially dependent on the medication and can go through a protracted rebound if they ever have to discontinue.
One reason I have never considered the blood pressure medications is because, and correct me if I am wrong, if one takes them too consistently for too long, then sudden cessation can be dangerous and/or deadly.
> The non-stimulant medications are very good
Define very good. From what I have gathered during my browsing of research papers of varying quality, it seems that that non-stimulant options are perhaps at the level of "better than nothing."
If I remember correctly, those who do well on MPH tend to do better on Atomoxetine, but even then, it's no guarantee. I've also read plenty of anecdotal evidence from people using Atomoxetine, and it seems like a large majority either cannot even make it past a few weeks due to intolerable side-effects.
Also, the wikipedia page for Atomoxetine is not very reassuring with the statement:
A 2020 meta-analysis found that atomoxetine was associated with anorexia, weight loss, and hypertension, rating it as a "potentially least preferred agent based on safety" for treating ADHD.
What I really want to see if more head-to-head drug trials with all these medications and non-pharmaceutical alternatives.
For example, how much more effective on average are stimulants than non-stimulants? Are things like caffeine, nicotine, or both combined more effective than non-stimulants? What about compared to stimulants?
All I can ever find is research supporting if a medication is successful in reducing symptoms compared to a placebo. I just want to see them all ranked against themselves. Of course, I understand individual experiences would vary wildly, but I do think there is a potential for some utility in this data.
Even getting in a small argument with my kids would increase my heart rate and blood pressure to unsafe levels. However, it did help me focus and pay attention, it also helped me kick my Marijuana habit (Legal state) which looking back just fueled my ADHD symptoms. It was also being used as a crutch to avoid dealing with my emotions and problems in life which just added to my anxiety.
Going back to the studies, another issue is that these medications can vary wildly from person to person based upon our own perceptions, experiences, and other comorbidities combined.
Like lots of medications, you really do just have to try out several until something works well with your particular body.
I wasn't aware of the long term positive changes, perhaps this is what my psych should have said instead of giving me an analogy of floating down a river and wanting me to carry on down that same stream without the meds...
This needs more context, because unlike stimulants, you can't quit guanfacine instantly or you'll feel pretty ill. You have to taper off it for a week or two.
Also, you can't drink on it (enjoyably) and it made me feel tired and emotional.
Just want to warn people here. Follow-up warning: Don't trust psychs. Much like cops they're actively trying to ruin your life.
"ADHD types" as I understand, are pretty controversial. If you're going to say that one "type" should not get medicine for a morbid condition, you should have a good reason.
What happens is a substantial percentage of people with ADHD get hurt by a system that uses them, chews them up, and spits them out with nothing, after taking every cent they have. Often times, we die from associated conditions, so it just gets swept under the rug. The industry isn't exactly searching for answers here, so their death is in vein, which infuriates me.
This is a known problem that I'm talking about, because I want it to change. Healthcare for people with ADHD is openly bigoted, degrading, and often harmful.
I'm astonished that despite all the news, conditions for people with ADHD are as bad as ever, and maybe getting worse. I think there's an interesting link to the trans community as well, since some of the psych issue overlap.
It may seem that trans have it better than ever, but they're up against whole armies now. There may be acceptance now, but I can imagine it being even harder to lay low. Mental health is less taboo, but people with ADHD are increasingly being marginalized, told to just give up on their aspirations, and accept life being disabled.
The worst idea ever is assigning them "monitors". The kid is in a classroom that goes too slow to hold their interest. And there is an adult whose job is to torture them with reminders to return to task every time they get distracted. Guess how well this works? And yet it is a standard IEP intervention used across the country!
For less than the cost of adding the monitor, you could move the same kid into an environment where they can learn at their own pace. Thereby saving money, having the child learn faster, and removing a major source of disruptions for the rest of the class. But we've literally passed a law mandating "mainstreaming", which makes the common-sense and effective intervention illegal unless the parent pays for it out of pocket.
But that is a rant for another day.
Eat the rich I say, then we can start solving some of societies problems. Until then we are all just walking dollar signs, I imagine ADHD is particularly profitable to companies due to our impulse purchases and lack of executive function.
Great fodder for the criminal industrial complex too.
In my personal experience, my current behavior health provider (which is not a psych) has been very interested in trying to find whatever works to help me get along in this world, be it medication or not. Maybe I got lucky there.
I've always been gotten the impression that ADHD is just another hurdle in my life and that I just have to work harder than more neurotypical people to achieve the same results.
I am curious to know about what age range you are in as I wonder if this is also a generational / parenting difference? I am almost 40 myself and see many hurdles and issues that my kids are facing nowadays which I can't even imagine sometimes.
How do you deal with chores?
Second, I use doing routine chores as meditation and thinking time. It does lead to doing the chore less efficiently - I might break off loading the dishwasher to pace, think, and jot down a note. But it is also personally productive time for me.
I think meditation is overlooked in favor of medications as a valid aid in folks with executive function disorders.
I personally just listen to music with noise cancelling headphones while doing chores. It also helped that I took the time to explain to my family that I am not trying to ignore them but sometimes I need to unwind after a mentally taxing day at work with some distraction free cleaning.
