A simple Hack that still works for me after years:
1. Place a tiny LED (red or yellow) by the side of your monitor or virtually on the screen corner. Basically anywhere almost bordering your field of view.
2. Make it blink like a fast heartbeat (120-150 bpm) and gradually slowdown to around 60 bpm (or your slow heartbeat base). Make the slope approx 20 to 60 minutes (you can adjust the best rate by testing in 10m increments after a few days in one setting).
Now...
3. Get to work regardless if distracted and agitated. Close all apps except what you need to work and BOOM!, let the magic happen. Without realising, your brain will try to sync with the light that you can barely see, calming you down and allowing you to go focus-mode with the task in had.
Works like hypnosis!
It is also a cheap hack... I build my unit with a cheap ESP32 and heart-rate sensor to sync deeper and dynamically adjust the slope...
Will explain better if any interest.
No science behind (only principles), I just hammered a solution like any Ape with the shakes would need!
- once the LED has slowed down to 60 bpm, do you keep it at that tempo for the rest of the day? for a few hours? do you ever go back to 120 bpm and then go back down?
- generally speaking, how did you come up with the idea?
- do you think that a software version (i.e. some blinking pixels in the top right corner of a monitor) would work, or is the intensity of the LED (i.e. the fact that it's not part of the monitor) part of the reason why it works?
- could you also talk about the heart-rate sensor - how do you use it / how does it affect the bpm algorithm?
- Once it reaches the lowest rate, the LED goes off after a 30min timer set, it fades the light over that time under the same blinking rate. So I won't notice.
- The Idea comes from desperation really, mostly curiosity on why sound beats from upbeat music had a effect to improve mood, i.e. work more at gym. Also the idea that your brain will take patterns and try to synch with. Check PubMed (few articles about)
- I started with a software version (v.1 and v2) and then a hardware one. No idea why, but hardware (as a side device) works really good. I 3D printed a tiny case and it is discreetly below my iMac screen powered by the USB. Look like an old modem but tiny.
Finally...
- I added the heart monitor (a cheap cable and wrist sensor) to see if I could shorten the time to achieve the lowest rate of blink based on my heart response instead of waiting the time or trying to read brainwave pattern (I try measuring voltage and electric wave form, from a headband I bought and returned after a rapid test) but the signal would mix with the work in front of me, so useless and expensive.
Using heart rate looks cheap, non-intrusive and effective to shorten the time, it goes 1/3 of time to get lowest, could use an apple watch vs cable and sensor but I'm cheap.
There was research some time ago (jeez, 10 years ago...) [0] [1] that used video and... computer vision algorithms to detect a person's heart rate without any devices. Wondering if it could be used here i.e. use your webcam instead of an external hardware sensor?
Other thing - would you be open to publishing/sharing your algorithm / esp32 code (on Github or as a blog article)?
We use this approach of video heartbeat detection on a real product (recruiting tool) but not for my hack ADHD device,
You can't really do video detection it in real time and properly, without overheating the cheap device. On the SaaS we did we use a recorded segment of video so we can analyse it afterwards, check the colour changes in the face of the subject and try estimate heartbeat with loose accuracy. More like high, Normal, Low after taking a few seconds as base.
The idea of the ADHD device was just a cheap hack done in a day for myself.
Not a product or commercial as I don't feel claiming it can do to others what I looks like does to me.
I'm definitely NOT attending an interview where this kind of tech is used. My heart rate is irrelevant to whether someone should hire me - and I say that as someone who doesn't even get anxious or nervous during interviews.
Not for interviews, video-applications, is used to sense stress and give extra points (not deducting them) if a person is indeed just too shy of being on video vs talking about something ; )
We use on video-applications when pre processing them, the idea is to sense stress levels when the applicant is introducing themselves at the start of the video and then not reducing their scores or points when the same person gets shy of being on video or forget something due to stress when talking about something else.
We try estimate a "confidence" level when saying something, but NOT able to guess if a lie. An actor can easily have full confidence in a script, but still be a lie.
We intended for roles that are client facing and where personal skills are key. Things like retail, costumer service, sales.... not technically or education based, temporary work and alike. Not that Orwellian yet ; )
Example: You need 40 people for an event to work a few hours as guides or hosts, from 100 applying the system can suggest a score and list them all in order so you can start watching or calling for interviews from somewhere.
I've developed an experimental ESP32 project that simulates a heartbeat pattern.
But I don't have a heart rate sensor, I used my normal resting heart rate as a basis for the simulation.
The project utilizes an ESP32 to create a LED blink pattern that represents a heartbeat, starting at a faster rate and gradually slowing down to a resting rate.
OMG. I could not do this. I hope it's useful to others, but not for me...at all.
The biggest distraction for me, when working/focusing, is movement at the edge of my vision. You know, like most websites with their moving ads, or fly-out videos that no one asked for, etc.
I'm glad you found your silverbullet, but that specific approach would wreck my productivity.
Your description is close to what I experience at times, that blinking thing may help you ignore outside the monitor distractions as it is there forcing you to ignore?
Interesting,
Do one and tell me ; )
I cost me $25 or less.... all spares ESP32 (most of them has a LED pinned anyways) and don't bother the heart monitor initially, just set time and rate of descent for the blink.
What if instead of a blinking led, it were a warm incandescent bulb, shaded by a diffuser? Bulbs have some on and off ramp time naturally but maybe this could be purposefully exaggerated so it pulses instead of blinks. Wonder if it would be as effective though.
Inspired by this post I threw together a new open source desktop app that has an annoying always on top window that has a flashing timer, this seems to accomplish the same thing. https://github.com/timsayshey/cringe-clock
Seems likely to be a placebo. You have a vested interest in it working, admit its not based on any sort of science, and one of the setup steps is to overcome distraction (which is the problem that’s trying to be solved).
> Seems likely to be a placebo. You have a vested interest in it working, admit its not based on any sort of science, and one of the setup steps is to overcome distraction (which is the problem that’s trying to be solved).
Fundamentally, if it works for the OP, who the hell cares?
And how would you even double-blind test this anyway?
> And how would you even double-blind test this anyway?
Get lights that either start fast and slow down or blink at speeds that randomly change then use serial numbers to track which lights are which, but send them out at random to test subjects?
you would blind the participants to the effect you are looking to measure. If they don’t know what to expect or what conditions there are, they can still get a placebo effect from random patterns.
> you would blind the participants to the effect you are looking to measure. If they don’t know what to expect or what conditions there are, they can still get a placebo effect from random patterns.
Maybe. Generally you'd do a manipulation check at the end to ensure that people couldn't identify what condition they were in.
Additionally, that's single blind rather than double blind.
The researchers can be blinded by not experiencing the intervention and handing out identical looking devices. You’re right that you would need a manipulation check at the end but this experiment is totally design-able properly.
I still think that the manipulation check would reveal failures of blinding, but yeah it is doable (but we needed a while to come up with a reasonable design).
And more generally, my philosophy (as someone with a PhD in the placebo effect) is that harnessing any expectancy/placebo effects in one's personal life is totally reasonable, and if it works for people and there's low risk of harm then more power to them.
We shouldn't gatekeep potentially useful personal treatments based on the gold standard. It's kinda the medical equivalent of YAGNI, I suppose.
Not to be too confrontational, but why did you feel the need to point this out? When someone has a solution that works for them, why possibly ruin it for them by pointing out placebo?
Mind you, pointing out placebo could be useful if the OP made the claim that their solution could cure a disease or something (such claims could discourage someone from getting effective treatment).
> When someone has a solution that works for them, why possibly ruin it for them by pointing out placebo?
You are likely aware of this already, but for others readers, it's important to know that placebos are still effective even when you know they are placebo. The term is "open-label placebo".
the first time I tried antidepressants I had this effect. I even knew about the placebo effect, and I knew they take multiple weeks to do anything. but yet the day after I took the first pill I started wondering if things were getting better and I was trying to deny it, but it felt like a change. (spoiler: it had the opposite effect and once they took effect I could barely get out of bed lol). It was just incredible knowing that it was placebo but still feeling the effect.
I wouldn't be surprised if you felt better even before you took your first dose; I can imagine you started feeling better just having a prescription in hand.
Imagine what it must have been like for "primitive" civilizations: "Oh my son, your hurt back has gone on far too long. I'm taking you to the tribal elder who will prescribe a remedy and do a spell. Once he finishes, all your pain will be a distant memory". And it works (for some duration).
Because it's a discussion about science and their comment is totally valid.
One of the biggest parts of placebo is going through the motions, whether you believe it or not. The original commentor appears to be aware that their approach may not have any scientific basis so mentioning the potential of placebo is fine.
I find music distracting when I work because I listen to it too actively, but I can imagine that a subtle regular pulse or beat might help. It would beed to be quiet and plain enough that it would not dominate my attention.
Even music without lyrics is distracting to me, but lyrics (if in a language I understand) definitely make it much worse.
Oddly enough, non-musical sounds (like birds or cars) don't affect me at all. I think it's the complex pattern-matching in music that is a problem for me. Of course, that's also what makes it so delightful to listen to.
For me it's more that the language processing centre in my brain is strongly single-threaded. Some non-verbal sounds do engage it, but there's a complexity threshold. Magpies chattering to each other do. Some classical music does, but not all by any means.
YES, it can be the placebo effect, but still placebo can works wonders ; )
I detailed better aspects on questions above, also not doing it commercially or claiming it can be helpful for anyone other than me.
In placebo, one needs to trust it will work (or see a figure of authority to believe it does), in my case I wasn't expecting much and got not far from it on v.1 (software), but by v.3 (hardware) I was surprised and used to it.
Yes, it could be the placebo effect, but placebo works wonders ; )
I detailed better aspects on a question above,
Placebo need you to trust it works (or see a figure of authority to believe it does), in my case I expect nothing and got not much on v.1 (software) by v.3 (hardware) it is surprising.
I believe there is research into rapid eye blinking followed by slow blinking causing the brain to "calm", so perhaps an external source has a similar effect?
I didn't look too much into it but I too have seen something long time past about patterns with light from a TV on some of those documentaries from the 80's, basically about people trying advertising with subjective flashes to induce a certain mood.
No really what I was trying to say but get your point.
The idea is that you sit at your desk even if too agitated and remove the visual distractions that aren't work so your eyes will either look at work or the blinking led. I have an iPad by the side so I can't see the screen but will open from time to time to check emails.
So, stare at the screen even if you don't feel like it and try 1o-15min.... if you forget and realised an hour passed and the blink stoped it... then it worked!
Yeah, but this blinking light is still at another level. I'm glad it works for the OP, but to me this really stood out as pretty absurd.
Sounds a bit like: I have a hard time falling asleep, so I have this blinking light next to my bed. I take a sleeping pill and let the magic happen. My heart rate then syncs to the light and I fall asleep. This light works great!
Yes, it could be the placebo effect, but placebo works wonders ; )
I detailed better aspects on a question above,
Mostly when I added the heart monitor, somehow I can measure that the time to lowest blink got shorter and I'm not paying attention to the device at all.
When I realise it us OFF I can see the logs and see how long it take vs the heartbeat to sync.
Also, I build myself so I like there was no marketing or product to trust, just test and adjust.
My daughter suffers from functional seizures due to FND and we do something similar with counting. When she is suffering from a complex motor tic we will ask her to count at a "comfortable speed" - which is always 100+ counts per minute. She will then slow down the counting until we reach 60 counts per minute at which point she has usually transitioned to a less intrusive tic or she has ceased ticcing altogether.
> I just hammered a solution like any Ape with the shakes would need!
This is an underrated approach. Following hunches and suspicions often leads to solutions that a pure evidence-based approach might miss or delay; especially if your suspicion goes against the prevaling wisdom.
Really interesting to learn about your solution for you daughter, great to see it works and appreciated the comment of my approach being an underrated one.
My case isn't anything as relevant as yours and maybe that's why I did not much of research, easy going for a crude trial.
ChatGPT got me a similar HTML based solution with this prompt (F11 for full scren):
Create a simple web page with a red blinking LED in the top-left corner. The LED should start blinking at 150 BPM and gradually slow down to 60 BPM. The initial size of the LED should be 40px, and it should completely disappear during the "off" phase. Additionally, include a red box shadow during the "on" phase of the blink. Please use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the implementation. Adjust the code as needed for clarity and readability.
Thanks! One new thing I learned after multiple iterations of: "That's great, but can you change this, or that". Once I was happy with the result, I asked it to produce the AI prompt that I could give next time to generate the same output, and that's what I put in my previous comment.
This got me so intrigued that I built https://github.com/vlameiras/tranquiled in order to have similar behaviour but in the screen itself. Nothing fancy, just curious to try it out!
Nice one! I will be curious to learn if that works for others too.
In my case v.1 and 2 were apps with a similar on screen red dot like yours. Much smaller and first placed at the status-bar (like the cock ":" blinking) then floating on screen lower left corner.
Things got interesting and worked best for me after I remove the light from the actual screen I must look at to work. Hence the device use, and then later the heart sensor.
The key (I guess) is to make you brain see it but not you (if that makes sense?). Something like you looking at your screen but can still see if an Ant moves nearby or your phone shows a notification. Near your screen but not on it ; )
In any case, great little test, and eager for any feedback you can get.
I just listened to a podcast, Huberman, that discussed how to improve your ability to task switch. Apparently, there’s some connection to how your mind perceives time. He mentioned an exercise to improve your ability to task switch that manipulates how your mind perceives time, switching back-and-forth between slowing it down and speeding it up.
I think the inability to task switch is a big part of ADHD and this thing you’re describing really sounds similar to what Huberman was discussing.
Now, I’m not a doctor and I have no idea what I’m talking about here. Every time I start talking about this stuff I imagine my doctor friend sitting in the corner of the room shaking his head (maybe some of you saying it’s placebo should do the same).
Thanks for this initial go at the blinking LED script! I went ahead and tried to add some quality-of-life features to this that I wanted. I've never used pyqt before, so I admit I had help from google and copilot figuring out methods. Anyways, here is an updated version that has a few more configurations for background color, circle color, slowdown period, graceful window resizing, and graceful shutdown.
Try doing one on a physical device too... My settings are just related to fade after reaching target or turn off immediately, Led colour (my ESP32 has a RGB onboard) and blink or pulse. Then there is a Start & Stop rate (150-60) as standard and IF sensor is connected or has data (heart) those values adjust too.
I have hundreds of things I do and very few go to product or build phase.
Not my view for this one as it is a personal issue. I would not be comfortable claiming it could do anything for others like it does for me. Also I'm not basing it on anything scientific other than raw experimental data from 1.
I'm happy to share it here and FREE for everyone.
I run a tiny tiny tech incubator in the UK, so hands full : )
No, I have hundreds of things I do and very few go to product or build phase.
For this personal issue, I would not be comfortable claiming it could do anything for others like what it does for me. Also I'm not based on anything other than experimental data.
I'm happy to share it here and FREE.
I run a tech incubator in the UK, so hands full : )
I explained above on another question, did started as Software (v.1 and v.2) but I guess my brain tried to ignore and sabotage the work on the screen, so I placed as a tiny device underneath (gotcha F brains!).
Like tricking the brain to see as not part of the work.
My guess is that may be working more like a simple "maestro" telling your brain orchestra and heart drummer to reduce the speed from Heavy metal to Ballad and that somehow makes easy to focus in what's in front of you?
I make no claims here, I did it for me and looks like it works, not scientifically based or proven, not even tested on more than 1. So, no idea if can or will work for you ; )
That said, I'm now curious with so many comments to see how it will perform for those building versions to test. Its a 20min project, free for those already with prototyping board around.
The key for me was to remove to my marginal angle of vision, not on the screen (like an app), the moment I moved outside and wasn't in front of it it work best. If you see it directly it does distract you indeed.
Nice tip. Thanks for sharing.
I'll probably try this by making a cheap one with one of my kids' microbits. This seems like the perfect board for doing this.
I didn't like the blinking at first, so I made it pulse instead (smoother) but was never to the point of headaches. that said, sound should work if you can keep a headset ; )
Anything you get aware that goes fast-to-slow in a smooth gradient is the idea.
I tried sound (beats) on a headphone with some tracks, then build a tiny app to show pixels on the screen (blink) and then settled on a LED on a prototyping board type of device (ESP32) as a quick project and that worked.
I only improved by adding the heart sensor months later, now I don't think about it much, Now even If I'm not aware of, every time I turn the iMac it powers the device via the USB and so it starts anyway at 150bpm when the heart sensor is not responding or not detecting anything. After an hour it gets to 60 and the light fades out....
I'm not aware when it goes off, so I guess it is working ; )
Few people here posted code, ideas and I added the device pic I used (similar) and the sensors... you can buil one with almost anything and try!
thank you for the correction. i blame one or all of fever delirium, lack of coffee, and allergy to math for this mistake. thank god i'm using a shitposting account.
oh sh*t. here we go again. another IoT that I would love to start and then abandon for some reason knowing full well how fix it but not find the "time" to do it.
Just use any blinking LED template code that your OEM offers for your particular board (ESP32 or alike) as it will be specific for the PIN the LED is wired and libraries available, etc.
Basically a function slope with a value from 150 to 60 that calls "blinks" over an hour, when at the end it turns off LED.
You can make it smoother, add the heartbeat sensor, make it pulse instead of blink, that stuff will be particular to whatever you have at hand.
GPT for such simple code after explaining the device and pointing to documentation should be a 3-4 shot process.
My one is horribly inefficient and shameful to share : )
I see, well in that case just search for ESP32 on Amazon and get one for a $5, then look for a few videos on Youtube who to program for a ESP32 board and you will probably learn as a first example something to control the board's LED. From that you will be half way, just modify and try things out ; )
Thanks for the complement,
I guess you would be a client (few comments)
I have hundreds of things I do and very few go to product or build phase.
Not my view for this one as it is a personal issue. I would not be comfortable claiming it could do anything for others like it does for me. Also I'm not basing it on anything scientific other than raw experimental data from 1.
I'm happy to share it here and FREE for everyone.
I run a tiny tiny tech incubator in the UK, so hands full : )
I used to think I had some ADHD symptoms: growing up I never did any revision for any of my school exams until a couple of days before, all my coursework and projects were done last minute in a week of intense focus, I've had issues with drugs in the past etc.
Then I met someone who actually has ADHD and saw them before they'd taken their stimulant drugs. They were completely nonfunctional in any sense of the word, they'd be trying to have five conversations with you at once and it took them about 30 minutes to put their shoes on, it looked like absolute hell.
Next to that I really don't have any issues and I don't think I'd be able to handle being prescribed psychoactive drugs.
Ever since meeting that person I've been a lot more hesitant to self-diagnose problems.
2. Things exist on a spectrum. The definition of it becoming a "disorder" is when it negatively affects your life enough.
During diagnosis a psychotherapist will be tasked with identifying traits of ADHD (IE; Markers), you will not have all markers. Everyone will have some.
Then those markers are investigated to discover how much they impact your quality of life. If it is above a certain threshold in aggregate then you are then diagnosed clinically as having "ADHD" and can be medicated.
What I mean is, for example: You can still have autism even if someone has significantly more severe autistic traits than you have.
Nit: Self-diagnosis is the first step towards a formal diagnosis. You don't go to the doctor to get antibiotics before self-diagnosing that you're sick.
That said, as useful as a formal diagnosis is (getting proper help, and even meds), don't skip it if you can afford to do it.
Yes. Thank you for stating it so well. Self diagnosis is like a conjecture based on observation. It needs to be proved out formally to be a working theory. But that’s part of the process and there absolutely is value in self diagnosis. It’s up to professionals to sort the wear from the chaff, webmd be damned.
Similarly anecdotal evidence is just not strong evidence, but it is still evidence. Anecdotal evidence from a lot of people is a dataset and from a wide variety of people is a good dataset. It's all about confidence levels. Consider likelihoods (different from probabilities) and just update your priors but never forget the confidence intervals. They're the most important part!
The D in ADHD is “disorder”, which normally means you can’t function socially, at work, and/or take care of yourself. Normally I don’t consider scatterbrained knowledge workers in the top 5% of the income distribution to be in that category. It is kind of fun so do work on speed though!
There are lots of ways "can't function socially, at work, and/or take care of yourself" can manifest even if you're in the top 5% of the income distribution. For example, that person's house might be an absolute disaster zone, with overgrown lawns, tasks piling up and a million tiny piles of bills and papers to be done "later". They might need 4 separate alarm clocks in 3 different physical places in order to wake up on time every day. They might be constantly forgetting to follow up with family and friends all the time and isolated and alone when they're not in the office. They might be the co-worker that when everyone is talking about what they did over the holiday weekend responds with "not much" because they're otherwise too embarrassed to admit they spent the whole 3 days in a state of paralysis over what to even do. They might be putting all their energy into appearing normal and functional at work because the alternative is being homeless or starving and you might never know because you don't see them outside the office.
All that to basically say income and job descriptions do not inherently say anything about what disorders a person may or may not be suffering from.
In other words, being able to live with a condition is not the same as the condition being debilitating.
A lot of mental illnesses go unnoticed by others because they're often very easy to hide (and you're encouraged to hide them). Thinking that you can't be in the top 5% of earners and are just doing "speed for fun" is like thinking you can't be suicidally depressed just because you are a comedian. Hell, most people were surprised by Anthony Bourdain despite him being open about his depression. What you see is not reality, so don't be quick to judge. You'd be surprised how many peoples mental states are a house of cards but look like they're living in the finest of mansions.
Seriously, comments like the GPs are not only bad takes, but actively harmful. It perpetuates the belief that people should hide rather than seek help. The big issue with mental illnesses is that they are typically extreme versions of normal behavior and we often paint them as unrealistically extreme and constant. They're highly variable and the most common thing to happen is people only seek help when they're in the spiraling states, where they are incapable of getting that help, but will not seek it out when they've normalized.
Plus, you don't know if they're in that top 5% post medication and would not have been prior. You don't have the counterfactual power to make such judgements.
> They might need 4 separate alarm clocks in 3 different physical places in order to wake up on time every day
I don't know if I have ADHD, but I've always been terrible at getting out of bed.
It bugged me so much I ended up building an app[0] to force me to get up. If I didn't get up and scan my toothpaste barcode within a few mins of my alarm, I'd have to pay $10.
It also has cheat detection so I can't just turn off the phone to avoid getting up. Alarms are stored in the cloud and lock 1 hour before going off so they can't be changed.
Many of my users tell me they have ADHD so it seems likely I fall somewhere on the spectrum.
It's a good thing no one defines disorders the way you do. Going through life miserable but have set up your life in such a way and with a set of coping mechanisms that help you stay afloat is apparently fine and your life needs to be in shambles. Do you feel the same way about chronic pain? Is dragging yourself to work despite it prove you don't need help? Clearly you can handle the suffering. It's the exact same.
Surviving only because you've structured your life to revolve around the limitations of your disorder isn't a sign that everything is fine.
Adderall and its contemporaries aren't speed and I promise you it isn't fun. Stimulant medications are miserable to be on, it's just that not being on them is worse. That one time you took high-dose adderall in college is not at all reflective of what the experience is like.
What if you can function socially, at work, can mostly take care of yourself and generally look the part, but on the inside you are a miserable husk of a person exhausted from the neverending struggle to appear functional and normal?
Is that person just having fun on speed in your view?
Others have responded to you as if you weren’t being disingenuous, so I will respond as one should to people like you: go fuck yourself.
Anyone that dismisses this as being a scatterbrained person that likes to do speed is clearly not trying to help anyone and are only here to tear them down and make them hate themselves more than they already do. The world would be a better place if trash like you was collected and disposed of. Grow up, asshole.
I still thought "X is a spectrum" is essentially the same as saying that everyone have it, which I don't think is a useful assertion. There should still be a threshold somewhere, something that of course psychology won't try to draw.
The threshold for any disorder is usually “is it causing a significant and negative impact on your ability to live a normal life”. And while there are a lot of squishy terms in that statement, it’s about the best we have. We know even less about the workings of the brain than we do about the workings of your body and anyone with a chronic and rare health issue can tell you just how little we know about the workings of the body. So these sorts of “standard normal life” and “significant impact” fuzzy phrases are our best tool.
Everyone is late sometimes, are you so chronically late that you’re losing or at risk of losing your job despite doing things that normal people would do (e.g. getting up earlier, setting alarms etc), that could be (along with other symptoms) an indication of ADHD.
Everyone is sad sometimes, even deeply so. Are you so down that the very act of getting up and making yourself food seems too much? Are you so hopeless that even doing something you love makes you feel nothing? That (along with other symptoms) might indicate you have depression.
