Comment by kahnix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kahnix | Hacker News Reader

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I was diagnosed with ADHD in my early twenties during university and didn't manage to get medicated until 3 years later (The queue was quite long and I ended up getting a prescription from a private doctor in my home country)

I think it became really obvious to me when I would require a ton of discipline to do assignments around making applications, but doing something like configuring linux from scratch was so personally interesting to me I could stay up nights and days without any external stimulation.

I found that medication (Methylphendiate 20mg) have definitely helped me focus, but the direction of what I'm focusing doesn't always yield productive results (hyperfocusing on reddit for example). I've also started worring that what I've really done is created a dependence, where eventually ill have to up the dose as what I'm currently on will make me feel like I did pre meds, and stopping will make me feel worse.

I hope you find a treatment that works for you OP, but I agree with other comments that you might have just discovered you have had ADHD all this time because its not 'onset'.

> I found that medication have definitely helped me focus, but the direction of what I'm focusing doesn't always yield productive results (hyperfocusing on reddit for example).

I had this problem (and others) with Adderall. Vyvanse (Lisdexamfetamine) has been much better for me. I've also found that I get better results when I take my ADHD medication with protein, and about an hour before any caffeine intake. YMMV.

> I've also started worring that what I've really done is created a dependence, where eventually ill have to up the dose as what I'm currently on will make me feel like I did pre meds, and stopping will make me feel worse.

I worry about this too. I've been on 30mg Lisdexamfetamine for about two years and haven't felt a need to up my dose. But if I skip a day it hits hard. I don't know whether it's worse than before I started medicating or if it's just that my bar for mental function has been raised.

> I've also found that I get better results when I take my ADHD medication with protein, and about an hour before any caffeine intake. YMMV.

Regarding eating protein, lisdexamfetamine is basically just dexamfetamine bound to an amino acid. Your liver has to break the amino acid and dexamfetamine apart before the dexamfetamine is bioactive. That's basically how the time-release works; your liver can only break them apart so fast, resulting in a steady stream of dexamfetamine. It's part of why doctors like it, because opening the capsule and snorting it does basically nothing.

Eating protein occupies part of your liver's processing abilities, which should result in a "smoother" come up.

> I worry about this too. I've been on 30mg Lisdexamfetamine for about two years and haven't felt a need to up my dose. But if I skip a day it hits hard. I don't know whether it's worse than before I started medicating or if it's just that my bar for mental function has been raised.

I don't take mine on the weekend, generally. I find it helps keep me grounded in terms of my capabilities on vs off the meds, as well as giving me some non-amphetamine-d time to work through emotions. The meds make me almost too focused, and I'll end up neglecting how I'm feeling to plow through another hour of coding.

I also occasionally get worried about my medication, my tolerance and generally the effect it has on me. I typically ask my doctor to switch me to a non-stimulant medication. Atomoxetine is what I usually get, which is a norepinephrine modulator rather than an amphetamine. I don't find it as helpful, but it's good enough to keep me afloat at work for a month and it lacks the "speed" feeling amphetamines can have.

> I don't take mine on the weekend, generally. I find it helps keep me grounded in terms of my capabilities on vs off the meds, as well as giving me some non-amphetamine-d time to work through emotions.

I did this up until about six months ago and definitely appreciated the chance to reconnect with my "nominal" self, but unfortunately it was causing significant issues for me and my family. I would crash and be tired (which was not unusual in and of itself, but more exaggerated), I would have extreme executive dysfunction, and I would be completely unable to get anything done around the house and/or spend quality time with my wife and kids. It was all the misery of my pre-medicated working life compounded and condensed into the most precious hours of my personal life.

I was reluctant to start taking meds seven days a week because I feared even more that it would start losing its effectiveness over time, but fortunately that has not happened (yet) and my weekends are much more productive and happier for everyone.

>I think it became really obvious to me when I would require a ton of discipline to do assignments around making applications, but doing something like configuring linux from scratch was so personally interesting to me I could stay up nights and days without any external stimulation.

>I found that medication (Methylphendiate 20mg) have definitely helped me focus, but the direction of what I'm focusing doesn't always yield productive results (hyperfocusing on reddit for example). I've also started worring that what I've really done is created a dependence, where eventually ill have to up the dose as what I'm currently on will make me feel like I did pre meds, and stopping will make me feel worse.

This is my exact problem too. I can concentrate/focus much stronger (better?), but work is too boring and annoying so my projects are much more interesting.

Excuse my ignorance, but what is the line between ADHD and interest/geekery in the scenario you outlined above?

