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Comment by phishin | Hacker News Reader

I have it and it is absolute gift that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It has taken years to figure how to harness it though.

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It's a gift until it's a curse, and ADHD crashout/burnout is an absolute monster to overcome when it arrives.

And for any person who's tasked with any sort of responsibility, it WILL arrive at some point. It's not a question of if, only a question of how well you can prepare for its arrival.

At its core it has striking similarities with a freeze response, which is overcome by increasing heart rate (e.g. stimulants, exercise, temperature shock). Big overlap with CPTSD symptoms as well.

The diagnostic criteria are all about the fact that ADHD is a net negative. If you feel it is a net positive then you shouldn't have a diagnosis. As a fellow sufferer I do understand that in certain contexts I can out-perform and even run rings around "normal" people. But overall, having ADHD is a bad thing and I wish I didn't have it.

Look, I’ve got it too. I’m glad we’ve figured out how to “game” the adhd. But it’s not a gift.

i have it too and it sucks, I have to take medicine every day for it. Why would an attention deficit and hyperactivity be a gift? Maybe you're talking about something else.

Can you explain what about is it a gift? What are the benefits you get from it?

I have found both hyperfocus and the ability to quickly "drop" (i.e. distract from) a train of thought incredibly useful.

Hyperfocus is great until it's not.

People with ADHD have "time blindness"; we don't process time the same way most people do.

We often don't realize 3 or 4 hours have passed and there were other things we needed to get done.

Sure. These are the other sides of the coin. I've been medicated for years and unmedicated for years. Currently I'm in a ~10yr unmedicated stretch. Do I have frustrating moments, embarrassing easily avoidable failures, and so on? Yes. Do I sometimes lose many hours to a task and forget to eat? Yes. But I'm also kinder, more playful, and more present with my loved ones when I am unmedicated.

If the downsides get too bad and things start to fall apart then I will medicate again. Until then, no way I'm making that tradeoff.

I would sum it up as an ability to think out of the box, naturally having creative solutions. Which itself is a double-edged sword...

I know a lot of people with ADHD and even more without it. I haven't noticed any correlation between ADHD and creativity or out-of-the-box thinking.

When you can align hyperfocus with your most beneficial vector of productivity, it's like you can accomplish anything, in half the time thought possible.

Problem is, there is no good way to direct the hyperfocus demon. It likes what it likes, it wants what it wants, and that's that.

Medication helps to save a pile of willpower/spoons/executive function safely from the demon so that we can get things that need doing done.

fighting that fight right now... was doing great until I got to a level with self directed work

Harnessing it? On one side people like DHH arguing ADHD is just "boys being boys", and at the other side there are people who obviously watched too many "ADHD is my superpower" reels on Instagram.

...you don't have it.

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