It's stupid, but it works. At least for me. I think it comes down to 2 different types of positive reinforcement:
1. It feels good to mark a task done. 2. It feels good to look at a list of all of the things I did that day, even if they were the size of taking out the trash.
50 small rewards works better than one giant one. Even if the 50 small rewards were just + points TOWARDS getting the one giant one.
Just keep an eye out for productive moods. Keep checking with yourself if you feel like doing chore X and if the answer is "yeah I guess" drop everything and do the chore.
That's the hallmark of applying technology for technology's sake, which is a lot of what engineers and tech entrepreneurs do nowadays. Especially for technologies that are getting a lot of hype. AI is blockchain all over again, a lot of "let me try to shoehorn this sexy tech where it doesn't really belong."
I'm sure a psychologist could load me down with some list of diagnoses if I was particularly curious. I haven't been curious, and I'm rather skeptical about the current state of psychology.
I have all three and I'm on Elvanse. When I first started it sent my anxiety through the roof, but my clinician wanted me to stick with it for a few weeks to wait for me to level out, and we increased dosage a few times.
When I found a dose that worked for me, it's a bit of a trade-off. I am a bit jittery for the first hour or two of the day, but that's "jittery" anxiety rather "doom" anxiety. The sort of fidgeting in your chair kind of feeling but the rest of the day is fine. I find the trade off is worth it for me.
When i tried methylphenidate, it gave me the "sense of impending doom" sort of anxiety. That deep feeling in your chest that something terrible is imminent, I didn't like it at all and that's part of why I started antidepressants in the first place.
A combination with Anxiety/Depression meds and therapy might help. Some types only need an offlabel antidepressant like Bupropion for both impairments. All the best.
> This involves a lot of managing of my emotional state, and a lot of REJECTING of outside demands by the world that I conform to how the world wants me to be.
A hallmark of ADHD is emotional dysregulation and impulsivity, so what exactly does rejecting "outside demands" look like? How exactly are you managing emotional state if not with medication? Ironically the only way I've managed my emotional state off medication is by conforming to outside demands and ignoring my individual desires/motivations as much as possible.
Trying to do things because someone is pushing me to do them will result in my becoming resentful, and losing my ability to get into an effective state of flow. But enough places in tech provide enough flexibility that I've been able to find places where I can be productive. And, in a virtuous cycle, productivity can make all sorts of oddities acceptable in an employee.
As for emotional dysregulation, let me address that. ADHD is caused by weak executive function. People with ADHD are slow to realize that we SHOULD do X, and the SHOULD is fairly weak. Therefore it becomes hard to resist emotions telling us we want to do Y instead.
I have two tools to address that.
The first is that at a purely emotional level, I strive to be fairly balanced. I work to address things that cause me negative emotions, like resentment, so that I don't have negative emotions to fight against.
The second is that I attach my "shoulds" to my understanding of what I actually want and care about. As a result the idea "I should X" is reinforced by a DESIRE to do X. And this emotional reinforcement makes it easy to do it.
Ironically, it is always easier to motivate myself in the short term with negative emotions. But the effect of doing so is a breakdown of the positive feedback loop that I'm using to maintain myself. Thus forcing myself only works for a limited time, and then falls apart. And so that short-term solution is toxic for me. I suspect that it is toxic for most people - but my ADHD makes it harder to deal with for me.
That said, everything that I do for me involves doing the opposite of what society pushes me towards. This makes for an interesting balancing act.
This is precisely why I chose academia. My whole day is mine, no one tells me what to do except which class to teach, and even then I can teach it how I please. It’s perfect for my adhd. They just let me loose and I do science and bring them money. Perfect arrangement. Sometimes I can be a stereotypical absent minded professor tho, but that doesn’t ever really cut against me. Students complain sometimes but I do my best for them and get high reviews, so I think I’m managing okay.
I've always had a pretty classic presentation of ADHD. Demands were hard for me to comply with, but I never lacked a willingness to comply when I could.
The pushing back against demands that I am describing is a coping mechanism that I find improves my self-control. But I don't avoid demands. In fact I make a lot of demands of myself - as long as they are tied to accomplishing things that I want.
What was effective or not in your search?
I also recommend not trying to work for Amazon.
Tools are useful in as much as they help you control your attention.
The only ones I've found truly useful are ER4SRs. (In ear monitors, -35DB to the environment. I listen to music while I work, at ~70DB. If you do the math about the only thing I can hear is a fire alarm... and that's about right. :) )
It may have been that my ears just seal better using foam than with the three flange oddity Etymotic puts on these?
I do agree the Etymotics sound better out of the box, but after using AutoEQ they sound pretty similar.
I've used the 7HZ Timeless, and it is an excellent IEM... But it doesn't match the ER4, for my use-case.
And in that case, the organisational tools are still helpful
Even for "normies" this is true. We all forget this. Medicine is often an art as much as a science.
As far as my ability to work to music... It beats office noise, and I have always had tinnitus, so... total silence is actually bad for me. Background noise saves me.
For a long time I thought I couldn't. Then I found lots of playlists of pretty good music. Try https://www.programmersmusic.com/ and see if any of those styles work for you.