Everyone has things that they want to have “just right”, whether it’s a well organized tool box, a clean car or a spotless mirror. Do you find yourself needing to ensure that every dish in your cabinets are sorted properly by size and weight, every day, even if it means missing that important meeting with a friend you haven’t seen in years and even though you already did this yesterday and only used two plates since then? That might (along with other symptoms) indicate that you have OCD.
Note that ADHD can manifest physically, mentally, or a combination of the two. I've been recently diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s after finally seeing a psychiatrist, and at most my physical manifestation of it is minor fidgeting.
Where it really burns me is not being able to dedicate brainpower for more than a few minutes at a time, unless I'm in one of my "focus" modes. Similarly, my brain constantly has multiple tasks/"conversations" going on and I'm always thinking of something else. Additionally, I'm always chasing something novel to satisfy some dopamine hit.
I've honestly worked around a lot of the issues I deal with prior to being diagnosed, knowing when I'm not in a "focus" mode and trying to (gently) steer back to being productive. I joke about my "gaming ADHD" where I don't sit with a game for more than a half hour or so before moving on to something else. Internal dialogues are just something I work with.
Not saying you're right or wrong, but it's difficult to compare someone else's problems with your own (potential) issues.
e: Also note that there are non-stimulants on the market. I'm currently trialing one while I wait for a cardiologist to review some records for possible stimulant conflicts.
Did you have the inability to read books? I notice that I simply cannot focus on reading a book to save my life. I can read internet comments and articles all day though. If I try to read a book I get annoyed that they're "not making their point" fast enough, especially with fiction and visual descriptions of people and places. I used to just complain about it, but now I wonder if thats actually pinpointing something wrong with my brain (such as ADHD). If I'm reading fiction, I do not translate the word "red" with the color, things like that. And usually within 2-3 paragraphs, my eyes are reading the text but my brain is thinking about computers or what I need to get done that weekend. It's awful because I'm missing out on an entire mode of art but I dont know what to do about it. I've only been enthralled in a book once or twice in my 40 years of life.
I read a ludicrous amount of books as a kid. Stuff like The Wheel of Time, 1000+ page books.
Now I just buy books and don't read them. I'll also buy audiobooks and bounce between them not really remembering much of the plots until I fall asleep.
I think the instant gratification of refreshing reddit/digg(rip)/instagram and having completely new things to see/read has destroyed my long term attention span.
I don't really like watching TV or playing consoles without having my laptop on my lap so that I can multitask and if I get bored for a minute refresh and see new things. It's bad. I'm single right now so I haven't actually used my living room TV in months. I do everything on my computer.
This is definitely a common thing these days. I'll mention that as someone diagnosed (within the last year) the same is true about me. But what's also distinguishing is that there's hyper-observant behavior. For example I might be out with friends and having a hard time maintaining a conversation because I'm queued into the conversations at the table to my left and to my right. Not because I want to, but because I can't turn it off. I've been like that since a kid too. Even back in 2005 I'd have the TV on, my laptop out, and be doing homework while clicking through Stumble Upon. So I definitely think there are aspects of our modern society that are creating an attention deficit disorder at a larger level but I think there are still things that distinguish ADHD from attention/novelty addiction. But don't be afraid to get tested if you think you have ADHD, it'll be covered by your insurance and can help you learn to better handle your issues.
But I definitely think we do need a discussion, especially as the people developing these addictive technologies, as to the consequences of what we build. Maybe you shouldn't take that job at TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, or Facebook, maybe you should. Just consider more than the money because if you can get one of those jobs you can probably get another high paying job. Or maybe question certain features and/or metrics and ask if they actually align with your real goals and if those goals are actually beneficial or harmful (it's frequently not obvious a priori). Move fast and break things is a useful strategy but not in every situation. Not everything can be repaired as easily as they can be broken.
> Now I just buy books and don't read them. I'll also buy audiobooks and bounce between them not really remembering much of the plots until I fall asleep.
I'm sorta addicted to Audio books. I apparently listened to slightly over 2000 one year on Audible.
Though for me, I can have half a dozen books and remember most of the plot(s). Smaller details will slip my mind, but the overall plot gist is just like a fun puzzle for my ADHD brain and it's back within minutes. Though for the life of me I can't recall if I took my medication today.
> I don't really like watching TV ...
Ugh, I've gotten that way in the past few years. It's kinda annoying, and I can only "focus" if it's a really good TV show.
My issue with reading is that my eyes will continue on while my brain has already left the station, so to speak. I'll end up having to go back and re-read sentences/paragraphs.
I started doing some research (prior to speaking with my psychiatrist) and started noticing some ADHD-esque behaviors in my toddler. I'm not looking to get them diagnosed (yet?), because who knows what is "normal young kid inattentiveness and hyperactivity" versus anything else, but ADHD is absolutely hereditary and a family history is one aspect that is/was used to diagnose.
I have a 9 year old dyslexic boy with solid ADHD (impulsive). It’s been quite the journey (so far).
He is heading back to ‘normal’ school next semester with no special support and fully integrated almost like a neurotypical. Sort of.
I have the same ADHD style:
Overall lessons:
1. Sleep. Melatonin. Transformational
2. Love. Love and more love.
3. Forgiveness and understanding
4. Throwing the kitchen sink at him for finding the outlet (sport) he loved. Gave him a sense of direction.
5. Ritalin: assists with ability to concentrate and therefore learn. Used only for education.
6. Educate yourself and get diagnosed yourself if you have.
7. Be the change in yourself and mirror and explain what you know (and don’t know)
8. Full spectrum intelligence test. Know where the issues are (processing speed, etc) and also where the strengths are.
We got a semi diagnosis at 5, then year on year assessments to see what we could know.
I wish there was a better support and road map for the steps to go through as a parent. I feel very lucky to be a dad of a child with ADHD in this time though.
This is good to hear that you have a solid foundation of how to best work with your son. I definitely wish I had that level of support growing up! I'm hoping to do the same with my kid.
I think your situation (especially with your child) outlines one of the insidious challenges we face in our modern society: breaking through the confusion and understanding the nuance of an issue (in this case, ADHD).
We've all heard the misinformation tropes "Back in my day, a kid was hyper because he wanted to play, nowadays $BOGEYMAN says those kids need to be medicated so they can get a 4.0", and they sound so alluring to large groups of people, so they write off ADHD altogether. Yet I distinctly remember kids from my childhood who could not hold a conversation, they would literally break off into a new topic while you were mid-sentence with them. Tell me how that kid can possibly learn anything if he doesn't even know that he vacated a conversation.
This is a parallel to George Carlin's "It's called shell-shock" spiel, or used by people to deny the existence of depression. It's very difficult to both convey nuance, and get people to accept it, even though it (the nuance) abuts life-threatening issues.
For people my age it was "Back in my day, people applied good old fashioned discipline. That's all ADHD is, a lack of discipline." Often discipline came via the strap or similar.
> Yet I distinctly remember kids from my childhood who could not hold a conversation, they would literally break off into a new topic while you were mid-sentence with them.
I have some variant of this - I'm constantly, subconsciously cutting in during someone else's sentence just to blurt out what immediately came to my brain, because I usually forget it by the time they are done. It's something I'm really working on, but it gets better day-by-day.
take good care of the kids nutrition. read up on it. take it serious. let it eat clean. don't fuck this up.
the connection between ADHD and nutrition is brutally underrated, in terms of amounts per meal, intake of food additives and the mix as well. if starchy carbs, then very little fat and little protein. if meat, then no bread, no potatoes, no noodles or similar stuff at all. veggies are always fine except if the digestion of the kid says otherwise. sugar is a tricky thing. timing is important in terms of time of day and time after food intake but it works bad after some foods, which is different depending on geographical origin of grandparents.
you don't need to point a camera on the kid or anything. the effects of foods and the stuff that the body releases to digest the different compounds on body and brain become obvious within an hour or two. but you need to know the baseline(s) of your kid, e.g. time of day, after activities, around certain people, in places, crowds, moods, etc. make sure you do.
this is something I have long thought about. carbs make me batty.
doing keto made my skin look much better, but also helped me focus, and I found it was easier to sleep. whenever I had cheat days and crushed like half a pizza I found I immediately was exhausted and had trouble focusing.
also coffee vs. tea. switching to tea every other day instead of coffee really dove home how much of an impact coffee has on things like serotonin[1].
interesting. will definitely take a look at caffeine's effect on serotonin. thank you.
most tea brands have a bad impact on my digestion and while I thought it must be the theine, which, as I learned, is just caffeine, I now believe it's connected to residue pesticides[1] since "homegrown teas" don't have the same highly undesirable impact.
anything that screws with my digestion makes my gut, the literal and metaphorical one, itchy and I get nervous. similar things happen when I eat short-chained carbs in amounts over 100g in one meal but the negative effect disappears after an at least 13h fasting period or 16h+ if I drank liquor the night before. so I assume it has to do with enzymes released in the mouth and in later stages of digestion since I sometimes start to feel itchy even though I only started chewing oats for example.
I believe my sensitivity and ADHD are linked to the amount of enzymes produced by my body during digestion and or some genetic mutation in an enzyme associated with the respective metabolisms.
the lack of focus and the exhaustion after eating carbs are relatable, but again , only if the fasting period wasn't long enough.
I tried Keto, but it made me quite a bit slower, which wasn't bad in terms of performance, but my cognitive processing speed was so much slower that I could not get used to it.
You might check out BeeLine Reader (I am the creator). [1] It's fairly popular in the ADHD community because it enhances visual focus while you're reading. Some people are able to read for 2x-10x as long with BeeLine versus without. I'm always happy to help out HNers with a free code for our browser plugin, just shoot me an email (contact in profile).
Is this the same beeline from 10 years ago? I sort of remember installing it back in middle school and really loving it and helping my ability to read walls of text. I never knew it got popular within the ADHD community or that it was still around.
Another reader helper I liked was the one that flashed words in place but that seemed more like a speed read hack rather than actually comprehending what you read, never used it seriously like BeeLine
Yep, the same one. You probably heard of us from our Show HN, [1] which I later found out was the 9th-most-popular Show HN, by upvote count. It really gave us a boost, and led to a flurry of media coverage!
We still have our browser plugins for web [2] and PDF, [3] but are now also integrated into education platforms, [4] and even some news websites. [5]
I've been bootstrapping it (and raising a family) so growth has not been as meteoric as some other startups, but it's been consistently up-and-to-the-right!
If there's ever a platform you'd like to see us work with, just let us know and we'll get on it.
I have this happen, I noticed reading is something I kind of need to practice. Maybe short comments ruined my brain lol.
I started getting into reading long books again last year. The beginning was rough, I was starting to think there was something wrong me. Sometimes I still do, but just being consistent and not hard on my self, I'm able to focus longer on reading and enjoy it. Some books and authors are easier then others too. LOTR series was work at times, enders game was pretty easy.
Alot if non fiction sucks too though and is pretty long winded.
If your worried about missing out on writing, there are short stories, and novellas to read
I can read novels I'm interested in. I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, but DNF a LOT of books that I cannot get into. My wife cannot not finish a book. Doesn't matter how bad it is, if she starts it she will eventually make her way through the book. She may put it down for a while and read something else in between but she persists. Regardless, we both average a little over a book a week. The game changer for me was shifting from reading at night (often well into the morning) to switching to audiobooks that I can listen to while hauling kids around, working in the garage or doing chores. Now I can DNF audiobooks because the narrator pronounces a word weird.
I am the same, I found a book I could hyper focus on. That was the Chaos Walking by Patrick Ness
I was so fully pulled into that world I was quite sad once I got to the end because I know I'm not probably never going to find a book like that again.
I do this with most texts I have to read each sentence 3-4 times because I know I will have made up half of the words I just read.
I have the same issue with my brain not really thinking about the current situation, if I'm talking to someone I will get bored in a minute or two and it's a real effort to force myself to pay attention.
Yeah, mine said it's ~50/50 shot. We're trying the non-stimulant while waiting on the cardiologist to do a deeper look at a potential heart issue. shrug
The most I've felt with the atomoxetine is a loss of appetite, which I'm not opposed to for the time being :)
There are degrees to everything, and the same psych disorder can manifest in very different ways in different people.
I have been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder. I "worry too much", in general, and have the odd panic attack or two per year. Some people have it bad enough they get these attacks daily.
That does not mean I don't have it or that it does not affect me, it just means it's mild in comparison to them, but my anxiety is still high compared to the average person when untreated. It does not have to be crippling to affect you.
>Self diagnoses (and diagnoses over the internet) are pretty harmful
Self-diagnoses can be legitimate or not - depends on the person doing them. They are often a necessity, in an environment where a professional diagnosis takes thousands of dollars or years in waiting (and is often done badly, by ill-informed professionals, like the many-decades prevailing myth that women/girls "can't be autistic", or that "ADD and autism can't coincide").
As (in this case) they are also based not on bloodwork or some physical indicators, but on a subjective assessment of a person's way of thinking, the person having the actual experience is often more qualified than the professional. Same to how you don't really need a doctor to tell you you're gay.
>One might even argue that the labeling aspect of a certain disorder (particularly a mental one) by a "professional" to not be particularly helpful too in addressing ones problems
One might argue that the false dichotomy between professionals and laymen, where the former is supposed to hold all the keys to knowledge and the latter to passively consult and follow the advice of the former, is a problem in itself.
And a little outdated in modern societies where the "laymen" are not some mud dwelling peasants who never went to school and only know farm work, but univercity-educated (even over-educated) in their own right, and libraries are not confined to the rich or the scholars, but every book ever written is a click away.
In any case, a self-diagnosis doesn't give you the required paperwork to get drugs, or to get benefits, or specific accomondations, or anything like that. So it's not like it hurts society by taking resources from "legitimate" diagnoses.
Last, but not least, pointing that X symptoms is "quite common to ADD/ADHD" is not self-diagnosis, it's not even diagnosing. It's a suggestion hinting to a possible condition. It could very well be used for seeking a professional diagnosis.
Or do you think people with ADD/ADHD just go to the doctor to get diagnosed out of the blue, and not because of some similar suspicion, spotting some unexplained symptoms or themselves, or identification with some symptoms they've read about?
There are a lot of problems with this comment. It might touch on a few legitimate ideas, like that we should probably consider the value of the patient's actual experience of course.
But even in light of ideas like that, this whole idea has resulted in people getting pills from people they know or websites based in less-scrupulous nations.
There are similar problems with most of the statements here - they make sense on the surface, but once you consider second- and third-order effects, it falls apart. We should not be encouraging moving away from professionals giving medical diagnoses. It may be a necessary evil at times, but it's a bad idea to encourage.
IIUC, there are two main components to ADHD, and you can have one, the other or both. And all qualify as ADHD.
I'm likely ADHD, and the majority of my siblings have it. There's a night and day difference though between me, who in a questionnaire scored high on both, and me who scored high only in one[1].
[1] Well, borderline in one and not the other. Immediately after taking the questionnaire I attended a work meeting and realized that there were at least a half dozen questions that I answered optimistically through rose-tinted glasses.
With all that said, I'm working to address my sleep apnea before getting a diagnosis because I've heard that sleep deprivation can manifest similar to ADHD.
My wife has a copy of the DSM 5 on our bookshelf, and flipping through it I noted that very many disorders have diagnostic criteria that, beyond just having some symptoms, they cause significant distress or impairment of functioning.
I had a friend growing up who was diagnosed with ADHD quite young whose experience was similar to your story–he had major issues with school that ultimately led to him being expelled, not going to college, having trouble with work and family etc. I thought of him a lot as so many of my classmates in a hyper-competitive school environment discussed how they could get a diagnosis and medication to have an edge on college admissions or whatever.
Its the significant distress or impairment which is key. As an example most people will put off doing things like sorting out an issue with their electricity provider, but I took that to the degree where I only sorted it when someone literally turned up on my doorstep to disconnect the supply.
Throughout my life I've found myself in situations where most people would go "well, this seems to be getting out of hand" and just carried on, getting ever more stressed and angry and seemingly being unable to get on with fixing it, whilst variously losing jobs, friendships, and a marriage. It was honestly a huge relief to discover the likely cause is ADHD rather than just being a failure of a human being.
I assume that is how most people get through high-school and university? Intense focus on the couple days before finals / final projects. I too did that. Is that not the case or is that warning lights for ADHD?
High school you can get away with it because the course content is easier - college is much more challenging...
i did that all throughout university and graduated with honors in an engineering program. it really depends on your coping strategies / personality / luck / etc. i definitely have adhd, it just took a few boring jobs for it to blow up my life in any real way. (i completely burned out, turns out relying on adrenaline as an adhd medication is not a great long term coping strategy.) some people will hit that wall earlier or later than others.
once, i accidentally dragged a lab partner into doing work the way i did. we turned in the assignment with less than a minute on the clock, and he nearly had an anxiety attack (i was feeling pretty great about things)
Fair - I also graduated from an engineering program - though the intensity around finals was grueling. Somehow I think the 80-100% finals weighting might have made it that way.
Why does the boring job blow it up? Not enough stimulation?
it ended up being a confluence of personal life stuff plus how pointless the jobs felt (especially after what a slog university was, i was basically already burnt out going into my first job.) i think boring meant adrenaline didn't kick in as much, and my first few jobs didn't really try to incentivize caring about work in ways that weren't blatantly exploitative or "on trust."
honestly, idk that it was really anything specific, so much as a bunch of different things finally catching up to me mixed with some bad luck
At least for me it wasn't just finals and final projects, it was everything. No assignment was done until just before it was due because (looking back now and applying an adult's logic to it) it wasn't high enough priority until then. It didn't matter whether it was every day/week assignments, long term projects or final exams. The only way I could make any significant progress was to be under a hard and short deadline.
Yup! I wish more people who say they have ADHD could have that experience. If someone says they have ADHD but they are unmedicated and they already are holding down a decent job but are only recently kind of struggling with something they called distraction or issues with focus... Then I say they don't have ADHD because it's so much more than that. It is issues with actual executive function. It is being unable to put your shoes on because you can't keep a straight train of thought because someone else is distracting you and you can't help but following all those threads of distraction while you are trying to perform a manual task.
This is not fair, there are definitely people who struggle with ADHD and do so with the belief they are lazy or internalise their issue as a problem that is due to personality or not being organised enough.
My psychotherapist said something along those same lines but it was in order to force me to answer the question why is it a problem.
For me, in my life, I have always "worked" during the day in an easily distractible state and without being able to commit effort to anything substantial or focus. I self-medicated with caffeine to get anything resembling focus and did all of my actual daily tasks in a 3hr window when I got home and worked into the late evening. Usually with a massive sense of guilt about how I didn't really do anything during the day.
This was ADHD, I could not control when or how I focused. It gets worse with open office environments, but that's not the cause. I have an issue with executive function and delayed gratification. I do not have the ability fundamentally (even when motivated!) to task my brain with working.
But I can hold down a job and have done so for 16 years at this point and I am very successful in my career. That is not a good judge, you work around your issues if you have them- in my case I just don't have anything resembling a life outside of work in order to paper over my executive function disorders.
I don't know, I held down a decent job without meds before starting a family. I definitely have days where my executive functioning is as bad as you mention, but it varies. I've known many people with worse ADHD symptoms than I have, but I'm also not a marginal case. I'm also fortunate to have a rather high IQ.
It took me 11 semesters (plus two summer terms) to finish my undergrad with a low C grade average. Prior to kids, I would get to work between 7 and 8. If I was having trouble focusing that day, I'd leave between 4 and 5pm. If I was having a good day for focus, I'd stay as late as 10pm. Two "good days" in a week would put me at over 20 productive hours, which is a pretty solid foundation for being at least in the "not fired" category. If I didn't have two "good days," well that's what the weekends are for.
Reading the above, I think I understand why "burn out" is mentioned in TFA as something ADHD can lead to...
I wouldn't go as far as to neglect someone elses experience because as with other disorders, people with ADHD can all be quite different.
I understand you because for myself it absolutely affects my executive function and I've been diagnosed as a young child, pretty much coping ever since. Could I get a decent job and hold it down though? Yes, probably.
Getting and staying in a job has many many more factors and making that part of the criteria only makes things more complicated.
I wish you wouldn't say things like this. It seems to fuel a popular narrative that's leading to underdiagnosis and treatment.
There's a good chance that much of the ADHD behavior is being written off, eg. as a moral failing, when it's really a disorder that's really harmful to the person.
I was this person most of my life until medication in my late 30s. For some reason (probably the ADHD) I never really payed attention to it but was always kind of vaguely aware that doing simple things like getting ready for the day, or any kind of planning always seemed much more difficult for me than most others. The worst is the kind of decision paralysis that would happen where you have all of these competing priorities shouting for your attention at once, and your mind rapidly flits between them until you are so exhausted you just check out and go read some hacker news... oh that's how I ended up here.
There's a good chance you do have ADHD. I was in a similar place to you, and it's important to know that it manifests differently in different people, and that there is a rebound effect when you stop your meds so what you might have seen may have been much worse than their unmedicated state. If you have the money I'd suggest just getting tested.
It presents in different ways. Someone isn't having 5 conversations, but could be drifting in and out of thoughts. It might just look like they aren't very interested. If it's more severe you would have more trouble controlling these kinds of things for a number of reasons related to the condition (poor executive function and impulse control).
I've met "people with ADHD" who seem to not have the condition at all, though pretty much always medicated. On the other hand, I've met people with far more clearcut symptoms, and I felt like I had way more in common with them. It sounded like they were living the exact same life.
I’d also suggest that any high IQ individual will by the very nature of being in an extreme of that IQ distribution exhibit some other behaviors that are in tails of the “normal” distribution for various behaviors.
I’ve had multiple people suggest to me I might have ADHD, it’s nonsense, I remember everything and don’t miss any deadlines. They observe me working simultaneously on many projects and since that is impossible for them, and frankly their memory is horrible, they don’t even remember correctly about the one project they are currently focused on, so suddenly they think this person is abnormal and hyper, ok they have ADHD.
I’ve occasionally had people with ADHD or Autism try to diagnose me with it. I took it seriously and read up all about it, watched YouTube videos where people explain their experience, and did the screening questionnaires. And I don’t think I’m even close to having either ADHD or Autism.
Just seems like people see something they can relate too, like listening to fast pace music, or ordering the same thing at the restaurant every time, and then link that to their condition/project it on you.
I think Slack is a silent killer of productivity, and terrible for an ADHD brain:
You're either "engaged" and "available" (meaning you respond to messages in semi-real-time, pretty much nixing your ability to do deep work) or you feel like you're missing a lot of conversation that's going on behind your back, because you're heads down with Slack closed. Slack is good for (shitty) managers of remote teams, because you can see who's "in the office", and randomly ping people when your lack of planning skills means that you are working on something that you forgot to get an answer for in a deliberate way (instead of buzzing by their cube as you used to do)...but for developers I think it's a poor bargain.
There are better tools out there that encourage and support async workflows. Twist, Basecamp, Github discussions, even email with appropriate filters.
I was thinking of this in bed last night. I could focus more using our terrible messaging system prior to Slack. And there was less banter, pessimism, pile ons, etc that now show up in threads. Sometimes I regret replying in a thread when it goes 50+ messages deep and you get pinged on it each one unless you mute
Just wanted to say how much thinking I get done as soon as I lie down in bed with the lights out. Of course, Sometimes, this goes off the rails, and I can't sleep. But generally it is a testament to having little to no sensory input, (in the dark, lying in bed) to be free to think clearly. ;)
A psychiatrist I love to listen to on YouTube, Dr. K, says that what you are explaining is caused by not giving the brain enough rest time (overstimulation). He says rest time is necessary for the brain the kind of sort through/debug things.
Much like sleep, if you go without for long enough, you will randomly start sleeping whenever you get the chance. So, when your brain is constantly "on" and your brain finally gets a chance to calm down, it will start running through all the shit that was blocked out due to being overstimulated.
While I know it's different for everyone and every workplace, I think Slack can be both good and bad for ADHD!
For me, while the distractions of Slack can be a problem, just as often my issue is less distraction than just needing an external motivator to get started. In that case, a sudden DM asking for an update or a request for help in a public channel may be the only way I ever get started actually working. (Obviously, this works best if your job is more about helping others in general than about getting specific tasks done.)
No I mean async. Slack is async. A phone call/Zoom call/in person conversation is sync. Presence indicators are irrelevant and trivially defeated. Besides, what part of ADHD makes you unable to be generally "around"? Not aware of an ADHD symptom that makes it difficult to literally be on a computer at all...
