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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Turn your ADHD obsession into doing the perfect schedule. Turn off your phone and computer. Add reminders of your schedule everywhere. Hang it on your walls. Post-it notes on things you have to avoid. BE BORED for hours without social media, music, podcasts. Use strategic fasting and breakfast to stick to bedtime (same trick used to adjust for jetlag). Get out of your house and walk in silence for an hour. Write with pen and paper everything that keeps you mind over-excited. Add drawings to engage your whole mind.

You have to train your brain. If you always walk with a crutch you will never walk properly. IMO, you should only try drugs once you can sort of stick to the schedule and you are still not reasonably productive.

If you start with drugs you'll become dependent and will need more and more. There is no magic pill.

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Your comment show a lack of understanding of the condition. With ADHD, we suffer from difficulties with executive functions, like adhering to a planning, being able to chose to work on something... I have obsession: I can't decide on what. I can work at length on complex subjects, again, probably not the one you expect.

It's not a choice.

Medication is not a silver bullet, but it allows, as explained in the parent article to do those things.

> Your comment show a lack of understanding of the condition.

Perhaps, since I'm not a specialist. I did use to think like you but I changed my mind through personal experience and helping relatives and friends with the same condition.

I wish you well.

> I have obsession: I can't decide on what.

This is something that some good old-fashioned introspection (and meditation definitely involves introspection) might be able to fix for you. Learning to harness and redirect the inner energy of your "bad" tendencies is a well-established aspect of many kinds of therapy.

Your point about the drugs, that's not true unless you're chasing a high

It's not always possible for someone to just tell themselves to start obsessing over a perfect schedule and just do things perfectly

the whole problem is the inability to do those things.

Yes, you can do it to a degree, but a kind of "follow the instructions" rarely works for me in any way.

You saying you should only "try drugs" if this schedule doesn't work just makes no sense to me.

You can't treat ADHD with just a schedule

My point is drugs-first is a bad idea with huge risks. I've seen multiple cases like this. It's all good at first and then it goes bad, sometimes really bad. Of course, it's my opinion and I'm just a random guy on the internet.

I think it depends on the person

But one thing I do think is that too many people expect the drugs to be a magic bullet that removes ADHD

from my own experience and from what I've heard, that is absolutely not the case.

It's a tool, and it helps somewhat but it depends on a lot of variables and sometimes it barely helps at all.

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