I imagine most of the HN readership could spend hours on something they love, and struggle to engage as deeply with many or most of the tasks that are required of them at work. But ADHD would not be the diagnosis for most people. Just boredom. What tips the experience over the line?

I’ll speak personally, I don’t know how other people experience ADHD, but I don’t just get “bored,” I have a crippling and anxiety inducing inability to do something. I REALLY want to do it, but I just, can’t? Like I physically can’t get up or walk over and do it, even though I know I have to and I even want to.

It really is a motivation problem, I have a strong desire to do it but I just… can’t?

An extremely, miserably stressful and depressing experience I have been through countless times! I’ve gotten somewhat better about it over the months and years (especially as its impact becomes more of a problem) but now I tend to channel it more into bikeshedding and perfectionistic tweaking....

Not diagnosed and got a high functioning score on an ADHD test so I may or may not have as bad of a problem as others. On the other hand, I failed out of college twice. it’s not great.

Yup, this is exactly the right description.

For lack of a better metaphor, imagine you have a job where you have to drink three cups of water per day. Seems pretty easy right, since it's just water. Most people can just drink it casually with no problem. It's just flavorless water.

Now imagine your tastebuds are different. Two of those three cups of water taste putrid, while one cup of water is delicious (like soda, tea or whatever your favorite beverage of choice is). Every day you're going to start with the best cup of water, and then struggle with the rest. Sometimes even all three taste putrid and you can't figure out why.

What medication did is that now they all consistently taste like water at minimum. Sometimes one cup is still better than the rest, but the others don't taste actively bad.

ADHD trends towards the extremes.

A hyper-fixation session feels closer to how people describe addiction than I’d like to admit.

When unmedicated, I can easily find myself diving down the rabbit hole for 12-14 hours straight, working on interesting but unimportant tasks.

You forget about any concept of time. You feel hunger but can’t pull yourself away to eat lunch or dinner. Daily goals are forgotten. You only stop when your body literally forces you.

With adhd it’s virtually impossible to do something not extremely stimulating - regardless of consequences later on.

With meds it’s still possible to procrastinate etc, just not to the levels as before.

To be completely fair it might not be exclusively ADHD. Research is discovering that Autism and ADHD are both on the "same" spectrum, and ASD covers both. Meaning they are not necessarily separate things.

My ability to do bullshit work, is practically zero. If it isn't a task that I find challenging/interesting/important then there is negative motivation (or tolerance) to do that thing. I can and will find something else to do, forever putting off the BigBoringTask. Sometimes I can fool myself, and sometimes I work the fix into the project.

Example: I _HATE_ filling out timesheets. If the company wants anything more specific then "clock in/clock out"; too bad. So, one place I worked I wrote up a bunch of script to scrape SSH logs to catch my login/logout, and would then calculate the "time spent on client". I also had it search emails based on that day and would pull the ticket number most likely related to why I was SSHing in. This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.

I love the fixing/solving, challenge/reward; I can't stand the tedium. And I just don't do it if I can't stand it.

I have had a clinical diagnosis for both ADHD & ASD. So it's no longer a mystery why I act/react the way I do. It also takes away the sting when somebody says "Everybody else has to do this, why is it so hard for you?"

First, obligatory xkcd [0].

> This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.

Yep. Occasionally I have to stop and remind myself that all I'm trying to do is rename 10 files (for example), and by the time I remember the {ba,z}sh-ism for parameter substitution, I could have probably manually renamed them. I usually tell myself that it's not nearly as fun, though.

This does occasionally present detrimental facets, though. I have a homelab, and as most people with one, its primary purpose is storing and serving media files (I promise I do other things too, but let's be honest – Plex is what people care about). I run apps in K3OS, which has been dead for quite some time. The NAS is in a VM under Proxmox, and I build images with Packer + Ansible. I've been wanting to shift K3OS over to Talos [1] for some time, but I had convinced myself that it was only worthwhile if all of it was in IaC, starting from PXE. I got most of the way there, and then stopped due to work taking more of my life than I wanted. Unfortunately, around this time the NAS broke (as in a hardware failure, not a software issue), and I was refusing to bring it back until the entire homelab was up to my absurd self-imposed standards. Eventually I convinced myself this was a ridiculous punishment, replaced the dead hardware, and brought it back.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1319/

[1]: https://www.talos.dev/

I feel you. Some of my hobbies are far more intellectually demanding that anything work throws at me. I wish it was the opposite -- it sucks to feel like I need to exercise my brain in the evenings when my best working hours are when I am stuck staring at a boring Grafana page. Having a "after work is relaxation time" period again would be nice.

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