People's expectations that you respond instantly have nothing to do with which app you use. They'll expect that via email if that's your work's culture.
> Slack is async. A phone call/Zoom call/in person conversation is sync.
Chat clients and Slack specifically are designed for sync primarily. GitHub discussions and email are wholly async. Basecamp has a chat feature not chat focus. I don't know Twist.
> Presence indicators are irrelevant and trivially defeated.
Presence indicators were relevant in the 1st comment. And what would victory be in this context?
> Besides, what part of ADHD makes you unable to be generally "around"? Not aware of an ADHD symptom that makes it difficult to literally be on a computer at all...
No one said anything like this.
> People's expectations that you respond instantly have nothing to do with which app you use. They'll expect that via email if that's your work's culture.
You said instantly. Not me or the person who wrote the 1st comment.
I believe data I saw over your assertion. Nearly 2 in 3 people in very different companies said expectations changed soon after their company or team started to use chat software. This excluded companies where near real time responses were expected already. Our tools shape us is a well known observation.
And that was not even the type of expectation I meant. The 1st comment talked about missing conversation while focused on tasks. This leads to being left out of decisions and so on.
> There are better tools out there that encourage and support async workflows. Twist, Basecamp, Github discussions, even email with appropriate filters.
And devs will just set up a Slack bot to send an automated ping each time a task status changes in those tools.
You're right, but unfortunately, when your company uses it and teams are distributed, you don't have the choice, and you have to find some tricks to accommodate.
I disable the `pop up` notification and just let the counter in Ubuntu dock tick up. This lets me see that there is a message without the distracting words in my face.
I’m 39. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD/AS about 11 months ago, after having seen a psychiatrist complaining about chronic fatigue (cf. my Ask HN from two years ago [0]).
Methylphenidate has helped _immensely_. As has accepting the wiring of my brain, taking a two-months sabbatical, and practicing awareness about the ADHD habits. I’m having the year of my life. I can’t remember being productive this consistently basically ever.
I was diagnosed a few years back and use the same drug - the difference is night and day for me. Astonishing difference to my life!
When people ask if I'm frustrated/angry that it took until I was mid-30s to get diagnosed, I respond by saying how I'm proud of myself for achieving what I have so far unmedicated/undiagnosed - and excited about what the future might hold.
> When people ask if I'm frustrated/angry that it took until I was mid-30s to get diagnosed
I've seen the Butterfly Effect movie from the early 00s. I know that going back and changing one thing can have drastic consequences, and not always for the better. ;)
I have been trying to find information on this - but couldn’t find any real scientific literature. Anecdotally, it’s true for me and my current psychiatrist was the first one to recognise the link and start treating my ADHD instead of the depression and low energy and fatigue that I went to her for. Not there yet. But can confirm that the meds help a lot.
Could also be hormonal, sickness, stress, lack of quality sleep/nutrition, etc. for men the drop off in testosterone definitely can manifest in feelings of lethargy.
I just started on the same medication after seeing a psychiatrist. We are experimenting on dosage. However it's frustrating, first month on 18 mg was almost better than the 27 mg I take right now, even though 18 mg in the end did nothing anymore. How did you find your optimal dosage?
My partner reports massive improvements (no fidgetting, calmness, less impulsive) but I still feel .... the same and sometimes worse when it comes to fatigue and work, even though I sleep well.
Pauses. I am experimenting with basic scheme of 25 mins focus and then 5 mins pause. It is mind blowing how it lowers frustration and sort of ensures that I start work only on a clear task which I often tend to loose to easily.
The biggest surprise are the pauses (no, no email checking or web browsing; get up and move around). While formerly I experienced it that I don't have enough time to do what I want to do, I experience just the opposite of it during pauses. Now, what do I do in this time? Wow. That's new.
But also hard to stick to it. But there is more to it, the rules and principles that go along with it.
Sounds like the Pomodoro Technique [0] (also mentioned in the article). Glad it is working out for you!
I tried that to help with my ADHD with very little and very fleeting success.
The classic Pomodoro is said to be 25minn + 5 mins break, which adds up to half an hour, which is a common measurement unit for time worked. I've discovered that for my needs, a 20 min pomodoro with 5 mins rest works better.
The problem is that Pomodoros are hard to count if you hit flow state and find it hard to stop when the timer rings.
To add a data point, I used to do Pomodoro timing (25+5 min) but now switched to 15 min timer with a loose 2-5 min break. It's still hard to actually pull out of hyper-focus/anxious perseveration sometimes, but the shorter timer period seems to match my task cadence better. And the non-timed break just vibes better because it doesn't feel like punishment then.
I've been in the diagnostic process for ADHD twice. First time I ended up losing all the paperwork, and getting kicked out of it. In the time between the first and second attempt, I developed PTSD which essentially stalled the second diagnostic as they could not cleanly differentiate between the two. For some reason, getting a diagnosis has been nearly impossible for me, despite each diagnostician saying "ADHD is highly likely", and the PTSD was a downstream effect of untreated ADHD.
I'm curious of any other developers have found effective, non-medication based ways to manage this.
The fact you lost the paperwork should be a pretty damn good indicator and this part made me laugh out loud. I'm glad to have been simply diagnosed by someone who just accepted my story as true. All this talk about diagnosis is just bizarre. It's not a 0-1 sort of thing, they have to trust you. Unfortunately you have to be confident and assertive because they will gas-light you in the name of being 'careful'.
Sports can be an important piece of the puzzle in the ADHD lifestyle. Especially high-intensity, game-like, engaging ones that you can identify with and be good at. I swear my executive self-control and discipline have improved since I started training tennis several years ago.
Now do remembering to fill your medicine when you're off your medicine :) you need extreme executive loading to argue with insurance and RXs especially with the supply chain issues.
The first time I got medical treatment for ADHD, I eventually stopped treatment because I missed a Dr. appt due to being sick and just couldn't get myself to arrange a follow up appointment.
And they vend it out to you one refill at a time too (at least with my provider), and due to the stimulant shortage you have to go to hospitals to get it filled and even then they don't have it available for some time
I ran out of meds once but thank God my lady forced me to go get them asap because she couldn't handle me off the meds anymore
That's why I use nicotine patches. I don't know how much of the benefit they deliver compared to something like Ritalin, but I do see a measurable improvement. (Including getting a major promotion)
Blame the War on Drugs and our asinine DEA with drug scheduling that is completely decoupled from science and reality. Never vote Republican, they just enjoy torturing the sick.
This has caused so many extremes in my life that I know actively avoid stimulant medications even though they objectively improve my quality of life. I wish excruciating agony upon the DEA and anyone who supports the current schedule system. It is just torturing the ill so that mediocre busybodies can feel superior without actually accomplishing anything.
I feel incredibly lucky that my parents got me evaluated for ADHD and Autism when I was still a minor.
It's much much harder as an adult. There is a lot of stigmatization and also this thought of "oh you got through school, oh you got this far" for adults with ADHD.
I used to take medication and it helped me a lot. Now however I have come off of them completely. The side effects can be devastating. In my case, I developed strong insomnia as amphetamines are much stronger than caffeine. Sleeplessness over a longer period can be very mentally deteriorating.
The advice I can give is to actively seek interaction with others suffering from the same, actively accept and ask for all accommodations and help, give yourself enough time for what you need to do and don't compare your experience to the neurotypical one.
It is different and it's a matter of coping and accepting oneself and ones disadvantages as a normal part of life.
Another thing I often say to people in my therapy group is that they should also be politically proactive about their condition. Things like healthcare covered medication, ensured accommodations etc and the fight against stigmatization are political by nature.
> The advice I can give is to actively seek interaction with others suffering from the same, actively accept and ask for all accommodations and help, give yourself enough time for what you need to do and don't compare your experience to the neurotypical one. It is different and it's a matter of coping and accepting oneself and ones disadvantages as a normal part of life.
This has been my approach at this point. I've had to accept that I will likely never get medication, or even a proper diagnosis. My family actively fought every teacher who suggested I had ADHD, and there were several. Very honestly, the only reason I have sought diagnosis is to get accommodation which would let me work within the focus patterns ADHD causes.
My closest friend has ADHD, and my partner is in the process of getting an ASD diagnosis. The majority of my time is spent around neuroodivergent types.
Simply having people around you who share your experience is incredibly helpful, since you can talk to them freely and be understood. I've given up trying to discuss the experience with people who are NT simply because the understanding that the challenges I face are not just inconvenient just isn't there.
>This has been my approach at this point. I've had to accept that I will likely never get medication, or even a proper diagnosis.
I don't see how the rest of your comment follows from this quote. Don't give up bud, its always worth trying. You can simply not take meds if you don't want to.
> don't compare your experience to the neurotypical one
I can't help myself from doing this, but I am not sure if I truly should want to stop making such a comparison. I find it leaves me feeling like I am inferior or sub-human. I have ADHD, and so what? ADHD can make things more challenging, but not impossible (within the realms of reason).
Do you also have an aversion to paperwork? Seems to be "a thing". Paperwork has paralysed me ever since I've been in high school. Have gotten in trouble and paid fines over procrastinating paperwork over my whole life.
I am also on the "Highly Likely", and currently on the waitlist for a clinic. The best thing I did was being open and honest with my partner, as my ADD behaviors would sometimes exasperate her. I did the same with my manager at work, and it can usually get you some degree of accommodation which can help you cope.
I suffer for the 3-for-1 Triple A special: Autism, Anxiety and ADD. Seems to be a fairly common combination. Physical exercise helps greatly with anxiety, and helps to some degree to ADD as it does generate a certain sense of "reward" in my brain.
Paperwork is my nightmare. I don't forget to do them, I just can't seem to get started on them even if they're simple and quick. Things I've done in the past
- Put off paying a traffic citation until I got a late fine that doubled the amount
- Put off gathering paperwork for taxes until my accountant told me if I don't send it now he won't be able to file this year
- Drove around with expired plates for 6 months until the car got towed parked on the street
Looking back, it feels silly to procrastinate on these simple tasks for so long but I guess that's the ADHD brain at work.
Last year I sent a friend a package. It took me over a year to send the damn thing. Why? I just couldn't find the motivation to send it. I had all the contents packed up in a box ready to go, and I live like 0.2 mile walk away from a Post Office. Still took over a year to send it.
Oh! I have another. I once drove with expired car tags for like 3 to 6 months. I already had them renewed and everything. In fact, my tag sticker was in the damn glove compartment the whole time. I just kept procrastinating on putting the sticker on because I didn't want to carve out the 1 minute it takes to unscrew the license plate cover, clean the plate, and apply the sticker.
"I'll do it <insert future time>."
It's shit like this that kills me.
Ironically, I had less issues with this kind of stuff prior to being medicated, but I also was younger and had less responsibility in my day-to-day life, so medication might not be a correlated much.
I totally get it and have been through exactly what you describe many times.
What finally helped me was (a) the advent of online services for nearly everything, so I can do it all in one session and not have to do multiple steps to accomplish something (or any back-and-forth phone/mail), and (b) a "just do it now" mindset. Like, when a bill comes I somehow finally have myself psyched to pay it online right away (don't ask me how I got here, I don't know. Maybe it's because I tied money handling to checking my bank balance when I get a paycheck - that's when I do most of my banking... seeing a higher balance and moving money around (and by extension, paying bills) feels exciting now to my lizard brain.) Otherwise, if I don't take care of it right away, I know it'll literally never happen.
I know that if I had been born 20 years earlier, I'd have a much worse credit score and probably be much poorer due to late fees. Online services and auto-bill-pay make such a difference.
I always find it interesting when people have a hard time getting a diagnosis. I was diagnosed as a child with ADHD and I've had ... tens of psychiatrists over my life and when I eventually move and go to a new one I've never once had one want to re-diagnose or have me prove in some way that I'm ADHD. I just tell them that I'm ADHD and my other neurodivergent issue and they prescribe me my medication.
I've never told a new pysch who my previous psych was so I'm sure they're not getting my medical records from them unless there's some sharing system I'm unaware of.
I wonder if I come off as strongly ADHD. I've been called "intense" before, whatever that means. I'm definitely fidgety and a horrible leg bouncer.
Lol
I was kind of rediagnosed as an adult and I missed the first appointment. Then it took me half a year to make another one. There I forget half my papers … and so on …
After 1h talk and some tests where I refilled everything so oft that it was a mess they didn’t have any doubt.
Ask a friend to dedicate time to be with you (even on remote) when you fill/send the paperwork. Or hire a secretary/student to do it for you.
You need a crutch, that's OK and totally normal!
If you want to take one more shot at it, try any online pill mill, the diagnostic process is much easier post-covid and may be as simple as a brief in-person interview with a non-MD practitioner.
Yes to both. I also wear an Apple Watch with the main display being a heart rate graph to monitor my stress levels over the day. I tend to average a resting rate of 100 bpm during periods of higher stress, and between 60-70 in periods of lower stress. Longer periods of high BPM indicates that I need to take a break.
The PTSD presents mostly in incredibly severe trust issues, periodic nightmares related to events, depersonalization, sleep problems, and paranoia. I also have an absurdly overblown startle response that looks more like a panic attack than someone being jump-startled. If I'm startled "badly enough", it triggers a panic attack. "Badly enough" can simply be someone tapping me on the shoulder when I didn't notice them coming up behind me.
I have and am. I got the PTSD diagnosed when I was trying to get the ADHD one done. And most of the sorting things out is directly related to the PTSD aspect, rather than ADHD.
Extremely relatable. Hyperfocus... I can easily spend over twenty hours focusing on something once I get in the zone, but it's extremely difficult to open the editor and start programming. Coping mechanisms and adaptative behaviors are all good and all but the power of lisdexamfetamine cannot be underestimated.
Lisdexamphetamine is a big help, but the side effects can be devastating.
Of course every person is different, but for me this reduced my sleep quality significantly. I can no longer take any of these meds if I want a good restful night of sleep. When I was younger it was no problem though.
That's interesting, I found it actually helps with my sleep. As it wears off (around the end of the work day) I feel pretty tired. Plus I no longer need to drink coffee to get through the day, so I think the lack of caffeine helps too.
I just want to offer an alternative perspective because I think it’s important not to discourage people who might be put off trying meds because of the potential downside. Once I had the dosage, and importantly a second dose at mid day dialed in, my sleep actually improved. My sleep problems were caused by adhd, so having it be treated as I was winding down for the night was a huge improvement in my ability to sleep.
It took me a long time to dial in my vyvanse prescription so it wasn't impacting my sleep, plus not taking it on the weekends.
Stress in all its forms also turned out to be a critical factor in sleeping well, too. Simply taking on fewer responsibilities (which I attribute in part to my particular ADHD) helped a lot there.
My doctor suggests I take Vyvanse on the weekends, 7 days a week - I feel like after taking it so long (almost a decade) I don't know who I am anymore off the pills - like I'm a different person almost?
Did your doctor suggest weekend breaks, or is this something you've tried yourself and found works for you?
Every doctor I have had has recommend taking breaks if and when possible. I try to do it myself, and I think it makes a difference. The research on tolerance to medications is not well agreed upon. I am not expert, but I do not see any biological way that the human body would not gain a tolerance to some degree when constantly exposed to an exogenous substance that alters dopamine, GABA, etc..
Nicotine tolerance is real. So is caffeine, cocaine, meth, etc.. I do not see how our medications would be any different.
I can plus one this. I thought it was the stimulant dosage in the afternoon that was keeping me up all night, but it turns out to be stress! Once that is relieved, things go back to normal.
I don't take it myself either. I've always been afraid of the cardiovascular risks associated with stimulants. I've seen recent research suggesting it doesn't increase risk but still.
I read that whole thing and didn’t read one word about nutrition?
I’ve come along way to understanding the nutritional metabolic pathways that may increase the symptoms of ADHD.
Pyridoxine, or B6, is the most studied nutritional factor when it comes to reducing ADHD symptoms. I’m not saying this is the only cause of ADHD, but if this works other things might work as well. Zinc is a good possibility on the list also.
While it discusses multi-year treatment, the paper says "After several weeks of such treatment the pattern of behavior in ADHD patients is normalized." which feels like something that could be easily tried out. Since it was published in 2013 I'd expect some follow-up? (checking for citations now)
Edit: Sadly, "No Tryptophan, Tyrosine and Phenylalanine Abnormalities in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4777504/ 2016, larger study. (although they measure the amounts rather than ratios, so not exactly the same idea)
Nutritional studies are hard to get funding for in the first place, never mind the follow-ups.
They found nothing in the study, because IMI they were measuring the wrong neurotransmitters. Dopamine is not the cause of the symptoms. It has to do with glutamate and GABA Balance. Since stimulants can control effect glutamate and GABA as well as Dopamine , that’s why there is all the confusion.
B6 also plays a role in glutamate GABA balance through stimulating the glutamate dehydrogenase enzyme.
May be a part of why so many people with psychiatric disorders (especially undiagnosed or untreated) often use nicotine and/or alcohol to cope. They both interact heavily with the GABAergic system. Alcohol also inhibits the activity of glutamate and reduces extracellular levels in certain brain regions. Too much glutamate in the brain can cause 'failure of different neurotransmission systems' and is neurotoxic.
It's too bad self-medicating with these substances comes with such awful downsides.
Ethanol is my go to medication. It’s the only calcium, sodium, and potassium ion channel blocker that can enter the brain. These are implicated in bipolar disorder which I have. The trick is to not abuse it just like any other medication.
I also have labile hypertension and it’s the only medication I can take that controls my blood pressure spikes.
I feel the same way about nicotine, although I can’t take it because it turns me to up. Nicotine is a stimulant and can be used as a medicine in lower doses. The problem is that people used to do and that sets up the addiction cycle.
I definitely have an issue with a very high glutamate/GABA ratio. My other go to medicine is Klonopin which I use only when I’m in a severe crisis. Like when I had a delusional psychosis when I had Covid.
I think this and many research efforts seem like how blind men are describing an elephant. They partially capture the truth. It seems to me B6 is just one of many cofactors that affect the one-carbon metabolism (methylation) besides epigenetics that play a role in ADHD. Recently I have been reading/watching materials from Bill Wash. His findings on ADHD make more sense to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhdI6rqORv8 If you look up further online, I think you can find the biochemical rationale for these findings.
Nutrition is very important indeed, but it has always been a problem for me. I wanted to focus on things I tried and worked on me. Of course, it's not perfect, but at least the points I listed made the things better for me. Everybody's different, so it's not a silver bullet, just my personal journey.
Can you explain more about how nutrition is an issue for you?
Would you ever consider getting your serum B6 levels tested? It’s pretty cheap and you can do it without a doctors prescription if you’re in in the United States.
For me, as I’ve gone through this journey - a key takeaway from understanding myself better is that commuting to and working from an office is far worse for my health than I thought and not something I could go back to doing.
An office is a place that’s very hostile to the majority of folks with ADHD and can have considerable health impacts. Its disruptions, lighting, heating, noises and work space disrupt my comfort, flow, mood and enthusiasm. It’s not something I’d go back to doing again - and because of that I’m healthier, happier, get considerably more work done, and want to engage socially more outside of work.
It’s great to see accessible articles like this become popular, I think it’s also important to make sure that all the mitigating strategies don’t end up falling solely with the individual, but we that we also work towards a healthier, more inclusive, working society.
You also regain 2+ hours a day that can be used to improve your sleep, nutrition and exercise situation. These are all key foundational requirements for people with ADHD that enable higher-level executive functioning.
One key identifier not mentioned in the article is that ADHD, as well as manically depressed, people typically produce extremely low levels of serotonin. It is common for ADHD people to compensate with stimulants like caffeine and sugar.
Many people crave minor stimulants in the afternoon or early morning when serotonin levels dip in the day. People chronically low on serotonin however will crave these all day long in extreme volumes in what looks like drug addiction seeking behavior. The result of such stimulant over consumption produces behaviors that appear like rapid bipolar disorders.
This does not apply to all people with ADHD, but when you see the behavior in people close to you it’s probably a good idea to have them tested.
My biggest learning about ADHD is that it’s not primarily about focus, but irregularities with task completion/transition deficiencies.
It's dopamine that ADHD lack and that you get from caffeine and sugar, not serotonin. People who are depressed do lack serotonin though yes. And you can have both. You can't get that from caffeine though.
That last one mentioned coloring agents multiple times. Different research has show artificial colors, as derived from petro-chemical processing like reds and yellows, are strongly linked with neurotransmitter disruption in all people, but the effect is an order of magnitude more significant in high risk children.
I really dislike the neurotransmitter discussions because they do not differentiate between "free" or "in-transit" neurotransmitter levels vs. "stored" or "awaiting dispatch" neurotransmitter levels vs. "receptor sites" or "available destinations" for neurotransmitters vs. "receptor activation effect" or "destination's response on delivery." That doesn't even get into the complexity of different types of receptor sites or their roles in all the different bodily systems and organs. It leads for utterly confounding conversations without strictly delineating what everyone knows and/or assumes about the topic at hand.
So, here is my quick and slipshod armchair theorizing: serum serotonin levels may be a predictor of ADHD due serotonin's role in activating certain autoreceptors that mediate dopamine release.
No. It over simplifies what is happening to the point of drawing false correlations. Low serotonin production is strongly linked with low dopamine production but the reverse is less clear. More direct to this conversation sugar and caffeine consumption addresses low dopamine directly, but this coping behavior seeks to address the results of low serotonin, not dopamine. People with low dopamine but regular serotonin also benefit equally from high sugar and caffeine intake, but are substantially less prone to seek sugar and caffeine for that purpose. In the end its about correcting for mood stimulus not task reward stimulus.
Oh I mean that makes perfect sense. You're agreeing with me. Caffeine and sugar give you dopamine. Of course those with low serotonin are likely to have low dopamine - being depressed makes you not want to do stuff. And I can also understand why being depressed would make you want comfort consumables more than being only low dopamine.
As with many behavior impairing/enhancing substances, there are effects on multiple neurotransmitters:
>Caffeine activates noradrenaline neurons and seems to affect the local release of dopamine. Many of the alerting effects of caffeine may be related to the action of the methylxanthine on serotonin neurons. [1]
Or take alcohol, which people typically associate only with GABA:
>Among the neurotransmitter systems linked to the reinforcing effects of alcohol are dopamine, endogenous opiates (i.e., morphinelike neurotransmitters), GABA, serotonin, and glutamate acting at the NMDA receptor (Koob 1996).
Two other things, first the notion that depression can be reduced down to a deficiency of neurotransmitters is almost certainly an oversimplification (if not outright incorrect). What we have is correlation, not causation, where GABA, stress hormones, and other mechanisms also show up. Second, even if this characterization of "low on neurotransmitters => depression" is correct, it is not and has never been just about serotonin:
>The monoamine-deficiency theory posits that the underlying pathophysiological basis of depression is a depletion of the neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine or dopamine in the central nervous system. [2]
Huh heard this before about caffeine but not sugar, that might explain why I'm an absolute sugar fiend. I'm just very lucky that my blood sugar isn't through the roof somehow.
I swear that every time I read an article by somebody who claims they've been diagnosed with ADHD, it is the same formula: "when I was a child...", "I didn't know what it was", ..., "I was finally diagnosed with ADHD", then finally "I have super powers no one else has so I will use them to my advantage".
I have been personally diagnosed with ADHD and have benefited from medication but it doesn't come without its costs. My wife was diagnosed when she was very young and we've had a lot of time to run self experiments and discuss ideas.
I don't think people want to hear this but I believe so many people think they have ADHD because of a lack of discipline. Even people with ADHD will understand what I'm talking about. Some days you can take your medication and still get nothing done with endless distractions.
We live in a world full of distractions and our attention spans are being whittled down with every new dopamine slot machine on our phones. What's rare today is someone stopping themselves from reaching for the digital crack and embracing the less stimulating but more rewarding long term goal slog. Treating every focus problem you have as a medical issue or a fleeting lack of motivation gives you an easier out. What you really need to accept is that sometimes you just avoid discomfort and the only thing missing is forcing yourself to get shit done and being content with it.
> I believe so many people think they have ADHD because of a lack of discipline
A fundamental characteristic of my ADHD is lack of discipline. I cannot force myself to do something if ADHD is getting in the way. On the rare occasions it's not, and I have initiative (a truly precious resource), it doesn't matter how much or little I enjoy the task, or how uncomfortable the task is, it's getting done.
As I'm sure you know, ADHD diagnosis, like many other diagnoses, needs two things:
1. Have at least N of M symptoms on a list.
2. Have those things have a material negative impact on your life.
> the only thing missing is forcing yourself to get shit done
...yes? Obviously?
