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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

What is the connection between ADHD and the Big Five personality trait of Conscientiousness? I know that they are negatively associated with one another, but I have trouble imagining the life of a high-C person who also has ADHD.

[1] leads me to believe they would look like someone with a high degree of hyperactivity and a low degree of inattentiveness.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3821966/

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I'm a high-C person who was recently diagnosed with ADHD. In my case, I was compensating for ADHD symptoms with extreme anxiety, which eventually became unsustainable.

That sounds like an awful dose to have. I think I'd rather just be a happy, non-anxious layabout than that. Did you have to go through a phase like that while weaning yourself off of anxiety as a driver of your own productivity?

I've been working on managing my anxiety for several years, and my productivity has been getting worse as my anxiety lessened (which was counterintuitive to me). That's how I ended up figuring out I might have ADHD.

I guess it depends if you're judging high-C by an internal desire/goal to be conscientious, or by actually planning and executing - because ADHD is characterised by a deficiency in the latter. A desire to be conscientious, coupled with continual failure to live up to it... that's what it's like.

ADHD has treatments which help significantly (structured lifestyle, medication). It’s like asking how half blind people can drive (answer is: they wear glasses to help them see)

It's not really like asking that. Blindness is a direct impact on vision -- ADHD is not a direct impact on Conscientiousness in all cases. That's why I linked the paper.

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