Note, I now find that music helps me focus, but lessens my creativity. So I only sometimes use music.
Motivation has been my biggest A-Ha with ADHD and trying my absolute best to align what I do with what I want to do otherwise I am setting myself up for failure and others for disappointment with me.
People tend to think of motivation as some innate property of your person. But it's actually an emotional response to inputs.
If you want some personal books for yourself, try Meditations (by Marcus Aurelius), The Gentle Art of Not Giving a F_ck, and Atomic Habits. If you want some management books to help with your team, try Peopleware (a classic), First, Break All The Rules (much better than the title suggests), and Tribal Leadership.
As far as I can tell, focus and motivation are just a symptom of the deeper discomfort and anxiety caused by lower neurotransmitter levels. In turn, that shapes your relationship with the world.
It sometimes happens that I just physically can't bring myself to complete some simple but important chore. That's not because I'm mentally weak, but because my ADHD brain does not provide the right amount of dopamine which everyone else with a more typical brain would get.
It took my son 2 months to be officially diagnosed. A real pain? Sure. But a heck of a lot better than the situation today where kids with chronic sleep deprivation are given an ADHD diagnosis, then sent home with a medication that masks the sleep deprivation while giving them insomnia.
Turns out once medicated, if I have caffeine after about 15:00 I’m in for a bad night. Brains are extremely weird.
The ability to recognise when someone might be thirsty, doesn't mean dehydration no longer exists. They go together.
Can you prove that? Because my understanding is that ADHD isn't diagnosable by imaging the brain. If there was a structural difference, presumably it would show up on scans? Or at least post-mortems?
AFAIK it is visible on fMRI, but doing so is incredibly expensive and taxing on the person - you'd need to keep them in the fMRI for very long time, repeatedly, and watch them doing different tasks.
But I've seen papers about this where they did that with some people. The brain simply doesn't fire up like a normal brain does. The structural difference itself might be too small (on cellular or even molecular level) to see with current resolution, but the effect is clearly visible - as well as that medication makes the brain behave more like normal brains, as opposed to normal brains on stimulants (which puts them into overdrive).
Quick search:
- https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/315884
- https://bmcmedimaging.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...
But this doesn't end with the prescription - I visit the doctor every 2 weeks and he continually questions me about the effects the medication has on my life, and tries to see whether it matches the expected outcome for a person with ADHD. If it did not, they would change the diagnosis.
In my case, everything fits - the stimulants make me slow down or even sleep, I'm less angry and overall more emotionally stable, less impulsive, and finally able to work on a task that I choose for an extended period of time. If this was not the case, I'm sure the doctor would be looking for a different diagnosis.
At first i wanted to disagree, then i realized why. Disorder means wrongly ordered or sickness. ADHD is classified as such, and if you want treatment, you need to get yourself diagnosed.
I really dislike the pathologizing of every neurotype that deviates from the imaginary normal person. I'm pretty sure, if you look closely you'll find something "broken" in everybody.
Other perspectives are possible. ADHD can be an advantage. A survey in a network of CEOs found over 60% have it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdT4DIiX7Nk
Some become a Rockstar: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ElaL9Zo_Oes
In my case, I was hyper-focused on computers since I was a child, and that got me my career/business and that probably saved my life -- because I was totally unable to do anything in school and wasn't able to finish first year of high school and dropped out of it. I wouldn't call it an advantage even though it's probably the reason why I'm so good with computers.
In many cases like the CEOs you speak of, you see the surface - their success - but you ignore the problems they have in day-to-day life, the ruined childhood and the ruined relationships in adulthood. Many would trade all their success for normal life.
It's definitely a disorder. A weird one that might give you above average abilities in some very specific cases and areas of life, but still a disorder. You wouldn't say autism isn't a disorder just because there are few autistic savants.
Also consider - ADHD is much more often present in highly intelligent people. What you see might be a person that was able to overcome their disorder through their intelligence, but their life would be much better and they'd be way more successful had they not have the disorder. And now imagine how a person of average intelligence with ADHD must struggle with their life.
I have an IQ of 136, which is considered to be very gifted, but my performance and life success thus far are decidedly average. It's a debilitating condition if it's not detected in time and not managed.
With regards to the second half of your post: I understand how you meant for it to come across and that you posted it with the best of intentions, but it still hurts a little bit to read. To save you the sob story, let's just say it's a bit similar to telling paraplegic to be happy with his cool motorised wheelchair that he gets to ride around in all day, and that some of the greatest achievements in history were made by people who often sat in chairs also :)
It’s a cruel paradox. A constant background of quiet anxiety, permanent absence of satisfaction, risk taking behavior combined with gripping fear of failure, and a perpetual quest for more can be a great adaptation in an unstable and insecure environment. However, it’s not exactly a blessing.
Yeah, about that. I fell into the same trap. Now I have someone who thinks her relative superpower makes her more mature and me more infantile even though she grew up dyslexic and still cannot distinguish to/too/two (and even though my income, while more highly variable than hers, is also far, far greater). Apparently it's fairly common for this to very negatively affect relationships. How in the heck did you manage that?? (assuming you did)
How do actually do it will vary widely from couple to couple. The book The 5 Love Languages may help. It was one of many that helped me.