As far as I understand it, that's the whole point. People who don't have ADHD just don't struggle with that to the point that it shapes their life, it's just an occasional annoyance that doesn't require any special effort to deal with.
I dislike this post because medication is only a (meaningfully large part) of managing adhd. It’s not a magic pill that solves it and if the patient doesn’t have a holistic approach that includes mindfulness, exercise, diet, managing other mental health issues, and structure - then they’re still likely to fail.
I’d encourage you to read more about adhd because a huge symptom of it is lack of long term perspective in decision making. It’s like one of the defining characteristics. Trying to dismiss that as someone being lazy or undisciplined is a damaging stereotype to spread. It’s the equivalent of telling someone with depression to snap out of it or get some sunshine
I think you missed my point. I'm mostly talking about the litany of people on social media that believe they have ADHD without brain scans or any formal diagnosis.
Almost everyone suffers from some lack of discipline and some mistake it for being neurodivergent. People with ADHD can also lack it. Your point of taking a holistic approach is correct and I wasn't trying to single out medication. People with ADHD don't get a free pass on building discipline. In fact, to your point they require more of it to overcome their struggles. Medication, mindfulness, exercise, diet, and structure all take a lot of effort and consistency. It requires you to be more disciplined.
I'm not sure I like the word disciplined but I'm being pedantic. It takes tremendous effort, finding the right resources, and setting up structure to be successful. Which maybe is discipline? Idk
The good thing is that while getting started sucks, if you're consistent with it you can train your mind to seek out and crave long term goal progress and completion in the same way you can train your body.
> if you're consistent with it you can train your mind to seek out and crave long term goal progress and completion in the same way you can train your body.
How? I mean, one of my major symptoms is that I can't for life do either! "Training my body" doesn't feel like something natural or within range of possibility.
Yeah, I found it close to the annoying "you could try not to have issues... harder". I'm glad some people find they can actually change their behaviours. But it's more of a "if you /CAN BE/ consistent with it" issue for others.
"Life is suffering". Better to accept it. There is joy in life but what you are present for even without training your mind is suffering. It's way easier to recognize and remember than joy.
What do you mean by "natural or within range of possibility"?
One is consistent by doing, not by feeling (of course feelings have their own place in life). I don't enjoy going to the gym per se. I let go of that and go. I don't go because I feel happy and motivated before exercise. First, I went because people for thousands of years have saying so, and biologically it makes sense. Then, because I know how I feel in the short and long term after the exercise.
I do different sports for enjoyment and different for keeping in shape of course. I love hiking but going to a gym is more sustainable as a regular way of keeping in shape in all seasons and weather.
Yep, I know a lot of people who have the most horrible lifestyles who claim to have ADHD. I had previously been entirely useless in my life and claimed to be depressed. As soon as I made an effort to be happy and implement healthy coping mechanisms I quickly became a much more functional human being. I have found myself recently wondering if I have ADHD a lot. I'm starting to realise this may be the same thing and I do need to have some self discipline. I am pre-disposed to being disorganised, terrible at dealing with time and very contrary in the face of things I don't want to do. However, I'm pretty sure these are things I can sorta improve on and are not so tied to my brain chemistry that I must yield to them. Recently I had a gf who was hypersensitive to all noise, practically unable to sleep, extremely hyperactive, addictive tendencies, impulsive to a ridiculous level, terrible relationship to food, always talking too much or too little to hold a conversation as expected, worse concept of time than me, constantly living in an extreme level of chaos. She was recently diagnosed ADHD and nothing has ever been less surprising to me in my life. That gave me a good insight about what is the difference between me being pretty disorganised and always feeling like it's hard to start doing things, and what being ADHD looks like. Mainly, I do not have all these other neurodivergent tendencies like hypersensitivity. So hopefully I will be able to continue working towards functioning as a normal adult although I do find it sorta challenging. I am investigating physical medical reasons for my difficulty focusing and still looking to see if I can get assessed though, just to rule anything out. But I think I can do a lot more with my behaviour than I think.
Erm a lot of things. Diet and exercise are literally key. Diet less so, I can be depressed with a great diet. But with adequate sun exposure and exercise it's pretty hard to be super depressed unless you have a serious chemical imbalance. (edit: I also think having goals in your exercise that you actually care about somewhat helps).
I go outside and stare at the sun every morning for like 5 mins (this is so key I can't even overstate it). I take a cold shower after that (proven to increase your baseline dopamine). I exercise almost every day. I try to never spend a whole day in my house unless I'm sick, preferably spending the majority of the day outside my house. I try to get 8 hours of sleep at least 5 out of 7 days a week, by which I mean 9 hours in bed with the lights off. Being in bed 8 hours isn't sufficient. All this makes me feel awake and sorta alive.
I keep a journal where I set myself goals for the day and I reflect on my performance and my state of mind at the end of the day. Sorta a bullet journal deal with a bit more feels but in a practical way. It's for monitoring and encouraging iterative improvement and for analysing and mitigating negative thought patterns. This allows me to keep myself accountable but also just cope when I'm literally crying in the evening for no reason. It's like my emotional support book.
I was having trouble with caring about anything I usually would. I just started trying to act like I cared. Like acting curious, being highly engaged. And it sort of leads to you naturally being more interested after a while.
I try to create social interaction for myself every week even if no-one invites me to do anything.
I have Freedom app on my phone blocking most stuff for the first 5 hours and last 1 hour of the day. I also don't listen to music or podcasts in the morning. This leaves my brain feeling less sluggish and helpless.
I sign up for really random stuff sometimes just to make my life interesting.
Lastly, I do a lot of deep breathing when I'm trying to get things done because I tend to get anxiety about literally any task.
Edit: I don't know why I need so much going on to make myself function like a normal person. But it works a lot better than not doing this because otherwise I literally curl up into a ball, give up on life and get fired from jobs.
For a while there I thought I had ADHD, and started looking for avenues to get diagnosed. But when I talked more with some friends who have serious cases of it, I started to doubt. Instead of going for the medication, I removed distracting apps from my phone and logged out of socials. It took a few weeks to settle into the routine, but now my focus/attention problems are all but gone. Go figure!
I have diagnosed ADHD and I do not have social media (besides HN), distracting apps or anything. I just have stock GrapheneOS on my phone, no extra distractions.
This helps tremendously but doesn't really affect the core issues of adhd, which are a lack of focus when that is needed. Note that it's not a general lack of focus and not a lack of discipline. People with ADHD often fall into depression because they cannot focus well enough even with the right discipline and motivation.
Exactly. I came to the conclusion that for me it was an environment/discipline issue because (among other things) my severe-ADHD friends would try the same tactics with 0 effect. If I can manage attention issues with lifestyle changes alone, it’s probably not a brain chemistry problem.
I do think it’s a testament though to how brain-rotting the always-on socials/apps/notifications can be. They messed me up so bad I literally thought I had a medical condition! Yikes.
Not really. ADHD is well documented in brain scans that show a lack of activation and structural differences. You can actually see the difference between the brain of a person with ADHD and a control. It's not just 'having weak discipline' and 'not trying hard enough.' It would be like looking at someone with no arms and saying 'I believe that this person can pick up a ball but they just lack the discipline.' Nope, the structural basis to make that happen is absent. That's ADHD.
I found an article written... a while ago now which describes the issue already, having the internet under your fingers and endless short form distractions: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/.
> My mother first helped diagnose me with NADD. It was the late 1980s and she was bringing me dinner in my bedroom (nerd). I was merrily typing away to my friends in some primitive chat room on my IBM XT (super nerd), listening to music (probably Flock of Seagulls—nerd++), and watching Back to the Future with the sound off (nerrrrrrrrrrd). She commented, “How can you focus on anything with all this stuff going on?” I responded, “Mom, I can’t focus without all this noise.”
I'm confused btw; the date on the page mentions it was written in 2003, but the article mentions Slack which didn't exist until 2013, unless the article's been kept updated over the years.
> Me, I’ve got a terminal session open to a chat room, I’m listening to music, I’ve got Safari open with three tabs open where I’m watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I’ve got two notepads open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I’m writing this column, as well.
the current version:
> Me, I’ve got Slack opened and logged into four different teams, I’m listening to music in Spotify, I’ve got Chrome open with three tabs where I’m watching stocks on E*TRADE, I’m tinkering with WordPress, and I’m looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iMessage open, Tweetbot is merrily streaming the latest fortune cookies from friends, and I’ve got two Sublime windows open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to-do lists. Oh yeah, I’m rewriting this article as well.
I got diagnosed with ADHD a couple years ago, and it has remained a shit show since then. It was a shit show before, but now medical appointments and crazy restricted medicines have been added to the mix (I ran out of an addictive antidepressant this weekend, not fun). It feels like everybody agrees I'm sick but nobody has an effective treatment for me. I went to see all the doctors who accepted to see me (it's not that many, the appointment system is made to fend of patients, not help you see a doctor), nobody had any magical insight. I lost the best job of my life because of my inability to stay on track.
I don't find this hyperfocus to be unique and became quite resentful when diagnosed later in life by a therapist + psychiatrist. In my case, I was confused as to why I was always underperforming and needed to work extra hours to catch up with my peers, for example. It is not lazyness, when alone I’m a dialed down version of Martin Lorentzon (reference here from the Spotify docuseries)
As a child, I had nicknames related to "crazy." Today, the one thing I take pride in related to ADHD is my ability to think outside the box.
I personally don't believe in any "superpowers". Its just adversity you face, nothing good about it. I'd rather not have it obviously.
But maybe my experience is different became I later also got diagnose with having Aspergers.
I read a book once decades ago about ADHD, and it said lots of children are misdiagnosed with it. One of the very common causes is that kids who don't eat regularly (or eat sugar then crash) will encounter low blood sugar. The body reacts to this by dumping adrenaline in the bloodstream and ... voila ... an excitable kid with little focus.
It's both under- and over-diagnosed because the funnel for children is teachers who have basically been trained to refer the "problem children" for diagnosis.
I have a son who has extreme anxiety, and kept getting referred by teachers for ADHD. Hyper-vigilance for danger can make it hard to focus on arithmetic, particularly in an elementary school classroom. The psychiatrist ended up putting a note in his file because this was happening.
Meanwhile, I also have a daughter who is so obviously ADHD: she forgets to turn in her homework; there were 6 of her jackets in the lost and found in October; she will go to school without her eyeglasses; &c. But, she doesn't disrupt the classroom and is otherwise seen as a "good kid" so she was never referred by a teacher.
I used to be your daughter! Super quiet, got all my work done on time, was seen as "gifted", but would lose absolutely everything (and I mean everything).
I really suggest some sort of setup to maintain structure as she gets older - being aware of a diagnosis or having medication / therapy would've really saved a couple painful years in university for me
Between decades ago and now we've recognized that sugar only causes excitableness in children who are prompted (Clever Hans style) by adults who expect such an outcome.
The wisdom you're referencing is circa the 70's, it's been attempted many times since and has never replicated.
The comment you're replying to doesn't seem to mention the debunked "sugar rush". The "crash" on the other hand seems to be more replicable.
Also your framing ignores that the "prompting" can be circumstantial rather than targeted. The "rush" is frequently misattributed to sugar when it can actually be better explained by the food itself being a rare treat (and thus exciting) or the situation in which it is provided being special (e.g. a party). Or it can simply be the joy of eating something very tasty.
It's less Clever Hans and more "kids are more prone to sudden outbursts of strong emotions and adults blame it on food".
Also, this blog post misses body doubling which is incredibly helpful and can even be done virtually with focusmate or a similar service (I use focusmate personally but I do want to spam so no referral link or crap like that). Indeed, for me the only way to swallow a frog is focusmate.
Same here. I have never been able to intentionally build a routine for just about anything, despite the autistic part of me aggressively wanting routine.
I find I love the ideas of structure and routine, and fully grasp the importance of maintaining invariants and discipline, but utterly fail to apply those concepts to my life. Rather frustrating
I have grave reservations about AI art, but...nope, that doesn't follow.
It's true that there are a lot of (human) artists in the US. (Something like 80 million, broadly defined.) And it's also true that the art and media each artist views shapes the art they create, including art and media we see quite incidentally - graffiti, ads on bus shelters, paintings in the hallways of office buildings. And in the course of the year each of us will view thousands upon thousands of such pieces of art and meida.
So if we had a licensing scheme such that every artist had to make a non-negligible payment to the rights holder of every bit of media they view, then artists, collectively, would be liable for hundreds of billions of dollars in royalty payments. 80m aritsts * 1k pieces of media * $5 license fee is $400b; that's just basic math.
This calculation is, very obviously, not an argument that all art is theft. It's just some math about a hypothetical licensing scheme, and that's all a18n were doing too.
You may think (and I'm inclined to agree) that a human paging through an artist's ArtStation profile is fundamentally different than an LLM using it as training data, but that's an argument not addressed by a18n in that quote.
Your source does not support your claim. They say that if every single individual piece of data used to train a model was to be paid out, there would be a lot of payouts. You could just as easily say that if you had to pay the state for every step you took on the sidewalk, you would have to pay the state a lot. This does not prove that you are indebted to the state for millions in sidewalk usage because fortunately for you the law has not decided to make you pay for using the sidewalk, just as it has not decided to make training data have to pay per file.
> just as it has not decided to make training data have to pay per file.
That's quite exactly what the copyright law states, though. I never thought the day will come when I root for Getty Images but the techbros have managed to do it. Congrats, I guess?
Stolen art requires the original to be taken from its rightful owner. The original owner still has their work, meaning no theft has occurred. Also worth a mention is that in the case of AI art the original owner is hard to discern in the first place because the work is often too transformative to pin any part of it to even a single artist.
DMCA defines copying as theft. Derivative artwork requires paying the owner of the original copyright.
> A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work."
Let's tick all that apply:
- based upon one or more pre-existing works [yep]
- (...) any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. [yep]
"Sufficiently transformed" isn't enough to not consider it clearly derivative. The code takes in existing copyrighted art, transforms it, and shits out derivatives. Derivative artwork requires a license to the derivative rights to exist, otherwise it's in violation of existing copyright law. This is an incredibly simple case to argue. The derivatives literally cannot exist without that which they are derived from.
Then the DMCA would be wrong: Theft requires the original owner to lose their property, which does not occur when copying data. This is no surprise as the DMCA has always sucked.
Frankly you missed my point entirely, the DMCA and my/the technical community's general disdain for it doesn't have much to do with what I wrote. What I'm saying is that in 99% of cases AI art is unique enough that you simply cannot pin it to an existing author and say that they were copied directly. There are obvious exceptions when you prompt it as specifically as possible to try to make a copy as best you can (which is still never quite 1-to-1 with the original), but in 99% of cases, it is pretty much not possible to pay the "original artist" because you cannot identify them. What good is an unenforceable rule?
It's encoded in law. I wasn't talking about "what should be", I was talking about "what is".
> it is pretty much not possible to pay the "original artist" because you cannot identify them
there are numerous cases where an AI has spat out "literally just the original image, but badly". It really sucks that AI companies might literally have to- checks notes -"pay the people they're stealing from", though. Oh, my heart weeps for those billionaires that might have to shed a penny from their fortune to help those they sleep upon.
Follow Jesse Anderson's Extra Focus substack (there's a book too), his newsletter helps you understand ADHD much more than anything I know of. And there are useful tips too. Remember, if it works for you, it's not weird :)
One of the more interesting things about ADHD is that some of the things ADHD sufferers call "coping strategies" (using calendars, writing documentation) are actually just really good ideas for anyone.
The twin demons of diminishing returns and hyperbolic discounting mean that people who don't need to have these systems in place for the current demands of their lives, usually don't have them in place. ADHD sufferers probably get more out of implementing and following these systems on the margin, so they're paradoxically more likely to reach for them than the average person. (I predict Getting Things Done is popular with both high powered executives of all kinds and middle of the road ADHD laden office workers.) But current demands being low rarely predicts future demands staying low, and having a habit of working with these things already deeply engrained is a really, really good idea even if your Todo list only has "Get out of bed", "Finish Breaking Bad S4" and "Get back in bed" on it.
I think the number of items that any given office worker in today's environment has to juggle far, far exceeds working memory, never mind that using working memory to maintain a running list of tasks precludes or at least contends with using it to actually think about the individual task at hand.
I haven't used the Getting Things Done method explicitly, but at a glance it looks like a more formalized version of what most of the people I know who are well-organized and have good time management skills seem to gravitate to naturally.
I don't think I know a single person who I'd consider "very on top of things" who doesn't have some mechanism, formal or informal, of noting/organizing/prioritizing thoughts and tasks. The idea that they are in fact coping with something and "regular" people just keep everything in their heads doesn't make any sense to me.
In the same way fire was discovered by an anemic woman, maybe. It seems most popular among my lawyer/paralegal friends, though, and "low working memory" is not a harbinger of success in those fields.
This article is really good and a useful summation of things I've felt and tried to explain, going to pass it on to my partner!
The only thing that I found interesting was with regards to choosing focus days, as I just cannot do that - I don't know hour to hour whether I will be able to focus or not, it's always a total battle.
However, my hack is that when coding I need to watch something silly: like cooking shows, reality tv etc - something I can partially ignore.
This was a fix I discovered about 20 years ago and it's helped me ever since, I've always described it as keeping the child portion of my brain happy whilst the adult portion gets on with its job.
I was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD (what was ADD) 8 months ago, medication really helps with emotional regulation and staying on task - yet I can still code better when I'm watching some random rubbish.
Thanks for your comment ! I have the chance to be able to choose when I’m going at the office or not, it’s a great chance and even if it’s planned to go to the office and it’s one of these down days, I can choose not to go and work from home at my rhythm.
Regarding to what to watch/listen to to be in the "zone", I really think it’s personal. Personally, if there’s some moving images, I’m unable to focus, but with some music (especially repeating electronic music), I can be in my own bubble for hours
I love how this community has such a disproportionate number of people who have ADHD. It's almost like programming is actually just incredibly difficult to pay attention to for any normal human being and the field is competitive enough that people basically have to find a way to get a prescription for stimulants.
(Honestly not trying to discredit anyone actually suffering from ADHD, just seem implausible to me that so many have it given that programming also just requires an unhealthy amount of attention to finish tasks in a "timely" manner).
It may also be that many individuals who are on the autism spectrum also present with comorbid ADHD.
And that things like coding, solving logic puzzles, rationality etc is disproportionately more interesting to people somewhere on the autism spectrum.
But.. I don't know.
To make it broader, neurodiverse conditions, autism spectrum being the other one; no surprise there's a lot of overlap between ADHD and ASD when it comes to some of the symptoms.
That honestly just isn't a stereotype I see play out in reality aside from the sort of "pop" coders like Carmack and Stallman. Like I've met neurodiverse coders, but in roughly the same proportion as I meet neurodiverse folks in other facets of life.
Here's another hack: 10mg Methylphenidate. YMMV, but the alternative is a boat load of systems, routines, caffeine, which all may or may not work depending on how the day/week is going. Not a panacea to be sure, but for those adults with ADHD inattentive where dopamine deficiency impacts executive functioning it can be essential (and incredibly effective).
When it comes to Amphetamine derivatives what works for you might not work for someone else. Stimulants generally work well, but some people have genetic conditions that make their situation worse. It's best to find out which medication is best for you.
Had me until "Obsidian" - absolute worst thing ever for my ADHD. Hours spent tinkering ... experimenting with plugins. I was on the verge of developing plugins before I realized: I wasn't getting anything done. I gave up and went with OneNote. The freeform canvas is a godsend for my ADHD (I am able to lay things out spatially left and right), but I'm not able to tinker with it as much anymore.
So much this. My inbuilt desire for perfectionism occasionally leads me to believe I can create "the perfect system!" using tools like Obsidian, etc but what actually happens is that I spend a large amount of time working on the system and forgetting about the actual tasks I needed to do.
OneNote with it's "paste anything, anywhere on the page" and fairly minimal organisational options make it the closest thing to a notebook/scrapbook I've ever used on a computer. It's not perfect, and I've come to accept that :-)
You should try Logseq. What you do is just write. Don't actively think about it, organization will come naturally. Just liberally use tags and backlinks to find your notes later. That's all.
What is everyone’s experience getting officially diagnosed and treated? I match up pretty closely with textbook symptoms and all of the free online “tests” indicate I should get treated for it… but how? I’ve found places that offer an ADHD screening at the tune of multiple thousands, not in network with any insurance, but those places don’t also treat it. I’m more interested in pharmacological treatments rather than typical therapy (after over 40 years, I’ve developed coping mechanisms like the author), but it’s hard to choose what type of doctor is best here.
What experiences does everyone here have?
OP didn't report trouble getting someone to believe they have ADHD, they reported indecision and difficulty identifying someone who offers treatment and arranging an appointment.
As someone who did get diagnosed: It took me _five_ attempts to get all the way to an appointment with a psychiatrist (inability to find a suitable psychiatrist, lost referrals, missed appointments etc). Navigating the medical establishment with untreated ADHD is hell. Now I've got treatment for it, I could do it easily, but it's really hard to overstate just how non-functional you can end up.
Because the symptoms are easily faked, I needed a significant range of retrospective evidence - quotes from school report cards, interviews with my parents - which I had to arrange prior to assessment. If I hadn't been able to produce those, I likely would not have been able to get treatment.
I got diagnosed and then got medication. Ritalin/medikinet is the default here.
It felt like a really strong coffee. It did not really help as I could just focus intensely on the wrong things for hours then crash. The comedown was not fun. The side effects were not fun. The benefits were questionable.
Above all, my lifestyle is built around ADHD. My work is structured to accomodate my quirks. I was happier riding the waves as there were almost no consequences for doing so.
Perhaps another type of medication would have worked better, but no medication at all is good enough.
One thing I appreciated is that they titrated the medication safely. I hear that American doctors start people with a much stronger dose. German doctors seem more moderate, and more willing to try therapy first.
If you live in the US - go to Zoom care - talk to a doctor, fill out a survey - walk out with a prescription. I don’t use medication anymore but when I first discovered it, it changed my life for a time - and in the US it is incredibly easy to get prescribed from my experience.
Maybe it’s dependent on the location? It absolutely is the case currently where I live and it’s not just Zoom care, basically any primary care provider has a survey for this, it’s kinda how it’s diagnosed.
Not me, but my BFF managed to get diagnosed in her mid-30s. She was killing her heart with all the stimulants she was taking and her other ways to cope. I don't k own hoe she got diagnosed, but she definitely didn't do it for thousands of dollars. She couldn't have afforded that.
I do know that therapy and medication made it night and day for her. She immediately dropped all caffeine. Her sleep and general mood was so much better and she wad way less flakey. She doesn't dismiss therapy although I know she hasn't gone every week for a while not and mostly goes when she's feeling like she needs it. Medication was a trip and error, but she's much happier with this steady state.
Yes, but they also can have side effects, some worse than dealing with ADHD. There are various non-stimulants like Atomoxetine which are also approved for ADHD and work for some that can't use the stimulants safely.
Every now and again a certain disorder becomes more culturally prominent and psychiatrists get a wave of patients interested in being screened. The unfortunate part is this is what's happening with ADHD at the moment. Mostly outside of America it was always hard to get a diagnosis because ADHD is treated by 'drugs of abuse' (which really sketches doctors out.) It's a very common experience for people to try get a diagnosis only to have a doctor that either believes ADHD is BS or that the patient is just after getting high. But now there's a new stigma too: doctors who believe the condition is being massively over-diagnosed.
I think in America you should still be able to get access to meds fast. But trying to chase local doctors means all the slowness that comes from a local economy (you really want an ADHD specialist because of stigma.) I would be trying to find telehealth options if they're there. I do agree with you about the behavioral approaches. The best option IMO is pharmaceutical. Stimulants are ~70-80% effective for people with ADHD.
If you're in the US, talk to your GP, family Dr or w/e. They can prescribe but they cannot diagnose. They'll refer you to someone. You probably want to be referred to a counselor rather than a psychologist.
You should _really_ consider therapy in addition to any medication. The meds will be amazing for a month and then useful for a year. After that you're going to have to make a decision about how you want to continue treatment. Keep bumping the dose and adjust to the side effects or 'typical therapy'. By then, that therapy is going to be much harder to apply to your life than it would have been in the first few months when you started the meds.
