I conditioned myself to fail

How many times have you encountered a piece of software that is utter garbage from a ui/ux/engg. perspective but gets used ALL THE TIME? plenty of b2b examples of this including back ends of banks. They are awful, but they work. The business solves a very real customer problem and the tech is just a supporting (although still critical) act. As long as the problem gets solved, the tech. does not really matter. There is obviously more nuance to this vis a vis software maintenance etc. but when starting up, the tech should matter to you less than finding a valid problem.

I am less hard on myself. My therapist helped me realize that some of the things I was blaming myself for were actually not my fault. I have some techniques to help me with some of my everyday struggles. I sometimes are able to aim my hyperfocus instead of just letting it point to whatever random thing crosses my mind - the trick there is realizing that almost anything worth knowing has some interesting nuggets, you just have to dig for them sometimes.

My son was diagnosed at an appropriate age (he has hyperactivity so it has been visible for a while).

I'm kidding. Once you know what, you can check your patterns against the standard and the deviations. Then you can approach the circuits that are fucked and identify triggers.

Best to get to the roots of the reinforcement in childhood, though. Behaviors and preferences surpressed, people you didn't beat up for reasons and so on, behavioral triggers, when you held back and why. What distracted you when you did a specific thing or the other. And, of course, the standard stuff, what were you rewarded for and did you really care about that thing yourself?

Might take a while but it'll be worth it.

Let me add some context to this that isn't obvious from the outside: There has been a massive surge in ADHD self-diagnosis in recent years, fueled largely by TikTok and other social media. During COVID it got so bad that there were even pill mills offering ADHD diagnoses via TikTok ads, and anyone who paid their fee was basically guaranteed a diagnosis after a short 5-minute video call.

This causes problems for many reasons, but one of the biggest is that people are arriving to doctors with a self-diagnosis to the exclusion of other conditions. It's the job of doctors to look at the whole picture and explore other explanations, which can feel insulting when someone has already arrived at a conclusion.

There's a growing problem where people who are actually suffering from depression, anxiety, or even physical conditions like sleep apnea are self-diagnosing as ADHD and then requesting stimulants from their doctors, which temporarily masks their underlying condition and makes everything worse.

I understand why you felt shame, but if there's one thing I can tell you it's this: You actually want a doctor who questions the diagnosis, doesn't rush to prescribe habit forming medications, and explores the big picture. Having someone concerned about your health as a whole is very valuable.

> (because you treat ADD and ADHD with a controlled substance).

There are actually several non-stimulant ADHD medications. They can work quite well, but they come with one caveat: They can take a long time to show their full effects. There are studies showing that the positive effects of Straterra (Atomoxetine) continue increasing even past the first 12 months.

Controlled substance stimulant medications have the opposite time course. People take them and feel them working immediately. Within hours. However, tolerance also starts accruing immediately and people will often feel like the medications aren't "working" after a while, when in reality they've just reached steady state.

> I went on phentermine for a few weeks, for weight loss, and my mind felt absolutely amazing on that medicine.

I have to warn you: All stimulant medications will produce false feelings of euphoria, motivation, and excitement when you first start taking them. These effects do not last. The brain will adjust to the medication over time and that "amazing" feeling will disappear.

Your experience is extremely common, though: People take a stimulant, either from their doctor or from a friend, and feel great. They think that if they can secure a constant supply, they will feel that way forever. Unfortunately, it can actually distract from the true goals of ADHD treatment when people start chasing that short-lived feeling while neglecting the treatment of their attention.

The truth is that after someone has taken a stimulant for years, it no longer makes them "feel amazing" like that, even though it can help the ADHD. The brain reaches a new homeostasis in the reward centers. This introduces a secondary problem, wherein any missed doses or attempts to lower the dose produces a rebound effect where mood, motivation, and focus are temporarily lowered due to deviation from that new homeostasis.