This is exactly what I suspect of virtually any kind of app, software, platform, etc. I’m advertised as intended to help me with ADHD. ADHD is expresses itself in such a broad variety of ways. I just don’t trust that any kind of app is actually so tuned into my experience of ADHD that it could actually be helpful.
I hesitate to say this: but, it’s hard hard not to feel offended at times by the ways in which ADHD appears to be radically oversimplified to fit into a narrow product specification and pitched to people who might really need help.
At least this seems to be free to use. I really hate when solutions like this cost money and advertise specifically for ADHD. Because, being impulsive, of course I sign up for the thing, use it for maybe a couple days, then stop using it, but forget to unsubscribe for like 5 months, wasting a bunch of money...
Have you been able to find something that works for you?
Besides that, the main thing I've learned is there's no one-size-fits-all type solution. Sit down and pick one thing you want to improve on, the smaller the better. E.g. procrastination of chores is a big issue for me, and there I realised I'd been looking at it from the wrong point of view. Trying to motivate/schedule chores was completely pointless. The real issue was how easy it was to procrastinate it for something else. Once I reframed it as making procrastination harder, solutions were easier to find. One problem was I would just stop by my computer in the morning to check social media or HN or what have you, and end up sitting there for 5 hours doing various things. So I time-locked my computer using pam_time on linux. Sure, I could perfectly well bypass it by booting up a usb stick and editing the configuration, but that would take time, and some planning(gotta find a usb stick, write an ISO from some old laptop, etc). That provided enough friction to stop the impulse to procrastinate, and enough time to stop and realise I actually can't "just check something real quick", I'll always end up moving from distraction to distraction for hours on end. That's the real issue; the time frame where you actually believe that is short, but long enough to get sucked in.
In other words, and it took me years to realise this, the key cause of procrastination is impulsivity, and impulsivity follows the path of least resistance. So if doing the dishes is actually the easiest thing to start doing, that's also what will come to mind.
So I think these services always take the wrong approach. Instead of promising to make the ADHD disappear or take a disciplined all-or-nothing blocking approach, they need to consider the fact that people with ADHD are aware that it's a thing they have to life with and generally try to optimize their lives to best cope with it.
So any such company should probably take on whatever tasks one has to do in life to survive in general and try to make all of that more accessible and disability-friendly to be of most help.
And we still live in a world with a lot of stigma, the ideas that adult ADHD isn't a thing or that medication is outright bad or literally cheating in life, or that ADHD doesn't exist or is overdiagnosed. There's A LOT to tackle in this lane.
I suppose that's my point. ADHD has such a diverse battery of symptoms (many of which are also expressed in other pathologies) that targeting just one of them with an app and then pitching it as "an app to help with ADHD" is very unconvincing (if not downright lazy, if not cynical). An app made to do a generally useful thing pitched to anyone who has the need for that thing, however…
Medication is a mixed bag. Great for those that it is great for, but not great for others. ADHD is way over diagnosed. Many disorders can cause lack of executive function, and if you have one of those, a specific treatment is better than masking one of the symptoms.
Yes. There is a lot to tackle in this lane. But part of it is that we need to clearly understand what the lane actually looks like. It isn't simple.
"This is how you treat ADHD based off science, Dr Russell Barkley part of 2012 Burnett Lecture" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tpB-B8BXk0
Edit: here's a newer one by the same speaker "ADHD as Motivation Deficit Disorder" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR3RJU6838c
He does fine until he starts spouting dogma about what all interventions must look like. That part is BS. BY FAR the most effective intervention that I've seen for ADHD in children is https://www.cdc.uci.edu/. It does none of what he claims you need to do. And it routinely takes people who can't perform in a normal classroom, and turns them into people who can.
I just watched a bit of the second video.
One problem with his model. One of the classic presentations of ADHD is hyperfocus. A state in which everything he says about ADHD is wrong.
The problem with both videos is that he is focused on control as accomplished through executive control. But there is a second path towards emotional control involving dealing with our emotions. And if you succeed in THAT, then your basic emotional makeup is supporting your self-control. Rather than imposing control through executive function, your executive function is being supported by your emotional makeup.
I've found this to be a far more effective way to do things. But it requires unlearning a whole lot about how we think that things should be done.
I could write a book, and it would still feel vague. And what I do for myself, isn't going to work the same way for you.
I will say that my path involved a lot of work on self-honesty. A lot of work on body awareness. (A lot of emotions show up in your body.) A lot of work on building empathy and gratitude. Meditation played more than a small role.
All of that just to get to the point where I'm aware of what I need to be aware of to start finding what works for me.
[edit] The best book on meditation might be John Yates - Mind Illuminated. Got it after a recommendation here on HN.
I have a hard time understanding what this means
Many things are measured on a scale that goes from mild, to moderate, to moderately severe, to severe.
Mild ADHD: You're more distractable and forgetful than most. You have techniques to get around this such as reminders, planners, assistants etc.
Moderate ADHD: You struggle with important task completion all the time. You've experienced consequences from it such as job loss or dropping out of college You may have depression or anxiety related to your ADHD
Severe ADHD: You're in prison because of a violent outburst caused by your emotional disregulation. You're homeless because you can't hold down a job or a relationship. You're dead because you crashed your car while distracted.
