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Comment by from-nibly | Hacker News Reader

Fellow ADHD haver. You sound like you have ADHD and burnout. You need to tease those apart and deal with them one at a time. ADHD is going to be easier to get started on.

If you indeed get diagnosed with ADHD.

Do NOT try to do a bunch of weird stuff to "boost" your brain and fix your ADHD. Pills are good and I take them and if your doctor agrees you should then its a good idea to take pills.

But I see people with ADHD thinking that they need to make their brain more reliable. But the ADHD brain just isn't. It's like trying to say you only need 1 replica of this service if you can just get it to be reliable enough.

You don't need 1 reaaaaly reliable replica you need 3 replicas in HA and circuit breaking.

Make your environment; your job, your house, your finances, your routines, ADHD proof. Treat yourself like the chaos you are and make your life resilient to it.

Don't make it so you don't have ADHD (impossible) make it so it doesn't matter.

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This is how I fixed my focus problems (written very hastily as I am short on time):

Watch out for domestic abuse or bullying in your life, if you are a victim of it, the upset from it will knock out your executive functioning for a while and give you ADHD symptoms, due to the effect of the cortisol stress hormone. You might need a few weeks (or even months) of calm to get back to normal. To reiterate, check for stressors in your life and things that are making you upset. That can disrupt your focus.

Also, if you find yourself wanting to get up and walk about all the time it might be due to your mind subconsciously wanting to get away from the sources of distress.

If you find yourself fidgeting, it can be the mind's way of self-soothing yourself, to calm yourself down, so that you can work. Let yourself do it, without micromanaging or monitoring your focus, and you will naturally fall into the process of working, as long as you are paying some attention to the work... So as the days/weeks go by you will find yourself spending more and more time focusing, gradually bit by bit as a positive feedback loop is being built in your mind. You obviously want to work and focus, so let yourself do it, without excessive control or self-monitoring.

Also I found it good to frequently play some quick game on the computer in between the work - and eventually the work will take over and you won't find yourself needing to play the game anymore. Again I think it's a way of calming yourself down.

That is what worked for me. And how I broke out of it.

> Make your environment; your job, your house, your finances, your routines, ADHD proof. Treat yourself like the chaos you are and make your life resilient to it.

Can you expand on this? What suggestions do you have for accomplishing this?

This is going to sound like an empty promise (it might be), but I think this deserves a whole article, brb.

> Do NOT try to do a bunch of weird stuff to "boost" your brain and fix your ADHD. Pills are good and I take them and if your doctor agrees you should then its a good idea to take pills.

I'll be bold and go one step further; Even with nutritional supplements and the like, make sure you have some feedback signals (a doctor, friends, etc.) and -use them-. And even if you're on your own and you think it works, Talk to a professional. I have had friends -and- colleagues who either have crawled along with self-help or switched to self help and wound up losing years of personal progress.

> But I see people with ADHD thinking that they need to make their brain more reliable. But the ADHD brain just isn't. It's like trying to say you only need 1 replica of this service if you can just get it to be reliable enough.

Honestly sometimes it's like people treat 'ADHD Diagnosis' the way an impostor architect hears 'Cloud Application' and tries use the exact same pattern they always use for cloud apps, regardless of if it's the right fit for the specific problem.

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