Hard to say without some idea where you are, but it was not hard for me. It did cost me a few hundred $ overall, but the process was fairly simple. It did take a few months to get a spot for a remote appointment (if I lived in the city it would be faster in person) And I just knew the clinic knew who they're dealing with (reminder sent a week and a day before, reminder sent about payment, reminder about a followup, etc.) Maybe try finding some group which may have experience / specific contacts in the area? There's bound to be a country/state-specific group online where you can ask.
you will need to tell us your location; it will vary greatly across the world.
In the UK, for me, diagnosis wasn't too hard via BUPA - my phsychiatrist seeing me for my other mental health problems recommended me and it was relatively quick to get an ADHD diagnosis; now, however, I am stuck - there's a UK shorage of medication so my psychiatrist is unwilling to proscribe for a new patient whilst existing ones aren't getting what they need. Until that gets unblocked I'm in limbo; additionally BUPA do not cover any ADHD costs (except the diagnosis) - after that you're on your own and you either need to self-fund or go via the NHS; the NHS won't "just" prescibe; for me they want that to come from the psychiatrist and they'll then pick up the medication part of it - but see above about BUPA not funding ADHD costs.
If you go NHS all the way then you'll be on long waiting lists and, presumably, some sort of post-code lottery as to your experience.
I'm willing to self-fund to get to the point where the NHS will take over (and apparently that's a dice-roll too; my GP says he will prescribe once the shrink gets me on a stable dose, but not before - apparently some GPs refuse and require that you go via the NHS for everything, so you're on long waiting lists again); but am currently unable to progress due to the shortage of medication, as mentioned. I am also expecting relatively large bills as I will need to self fund both the psychiatrist and the initial medication prior to the NHS picking it up.
Anecdotally (reading ADHD forums on reddit) experiences in the US sound much more random.
Expect to pay between £700 - £1500 (initial consultation, titration fees). Then the ongoing medication costs.
Honestly I am torn on this issue, I don't think we should have a nation filled with amphetamine users, but right now I'm a self funded founder and I can't justify this cost. So I have no choice but to self medicate with medication I have procured myself through alternative means...
The other option is "Right To Choose" through the NHS - you ask for a referral by your GP to a private ADHD specialist.
The NHS ADHD waiting list in my region was over 6 years but using RTC, I was diagnosed in around 6 months with no extra cost and prescriptions costing the NHS standard. Places like ADHD360 and PsychiatryUK focus on high throughput / low cost so the amount of time and qualifications of the practitioners won't match hand-picking a private psychologist but you can't argue with the cost.
Not in the slightest. It adds flavor to the page and makes it more approachable than just a wall of text. This is one of the benefits of generated images - it is a nice middle ground between creating your own and choosing from stock images.
Yeah. These are basically glorified stock pictures that superficially seem to fit the content. But images shouldn't just be about aesthetics: they should also complement the content. AI-generated stock pictures don't have any sort of hidden meaning, you're wasting your time if you look at them.
ADHD is medicalizing a set of mental habits that many smart people form early in life partly out of boredom, and partly because they can get away with it. The criteria for diagnosing it in adults are impossibly vague and ad-hoc, and I have yet to meet anyone who went through the evaluation process who wasn't diagnosed with it.
By all means have at it if you enjoy legal access to terrific stimulants (they really do help you focus!), but maybe take the idea that you've suffered under the burden of lifelong illness with a grain of salt. ADHD is our generation's neurasthenia.
That's why we have universities, so that people can get legitimate claim to authority and familiarity with the subject and its nuances based on years of study and research.
Imperfect? Sure. But it sure beats the "trust me bro" university.
I get tired of hearing everyone claim they have ADHD. Or are sensitive to gluten. Or get sick from msg. Not realising the people who do actually suffer from these things are so few. But now it’s mainstream and cool.
Thing is, everyone can self-diagnose as Something Is Up, but thanks to the health care system being broken, nobody actually gets checked out, nobody is told "there is nothing wrong with you", or "you keep chugging energy drinks so your bowels are fucked, you don't have gluten allergy", or "you get 300 notifications per day and respond to all of them, you don't have ADHD".
At the same time, when you let that influence you it may contribute to make the situation worse for those actually affected.
What you're describing is probably a net positive for those actually affected. More awareness and less stigma.
Basically you have ADHD/ADD if your symptoms are maladaptive to the modern environment. The modern world is increasingly being able to focus and produce.
And yet it isn't. Schools over here are less sitting in rows facing the teacher and Pay Attention, and more sitting in groups, get a laptop out, "fun" project activities. Modern workplaces - in our industry - are all about a deluge of distractions, meetings, tickets, incoming or always-on calls, side activities, incoming merge requests, Slack messages in half a dozen spaces that all need to be read or you might miss out, on top of a lot of people being open for private communications and distractions like making appointments, chatting with the home front, etc.
So no, I don't know where you live or work, but I don't agree that the modern world wants you to focus and produce.
>ADHD is medicalizing a set of mental habits that many smart people form early in life partly out of boredom, and partly because they can get away with it.
Spoken like a bona fide "bro" with no professional qualifications on the matter, not familiar with the research (except perhaps cherry-picked outlier stuff to reincorce their preconceived notion), and no personal experience of the devastating effects it has on the individual on all aspects of life (the very opposite of "getting away with it": professional and academic failure, social isolation, and other such outcomes, from the kindergadern -e.g. the "weird" stimming kid everybody bullies- to the grave).
But they sure do know some people claim to have it on TikTok when they don't, so the condition surely must not exist.
Considering doctors hand out Ritalin like skittles then you have to be pretty stupid to truly believe 75% of the population magically developed adhd over the last 70 years.
>Considering doctors hand out Ritalin like skittles
That's the "kids these days" myth. The reality is that to get diagnosed with ADHD and get to get medication is for many a long process, for most neglected until too late despite obvious signs.
>you have to be pretty stupid to truly believe 75% of the population magically developed adhd over the last 70 years.
Or you know, aside from the fact of more awareness (so people who would just be left to sink or swim on their own in the last 70 years, or merely considered "weirdos" and "failures" are now diagnosed), the world has also severely changed over the last 70 years, and aspects of it (many more rigid time-sensitive responsibilities, many more desk jobs, muct more emphasis on information processing and retention, infinitely more distractions, much more sensory overloading environments, and so on) make it more evident when one has it, and make the impact more severe.
And there can also be environmental and genetic factors involved (autism for example, a common commorbidity, did grow among other factors because more educated people with background/tendency for autism inter-marrying with more of their kind - with university, information, and tech jobs, and so on, as selection mechanisms). Such factors are under active study.
It's also nowhere near "75% of the population". At best around 4-8%, if that.
Hyper-focus is an amazing trait for software development, when it's focused right, but than it sucks balls when you can't focus, for days, weeks or months, because... well ADHD.
Why do a lot of developers, especially the more "chronically online" ones, exhibit ADHD symptoms? I'm not saying they are necessarily, but there are striking similarities.. do the screens make people mad or are mad people attracted to screens?
From someone that actually has ADHD and has finally got it under control:
1. Our genetics means that one gene producing double the dopamine uptake receptors and a combo of other genes messes with something else (50% of all ADHDers have an anxiety disorder either GABA or serotonin based). In fact that is why ADDERALL is not addictive for us but is addictive to a normal person with the normal count of dopamine uptake receptors as cocaine, meth, etc. work on the TAART stretch of the dopamine uptake receptor.
2. Dopamine analogs plus coffee troopics tend to work at getting leverage to put time org and note org on top. My stack is:
-30 mg caffeine taken one to 2 hours after waking when cortisol starts decreasing
-green tea extract
-maca extract
-vitamins through fenugreek
-dopamine analog via goji berries
-L-theanine to stretch the 2 hour caffeine effect to 6 hours
Note for non ADHD people your cortisol starts decreasing after you wake about 1 to 2 hours after waking as this is what made caffeine drinks a habit. It is not wrong to take caffeine an hour or two after waking or at 10 am. You just should follow it up with the weak EGCG found in green tea and L-theanine to make it stretch to 6 hours.
> In fact that is why ADDERALL is not addictive for us but is addictive to a normal person with the normal count of dopamine uptake receptors as cocaine, meth, etc. work on the TAART stretch of the dopamine uptake receptor.
What evidence do you have to support this claim? I have plenty of anecdotes of little value that would conflict with your claims. I find your claims hard to believe without evidence. Addictions are highly circumstantial and complex disorders.
This could not have been better timed for me. I was diagnosed with ADHD yesterday.
Apparently for me, the working memory is a major issue.
If anyone has any tips here I really appreciate it if you could comment your suggestions here.
My biggest technique is just making indented outlines. The most important thing is having low friction to getting started on them. All other parts of 'the system' basically do not matter and you dont need to spend any time on it.
I either use a sticky note (I keep a few loose ones in my wallet), or I activate onenote with win+n and can type on that immediately. Anything higher friction than that isn't gonna work, which is why I don't use a phone app. Getting to the writing screen in any notes app is too much.
I also like to take meeting minutes because I otherwise cannot focus on meetings at all.
* Create your own reminders, like setting alarms and reminders. Leave Post-It notes on areas you frequently look at.
* Habit stacking. If you constantly forget chores, you can stack them on top of something you regularly do. For example, you may put a load of laundry in while brewing your usual cup of coffee.
It's basically pomodoro, but with different way to visualize about it, and it somehow feels...better? At least for my ADHD brain. The author wrote blogs for years, and just diagnosed with ADHD a couple years ago, and somehow his lifelong struggle suddenly explainable(you know, like many of us ADHDer did)
That aside, his blog is usually a joy to read.
This is me talking. I have more problems than just ADHD.
This is a long comment. If you just want a strategy for dealing with working memory inside your head, skip to the end and read 3.
For me increasing working memory was a dead end and I found it far more effective to optimize how do use what I have. The vast majority of my advice and strategies revolve around mental health. Mental and physical health alone can add one or two slots of working memory because your brain is working better.
Some advice:
- Do not limit yourself to doing daily things the normal or accepted way. Do not let yourself or other people tell you that you need to do things a certain way. If you can find a way to not lose your keys, it doesn't matter how crazy or stupid that way is because the end result is you don't lose your keys. (Please be considerate of other people.)
- Half measures are okay.
- Half done is usually better than not done. If you're stuck, walk away and get something else done. The feeling of accomplishment on a small task can recharge you. Then you can go back and finish the other task.
- Failing doesn't mean you need to fail completely. For example, if you're on diet and start annihilating a large number of small high-calorie snacks, that's not an excuse to finish the bag. :)
Strategies
1. Reduce your baseline cognitive load. That's basically what my advice is trying to do. The less you are fighting your own expectations and limitations, the more you can focus on getting things done. (Cognitive behavioral therapy is solution here.)
2. Remove stress or distractions. This is the same strategy as cognitive load, only applied to your environment. For me sometimes I just have to clean before I can get work done.
3. Map and reduce. This is involved and difficult to explain. I recommend using paper until you get good at this.
The goal is you need to do is take complex ideas that use multiple slots of working memory and make them take one or zero slots. There are several ways to do this.
Paper is the easiest method to explain. Write out what is in your memory and then rewrite it so that it compacts into one thing you understand. What you should be able to do is look at the paper and immediately understand what is going on without having to think about it. This frees up all your working memory to make connections to other things.
This can also be done with short term memory. You think about the problem and reduce it to a single idea or process. When you understand something well enough, you can hold a pointer to it in a slot of working memory.
Long-term memory is just regular learning. Programming languages and that embarrassing thing you said eight years ago are stored in long-term memory.
A very good writeup of how it works. Especially the perfection or nothing thing. I found that Trello helps because the stickers you create can be very simple, and I always need a reminder.
You need to have a note capable phone like a galaxy 23 ultra. You also need a smart watch so you don't turn off your reminders in meetings and to forget to turn back on. Redmine and or jira are your friends. Make a list of all expectations and star the ones that are action items. Ironclad once a day go through the list and either complete or transfer into a task tracking system each starred item and then check it off--don't use the list to manage tasks. If you manage others, do the same and set follow up events for you. Never silence, only snooze alarms unless completed. Set annoying alarms or block out time for heads down work to avoid time blindness for when you hyperfocus. Your Ventromedial prefrontal cortex is not functioning correctly and consequently your planning system needs a wheelchair.
I've gone through the process now of being reviewed for ADHD both in Australia and the US, and I can say Australia really makes the process nightmarish.
To start with: the meds are so restricted ordinary doctors / GPs can't prescribe them. And trying to bring up 'ADHD' may get you labeled as a 'drug seeker.' But let's say you get an appointment with a psychiatrist (the ordained ministers who can write stimulant prescriptions) - wait times can be anywhere from 3 - 6 months. Upon which you're not guaranteed to be taken seriously because psychiatry isn't an exact science and not every doctor even acknowledges everything in the DSM.
In the state that I'm in I had to be drug tested before and after getting on ADHD meds. Before to make sure that I wasn't a drug seeker. And after to confirm I was taking the meds and not selling them. My doctor then had to apply for a special license just to write my script. He did this by writing a letter full of supporting clinical information and applying for the license to issue the script. So after all that effort (easily 9+ months) you get the chance to be given meds by such a doctor. But currently there are supply chain shortages so many people aren't even able to get their meds.
My US experience (much shorter):
When I was in the US I used a telehealth app on my phone to speak to a amazing clinician who specialized in ADHD (google some or this looks like shilling.) I had my meds not long after that. I currently don't bother with medication though because although it works exceptionally well: I can't sleep on them. I'd say to US people - have a look at some of the apps out there. You'll want to go with people who can actually prescribe and not psychologists.
Keep in mind there are other reasons that can cause concentration issues (depression and insomnia are examples.) It would probably be better for most people not to have ADHD as other illnesses are potentially easier to treat with less side effects.
((I really liked the conciseness, typography, and artwork in the article, by the way.))
It's better to have a diagnosis either way to be honest. If you have it and were undiagnosed for decades, you will finally have an answer to why you're different, and as some that took medication for the first time, it can finally go quiet in your head.
And if you don't have it, then you can look at other causes for your problems. Because nobody (and/or their dog) will think they have ADHD unless they have identified a problem first.
100%. I’m glad Australia appears to be doing an actual diagnosis rather than just prescribing drugs.
All kids are different. Some kids can sit and read for hours. But some kids need to do physical stuff. Schools don’t cater for the latter. Gone are the days of learning wood work and metal work, cooking, sewing. Kids don’t do PE class like they used to. We try to ram all kids through the same meat grinder and when one resists we try to dumb them down with drugs and force them through. These kids are probably WORSE off being on drugs and shoved through the meat grinder than had they dropped out and done a trade skill instead. Nope it’s adhd and we got to drug them up and in most cases it’s a visit to the doctor and “do you have adhd” “I think so” “good enough for me here take this drug that I get paid to prescribe you”
Have you attended those classes or just citing something you googled? Because they aren’t the same now as they were in the 50s or 90s. And those classes are like once a week now as academic classes are the main focus. This type of schooling still does not cater for kids who often excel in these classes but do poorly in general academics. But hey. Keep pushing those kids through the meat grinder!!!
Can't hack ADHD without first sorting out other problems.
It's treated as a singular issue but in my experience it's not. Here are some factors to consider:
1) Does the person have a quiet place get high quality sleep in
2) How is their relationship with family and significant other
3) Do they exercise - physical stamina helps build mental stamina and helps with clarity
4) Do they eat healthy
5) Anxiety or depression. If we are constantly distracted there's likely a good reason for that. You can't focus on movie if your house is on fire and this fire can be emotional one with unresolved traumas etc.
What we see is only the tip of the iceberg and fixing the roof before we address the foundation won't work longterm.
I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 19 but nobody really did anything with that information, and I to this day refuse to use it as an excuse for why I can or can’t do things.
I think it made parts of my life harder, and if I had ever ended up in a seriously bad place I would have taken it more seriously, but I very much didn’t want to define myself in terms of any one aspect of who I was.
Now, my adaptations make me an awesome combo of ADHD strengths with only the charming and quirky downsides, rather than the debilitating ones, and I am immensely proud of that fact.
You can acknowledge and treat it without "using it as an excuse". And there's certainly no need to define yourself by it. Imagine having that same mindset with other treatable disorders. Cataracts. Eczema. Addison’s disease. Cavities. There's a million examples where most folks wouldn't even consider ignoring - let alone embracing any "quirkiness".
I didn't say one couldn't treat ADHD without "using it as an excuse" and I didn't say there was any need to define oneself by having ADHD.
I said I didn't want to define myself by my ADHD and because of that, I ended up finding non-pharmacological ways to treat my ADHD to the point where I've been able to have the best of both worlds. What I was able to accomplish has nothing to do with you or with anyone else.
I'm having my first visit to a doctor regarding my symptoms this week. Very interested if I need a treatment and what they will say. My main problem is craving for dopamine: nicotine, caffeinated drinks, hot shower, games, tv shows, drugs - I just cannot focus, I crave for something to stimulate my brain, and sometimes I end up abusing substances because of this. For example, I used 5-7 doses of nicotine spray per hour. Just like a mouse that found a button for dopamine release.
I think if I can eliminate this, I will feel much better.
This is great! So many people in the ADHD community don't dig in enough into the 'superpower' side of it, so I'm super glad you covered that here. We can't get rid of the bad parts so I think it's extra important to lean into the good parts too.
I will also share this Historia Civilis video on the history of work, which really resonated with me as an ADHD person -- It's OK and even more 'natural' to have fast and slow days.
And I will say, for me, Obsidian was another red herring. When I see Gwern's blog I dream about my ordered note taking life and I tried for about a year to do that with obsidian. I took a lot of notes, but I don't read them and they do nothing for me.
I ended up after a lot of trial and error with a bookmarklet that lets me take notes right in a browser window paired with a real planning app like tick tick or Google keep or whatever.
The quick notes are good for when I'm trying to avoid my other Todo list because there's something I don't want to do on it but I still need to take other notes.
I think many people in the adhd community don’t think it’s a superpower, which is why we don’t dig into that. As someone who was diagnosed later in life the profundity of what adhd has cost me cannot be overstated. It is not a superpower, it is my worst enemy.
Same. My adhd has made me a decent developer despite very much not wanting to do that sort of work. However it has absolutely destroyed my life and relationships and my ability to even sit down and get dev work done. I’m currently on my third “sabbatical” of my life because I’m incapable of working right now. I’ve been jobless close to three years of my adult life now - not because I was ever fired, but because I’m incapable of managing my adhd well enough to work. I’m trying extremely hard
Being diagnosed at the age of two with pretty severe ADHD I do not consider my disabling disorder a superpower in the least. I could see it as something if I was more naive that could be exploited by my employer if I had one and if I let myself into a situation like that and that would be damaging to me if I let that happen. I'm sure I could be really productive if I don't take care of myself for an extended period of time to finish a project using all of The fuel in my tank multiple times a month but I really don't ever want to be in that situation because that's basically where danger lies.
> This is great! So many people in the ADHD community don't dig in enough into the 'superpower' side of it, so I'm super glad you covered that here. We can't get rid of the bad parts so I think it's extra important to lean into the good parts too.
Thanks for your comment, that's what I wanted to express. We can't run away from the bad parts, so let's try to deal with it and find some stuff to help us.
Instead of taking many notes I just only use the daily notes. Its basically one continuous stream that also represents the stream of time.
So I could very easily scroll down a few days to see what I did then and if I need to look something up (I have all the days in one continuous view).
Works well for me although sometimes its hard to separate work from personal notes this way.
I don’t recall a single piece on the subject that attempted to define productivity. I’m saying this because my own conflicts with the condition taught me that work is not something so simplistic as for the same strategies to be effective in all environments. What in fact has worked for me, is not exactly to adapt myself to the work, but rather to adapt the work to my limitations. I keep realizing that productivity has many forms. Merely being able to sit and yield artifacts at a high velocity is not necessarily productive. When on pharmaceutical amphetamine, I’m perfectly “productive”, but most of the times the quality of the results are poor. In comparison, the work I yield when not on medication, although performed completely irregularly, tends to be much more high quality. So it must be acknowledged that productivity has no intrinsic relation to efficiency. It’s much more important to be efficient than “productive”. All in all, it’s important for folks with ADHD to treat themselves better and find a compromise when dealing with the societal expectations placed on them. I honestly find bizarre some strategies people employ to cope with work, flirting the inhumane, like a self-inflicted dystopia.
I can't recommend https://reclaim.ai highly enough, which the article mentions. It's absolutely a game-changer for me. My whole life is scheduled in my calendar. I have a bunch of automatic meetings with my team. It's really been a life-saver for the past couple of years. They're also always improving the product.
The audio environment plays a big role when it comes to fighting distractions, especially when having ADHD.
The problem is usually that it’s either too quiet (so the brain is not engaged and every small noise is very hearable and distracting) or too loud.
The other problem is when the sound environment is not predictable. This means your brain is constantly afraid it will get distracted (phone call, slack notification etc.) and you can’t enter a flow state.
I have all the symptoms described (inattention type, not hyperactivity), including hyperfocus. A test my therapist had given me indicated that I do have ADHD. However, she told me that I do not actually have ADHD as my hyperfocus does not fit with "attention deficit", and there's alternative explanation for the symptoms from some other issues. Upon reading this post however where inattention and hyperfocus are both mentioned, I sense she may be wrong.
In my case, I feel sure that I did not have ADHD symptoms during childhood. These symptoms I believe have come extreme and unusual mental stresses I have been subjected for several years. However, there's not enough literature on ADHD coming during adulthood. Most, like the OP, say that it would have gone undetected during childhood. Some say that ADHD can develop during adulthood too. I have also read that Adult ADHD seemingly has a different mechanism than ADHD that develops during childhood.
Is your therapist a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist? If not, I would take what she says with a great skepticism.
> I feel sure that I did not have ADHD symptoms during childhood.
That would be an instant disqualification of an ADHD diagnosis.
> I believe have come extreme and unusual mental stresses I have been subjected for several years
I am not a clinician nor do I know the full extent/magnitude of your stresses, but have you ever investigated (C)PTSD? If can mimic many ADHD symptoms.
> However, there's not enough literature on ADHD coming during adulthood. . . Most, like the OP, say that it would have gone undetected during childhood. Some say that ADHD can develop during adulthood too. I have also read that Adult ADHD seemingly has a different mechanism than ADHD that develops during childhood.
Based on what is commonly understood about the condition, it cannot come on in Adulthood. Similar to how there is no Adult-onset Autism. You're born with it or without it. Also, just because symptoms were not "detected in childhood" does not mean the symptoms did not exist in childhood. My symptoms were not detected in childhood, but oh boy, were the signs and symptoms there. I just grew up in the South East, US where stuff like ADHD just didn't exist, and I and plenty others were punished and ridiculed for our "daydreaming," "restlessness," "laziness," and "inappropriate behavior."
Personally, I am not sure if I buy the research on this topic though. Then again, I also think the label "ADHD" is just like "Cancer" -- a massive blanket-term for multiple similar conditions. So, who knows? It's not like there is a single biomarker that has ever been discovered that can be used to diagnosis the condition. It's all just professional opinions based on agreed upon patterns and heuristics.
Anyway, I hope you figure out something that works for you.
Thanks for a detailed response! Sincerely appreciated.
>> Is your therapist a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist?
Yes. Clinical psychologist.
>> That would be an instant disqualification of an ADHD diagnosis.
You could be right. That's what most literature says. However, there's some talking about ADHD developing in adulthood. I cannot say whether to trust or not; surely there's very little such literature.
>> ... nor do I know the full extent/magnitude of your stresses
I have been shouted upon by my wife at peak volume for hours at a stretch, about once every two days, for years, with her usually beating herself badly along the way, sometimes threatening with knives, and so on and on.
As I wrote in another comment here, I started facing these symptoms around 2011 and distinctly in 2012, when I was 35 years of age. Prior to that, I have always been a star performer, during childhood and at work, with no such symptoms to the best of my understanding.
>> ... but have you ever investigated (C)PTSD? If can mimic many ADHD symptoms.
My therapist did mention that to me and told me to read about it. I read about it on Wikipedia, but do not know enough myself to say either way. I'll talk to the therapist again on my next visit.
> and there's alternative explanation for the symptoms from some other issues
> I feel sure that I did not have ADHD symptoms during childhood
Both are hard requirements for the indication though. (at least in my country where they use the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)
* Symptoms must not be attributable to other issues.
* ADHD must have been there all your life, so before a certain age (in my country 12yo) symptoms must have been there, and they must be acknowledged. Not necessarily that they were then attributed to ADHD, but they must have been present.
Source: i'm in the diagnosis currently. I'm 45 years old. I'm not a shrink. I'm currently actually supposed to finish my bookkeeping, hence I'm on HN.
