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Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

I wish you the best with that, but by the metric of 'if I can do it for 5 minutes I can probably keep going because I wanted to do it' would mean that I don't want to do, very literally, anything.

To be fair, I only just recently (past month) talked to my doctor and started treating it properly so I'm still in the tweaking the dosage phase.

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Another thing to consider is that, once you are medicated, you have a whole new set of skills to develop.

I remember when I started taking ADHD meds and I was like “wow I can focus now” and proceeded to focus with all my might on the wrong thing.

My rule of thumb is: Whatever I am doing when the meds start working is what I'm going to be doing.

Same. When I first started taking meds this was a hard lesson to learn. Yay I can actually focus on a task now. It just so happens that task needs to be whatever I'm doing when they start working.

That interesting. I can hyperfocus without medication just fine. It's the choosing what to focus on that I take medication to solve.

I think "just fine" would imply you can invoke hyperfocus whenever you want. In my experience, it happens with the most undesirable things at the most undesirable moments.

But I know so much about randomly WW2 battle and military boats and airplanes that was critical to know at 3am when I had a full docket of stuff to do the next day...

I can relate. Also, sometimes I can even invoke it on things I want to. However, I just can't turn it off when needed.

I think that’s true. If I want to focus on the thing that is my current obsession I can invoke that focus whenever I want. Never mind if I’m at work, in the shower, or at a birthday party. It’s just not very useful to achieve the goals you probably have at those places.

That seems to contradict my third sentence. Hyperfocusing does not mean choosing what to focus on. My point was, ADHD to me is not an issue in focusing. It's an issue with choosing what to focus on.

Understood, thanks for clarifying. In my case, my hyperfocus sessions (sometimes on useful, sometimes on useless things) are in between absurd levels of distractions so I can't totally relate.

> Another thing to consider is that, once you are medicated, you have a whole new set of skills to develop.

Exactly. Once I got diagnosed, the doctor wanted to remove the SSRI's that had been treating the side effects and not the root cause... but that happened too quickly in my case. I had constant episodes.

After a few months, I had to go back to them while I was still learning about everything, how I had to change habits, what would work now, etc.

Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example?

Suggest thinking as if you already accomplished the thing and then work backwards from there. Start with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, because it’s already done. Now, you just need to do it.

Or whatever approach works for you. Everyone is different.

> Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example?

Looking for other reasons behind procrastination is very important, indeed.

There can be many, many core beliefs that hold you down.

This will sound cliche and 70's pop-psy self-help, but people think about themselves as an adult of age XX and don't realize many core ideas about themselves are not those of an adult, but those of themselves at age 7.

My example is that since my daughter was born I was using on her a blessing my grandma was always using on me, and I did not realize I was miss gendering her -- I was using the masculine form and my daughter eventually asked me about it -- why was I using the masculine form on her -- it then struck me I heard the blessing from my grandma when I was very young and it just became a core part of me.

That's cute, until you realize you internalize A LOT of stuff by the time you're 7 and unfortunatelly it's not always positive stuff.

My father did a lot of good things for me, but he was very competitive, he almost NEVER let me win at anything to the point he became visibly distraught when I was about to win against him, so I struggle to capitalize on my insights, especially when I have strong "about to win" feelings which turned into a life long self-inflicted "Cassandra curse".

Hyperfocus is an interesting one. You can now focus on a single thing so profoundly that you forget to eat or sleep. Slight caveat: you don’t have control over what you hyperfocus on.

Suggested books which I found helpful. There may be audiobooks available, if that is more your thing.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/learned-optimism-how-to-change-...

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-now-habit-a-strategic-progr...

Mitigation strategies start to look a lot different when you have a better sense of adjusted capability. I expected it to be something I felt when I started a task, or how I felt about starting tasks— like if you’re stronger it’s easy to sense that you can pick up heavier objects, and picking up heavy things doesn’t feel as burdensome. That’s not what it was like for me. It still feels just as shitty and annoying to do things I don’t want to do, but once you realize how much better you are at staying on task and doing the work to completion, and doing things that might have been a cognitive challenge before, giving up/avoidance doesn’t feel like the only choice anymore.

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