Some people struggle in some situations, but with behavioural management can control it. Some people will find any excuse to not do what they're supposed to do, and have to fight the urge all day every day.
I personally had a bit of the latter, in that I often found myself just unexpectedly walking off mid work and finding myself across the building for no reason. It was just a physical urge to get up and do anything apart from work
For me, that happens with chronic lack of sleep. Particularly when combined with stress. But in general I'm not too sensitive to sleep. I just start with a low baseline of executive control.
Good for you. Not everyone is that lucky though.
> Yes, yes, I know the idea of eliminating distractions so that I can focus. Honestly, that's crap that leads to disasters every time I try it. If I have positive motivations to do X, distractions are easy to set aside.
I don't have ADHD but this is something I struggle with/keep at the back of my head constantly. It took me a very long time to accept that (to put it bluntly) it's almost impossible for me to force myself to work on something I find useless. I wrote about this here: https://sonnet.io/posts/hummingbirds/ and here: https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/
Do you have any resources on the subject you could recommend?
I have high motivation/curiosity and struggle hard to do things even if I know like and enjoy them.
Medication helps tremendously with this and I reduced it for a few years and still have behavior patterns I learned on medication
That said, I would not discount that it works. Motivation only works for me if it is either overwhelming, or I'm in a good space. And that mostly means only when I'm in a good space.
Getting into that good space requires keeping my shoulds only things I want for a long enough time to condition my brain to the idea. This is hard to arrange, takes a good while to start working properly, and is easy to accidentally undo. It certainly isn't something I can just turn on.
I've been through a degree, a masters and years of work using every trick in the book to force myself to work and not get distracted. I have super detailed plans, all of my work is accountable, I write down everything I have to do. It goes on and on how I micro-manage my day just to force myself to work or do my tasks.
Then I got an ADHD diagnosis, started medication and my life changed. Suddenly I can just sit down and get to work instead of fighting myself to put the phone down and close reddit. I don't get up and wander off unexpectedly, I don't feel a physical urge to walk off out of my seat and in my 30s I realised that's what normal is. I don't put off every little 5 minute task, I just do them without a second thought.
Sure, I can survive without the meds, but life is so much easier not having to fight against myself for every single damn task.
I also take antidpressants and I view them in the same way. The tablets don't "cure" me, but they clear my head enough so that I can make the conscious decision to improve my behaviour.
I found much later in life that the only things that consistently motivated me were a looming deadline, or severe consequences to failure. The lone exception was computer puzzles, by which I mean things like “how do I get this obscure Chinese sound card running in Gentoo,” or “how does a file actually get written to a drive? oh look blkparse…”
About a year ago, I got an ADHD diagnosis for primarily inattentive type, and my life changed. There have been some tweaks here and there to medication and dosage, but the amount of focus I can now devote to tasks which previously would be monstrously difficult - like writing Jira stories - is amazing.
You've offered no compelling reason to use this, nor explained what it does or how it can help me except in the vaguest of terms.
It seems to be an effort to game you into being a more productive worker, and not actually helping you live with ADHD.
Additionally, while I very desperately want an AI personal assistant to help me manage my ADHD, there is absolutely no way in hell I'd ever use something that doesn't run on my hardware in my house that I physically control. Such an assistant would know literally everything about me, and that is not something anyone should ever trust to a company.
Where ADHD leads to problems being productive despite having the intelligence to do the job, and that jobs tend to, y'know, fire you if you're not productive, and you go homeless without money, which you get from having a job, isn't helping ADHD people be productive the same thing?
As far as your trust issues go, that's for each individual to decide. Some people are able to see past their cynicism and derive value from the products companies make.
Sure, if you believe the meaning of life is working as hard as you possibly can for no benefit until you die.
Real people in the real world have passions, desires, hobbies. Chores, relationships, responsibilities. We have lives. If you've ever met someone with severe ADHD, you'd see that it affects your life deeply and can greatly decrease your quality of life. And that's mostly because of the 'work til you drop' mindset.
> As far as your trust issues go, that's for each individual to decide.
Trusting companies who have over and over done everything they possibly can to turn your trust into money is not really a sane or logical stance to take. Giving enormous detail about your personal life, or confidential work data to a company that blatantly does not respect you or your privacy is not wise.
So to sum up, you're mansplaining my own disability to me and gaslighting me about not trusting openai.
Don't stop now, my 'shitty dudebro' bingo card is nearly full
I'm sorry you have it too.
And you understand that as them "taking your comment poorly"?
Bingo!
I have ADHD and have been very successful in my work life so far. I'm on a prescription medication for when my focus is necessary but that seems to be either dismissed or heavily frowned upon here.
Is there a reason why the answer to ADHD seems to be "use AI to do your work" rather than "use the proven medications to allow you to focus"? It just seems strange to me.
For me personally, I am interested in exploring every avenue available to me to help me get away from medication, because I kinda hate it. The results I get make it worth it, but every medication I try makes me feel bad physically, and I hate the extreme ups and downs throughout the day that stimulants can cause.