The test I was given is called DIVA 2.0. It says it is based on DSM-IV criteria. I have no understanding of how DSM criteria evolved.
The DIVA 2.0 test notes, "Research has indicated that at adult age, four or more characteristics of attention problems and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity are sufficient for the diagnosis of ADHD to be made." I had seven out of seven characteristics for inattentive type ADHD.
I am sure I did not have the symptoms during childhood. I started facing these around 2011 and very distinctly in 2012, when I was 35 years of age.
Wouldn't that imply that everyone with ADHD had childhood trauma? I can see that explanation being true for some, but not all nor a majority of cases.
I'd be more inclined to believe trauma to the ADHD offspring's mother, while pregnant, would be more explanatory than the offspring's environment post-birth.
I really don't think this article has much to do with ADHD. Work is work even if you like what you're doing. Nobody can handle the barrage of notifications and being always-online and always-available. Couple that with a job that requires focus and it's an uphill battle. Again, this is for everyone.
Everything in the article can be applied to everyone.
I'm diagnosed with ADHD, and it's been a struggle. You can say that it's more a struggle now than ever, with the medication shortage.
With that said, I always found it interesting that many psychologists are extremely polarized on the so-called hyperfocus. One I spoke with said that hyperfocus is contradictory to ADHD, while another said that it is indeed something that many with ADHD experience. These were psychologists with decades of experience, and have diagnosed hundreds/thousands of patients.
Diagnosis has seemingly become very hard the past years, with the spread of social media and ADHD "influencers". Viewers become fixated on having ADHD, memorize symptoms, and parrot these when undergoing diagnosis.
Yes, there's a stigma but there's also about a 6x improvement in my mood and ability to stay focused on a single task after I take 5mg. I've never developed dependency and generally only take it 3-4 times a week. I've also never really had to increase the dose.
This came after two diagnosis from neuropsychiatrists both reaching the same conclusion.
Being diagnosed at 22 I'm glad I wasn't prescribed adderall as a teen but I loathe how much more I could have achieved in college seeing how much more capable I am now.
I acknowledge it's probably not great for my heart health - but I was so depressed about how I was unable to get anything done or focus on studying before that I'd always make this tradeoff.
I'm in the same boat -- same age of diagnosis, same qualms, etc..
I am at the point in my life, a decade later, where I couldn't care less if there are longterm harmful effects.
1. I'm sure my unmedicated life would have continued to be equally unhealthy in different ways.
2. It's not like old age is sunshine in rainbows. I rather die in my 60s or 70s from a heart attack, with dignity, than live long enough to slowly watch everything and everyone I ever experienced dissipate from my mind until I am husk of a human being due Alzheimer's or Dementia.
The article doesn't mention this (nor have any of the 500 videos I've watched on YouTube on this subject), but you might find that listening to instrumental music has a significant beneficial effect. Music with lyrics doesn't work for me because I start to follow them. Music from someone long dead can be better because less inclination to pull up their Wikipedia page. Music seems to wedge a wrench in the brain mechanism that initiates distraction. It keeps the default mode network busy enough to retain focus on the main thing. Also pick long pieces of music, or auto-playing AI-based playlists, otherwise you go down a rabbit hole of selecting the next piece of music.
I’m the opposite of this - I can only listen to music with lyrics as it gives me something to “listen to” even though I barely hear a word of them let alone remember or be able to sing along. (Faster music like rap or metal is great)
Brown noise is probably the only sound I can tolerate for a long periods of time without lyrics, even better than this is ANC headphones with nothing playing.
I use instrumental music or one song with a good rhythm on repeat. Since the song is on repeat, it doesn’t matter that there are lyrics - it all becomes part of the background rhythm.
Is in an ADHD thing to scatter random pictures through the article rather than just have the text? Perhaps it breaks things up in a way that makes concentration easier? For me they were a distraction -- I much prefer to have a wall of text.
The web is full of this style these days, so perhaps the algos have decided it increases engagement.
This is not a snark comment or a complaint about style! People should post however they wish! I am just curious if there is data on the topic. I know Medium requires a junk picture at the top of every post, but I haven't seen data on this from them, just an assertion that it's importand.
For those suspicious but who do not have a diagnosis (or who have a diagnosis but who can't use the usual stimulants), I've found the following supplements helpful. I'm a 5' 11", 190 pound man (for reference in regards to dosage).
In descending order of apparent impact (yes, anecdotal, though the psychiatrist recommended them based on published research):
- L-Tyrosine
- Fish oil (3 g daily)
- Pycnogenol
- general amino acid supplement (covers most of them but not the L-tyrosine listed above)
- Magnesium (500 mg)
- Men's multivitamin
... interesting to note that apart from the fish oil, this is almost exactly the reverse order of when I started each one.
Increases my suspicion that there's a cumulative effect, at least for me.
I've developed an experimental ESP32 project that simulates a heartbeat pattern.
But I don't have a heart rate sensor, I used my normal resting heart rate as a basis for the simulation.
The project utilizes an ESP32 to create a LED blink pattern that represents a heartbeat, starting at a faster rate and gradually slowing down to a resting rate.
Here's the link to the project: https://github.com/Qiaogun/ADHD_Blink
This was a very well written piece and really resonates with me.
I've never been diagnosed with ADHD but when I read pieces like this I always walk away feeling like I check most of the boxes. Has anyone ever encountered the same and been prompted to get help? Asking on HN probably isn't the best idea, but sometimes I really struggle with certain flows and the way others work that seems to run counter to my peak performance.
I was also diagnosed at 22yrs(now 26), I've been using ritalin as a major fix for focusing on jobs/tasks, after couple years, it just doesn't seem to be a good solution for this, because I realized how unproductive I am without meds, as of now, I'm browsing through HN just because I haven't taken my meds and I'm at work rn
Sadly won't have time to read all comments, maybe someone said it allready.
Once a commenter here on HN wrote that meditation helps him better than anything else. Still have back into the groove of a regular schedule. The best book on the topic might be Mind Illuminated by John Yates, got it from a recommendation here on HN.
Another good one is ADHD 2.0 by Hallowell and Ratey.
What I've learned is that there isn't such thing as focus. Focusing is not something you can do. Focus is simply a lack of distractions. If you block all distractions, the only thing left is focus. Blocking distractions is something you can do, if you want to.
The major issue is how to catch up with important news and developments without getting distracted.
You can lock me in a room for 24 hours with nothing but a math textbook, but I'd probably still do nothing even at the height of boredom. I'd probably just space out and start daydreaming. I'm sure this is the case for others as well.
I would have thought this was me writing this in a fugue state.
I was diagnosed last year with ADHD, at 32.
I would say ADHD has traits, you might not have all but once you start doing research into it you find you tick a lot of the boxes. Psychologists can help as they can figure out what works with you, once you find a decent one.
Everything in this post is great, as always find what works for you.
Earlier this year I've spent months intuitively building a product to address some challenges I've faced in the past years while working remotely.
It took all that effort to understand, after hearing from the users, that the product was just the result of me trying to solve my own undiagnosed ADHD symptoms...
Great post! I don't know if I have ADHD, but I have struggle with getting into focusing and staying focused if I don't get into the zone, a lot of that speaks to me.
> For me, having multiple monitors has been a game-changer; it allows me to spread out my tasks visibly and switch between them as needed without losing track
Fun, I have had the opposite revelation. I had several monitors for years, and what made a difference was switching to just a wide one, plus some hygiene around closing windows I don't use. Using a nice background helps, as it motivates me yo have sufficiently little content that I can see it.
> While the open office layout is often praised for fostering collaboration, it can be a minefield of distractions for someone with ADHD
And interestingly again, I like going to the office because a) few of my colleagues are going, b) I have much less distractions there than at my place
> Amazon’s Silent Meeting Technique
From my short tenure at Amazon, this is one thing I miss to an obsessive degree. These are great. But switching to other companies and failing to advocate for it, I realized that people don't like reading. They want to be fed content. I dread when something is documented through the recording of a meeting, I want a doc. I hope to find such a culture again!
> Obsidian isn’t just a note-taking app for me; it’s the cornerstone of my daily organization
I like the idea in concept. I even built an extension for Obsidian that parses all your notes for to-dos and presents them as an interactive board and backlog (Proletarian Wizard). I have used that for a few years, but I usually drift enough from my todos that it's not very useful. The other problem with all these syncs is that they are one way only, so it'd make me anxious that the info is scattered between my system and the central one. Like the idea though.
> Team members are encouraged to block off periods in their calendars
Does that work for anyone? I have been doing that for years, through probably 5 or 10 teams, and so far my main observation is that people don't give any consideration for my own agenda. The moment my calendar is busy to beyond 50%, people start sending invites on time marked busy. I think they mostly don't even check, or sometimes even worse they take notice and send something in the likes of "you were marked busy but I hope you can join".
A few years ago, I was part of a neurodiversity ERG, and we were gathering recommendations for the new office that was going to be built. I found "Designing a Neurodiverse Workplace"[0]. It is a fantastic design document that told me about things I didn't have the language to express that I needed. One of the points it makes is "have a variety of types of spaces and let people pick and move between them", which the author touches on with regard to hybrid work. Everyone (not just ND people) gets overwhelmed by sensory stimuli sometimes, needs to be alone sometimes, needs to be around people and noise sometimes. I kinda knew "yeah yeah accessibility benefits everyone" but I didn't really get it until then. Highly recommend reading this.
A little off topic, but I recently realized I've been stimming for decades. I don't fidget or do any of the standard stimming techniques. What I do instead is explore the space I'm in with my eyes. Like right now, staring at a pen on my desk, after a few seconds my eyes start to explore other objects on my desk.
2. The drop in estrogen around perimenopause/menopause worsens symptoms. It leads to late-life diagnoses as women's coping strategies no longer work as well.
3. Perimenopause starts 10-20 years before menopause; women in their 30's can suffer from perimenopausal symptoms.
Whilst I agree with a lot of this, I think there's an issue around expecting someone with ADHD to just onboard using all these tools without a prior history and engrained usage.
Such as just "using wikis and JIRA etc" is a bit handwavey imho, it needs to stick otherwise it'll just be forgotten.
Whoa. This is the first article on ADHD that wasn’t a flaming pile of shit. Only thing I would add to this is “don’t forget to use your wheelchair aka adhd meds. No sense making your life more difficult than it needs to be.”
I didn’t want to talk about medication because I know a lot of people with ADHD aren’t (or don’t want to be) medicated. But, I fully agree, my whole life changed since I’m on Ritalin
i don't have adhd but i definitely have fked up executive function and oh boy do i procrastinate! it always has been when weeks have passed on, months even years! and i still haven't made up mind to tackle the tasks. Has led to gigantic amount of missed opportunities. I seriously fed up of it. God know makes me scared about thinking when get old and frail. Have read lots of self-help books based on "evidence backed science" only to realize that none work and the authors make a buck exploiting people's desperateness, lazy people are seriously helpless i guess.
I'm sure the post is useful but i'm getting really distracted by the AI anime-like art. Maybe tone it down a bit, yeah? For a post about helping ADHD sufferers focus on what matters, it's quite incongruous.
Call me naive but I find that the term ADHD has become far too general and overused. It’s a common scapegoat for what could otherwise be described as bad habits for a lot of people.
It could be, yeah, like many things, I guess — gluten, hormones, etc.
Maybe we'll find out later that all of this is just some big mass hallucination we all try to believe in order to cope with today's horrible work life. Though, for me, the symptoms described are so accurate it's scary, and they explain my lifelong struggles — it's a revelation, really. It provides a glimpse of the signposts I can look for when I need help.
I'll also keep in mind that any concept we have about ADHD now can also change when we have more evidence (or not), but I'm subscribed to it for now.
That Amazon Silent Meeting thing... I think that would drive me crazy. It's annoying enough when someone hasn't read what you've posted as an agenda in a meeting invite and you have to tell them about it. I don't want to sit on camera with 6 other people reading a 6 page document.
- Forgetting to look at the to-do list -> Make a different to-do list
- Have 10+ to-do lists
- Forgetting what the to-do even refers to
- Discover emacs org mode, it can link everything together -> constantly forget emacs key bindings
- Use logseq/obsidian instead -> forget which names/links refer to projects -> have 10+ aliases referring to different perspectives of the same project
I need static types, logic programming, graph search algorithms, and a bit of AI, to help save me.
Also, it'd be nice if modern software was easier to interface with. Needs more support for deep linking and syncing. The "walled garden" approach is anathema to solutions that can help ADHDers.
- "Forgetting" to look at the calendar, or to-do list, or your phone reminders, or a list written in large letters on a whiteboard behind your desk.
I seem to have a cognitive equivalent of an ad blocker, my mind will literally erase any task list from existence, the moment I start getting even slightly anxious about it. It's like a magic spell - I can put the list in front of my face, and my eyes will just keep glossing over it, like if it was a tear in reality.
Correspondence, keeping records and making appointments are attention destroying activities.
For a few year stretch I worked with a team project manager who wasn't technical at all. She'd setup the meetings that I needed to have, diligently take notes in those meetings and then we'd get together to recap everything figure out dates and all that. Then I'd get back to nerding out but with a ordered punch list that I knew Donna needed me to get done.
It was the best.
But the pmo wanted to do things a different way so their engagement model moved from embedded PMs focused on team deliverables to individual project focus.
Now instead of Donna there to assist with correspondence, keep records, make appointments, and carry out similar tasks I had an army of fragmented Donnas each focused on their one thing and each needing oversight to understand my involvement and external dependencies.
The move probably gave the pmo a more modern feel and better reporting but it killed productivity for ADDs like me since a large portion of my time each day became correspondence, keeping records and making appointments instead of cranking out nerd units.
My therapist recently diagnosed me with ADHD. I strongly disagree with that diagnosis, and I realised I don't know what ADHD actually is and that the internet and this article haven't been of any help.
I can relate to everything that this article says, but I suspect this is true of every single person with a mentally challenging job.
HN is full of developers complaining about open offices and useless meetings; do all of them have ADHD? Otherwise, what's the difference between a ADHD developer and a regular developer?
I _do_ have specific body problems that make my work harder, such as a very strong noise sensitivity and a circadian rhythm that requires me to sleep longer than the average person. Dealing with those specific problems did much more than throwing my hands in the air and yelling "ADHD".
Instead of a 2000-word article that might have been generated by AI, I would just follow these three points.
> complaining about open offices and useless meetings; do all of them have ADHD?
There's a commonly used diagnosis survey you can check. It should give you a better idea than this.
> ADHD developer and a regular developer
To give you one example (but this won't cover all cases / everyone's experience), if you're in the bathroom and think you need to change the toilet roll, then proceed to forget and remember it again 6 times before leaving the room, then head for the toilet roll stash, forget about it and go make yourself a sandwich instead... and that applies to almost everything you do throughout the day, you're probably in category 1 not 2.
For medication, another example would be when you take stimulants and get relaxed, less nervous and feel like you could finally go for a nap...
What I'm saying is, some people may be experiencing smaller issues for the same reason, or they may just not be satisfied with their environment and are able to act on it, but there's some threshold where it's not even the same category. If you don't know what ADHD actually is, maybe check the experiences written by people who do struggle with basic things daily while seemingly highly functioning otherwise? There's a number of subreddits where you can find them.
Noise generates a very physical feeling of pain that tires me down and makes it impossible to focus.
It's the equivalent to having somebody constantly punch me in the face: it's annoying and distracting at first, and it eventually turns into tiredness and lack of motivation to do anything other than leaving the room I'm currently in to breathe some fresh air.
I understand this is something that happens to everyone (which is why so many people dislike open offices), but I have good reason to believe my noise sensitivity is worse than average and that it has been so since I was a kid.
> HN is full of developers complaining about open offices and useless meetings; do all of them have ADHD? Otherwise, what's the difference between a ADHD developer and a regular developer?
Diagnostically speaking? The number of symptoms and the severity of those symptoms is basically it. Everyone will likely experience some of the symptoms of ADHD during their life. The co-occurence of those symptoms and the amount they affect your ability to function day-to-day is what makes the difference.
Some people will debate over how "real" ADHD is, where real means people with ADHD are a disjoint group and not just people on the very low end of the "ability to focus" bell curve. From my research I do believe it is "real", but that whether ADHD is "real" like sickle cell anemia is real or its just part of a normal bell curve doesn't really matter because society isn't going to adapt around you. If medication is what make the difference to maintain a normal life for some then that's probably a good thing that its available. If people who don't "really" have ADHD can learn strategies for focus and time management that's also a good thing.
> Dealing with those specific problems did much more than throwing my hands in the air and yelling "ADHD".
For a lot of people, dealing with their specific problems starts with recognizing what those problems are and identifying strategies to help. Diagnosing it gives validation that its something concrete you can work on, gives access to mental health professionals who can help you develop solutions, and creates a community of people all trying to solve similar problems.
I passed lot of exams (A grades, etc) with last minute study. But at some point I reached a ceiling (failed). So different people might have different ceilings.. for some they might reach this ceiling at grade 5. Some might reach it at degree level.
Lots of things to move from multiple (mental) "I'll deal with it later" piles to here, so excuse the randomness...
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 44/45 too. I can't believe that no one (not even me) identified it based on all the symptoms and signs throughout my life. Medication was a life-changer. Suddenly all of my therapy started to become more effective. I was able to slow things down and actually take a long, hard look inside. Gave me the ability listen, understand and validate my emotions, fears, concerns, behavior... instead of just reacting or pushing things down and out of the way. One important realization was that the medication wasn't just for work hours. It also enabled me to be "present" outside of work too.
Just wondering if anyone has an opinion on Andrew Huberman. I'm always skeptical about anyone on social media these days. Doesn't seem like he's trying to sell us anything, and has seemingly decent, understandable explanations about brain bio-chemistry and characteristics of those with ADHD.
Can anyone recommend a tool for the phone that can use Siri/etc to record and organize reminders, thoughts, etc? Imagine the functionality Loom (mentioned in the link), Obsidian, todoist, etc... all mixed into one app, but Voice/Siri interaction being the main interface to interact with? I find that when I use a visual UI, I end up doing something unrelated. Tweaking settings, noticing a txt I haven't responded to, trying to organize previous tasks, etc...
I was one of those stay-up-to-the-late-hours type of person all throughout my life. That of course changed with a family, and so I began to suffer as a result. I found that I had no time to focus on learning and keeping my skills up to date. It made me really frustrated, fearful and resentful. Especially difficult bc I never really "worked", I was passionate about what I do and love it. At some point I figured out a way to use that anxiety to get me out of bed early in the morning (quite unusual and difficult for those with ADHD) and to my desk hours before anyone could disturb me. Suddenly I was getting up at 4-5am (6-7hrs of sleep), ready, refreshed and at my desk, giving me several hours before anyone could interrupt me. That all changed recently due to some personal matters, but I think I'm on the right path to getting back there.
Anyone else heard that those with ADHD often think/write like a lisp language? Lots of "...", deeply nested "((()))", "etc"... in their sentences.
I see every sign of ADHD in my young daughter. I guess I'm glad that I have and can recognize it so that at least I can empathize/sympathize/understand/validate what she will go through in life, and hopefully be able to provide some guidance/help/support for her as she navigates the difficulties. I wish I had had that throughout my life, and in many ways, on a daily basis, I feel like I'm learning everything from scratch with my recent discovery. I now see everything through a different lens, like I needed glasses all my life and only recently received glasses.
It looks like we face plenty of common things. I have the same feeling as you regarding my daughter, too. On one hand, it freaks me out, but, as you said, on the other hand, I will be able to help her.
If you find some tool to interact with the phone vocally as a main entry point, I would be genuinely interested. :)
an opinion on Andrew Huberman. I'm always skeptical
about anyone on social media these days. Doesn't
seem like he's trying to sell us anything
I only recently became aware of him so I don't have a real opinion. First impression was I liked many things he said.
One thing I'd note though is that he is absolutely trying to sell something - he runs a supplement business that has attracted some controversy because IIRC he may be overstating the research behind some of his concoctions. (That said, I think they're just formulations of various common generally-recognized-as-safe supplements, and I don't think he's pushing anything fringe-y? not sure)
FWIW - selling something does not immediately disqualify him from credibility IMO. For better or worse this is capitalism. It's actually even worse when we expect to be ascetic monks with no worldly financial interests. Instead let's be realistic and transparent.
The way I work is being driven by obsessions. I have strong hyperfixation and hyperfocus tendencies that I can't control. If there is something interesting that captivates me, I will do it continuously for hours, days and even weeks. Sometimes I seemingly lose all interest for no reason and have a hard time picking it up again. When the hyperfocus hits, it feels amazingly euphoric and "zen". It's the same feeling you get when you're watching a video and just become a zombie starting at the screen, purely consuming the content without any other thought, and when it ends, you're left with this dreadful feeling of coming back to your pitiful existence.
My mind is always preoccupied. I have a constant inner monologue. Whenever I tend to be in a waiting room I just stare at the wall and start imagining conversations and situations and start talking to myself about various topics. My mind always makes connections between so many different topics, I can never keep a straight line of thought. One subject will bring another and another. A constant web of thoughts. I tend to have very long-winded (up to 5 continious hours or more) conversations with friends that leave me sweaty and exhausted.
I've heard that ADHD helps a lot with introspection, self-reflection. While the constant noise and urge to be active feels debilitating, I've had some pretty interesting and life-changing conversations with myself that a lot of people don't often experience without anyone else present. Although it balances out with the constant anxiety.
When it comes to entertainment, I'm always a binge-reader, binge-watcher and binge-player. Visual novels have probably kept my attention the most and I must have spent entire days reading them.
When it comes to doing my work, it's a weird dance. I must have the impression that the task is easy, and the steps are obvious. That often is not the case, but the situation gets me in a zen state where I combat the problem until I come to a reasonable situation that passes one way or another. If I know it's going to be hard, I can't even start without having a panic attack. You can feel it in your stomach. Your mind starts to blank out. Your vision gets blurry. It's the sort of feeling when you see something that makes you really ill. For some people that's a dead body, for me it's medical descriptions.
Even saying all of that, I still doubt that's how I really function. Looking from the outside, I just get the urge to do something, and I act on that urge. That's all. Whatever it be. It will take all my focus, and all of my energy, and you won't be able to get me out of that focus state. I will keep thinking about it until I either get to sleep or something snaps me hard out of it, and that severely decreases my motivation. Relying on instinct and acting on my obsessions was the only thing that helped me, either directly or indirectly. Otherwise I can't manage.
Medication has immensely helped me control my focus and help me take breaks, but not even that stops me from acting sometimes. I've seen a few comments here mention body doubling, this has also helped me a lot, services like FocusMate are amazing and I can't praise them enough, so simple, yet so effective, and my anxiety really pushes its effectiveness further.
Yes, I am currently hyperfocusing on writing this, if you couldn't tell by the several paragraphs of text and over-sharing. I have a task to write an article about my ADHD, yet it's still sitting there, because posts like these are the only things that get me to write about it.
I tried getting diagnosed and medicated and I was scheduled an appointment with a horrible psychiatrist that dismissed all of my problems and said I couldn't have ADHD if I could recite the days of the week backwards and sit still. The horrible things I felt after that still haunt me to this day and it occasionally slips into my mind and makes me sick. It is an extremely embarrassing thing to share, but a previous comment mentioning this told me that it's alright, and it's a reasonable traumatic response.
Writing about how I dealt with school would be just repeating what others have said. Deadlines never had any effect on me, I would always do things on the last day or few days, and I had an extremely difficult time with math because I how I mostly think is by making connections between previous information, which I find hard to do with math, that requires pure reasoning and logic.
I don't like breaking down tasks. I don't want to plan anything. The only reasonable way I get work done is by bashing away, being pissed off it doesn't work as I expect, and keep working hours non-stop until I get to a reasonable state. The less I know, the better. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for most of the time, especially for big projects. All the things people use as crutches make me ill. I have never planned my day. I go with the flow. The only "productivity tools" I've ever used is the reminder and a simple task list just to keep track of interesting goodies I might pursue. I have a horrible working memory and externalize an immense amount of information and keep it in notes format. I am a RABID fan of Zettelkasten and preach it like the second coming of Jesus Christ.
TBH I found this article a bit poorly written, especially around the core of the symptoms*. It does not even list out what exactly are the kinds of things to look for when you are in say your 30's or something and suspect you have ADHD. The list of recommendations though are good, especially simplifying note taking, which can be a drag to keep upto date.