In short: Don't read too much into how you felt while taking powerful stimulants for a short while. It's not analogous to the therapeutic effects of ADHD treatment, though it's easy to mistake one for the other.

Your written story comes across to me mostly as regrets of counterfactual timelines; the result of your perception because of societal pushes. If you wrote "25 years of successes", I wonder how it would read?

> What type of mental health professional should we seek out?

What a strange question... the implication is that you think your life problems (perhaps completely normal) are due to a medical condition. Perhaps ask the people who know you best what mental health conditions you have. It's a slippery slope once you submit into the mental health vampire system (and abrogating your agency has other psychological costs).

What's the medical term for a hypercondriac that believes there's something wrong with their mental health so badly that there is something wrong? I'm pulling your leg: it is normal to worry and do seek help if you actually need it. Usually family and friends have a good idea if you need professional help: mental health problems are almost defined as problems that cause you and your loved ones severe downsides and outcomes are often visible (less commonly well hidden).

In theory, coaches are the people to help us learn to attain goals. Is get councelling getting coaching?

The article itself is frustrating because it a narrative based on self-diagnosis using psych terms (conditioning, dopamine). Any comments here are framed within that context. I wonder how their friends would explain the problem they have identified?

If you want a formal diagnosis, a clinical psychologist should have the authority to assess and diagnose ADHD. A psychiatrist can, too. The best way to approach getting a diagnosis (and the finer detail of what kinds of psychologists can do a formal diagnosis, what referrals you might need, etc.) is highly dependent on location. Once you have a diagnosis, you should be able to try medications if you want.

If you aren't interested in medications, you might still want to pursue some (enough for you to learn about yourself) or all of a formal diagnosis if you want. The benefits and downsides of a formal diagnosis are also highly location dependent.

Talking to a psychologist might be helpful regardless of diagnosis.

Please don't use an ADHD 'coach', they're a predatory scam

Thanks for mentioning this. I see so many comments with people self-diagnosing themselves with pathologies because, "I forget things often," "I get distracted a lot," "I get bored," "I sometimes doubt myself when there's a challenge ahead of me."

These are normal things!

I think a lot of people just don't have a good baseline for what's normal.

Sure, but the poster lives that life (has adhd) so you should give some credence to that as well. They want others to have an easier road.

Have you been able to go through titration and dose adjustment with a (competent) psychiatrist? When starting or restarting meds it's expected for the first few days (or more) to have a more obvious impact. After your body has adjusted to being on the meds, if the meds aren't helping (or are outright making things worse, like making you sleepy), you could just need a higher dose. The adjustment period is a bit different than the issue of proper long term tolerance.

There's a fair few options as far as stimulant meds go, and the combinations of drugs, release profiles, and dosages can take a bit of iteration to find what works.

There’s also nonstimulant medications used for ADHD but they're generally less effective than stimulant meds, but we're all different and maybe they'll help?

I consider marketing, broad based brand awareness and “sales” to be more one on one. Of course I’m talking B2B.

Context: I’m a “staff” cloud consultant at a 3rd party consulting firm and was previously a mid level cloud consultant (L5) working directly ar AWS (ProServe). I just got into consulting four years ago from hands on keyboard development + cloud architecture at smallish product companies. I’m really new to this.

Currently, when I come into a project, I already know from a thousand foot view what the customer wants - the business problem they are trying to solve or the opportunity they are going after since sales has already spoken to them and I’ve spoken to sales.

My job is to get them there (well now to lead a team) and to convince them that the solution I present to them is the right one. But my job is still just to convince the decision makers. Sales handles talking to the people who control the purse strings.

My next goal is to convince clients they need something that they didn’t know they needed instead of convincing them that we are the people that can help them execute on an initiative they already know they want.

Hopefully moving closer to the customer will provide some protection against software development getting commoditized to cheaper places (more likely) or AI (less likely)

I'm reluctant to try and follow the gradient because I'm convinced it quickly leads to abandoning the ethical constraints, and I don't want to become such a person.