Medication is fine, it helps a lot of people, even if it doesn't work for everyone. For some, the effect is quite profound, even life changing. It's up to you, and anyone telling you it's somehow wrong isn't worth listening to.
As to AI, what I want is a LLM acting as a personal assistant fed from a database of all of my daily experiences. My brain isn't that great at organizing and recalling data, so I want to take all of the data I receive and feed it into a machine that can organize and recall it for me. I want a digital copy of my brain that I can search through.
The AI can pick up from my conversations that I promised Bill the TPS reports at 4. Because I'm bad at remembering and actioning on things, it can pop an event into my schedule. Or it can pick up that I said I'd work on encabulator designs in six standups but there's no reference in my commit history and nag me.
I could ask "what do I know about encabulation" and get every article I personally have read relating to mazelvanes and perfabulated amylite. Or "what was that book I read one time about time traveling dogs", or "what's my sister in law's favorite color?", or "what did Kathy say last week about her kid's audition?"
Better yet, it could scan through conversations and guess that Alice wants fancy German chocolates for her birthday because she mentioned it 18 times.
There's just some things my brain does badly at. Just part of the neurological lottery I guess. I want to make up for that by offloading cognitive effort onto a machine. That will massively improve my quality of life, which has the side effect of making me much, much more productive.
I feel like this is a more positive way to help ADHD people. It works with you to make up for the things you're deficient at, rather than making you work harder to compensate. It's actual helping and not "you can do better"
I think everyone could benefit from this type of thing, but right now I see enormous potential for actually helping ADHD and autistic people.
The same people who are anti-medication are most likely anti-AI.
I have ADHD and I’ve studied it a bit, and have followed a lot of developments and changes in perceptions around it. I also don’t use meditation.
Generally, I’ve noticed a lot of society has a vague anti-daily-medication-for-mental-health view. If you need it every day people tend to be against it. Part of it is that people seem to think you should learn how to cope (you should), which some people think as minimizing the disorder (which is bad). I’ve seen people mention that they don’t like how medication changes your personality (which can be very strong) or generally just don’t like the feeling of being on it.
I’m not a doctor, but ADHD medication can increase your risk of suicide and other severe mental health issues, so there is good health reasons not to take it unless you “need” to. Everyone just seems to have a different definition of “need”.
Personally, for me and my decision not to take it, I felt it was important to learn to live how my body wanted me to. I never liked how i felt on the medication, and i wanted to be myself. Society is very focused on productivity, which can be hard for someone with ADHD to fit into. I wanted to learn how to fit myself into the world, so I could “succeed” and live a happy life (whatever that meant) without having any dependencies. I didn’t want a missed pill one morning or a drug shortage to impart my ability to live my life. That might mean that I don’t have the career I wish I could have, and I won’t live by others’ definition of success, and maybe I have to make conscious changes to my routine.
In the meantime highly productive people from Thomas Jefferson to Richard Feynman appear to have had ADHD. Do you really think that this app would have made a positive difference in their lives?
Based on what behaviors other than being somewhat eclectic? I've seen people try to diagnose historical figures before, but I have never seen these two on any list that I can remember.
Richard Feynman I'm basing on my impressions from Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Others Think? In particular the first book explains his inability to function when he tried to comply with external demands, and describes the lengths that he went to to live a curiosity driven life where he functioned much better. That matches my experience of ADHD. The second book has a long description of the period in which he wrote https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm. That description contains a lot that is instantly recognizable as what it feels like to have hyperfocus.
Your attempt at framing consumer protection as trust issues undermine the emotional scope of being a human being. You should seriously evaluate why someone who asks for the right to privacy is being framed in your mind as having a “trust issue.”
AI, in its current iteration as a centralized technology, will encourage future rent-seeking by incumbents and impact those dependent on it. Open access to models and locally running offline AI technology will be critical to its long-term success.
When you want my money, and I don't want to give it to you, that's an "issue", but more for you than me.
That said, a lot of "ADHD apps" are todo lists and planning apps. ADHD isn't a disorder of planning, it's a disorder of doing. I can make realistic, specific, achievable plans as well as anyone else, but when it comes to doing the work it often just doesn't happen. Literally yesterday I lost a freelance client purely due to my own procrastination. I had a sensible plan and didn't follow it.
I don't want to just slam this app or other existing apps, so in an effort to be constructive here are some spaces that I think could be explored further to help people with ADHD:
* Smart speakers. I use them heavily and they are a great distraction free computing device. "Fire and forget" reminders are great. I have a smart speaker in every room and can set a reminder to do something in 30 minutes time without having to move, find a pen, pick up a phone or distract myself in any way.
* Emotional regulation. ADHD means you are on a rollercoaster of emotions that you can't regulate well. There are techniques for controlling them but when you are blinded with rage or bursting into tears you don't remember. Perhaps a device could constantly asses your emotional state and remind you of regulation techniques right when you need them.
* Anything centered around positivity and forgiveness. An app that makes past successes visible without minimizing the impact of the disorder would be great.
Aside from a privacy nightmare. Yeah I am giving a presentation to the board about this new confidential product and i dont know how to structure it
> Tell me all about this new product and how it will work. > Can you tell me the name of the company and its stock ticker?