I would also add meditation and getting a good counselor/licenced therapist(they are hard to find). You can find a good counselor in a few ways: from someone who does your formal neuropsych eval, ask your kid's doctor. Look at psychologytoday.com and filter the list and run through it. For ADHD which does not accompany severe cognitive impairments you want to likely look at a CBT coach(Phd,PsyD holders) to help. Someone who knows what they are doing.
* If you think you have ADHD or ADD please consult the complete DSM-V manual[0](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t3/) and at least try and match your symptoms up from your past experiences. I would highly recommend a neuropsychlogical evaluation test. Google for it.
Here is an abridged list[1] of symptoms from DSM5 for ready reference:
Inattention: Six or more symptoms of inattention for children up to age 16, or five or more for adolescents 17 and older and adults; symptoms of inattention have been present for at least 6 months, and they are inappropriate for developmental level:
◦ Often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, at work, or with other activities.
◦ Often has trouble holding attention on tasks or play activities.
◦ Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly.
◦ Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (e.g., loses focus, becomes sidetracked).
◦ Often has trouble organizing tasks and activities.
◦ Often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to do tasks that require mental effort over a long period of time (such as schoolwork or homework).
◦ Often loses things necessary for tasks and activities (e.g., school materials, pencils, books, tools, wallets, keys, paperwork, eyeglasses, mobile telephones).
◦ Is often easily distracted.
◦ Is often forgetful in daily activities.
Hyperactivity and Impulsivity: Six or more symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity for children up to age 16, or five or more for adolescents 17 and older and adults; symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity have been present for at least 6 months to an extent that is disruptive and inappropriate for the person’s developmental level:
◦ Often fidgets with or taps hands or feet, or squirms in seat.
◦ Often leaves seat in situations when remaining seated is expected.
◦ Often runs about or climbs in situations where it is not appropriate (adolescents or adults may be limited to feeling restless).
◦ Often is unable to play or take part in leisure activities quietly.
◦ Is often “on the go,” acting as if “driven by a motor.”
◦ Often talks excessively. ◦ Often blurts out an answer before a question has been completed.
◦ Often has trouble waiting his/her turn.
◦ Often interrupts or intrudes on others (e.g., butts into conversations or games).
I think we need to really take a hard look at today's world of tech and how we communicate and collaborate.
I find that, if time allows, I get a massive productivity boost after 4:30pm and everyone is either winding down or leaving. All the sudden, the walls flatten, the horizon deepens and I enter a deep state of flow.
Around 10 AM, after an elongated "stand up", I should be ready to go... And yet it's absolutely impossible to not alt-tab 300 times per hour, and I can't seem to even remember the code I just typed or what the hell I'm even trying to do.
Even if I close Slack, Outlook and turn off all notifications, I've got a minute-by-minute cron job in the back of my head that ticks
"Hey! One minute has passed. The world could be on fire! Is it?"...
I remember once I had to travel for family, to a different timezone, I was super productive. Only 1 14" screen and a different timezone. Pedal to the metal.
Ah, the 90s. The CRT, the keyboard, the fullscreen applications, the lack of communication. 1 or 2 emails a day. Bliss.
Add to today: kids, imessages, facebook, twitter, mastodon, instagram, emails, slack, discord... How the fuck do I even survive the week?
> I find that, if time allows, I get a massive productivity boost after 4:30pm and everyone is either winding down or leaving.
The most important ADHD accommodation for me has been a private office (in my case working from home).
I'm insanely distractible—the slightest noise can throw me off, and even the threat of an impending interruption is enough to make me lose focus thinking about how I'll respond if it comes. In an open office, I had very little control over my environment, and so it was impossible for me to keep focused for any length of time. If it wasn't a coworker interrupting me personally, it was a conversation happening behind me, or even just someone walking by and me wondering if they're going to interrupt.
At home, I have a private office with a locked door, and I put on hearing protection over earbuds, which blocks essentially all sounds from the house. I can control my notifications, so if I'm in flow I'm completely uninterruptible.
The other big benefit from privacy is that I don't have to feel guilty when I do get distracted with something. There's no one to see me and judge me for not "looking like I'm working", so when I do lose focus for hours and then get the whole day's work done in a single hour of hyperfocus, no one knows or cares that I couldn't stay focused that day—all they see is that I finished what I said I would. Privacy allows me to use my strengths (working well under pressure) without fear of judgement.
I did, but that was never enough: even 37dB ear muffs aren't enough to completely suppress the noise of a conversation happening nearby, but the ear muffs plus the walls and the door are.
And, of course, as others point out, the auditory distractions are only part of the problem with an open floor plan.
I've got good results with white noise, not sure if that's something that would work for you. And of course I didn't suggest that this eliminates other distractions.
Way too many distractions in an office, it’s not just trying to tune out sound, it’s visual, temperature, lighting, social, commuting etc…. They all increase your load.
I've been in open office plans where wearing earbuds/headphones was seen as hostile/negative towards others. This was many years ago, but... not that many (in the mid 2000s).
At my company, we have daily standups and they throw off my whole morning. I only really work effectively when I am left to it and so have outlook/slack/messages turned off during periods where I am trying to focus - has got me in trouble with management a few times but I am not sure what else i can do.
The piece was a good read but its so personal to me that it doesn't really help sadly.
This exact complaint is very common among juniors I’ve mentored: A single meeting can destroy their productivity for hours following the meeting.
The most successful advice I’ve found is to find a way to reset after meetings without using your computer. For whatever reason, they’re emotionally drained after meetings. They get back to their computer and reach for Reddit or Twitter or something for a low effort snack, which then spirals into an hour or more of doomscrolling or distractions. This then translates into self disappointment at their low productivity, which further drives them to seek more cheap online entertainment and the cycle repeats.
So try something else. After your standup, go for a walk. Don’t use your phone. Do some stretches if you WFH or have a quiet place. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the rut that destroys your productivity.
I've tried all these tips and more. I've gone as far as taking a run after meetings. Nothing really works. I've come to conclude that the problem is the meeting itself, not the way you recuperate from it.
This is an under-rated comment. I had a similar revelation that eventually led to the conclusion that the computer is a crucial part of the distraction, and that many activities are best performed at least partly without it. Examples include:
I don't have ADHD but I also get destroyed by meetings. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I was in a deep flow just before the meeting and it was near impossible to fully disconnect and actually be present or that I felt the meeting itself was a waste of time and the realisation I just clocked in 1hr of unproductive work. Often it's a combination of both and it can be quite distressing mentally.
Regardless I would never allow myself to browse anything not work related when I'm actually working (i.e. twitter, reddit) even when I'm "destroyed". I think cutting the unproductive crap out completely when working and trying to find more healthy coping mechanisms is far better.
I suspect the juniors are taking the meetings too seriously, and getting stressed during the meeting to the point that it's difficult to transition away after.
I've had this problem too. But now that I have more meetings, it's become much easier to transition back to focused work. It's only the occasional more-stressful-than-usual meeting that eats up my attention for hours afterwards.
I don't know what the solution is for most people. I guess this is why some people who transition manager --> IC can be so effective.
This is because your brain is like ChatGPT: it's in a loop generating the next symbol based on the prior context. You need to load the context up, then you're ready to generate symbols. If there's a BS meeting, all that context is paged out and now you need to re-load it. Plus there are motivational aspects that make "loading context some AH manager just blew out my brain" more difficult.
That's a bummer. My team does standup at 3 PM (we're also bi-costal), but I let the teams chose their time, and this is what one particular team chose. Maybe talk to some of your teammates, and maybe you all decide you want an afternoon standup, so you can hit the ground running in the morning for a few hours, before the interruptions start.
Depends on where you are, but you can often get by, ignoring directives from management, if you are an active communicator and you’re completing assigned tasks.
It’s still better to state your problem. I like to use the “non-violent communication” as a template. Something like, “When we have the standup, I have a hard time refocusing on work afterwards. I’m concerned about the impact this has on my productivity. Can I send status updates via Slack?”
I’m not gonna pretend that this is a solution to your problem; I just want to sympathize and have a conversation about some of the strategies that we can use to fix problems with management that interfere with technical work.
I'm the opposite. I have ADHD and I function much better with meetings, talking it out with other programmers, and the cacophony of noise from an open office. Everything distracts me anyway, so I'd rather it be work stuff than my own thoughts about some awkward moment I had in 1995.
It's probably because this is not an ADHD issue, but just a difference amongst individuals. I have ADHD and meetings do not really seem to impact my functions other than increasing urgency because I have Total Time - Meeting Time left to do whatever task..
> has got me in trouble with management a few times but I am not sure what else i can do
Don't worry about it. I think this is good advice for any software engineer. Eventually you'll be senior enough or on a different team and it won't be a problem.
Agreed, I'd add to give your manager your phone number for emergencies and tell them you've allow-listed their number to ring when others can't. Then get back to flow
Sometimes there are genuine emergencies. If your company got hacked and is all hands on deck, you kinda have to be interrupted. There are situations in which emergencies may not be paged through normal systems.
If you like the company/team enough to work there, you should learn to respect the way it operates.
Hopefully it doesn't sound too combative, but I wanted to express that it's a two way street and compromises have to be found. I dislike various things in my company on a personal level, but often make sense from company/team point of view.
If you have the kind of clueless/toxic manager who is going to abuse this sort of arrangement, they are probably never going to agree to this sort of arrangement in this first place.
For nearly all working relationships, I think it's reasonable to keep an emergency communication channel open.
daily check-in throws off my morning too. i have an hour from when i start til check-in, which is not enough time to get into deep work. looking forward to moving to a new timezone where i can take advantage of that timing with two hours before check-in.
WFH encourages scheduled meetings. It's a nightmare. I'd much rather just get an interruption out of the blue than have someone schedule a meeting to talk to me, because in the run-up to the meeting I won't try to start anything (what's the point if I've got a pending interruption?) At least my standups are first thing in the morning.
I don't understand it. My company is fully remote but they are absolutely horrendous at async comms. I was trying to walk someone through adding a docker build process to their CI and.... he just couldn't communicate/understand it through slack and he wanted to schedule a meeting. Great, now instead of being able to respond while working on other things I have to cut out an entire hour of my day just for you.
Thanks.
Beyond that I refuse to do daily standups. I'll quit a company if they won't let me do async or communicate through slack. I'm not logging in and the start of my day being a meeting every single day. Absolutely not. I've been there before.
Idk if that has to do with async working. People pull that kind of stuff in office too. "Hey I don't get this, can we schedule some time so we can /you just do this for me " then you sit at a conference table or at their desk for an hour lol
Interesting. I like the daily meeting - gives me an anchor for my day that works with the meds. But like most ADHD people when unmedicated I get more productive at night, so I can see why you'd hate the daily checkin.
I'm about 20 years in and the first 10 years of my career as a SWE I had absolutely horrendous managers and daily checkins felt more like proving to someone that you had done any work the day prior, shaming you if you didn't produce enough. I have a hugely negative connotation to them even today, vs feeling that they're a positive team-collab sort of scenario.
At two companies the actual CEO and CTO were in every single one of our standups (startups of course).
It's funny how good (or shitty) experiences shape things. I like peer reviews and regular 1:1s with management. I've had good experiences with them, and have sorely missed them at jobs where they didn't happen.
But I know good engineers (who are also good communicators) that loathe them with a great passion.
I'm a Staff SRE. I literally mentor an entire SRE team every single day.
I didn't say a single thing about paired programming. Christ. Did I say that the dev wanted to pair program? No, I didn't. I would have happily hopped in a huddle with him as OPPOSED to scheduling a meeting 3 days later.
I am sick of meetings and people who are incapable of working async, especially when we're in different timezones, which is exactly what this thread I'm responding to is about.
> I was trying to walk someone through adding a docker build process to their CI and.... he just couldn't communicate/understand it through slack and he wanted to schedule a meeting.
this sounds like pair programming imo.
> Great, now instead of being able to respond while working on other things I have to cut out an entire hour of my day just for you.
this reads as a bad attitude towards mentorship. sorry for that assumption.
My frustration is not knocking this out over 10 slack messages right now and having to round back to it days later. I want it done and off my plate.
I'm ADHD. I don't want lingering tasks floating around giving me anxiety when they can be done quickly. I'm going to forget it exists until 10 minutes before when it pops up on my notifications, then I'll have to context switch over to that situation.
One of my biggest coping mechanisms is as soon as something pops into my mind I do it RIGHT NOW. If I walk by the laundry basket and think of doing laundry I grab it and do it RIGHT now. Or I'll just walk by it for a week completely oblivious to it.
I'd much rather just get an interruption out of the
blue than have someone schedule a meeting to talk to me
After 15+ years of exploring my own ADHD and learning about others' experiences, I'm still constantly wowed by how differently we all react to this stuff.
For me, out-of-the-blue interruptions are a worst case scenario for my ADHD. It's very hard for me to get into the "flow" if I know that I might be interrupted at any moment. I prefer scheduled meetings as a less-evil alternative.
In my experience scheduled meetings tend to be longer and involve more people than necessarily.
Also, somewhat contraintuitively, I often avoid starting some new work e. g. 30 minutes before a scheduled meeting, meanwhile without it I just start, and if interruption happens,... it just happens.
Also, somewhat contraintuitively, I often avoid
starting some new work e. g. 30 minutes before a
scheduled meeting
No, I think that makes sense and is pretty common.
It's hard for me to get into the zone if I know I've got a hard stop in 30 minutes.
Two workarounds for me. One is that I tell myself I'll spend the final 5 minutes jotting down todo's so I can pick back up relatively close to where I left off. I normally work in 20-30 min bursts anyway. This is actually not super successful for me but better than nothing.
Slightly more effective for me is using those 30 minutes to bang out some smaller tasks. Review a small pull request. Pay a bill or two. Apply some software updates. Gotta be done eventually so I get them out of the way now, in service of more focus time later.
This reflects exactly my day to day struggles.
Especially that productivity boost when every one starts leaving, and I _was not able_ to finished the smallest one of my tasks planned for the day 'til then most of the time.
I'm writing "was not able" on purpose here, because as someone (being blessed) with ADHD, your brain does not allow you to make progress on the smallest tasks due to all those fireworks being blown around you in your brain.
During my part-time studies (I had a 70-80% employment at that time) the time I really started studying productively was after 9-10pm when everyone around me went to finish their day and the world around me started to go silent and night is coming in.
Thinking of it today, I don't know how I would have survived that time without the huge support from my wife back then. So all the credits of me being able to complete my studies go to her!
Nowadays, I would not know how I would get through the day-to-day work without medication most days. That often worries me a little.
Yup, I think all the meds for this can succumb to tolerance. A real life Flowers for Algernon. Over the years I've upped the dose, switched meds, drug holidays but nothing has matched how well my brain worked the first couple of years on meds.
> nothing has matched how well my brain worked the first couple of years on meds
As someone who also has a bit more than 2 decades experience with ADHD medication and started with meds quite early in my teenage years when I went to school, I have very similar experience to yours.
One of my assumptions is that it also has a lot to do with the humans metabolism that changes over the years.
One of my assumptions is that it also has a lot
to do with the humans metabolism that changes
over the years.
That theory makes sense to me. However, my anecdotal experience is that I never tried any of these meds until my early 30's.
The first few weeks on Adderall were f'ing magical. I remember tearing up, I was so happy. Finally I was laser-focused. A bit emotional thinking of it now.
The magic faded fast. Adderall was still a large net positive for me for ~6-7 years. But never like those first few weeks. I guess I got somewhat close to that original experience a few times, after extended breaks from Adderall and restarting it.
Anyway, this is of course a sample size of 1. But since all the experiences described above took place in my 30s I don't think that metabolism change was a major factor. Certainly not within the first year. Again I know... n=1 =)
> Especially that productivity boost when every one starts leaving, and I _was not able_ to finished the smallest one of my tasks planned for the day 'til then most of the time.
This is super true for me as well, to the point where I structure my day around this. I'm lucky to have a workplace with flexible hours and enough seniority that nobody complains when I roll in at 10, which gives me a few "quiet hours" from 4-6 as others trickle out.
If you haven’t tried any sort of mindfulness/meditation program, I’d recommend one. I like Ten Percent Happier and enjoyed the app and its content (not affiliated in any way).
Being able to think about nothing is a skill/habit/muscle that needs to be learned and practiced. My mind still can churn but at least now I have the tools and some ability to tell it “not now” and quiet it some. It’s been pretty dramatic, especially in being able to fall asleep quicker.
As someone with a lot of focus potential, its mildly frustrating to read these accounts because even I'm terribly distracted, if I let myself be. But I've been meditating for a while and, in conjunction with a lot of discipline around avoiding social media, have been able to hit a sweet spot.
I wonder though if I never discovered these two things, and simply absorbed everything I read online and convinced myself I had ADHD and got on meds. It's modern life, getting people down. There's simply no way to break through without recognizing that life is inherently distracting, and finding strategies around that.
This is not dismissing the reality of ADHD, however, only to note that medication is overprescribed and that many confuse biology with extremely targeted algorithms designed to capture attention.
And then there are the drug companies who capitalize on workers required to maintain long periods of focus; knowing they are vulnerable to performance pressure, they flood the industry with marketing. Next thing you know, an entirely healthy person's attention is destroyed, because the new baseline is oriented around a stimulant which they do not need, and which operate contrary to someone who actually has ADHD, which meds benefit. Like the opiate crisis, its all just an everyday American tragedy.
Unfortunately genuine ADHD is a physiological problem that requires stimulant therapy _and_ cognitive behavior therapy in conjunction. Your dopamine and/or acetylcholine receptors are out of whack. This is why coffee and cigarettes/vapes are so prevalent. Methylphenidate or dexamphetamine work best but you pay a price. Yes, I have real world executive function research lab experience, so I know a bit of what I'm talking about. You need a good neurologist.
Maybe you can provide some perspective here: it seems almost universal that people who start these medications never find a dose that provides durable benefit over the long term. Makes sense; we acclimate to a new dopamine baseline, right? Almost everyone I know ends up on a significantly higher dose than they started with.
And the stories of feeling like a zombie when off meds are very real and pretty freaky.
I was on Adderall for ~6-7 years. The following is just my personal experience but it seems to match well with the vast majority of anecdotal experiences I have read about in many many years of being immersed in this stuff... although these won't be true for 100% of people.
Almost everyone I know ends up on a significantly
higher dose than they started with.
One: At least in the US, for whatever reason, doctors tend to initially prescribe you a very low dose. I think this is a big part of why everybody ups the dosage.
Two: Many/most people seem to avoid dosage creep by reducing or limiting their dose on weekends or on other days when it is feasible. If you take e.g. 20mg every day, 365 days a year, it's pretty much guaranteed to lose effectiveness. But if you can take that down to ~5-10mg on weekends that helps. Also weaning yourself off of it entirely from time to time seems to provide a reset. Doctors seem to never tell anybody this.
And the stories of feeling like a zombie when off
meds are very real and pretty freaky.
Well, let's call it what it is... it's withdrawal. However to put it in perspective, most people find it milder than or similar to caffeine withdrawal.
If you do significant amounts of stimulants every day and then go cold turkey you're gonna have a real bad time for a day or three.
On the other hand if you steadily taper your dosage down to 0mg over ~3-7 days it's not bad at all.
Again, doctors seem to never tell anybody this.
BTW, while I am kind of "rebutting" your points I am not pushing Adderall. There are downsides to it. It made me more high-strung and prone to arguments and stress. The frequent shortages are a nightmare. And so on. I eventually moved on.
I'm not convinced nicotine is not a better medication. Sure, it's probably more addicting, but it also seems to have plenty of other benefits, is more socially acceptable, and seems to have much less a profile of debilitating side-effects.
Of course, the same tolerance issues will creep up, perhaps even more so, but there is no red-tape, no doctor visits, no shortages, easy access, etc..
Is nicotine as effective as amphetamines or methylphenidate? I have no idea, but probably not, and that is mainly why I haven't experimented much with it. I will say that it's effective enough to plenty of people with ADHD self-medicate with nicotine, and seem to do fine enough.
If nicotine were half as effective, it still might be better, at least for my circumstances.
I am someone with severe adhd and I only use meds ( adderal) if needed. The side effects are heavy on the long run.
Having coping mechanisms and and understanding surrounding is way more important.
Without that and only meds I am only the person with the highest tension in the room.
And my adhd was measured. Low dopamine.
Btw I tried a adhd friendly diet and sports once . I don’t know if it was placebo or real but it felt like it helped much.
Mini meditative naps of 5 minutes also help if my brain is on the run.
Honestly in my opinion meds are the easy way out but the side effects make alternatives necessary. On the long run there need to be better solutions that imply that society has to go a step toward the mentally divergent or Ill and respect their behavior as good willing and maybe find a better way to incorporate those in the workplace and social life.
Sorry for edit:
For example. If I have one of those adhd moments, where I am bit to specific about something and talk too much because of it, my friends recognize this and tell me to „ wake up“. And everything is fine. But if someone like this is needed.. there I am ;)
I have, n=1, used racetams to help. Due to Trump Era policies, that door is closing fast. The thing that pisses me off the most is that drug holidays are illegal in some states. The FDA really does everything they possibly can to hurt people with ADHD.
I was in a clinic where they did ct or mri and measured my brain and the dopamine release. That was as a child.
I did say this because most adhd is loosely diagnosed and brain scans are rare but the final proof. Sorry my English is not so good
I've been on meds for about four years now and I'm now on a (slightly) lower dose than I was for the first few months after I started.
The higher dose was better for my emotional regulation and my focus, but it made my body feel wired all the time.
The dose I am on now does provide significant benefits compared to not taking it, especially when combined with daily vigorous exercise (likely at least partially due to improved sleep).
But I've never been on Adderall and I've never been on an IR med and I'm a woman diagnosed in childhood and again in adulthood, so I'm an ADHD unicorn really.
Did modafinil ever come up in your lab? I was DXed ADHD somewhat by surprise and due to the situation, medication was not an option (and is rather difficult to obtain in my country anyhow). After reading about off-label use of modafinil for ADHD, I gave it a go, and it has worked very well from my POV.
The lab was Air Traffic controllers. Same brain structures, but much, much higher functioning. I had many conversations with the psychologists about ADHD, but we were focused on measuring cognitive workload based on UI changes--measuring prefrontal cortex loading. I did most of the physiological event extraction from the terabyte event databases. Ironic (in a twisted fashion) that I would miss an interaction because ADHD, but the human factors engineer could pick it up right away. I tried the unregulated modafinil prodrug adrafinil but never asked the Doc to prescribe it. Our subjects probably didn't have ADHD.
Manage medicine. Sign IEPs. An Ed. D is best for the cognitive behavioral therapy. Neurologists will typically know ADHD better than non specialized psychiatrists. Some GPs, like mine, are well versed in it and can manage it. Indeed it seems like regulations kill any hope of helping ADHD afflicted. You really need a caring person to help you. Remember, you take your medicine before it's in your system. I see it like this. ADHD keeps you from paying attention to indoctrination, but doesn't stop you from learning, so you are dangerous.
Agreed. I like the vibe of Ten Percent Happier which is kind of like "Yeah, I thought this meditation stuff was bogus, but, for some reason it helps. No, it won't solve all of your problems, but it does seem to make things 10 percent better. And don't even think about saying 'Namaste.'" :-)
during covid I was "overemployed" at first 2 jobs, then 3 (which I sustained for over 8 months). Some of it was luck, like not having conflicting meetings, having jobs in different timezones, and the leniency given due to the chaos of the times, but I actually did get work done. But during the average day, I was only there to respond to slack and participate in meetings. I wouldn't really "work" as in write code, until after the sun went down (and I was west-coast working a central time job). I was just a body in a seat until the day was over, then once I knew nobody was available to pester me or expect me to do something, I could crack open the editor and hyperfocus. I also found that getting up super early, I could hyperfocus for an hour or 2 in the AM, then about 9-10am once all the meetings and bs started, I was just an actor. The rest of the time was juggling tasks and procrastinating, and using that energy to drive me to get work done. I would work saturday and sunday mornings (often, not always), but once my focus was lost I would stop. It was a hell of a time, but I learned that (like you) certain times of the day just weren't compatible with getting anything done. I dont think it's correct to say its due to "overstimulation" or caffeine, I think it has to do with brain states, and somehow knowing that I had to be available on slack (or had to make sure my mouse jiggler kept my status green) seemed to be enough to break me away from writing code.