They dont even say what the price is. Or how they monetize it. Or the source code Or ...
I think the best way to help is to fund basic research,
not just that it's made by people that don't have adhd, but people that haven't even read the modern science literature on the treatment and condition itself.
it's frustrating!
ATTENTION is all you need?
And yes, attention is all we need because we lacked it so much
And to lobby your politicians to take controls and schedules off the stimulant medications used to treat ADHD. Stop voting for candidates without sensible drug policies.
There are issues surrounding that in the US, given price. In Norway my meds are free.
OTC or not, the controlled substance laws and schedules (yes, in the US) have resulted in the demand exceeding the supply. People who need them cannot get them because they're just not available. Pharmacists can't even tell you what they do or don't have.
https://www.rev.com/blog/rev-spotlight/announcing-rev-ai-hip...
My first impression is that the results tracking will just be a report of failures and wind up causing disinterest in the application as a whole.
I also am concerned that the AI may wind up placing demands on me that I may think I want in one moment, but don't wind up engaging with...leaving a bunch of stuff piling up.
The example of the presentation just sort of leaves it at "About the presentation ...", at which point it seems like the user is expected to ...tell the ai about the presentation. So I haven't really been shown how it solves any problem that I have.
Also remember that AIs are biased on the training set and you're targeting a minority of a population. It's probably not going to know "how" to speak to me, what tones actually work, etc.
I hope that all amounts to useful feedback -- I do really want an effective product to offload stuff to -- but if it's not effective, it has negative value in my life.
It's easy to have them slip off the list and be forgotten about, or not be able to do small things to move them ahead and have that progress reflected in the task. But I desperately want this.
The apparent stagnancy of Siri might be just that.
It's a lot, and you'd need a pretty clever model in the middle of it to make sense of.
I don't know much about AI today, but I get the sense that you could string together a bunch of different systems today to achieve this, but no one has done it yet.
Also, if the dataset is exposed, it'd be an unthinkable privacy breach. Something like this has to run on dedicated hardware that you own. Feeding every intimate detail of your entire life into the cloud should be completely untenable.
This would be like every other “ADHD focus” tool, where after the hyperfocus on it wears off (during which I get no actual work done other than making lists and schedules and…), I never touch it again.
You can't 100% trust some company to secure something this personal, but you know that you won't one day sell your personal diary to some ad firm.
Plus, privacy isn't even the biggest concern. What do you do when the company hosting it goes bust? Or simply decides to not support it anymore, or randomly increases the price? The server in my basement has way less uptime than AWS, but I control what services it runs, forever.
Why not?
> a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult. Most tools will use AI technologies in the back-end to achieve their goals. Currently this includes OpenAI's models. As the tools and backend improve, the intent is to move to an open source alternative..
> goblin.tools is offered free and available to all. It will stay free without ads or paywalls. Mobile apps of the tools are offered at a low price (on Android and iOS), which will help cover the running and maintenance costs so the website can stay completely free. Keeping the tools freely available in a convenient form is a foundational principle to us.
> Mobile apps of the tools are offered at a low price (on Android and iOS), which will help cover the running and maintenance costs so the website can stay completely free.
Mobile apps of the tools are offered at a low price (on Android and iOS), which will help cover the running and maintenance costs so the website can stay completely free.
If you’re not looking for stereotypical growth, it’s sustainable.
* Information We Collect: We collect information you provide when you register for our Service, including your Google account data. This data includes, but is not limited to, your name and email address.
* Use of Information: We use this information to personalize, understand, and improve our Service, communicate with you, respond to your requests, and enhance the overall user experience.
* Sharing of Information: Comigo will not share your personal information with third parties.
* Security: We prioritize protecting your data and have implemented technical and organizational measures to ensure its safety. However, no method of transmission or storage is entirely secure, thus we cannot guarantee absolute security.
* Changes to this Privacy Policy: We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page.
I've been working on my own similar, local-first solution for several years, because I simply cannot introduce a significant external dependency to my mental stack. Behavioral data is some of the most sensitive and dangerous data to leak.
There's irony with these types of apps: the more utility I can gain from them, the more risk I have should they introduce dark patterns, become defunct, or even make well-intended changes that break my personal workflows.
The scenario outlined on Comigo's home page begins with the user prompt "Hey Comigo my board meeting is in 4 hours and I wasn't able to work on my presentation slides..." - a context-aware agent would certainly have pre-empted this well before the same day, right?
Sorry if this seems overly critical. I have a lot of passion for this space, and there's a huge need, but there's something like 20,000+ "mental health" apps out there, and nearly every single one I've encountered has big red flags.
Having a tool that can automatically add items from infodumps/todolists would be useful.
I don't udnerstand the chrome extension part though.
Obsidian helps a lot for actual notes. That's the only thing keeping me remotely organized.
> At some point it will become a hardened habit and honestly much better than some AI crutch. There are better uses for AI in my opinion..
That's very true, what I would love to see is have it intelligently pull todo items from my obsidian notes. I'm personally not a fan of using AI for anything if it's not local though, especially with access to all of my notes.
One of the symptoms of ADHD is borderline impossibility of forming habits, in the way that neurotypical people think about them.
"Keep using X, remember to interact with it" is exactly the problems people struggle with in the first place. This is not an actionable advice on its own.
For one, basically all alerts are the same. Meaning there's no good way to make noisy alerts for critical events and quiet ones for mundane things. You can set multiple alerts for an event, like 1 week before, 1 day before, etc. But it's manual every time.
Something more like PagerDuty style alerts that let you set up classes of alert patterns would help. Alerts that blow up your phone until you get them would help. It's so easy to have the calendar alerts go completely unnoticed with just a chime if your phone is in your pocket or in another room or if your alert volumes don't happen to be perfect, which is pretty much impossible since background noise levels change throughout the day.
Even such minor things, like when you snooze an alert and you can configure it to notify X minutes before the event, if you select 0 minutes it still alerts the minute before the event which is enough time for me to get distracted again.
No, it's one of my biggest disappointments of technology today is that such basic tools are so poor at their job and lack such straightforward configuration controls. The tools are made to work for Google, not for you.
So of course people are going to points loads of third party add ons, and hacks to get calendar to be marginally more useful, but WHY should we need to jump through hoops to make our devices serve some actual useful purpose for us?
If I have to go to my desktop then most of the value is missed.
This is why your comment is being flagged. You managed to contradict yourself with two sentences, while also presenting the tone of an ad.
If the profit model requires a loose privacy policy then let me pay for an airtight one. This seems like the needed model for anything in this realm ongoing.
I'm sorry, but that statement just irks me. If you're only a few weeks into development, how can you honestly say what you're making will be the "most effective specialized AI for ADHD"? It's an unrealized aspiration stated as an inevitability. I don't think stating that you're "trying to build" or you're "goal is to build" would be so irksome.
No, don’t be sorry. The behavior displayed by this product and its creator can be at best described as offensive hubris, or more accurately I would describe the behavior as disgusting.
BUT, point taken on how I am presenting the product. Clearly I need to rethink that and will.
I understand your point, and I truly believe in our mission. I'm driven by my own experiences with ADHD, along with my family's journey, I'm committed to making a real difference. We have a very strong team with relevant advanced degrees, 30 published AI papers, and meaningful collaborations in healthcare.
We moved quickly with a proof of concept in just a week, and we're in our 16th iteration now of what you could call and MVP—embracing Reid Hoffman's advice that launching early is key. And regarding my chosen semantics, I live by words of Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no try!"
1. What factors in ADHD is this product supposed to treat? 2. How are you measuring the effectiveness of this tool? 3. What other tools for ADHD are you comparing against? 4. How do you manage HIPAA protections? What physical, network, and process security measures are you using?
So, you've put "a few weeks" of work into your project, but nevertheless already feel confident that you can market it as a medical treatment. Why?
As a primer: What stresses me out during the day:
- reminders are useless, they lead to hyperfocus state and I cannot get shit done or focus on anything else before
- calendar events are useless, in work life I try to have external dependent events as early in the morning as possible and hope the best to have enough energy afterwards
- social events, even scrum video sync calls are draining energy, because rasterizing people's emotions is very hard. Especially in open office spaces, which is the reason why I am never in those.
- if I am in an emotional state that does not allow me to work (mad/sad/bored/angry/overwhelmed), I need to find motivation to work with little and easy to fulfill tasks that have a low complexity in the scrum sense. Quick bug fixes, documentation tasks, writing tests etc.
- if I am in an emotional state where I can focus (happy/excited/motivated/calm/focussed/hyperfocussed), I don't want to be distracted by anything else. I am usually listening to music without vocals because of that, because vocals, alerts and notifications are distracting. This app/extension does not respect that, and adds more to the sea of noise.
The reason I use VIM as an editor for more than 20 years, and around 10 years together with i3 is mostly because of notifications. GNOME 3 got better for that, but blinking windows and notification bubbles on systray icons are still notifications, and are still distracting, so I made my choice to move away from GNOME to i3 because of that.
With my current setup, I have zero notifications - for better or worse. The only app I allow in the systray is OpenSnitch (my firewall), anything else is not allowed to have a systray or background-running process. I avoid electron apps like the plague because of that, and I wrote helper scripts that automatically kill those apps when I close their windows. I even tried to submit a PR to upstream electron because of it, but nobody seems to care about this issue and they deleted it.
A lot of electron apps enforce their UI decisions upon to you, which means that the UI frameworks, if not allowed to run in systray, render shitty toasts on the active screen - even when they are on another virtual screen. So yeah, the UX of "modern apps" is horrible from my point of view, because they keep ignoring my decisions to not want notifications. This includes Thunderbird, Slack, Mattermost, Discord and especially everything from Microsoft, like Outlook, Office or Teams.
I cannot use Windows or MacOS because there's literally hundreds of notifications, popups and dialogs that interrupt my workflow. In every single UI, from IDEs to even the goddamn GPU drivers that offer me promos, now even in the Start Menu. WTF.
At some point I tried to build a task planning app for myself to overcome mentioned issues with hyperfocus and external dependencies. I got it into a somewhat working state, but am out of ideas on how to make it more usable across multiple devices without having to have to host a web service that could add pitfalls. Would love to hear feedback if others like the idea, too. [1]