For me personally, yes. I had gone into debt from gambling and bad financial discipline. OE allowed me to pay off all my debt and put a down payment on a house. Watching "number go down" in rapid fashion was very rewarding, and I wasn't a very active person to begin with so I didn't miss out on as much as a regular person would, being holed up in an apartment for virtually the whole year. But towards the end it had an effect on me, it definitely wasn't sustainable.
This!!!
ADHD is unfortunately named based on misunderstanding of the prefrontal cortex. It is executive function disorder. Similar behaviors occur from prefrontal cortex trauma. Barkley notes that ADHD stays so named because it is tied legally to entitlements.
Thanks, also had this discussion with a colleague (obviously not having ADHD) who thought he understands what I’m (having ADHD diagnosed) talking about and I argue he does not.
I then almost started to doubt my own perception abilities InsertHugeFacepalmHere
If you ever forget or wonder if you have ADHD vs being inattentive, just look back at its affects on your romantic relationships and how much it damaged them or made them more difficult.
How often a partner probably told you that they felt neglected or forgotten, or how often you'd wind up in a rabbit hole and forget that you also have to nourish that relationship.
Oof. This hits close to home. I have ADHD and my partner recently ended a four-year relationship for several reasons but feeling neglected and like she had to fight to get my attention was one of them. We didn't consciously realize this was a major problem until it was too late. And now reading this thread I'm realizing wow yeah I really wasn't doing a good job of paying attention to her and her needs even though I cared a lot about her, now this is something to be aware of and put effort into changing in my next relationship.
It's something that I unfortunately didn't put 2+2 together until my 30s after ruining quite a few and always wondering why I would be so enamored with someone and they never felt like I was giving them enough.
And my most recent ex was anxious attached. That was rough. I'm far more on the avoidant side, not sure how much of that is upbringing vs adhd.
There's a bunch of books about marriage/relationships with ADHD people. I haven't read any but I should. The lady in this video has written a bunch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pyAfOPGKlI&t=1s
Of all the optimizations I've done, moving to one screen/monitor ~10 years ago has been the biggest positive impact on my work, anxiety, and overall focus.
When I was younger, I was way too naive in the memetic desire when seeing other more senior folks with multiple screens, or even seeing "hacker" representations in the media with many screens with different orientations (silly, I know...everyone is dumb when they're young.) When you're 22 and insecure about whether or not you're actually "good" or belong, then you try to mimic the "best."
I hate having stand-up early am. If you get to work early, there's little motivation to start anything significant just because you'll be soon interrupted. Mid day before lunch is great, you get a sleep period in between two work sessions which often leads to better solutions. Everyone wants to go to lunch so the meeting moves at a quick pace, you have lunch time to decompress and absorb it. There's a morning block and afternoon block for uninterrupted deep work. It gives people a flexible arrive time in the morning, they aren't struggling to make it in for the meeting.
Such a minor part of your comment, but I simply cannot focus on anything if my apps aren't all fullscreen. I have two monitors, and two applications visible at any time. Right now I have this on one screen and a non-work YouTube video on the other (Your Mom's House is a great podcast btw, especially if you already have YT premium).
I have trouble focusing, I don't think quite to the level of ADHD, but it would be so much worse if I had 4 or 5 apps on each screen.
Or you found coping mechanisms. We all figure out what works for us. Like drinking a ton of coffee or things with caffeine... you're self medicating with your stimulant of choice.
You know, it's funny how different we are all when it comes to this.
I need all my apps visible in a tiled arrangement. Shuffling windows shatters my flow. I literally cannot have enough screen real estate. My dream is something like a curved 48" 8K monitor filling my entire field of view at 300dpi. (Vision Pro?)
I know a lot of people, ADHD and otherwise, like me in this regard.
I also know a guy like you, diagnosed with ADHD FWIW, who takes it a little further than you. He needs his apps fullscreened, and can't even do multiple monitors. One screen, one app.
I don't know how the f-- he works that way but I'm jealous. He's effective and has no trouble working on a 13" laptop in a coffee shop or whatever.
I had a coworker a few years ago who worked ONLY on his laptop. No monitors. No keyboard. No mouse. He programmed all day on a 13" Macbook Pro.
I will never understand it because I absolutely hate having full screen windows and I am almost worthless working off my laptop when traveling. Just lots of frustration juggling windows back and forth. I always have 2 or 3 apps side by side on my 48" and I have a 28" 16:18 DualUp monitor next to it for long text/dev.
I didn't work with him so I don't know how productive he actually was but I've always been curious if he kept up with the people who had 2-3 monitors and input devices. I have a hard time believing that he did but no actual idea.
Damn, that's crazy. Yeah, I don't see how that's physically or mentally possible. Completely alien to me.
The "laptop only, one app only" guy I knew actually was really verifiably productive. Which again is insane. We were working on a big Rails monolith. A task that inherently involves working with dozens of files simultaneously and looking at things up and down the stack while also looking at documentation and running code in the browser.
Not sure if you ever watch programmers on twitch, but check out ThePrimeagen, I think he's a perfect example of someone who really understands his tool of choice. One screen, one app, one window, and he navigates through code bases faster than anyone I've seen. It's a pretty entertaining stream too if his super high energy style isn't off-putting to you.
I've known a few of the "one monitor, minimal peripherals" types as well. When I think back to the "most productive" (whatever that means) half dozen or so people I've worked with, it's a mix of both. I don't think there's anything inherently better or worse about either approach, just a matter of finding what works best for your specific mix of discipline, interest, and brain chemistry.
I actually enjoy working on laptops directly but the keyboards always do me in. Just a little too cramped for my wrist/arms, and if I'm adding an external keyboard the monitor is just a bit too far away so I'm back to the normal docked setup.
That's fairly common. Think back to old school paper workflows or studying for school. Some people can concentrate with 5 books open and papers strewn all over the place. Others can't stand to have but one book open and one sheet of notes.
I experience a flow state around that time as well. Mostly because everyone leaves the office. 0630-0730 and 1630-1730 have become my golden hours. Which is weird because body doubling is often an effective tool for me. My true “0430” like the parent comment is really at 2000, but I force myself into a normal sleep schedule and fail often.
Yeah. My body/brain's natural "mental flow" time is really early mornings.
In reality, I generally have too much external distraction around me in the morning to capitalize on this.
So my actual productive hours are basically like, "whenever I am reasonably sure that everybody else will leave me the fuck alone for the next few hours." Which often means, "the end of the work day when everybody is signing off for the day."
Does the time change for you with season and light exposure? I sometimes experience this sort of thing too, where I will have a consistent window of productivity at an unusual time, but it never lasts for a more than a few months.
I’m too old and arrogant to be litigious. I just try to clear the path for the next generation by equipping them with expectations that match reality closer than I got.
I have migrated toward process and disaster recovery/avoidance over time. In the last ten years I have spent a lot of time thinking about the latter because everywhere I have ever worked, if an emergency goes on long enough I am one of the last three people still having a coherent thought at the end, and often the only person with enough brain cells to summarize what just happened and propose a 5 Why’s theory. Which sounds like bragging if you ignore the consequences of this, which is that I am also the last person to recover to 100% in the following days. Which is exactly why I’m thinking about it so much.
I have learned at least two things about myself and a few about other people from all of this. For myself, I know I am overly acclimated to blowing past my limits into my reserves. I am used to constantly monitoring my mental state and pushing for breaks.
For others, I know that adrenaline and cortisol reduce everyone’s cognitive abilities. It’s why we do fire drills. It’s why NASA launch facilities ritualize everything. Save your brain cells and improvisational skills for things we can’t predict, not for things we can.
In the first hours of an emergency, everyone else’s brain turns to mush while mine gets just a little squishy. What for them is their worst work day in months is to me just a bad Tuesday. And self monitoring is one of the first things to go. They’re operating at 80% while I’m at 95%, and they absolutely won’t call for breathers without prompting.
On projects where I am at the periphery, we all struggle together. On projects where I get to influence the agenda, or even father chunks of it, people often walk back out of that room feeling like they braced for a collision that never came, because I’ve routed around all of the foot guns and created low cognitive load ways to answer the important questions. If anyone has been complaining about me spending “too much time” on this, about half of them are convinced after one or two non-event events. If the majority of the people didn’t agree with my methods before, they do now.
I used to say I spend my A-game days protecting myself from my C-game days, but these days I’m more likely to cite Kernighan’s aphorism about not being smart enough to debug your own code. Write all of your code like you’re going to have to wrestle with it on an off day, because you certainly will at some point.
And putting high functioning ADHD people in charge of process and tooling is not a terrible idea. If you can figure out who those people are, that is. To be high functioning means constantly masking, because in this world it’s better to be rude and aloof than to be seen as broken.
On my current project our hot fix process is so bullet proof that I could do a hot fix in the middle of our sprint demo. And I have, three times. Once while I was the MC. All of that was me, and the automation tools I wrote for myself are the official process now. And instead of a bus number of 3 it’s somewhere north of 6. Important, especially this time of year.
I’m using chunk of my A-game days to improve the results of my B- and C-days. This means automating and simplifying things as much as possible. In work, hobbies and life in general. A-days are rare, and even though they are very productive, the output is mostly generated on B and C. Being able to progress even on the bad days shies away the meltdowns and burning out.
> I remember once I had to travel for family, to a different timezone, I was super productive. Only 1 14" screen and a different timezone. Pedal to the metal.
I think the pop-culture definition of ADHD has shifted a lot. In the past, being able to focus well (as you described in a different environment) would have been a sign that the issue was more environmental in nature, not a sign of clinical ADHD. Patients with ADHD struggled everywhere, even in distraction-free environments like a quiet library or quiet test taking environment.
Now, the pop-culture understanding of ADHD has shifted so far that we don’t bat an eye at declaring ADHD even when someone is operating under a constant barrage of environmental distractions. To be clear, someone with ADHD will have an even harder time resisting impulses to seek out distractions, but the fact that someone can focus just fine when their environment is minimally structured to keep distractions at a reasonable level would suggest that person doesn’t have classic ADHD.
> I think ADHD is the new norm.
I think this is my problem with the current pop-culture definition of ADHD: When the definition shifts so much that it becomes the “norm”, we’ve lost the plot. Something isn’t really a disorder if it’s “the norm”.
There’s a secondary problem I’ve been noticing in a subset of the young people I’ve worked with: Some of them self-diagnose with ADHD or get a doctor’s diagnosis, then mistakenly think that their ADHD diagnosis is an excuse for everything. I’ve had far too many conversations where I had to gently explain to juniors (via a volunteer mentor program, not as their boss) that having an ADHD diagnosis doesn’t mean that deadlines don’t apply them, or that they get a free pass for being late to meetings, or that they’re still obligated to perform at the level of their peers at work. Some of them have grown up in an environment where ADHD students get extra time to take tests, which some of them assume should translate to more forgiving expectations at work. It’s difficult to get some of them to accept that having ADHD means they need more accountability and oversight, not less.
I think we’re making a huge mistake by normalizing ADHD to the point that people think it’s the norm or that everyone has it because they surround themselves with distractions. Anecdotally, I’ve seen too many young people self-diagnose with ADHD and then actually spend less effort to curtail distractions, train their focus, and work on self-improvement. There’s something about becoming convinced that your behaviors are a medical condition that is out of your control (many erroneously declare they have a “dopamine deficiency” or similar misunderstandings of the science) that can give people a false sense that they either can’t improve their situation or that they shouldn’t be held responsible because it’s a labeled medical condition.
I don’t know where we go from here, but I can say it’s been an uphill battle to get recent mentoring cohorts to accept that attention is something they can improve with practice or even that they need to do things like silence phone notifications while they work.
I’m often stunned when I screen share with someone who has a non-stop stream of unimportant notifications in the top right corner, who later laments that they just can’t focus on anything for someone.
but the fact that someone can focus just fine
when their environment is minimally structured
to keep distractions at a reasonable level would
suggest that person doesn’t have classic ADHD
[...]
Patients with ADHD struggled everywhere, even in
distraction-free environments like a quiet library
or quiet test taking environment.
Imperfect analogy, but this is a bit like saying that somebody who is able to walk with reasonable assistive devices doesn't have a physical disability.
Like many or perhaps most things we classify as disorders, ADHD isn't a binary "you have it or you don't" condition.
Also, what constitutes "distractions at a reasonable level?" Very few jobs would meet my personal definition of that.
declaring ADHD even when someone is operating
under a constant barrage of environmental distractions
The definition of "disorder" in an individual is always going to be somewhat relative to the society in which that person lives and that person's life.
A person who lightly dabbles in illicit substances once in a blue moon would not generally be considered to have a drug problem. However, this is also going to be relative to that person's circumstances. Are you a 23 year old with no responsibilities? Are you a breastfeeding mother? Are you in a profession with frequent random drug tests? Are you a shaman in a culture where psychedelics have been a sacred part of your culture for thousands of years? The definition of problematic drug use is going to be very different for some than others.
As our society changes, and the number of assaults on our focus multiply, I think it is reasonable to expect more ADHD diagnoses.
Another way to think about it is that modern (and future) society will expose ADHD more aggressively. A farmer in 1923 lived a hard and demanding life, but he faced a very different set of cognitive challenges than a software engineer in 2023.
Think about how changing society exposed some humans' susceptibility to motion sickness. Motion sickness was not a thing until we learned to ride animals and build vehicles. Perhaps someday the DSM may contain some disorders specific to humans living in colonies on other planets.
I don’t know where we go from here, but I can say it’s
been an uphill battle to get recent mentoring cohorts
to accept that attention is something they can improve
with practice
A thousand times yes.
I love that we've made great strides toward destigmatizing mental health issues. But holy shit, it feels like younger people wear this shit as a badge of pride and it often feels like an excuse to avoid actual solutioning.
A loved one was recently diagnosed with ADHD. I told them I'll be their best friend and their toughest critic when it comes to ADHD. I told will love you and empathize with your struggles all day long because I have been fighting this shit for almost 50 years and it is soul-draining.
I also told them, watch the fuck out. I accept zero excuses. We can struggle together, we can cry together, but you better be looking at every single facet of your ADHD through the lens of figuring out a working solution.
"I have ADHD!" is not an acceptable excuse or thought-terminator. What I want to hear is, "I have ADHD so what works for me is doing it this way: ______" or perhaps even better yet just leave off the ADHD part and tell me your solution. Or that you are working on the solution. I will be by your side for that too. But overall that has got to be your mindset.
There may be a little bit of birds of a feather flocking together on this one. Similarly my closest circle have all got a diagnosis of something or other. Most are in the IT field too.
For me personally I mostly attribute this to how the circle initially formed - a bunch of outcasts to varying degrees new to college glomping on to any familiar faces from highschool (despite not really interacting during high school)
Any additions since college were adopted into the group through a mutual "we're the weirdos in this world, aren't we?" initial bond.
The groups were already split in my comment. How many emails in your inbox are in your inbox? All of 'em :P
I get the arguments for self-diagnosis but really it's self hypothesis. I only say diagnosed if they're medically diagnosed. Even doctors shouldn't be self diagnosing
ADHD is a spectrum sure but it has a low-end cap due to the second D, disorder. No disorder, no diagnosis, no ADHD. I'd love to have the same brain wiring without the disorder
I also think it's true that many professions will aggressively surface ADHD.
Imagine a plumber making house calls all day. There's a fair bit of structure and variety baked into his day, he's moving around, gets to use his hands, etc. It's hard and skilled work but it also might be really compatible with ADHD.
Now think of a software engineer. 8-10 hours of monofocus on a single task every day. It's just you and the computer... which also has the largest array of distractions (the internet) just a click away. Fucking nightmare scenario for ADHD. If you've got even a hint of ADHD this career will expose it and expose it hard.
It's funny because I could see those going either way for ADHD individuals
either nightmare scenarios or dream scenarios
i've actually done some small amount of event planning, an annual event for about 125 people. (i realize that's tiny, obviously people are out there planning events for 100,000 people)
yeah, you're constantly switching your focus back and forth between the 20 things that need to get nailed down in the next 3 months for an upcoming event. and a professional event planner is probably juggling ten small events or several larger ones. it's a juggling act but it's kind of fun. also you have executive freedom to an extent.
engineering is kind of fucked because you are expected to do deep deep deep deep deep big-brain thinking for 2000 hours a year, and yet you are still often bombarded with distractions on a minute to minute basis. absolute MISMATCH.
event planning is chaotic by nature, and hard, and requires context switching, but generally no individual element requires hours of meditative thought and iteration while 3 different managers ping you on fucking Slack and you're also supposed to "keep an eye on production" and also mentor five kids who just graduated from a 6-week code camp like engineering does.
a lot of entrepreneurs are ADHD as hell. the context switching suits them, especially when they are calling the shots.
Seriously, though, there might be external factors at play; different social circles might use these things and abandoning the apps could be the same as abandoning the groups.
You’re at work. Sure, there’s Slack - but dial the notifications down as much as you can. Almost none of us need access to social tools in that time. If you can’t help yourself then do what developers do and use tech to stop you reaching for those things.
ADHD has little to no physiological markers. As the floor of expectations for attention and executive functioning continues to rise, the rate of diagnosis increases.
One thing I noticed: Other people would get hyper from coffee, I would not. My brain would calm down a lot with the help of caffeine.
I would regularly down 3-4 red bulls (diet) in the evening if I knew I needed to fall asleep and sleep well. I'm not sure if it's been studied but anecdotal evidence from others seem to suggest I'm not alone and that some others have the same experience.
N=1, I sleep better on stimulants than off them. No problem falling asleep after drinking coffee (usually it makes me more sleepy), or even taking a prescribed stimulant before going to bed.
Paradoxical effects are not uncommon. My DNA is weird. I have lots of them.
One example, is opiates make me MOVE. Most people they zonk out, not me. I'm ready to move your house, one brick at a time, with my bare hands and feel like I could knock it out in about an hour.
Proton Pump inhibitors are common meds for acid reflux. About 10 years ago, I did a genetics study (I worked at the lab, and my data stayed mine) and learned that of the 7 classes of PPIs available, at that time, my body only works with 1. The others either have little/no effect or similar.
New research doesn't seem to support that stimulants have a paradoxical affect on those with ADHD (the sources cited were pretty interesting in my opinion). I'm not saying it's not possible for some, but it seems like people make it out to be far more common that perhaps it truly is.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2839459/#:~:tex....
Correct. fMRI studies show stark prefrontal activation differences between ADHD and neurotypical brains. I have run fMRI studies for air traffic controllers, who have the opposite experience from ADHD. Very high working memory and processing speed.
Are both of those really clinical markers for ADHD? as in, adhd would be expected to have low working memory and low processing speed? My understanding is its more about executive function I.E. deciding to start tasks.
admittedly my experience is coloured by my own clinical diagnosis of adhd plus anecdotally good working memory and processing speed
Both my son and I have a GAI in the gifted range. Our psi and wmi pull us down out of contention. I'm talking 88 and below. Both are heavily executive function loaded; a halmark of ADHD. Same happened with algebra. He was forced to repeat in 9th grade and they tanked me right out of algebra in 8th. Both of us taught ourselves calculus in HS because we were bored to tears. Algebra is heavily executive function loaded. Imperative languages with good debuggers or scripted were easy for us. Declarative languages, like SQL, not so much. Functional programming depends heavily on where I am with respect to the cortisol curve.
Do you think IQ tests are as valid as psychologists claim? I took the WAIS-IV many moons ago, and I couldn't help but think how BS the whole test was. I even intentionally dodged some questions for the hell of it to see if my proctor would notice.
I even got in an argument with the psychologist/proctor at one point during the symbol matching section. I was supposed to write the corresponding number under a series of randomly ordered symbols on a page. The numbers were mapped to each symbol using a key at the top of the page. I thought it'd be easier to solve all of the same symbols one at a time e.g., if A = 1, B = 2, etc. then I would write "1" under every A symbol, then "2" under every B, etc..
The proctor told me, "Wait, you can't solve them like that. You have to do them in order."
I replied, "Why does it matter? It's my test and it's what is intuitive to me to solve them."
He replied with something like, "Time's ticking" (implying that that I'm only hurting my score by talking with him).
There were probably more words exchanged, but that's the gist of it.
Anyway, after all the BS, I received my scores, and I swear there were flaws in the calculations (despite using the proprietary software) though my score wasn't too bad -- my GAI was much higher than FSIQ. I also had to calculate my own GAI since the ass never put it on my report (I found a pirated copy of the manual with the proper tables in the back based on the section scores).
The psychologist (who was the proctor) basically told me that due to my large variance in some scores that my test could be considered a "testing error" and "you do not technically have an IQ score" but he "managed to manipulate the numbers a bit to give me a score." He couldn't provide me anything with a confidence interval greater than 90% (not the worst, I know), and there were odd statements in my report about having difficulty scoring my test due to my age (I was 22 at the time). So, who knows? I refuse to ever do one again though.
Anyway, I know my behavior didn't help lol, but I also just got a weirdly pseudoscientific feeling from the whole process. I've done plenty of my own research on the topic, and I am still not convinced it's the be-all and end-all of psychological testing. I think intelligence is too abstract for humans to quantify currently.
> Do you think IQ tests are as valid as psychologists claim?
As someone who is the spawn of two MENSAns, has friends in Neurosci and Psych, and who has brushed up a fair bit on the topic, I don't think any psychologists outside those in a tiny subset of the community believe in IQ Tests. The support for them is at best "well they measure something, but we're not sure what it is, and we have trouble labeling it as 'intelligence' due to the broad nature of that term". There are so, so many flaws with IQ testing that have been pointed out not only by yourself, but also by others in the field. The only actual practical, measurable use an IQ test to improve lives to date was an application in the 1980s on intake for fighter pilots, and it resulted in many less fighter pilots dying from crashes during training.
I fear your great comment is only feeding into my confirmation bias because your opinion is exactly what I was hoping to read lol.
I do believe the test are not useless, and I agree with Taleb that IQ might be more accurate at the lower extremes i.e. less than 70. In other words, the test cannot measure intelligence, but is pretty good at finding a lack thereof.
However, the further along the bell curve one traverses, the more the test falls apart.
The only reason I was administered a test was for ADHD diagnostic purposes. Sure, the conclusion was that I had ADHD, but the psychologist was confident in my diagnosis prior to the test, so the test was more of a formality.
> The only actual practical, measurable use an IQ test to improve lives to date was an application in the 1980s on intake for fighter pilots, and it resulted in many less fighter pilots dying from crashes during training.
This is so fascinating.
Tangent:
I was listening to a podcast about what it means to be a genius, how it's measured, what it means, etc.. There was a section about Lewis Terman's research on gifted children/adults. He followed and studied the lives over 1500 gifted children over the course of his entire life. Out of all the gifted children, none of them became anything noteworthy -- doctors, lawyers, etc..
However, two boys that were apart of the same school system that were not studied because they were not gifted eventually went on to each win a Nobel Peace prize -- separately and in different fields.
I will not claim that Terman's research proves anything, one way or another, but I did find it rather interesting.
One imagines it's like a fast CPU with great L3 cache but nobody plugged the actual RAM in so you gotta use spinning rust as swap for bigger workloads.
ADHD is diagnosed based on symptoms, not based on physiological signs. Like most diagnoses, it's a co-occurring set of traits we'de decided is outside of what's normal.
>In conclusion, a series of biomarkers in the literature are promising as objective parameters to more accurately diagnose ADHD, especially in those with comorbidities that prevent the use of DSM-5. However, more research is needed to confirm the reliability of the biomarkers in larger cohort studies.
But yeah, generally there are a lot of conditions where you go report symptoms to your doctor or perhaps a specialist and they prescribe a treatment based on that alone. Testing is mostly used to rule out the really nasty possibilities or figure out what's actually going on when first-line treatments don't work.
Diagnosis is not the same as underlying physiological cause. The Browns or Vanderbilt assessments are useful for identifying the disorder because the symptoms are stereotypical.
ADHD is known to be highly hereditary and has genetic markets. I don't think it's normal, as it's fairly consistent globally (not all countries have the same access or culture around technology and yet ADHD occurs at around the same rates).
People can't see it. I've had someone chastise my son for missing an appointment due to his calendar app not working while standing right in front of a wheelchair bound person, then proceed to a discussion of accommodations with the latter :|
"Coping Mechanisms: Over the years, adults develop various coping strategies that can mask ADHD symptoms. For instance, someone might excessively rely on calendars, to-do lists, or alarms to compensate for forgetfulness."
In my case I have to say that is only half true. As an adult-diagnosed ADHD sufferer I cannot say that I developed coping strategies on which I relied excessively that masked my symptoms. Rather, I used to try [0] to develop coping strategies, only for me to eventually drop them for unexplainable reasons at the slightest routine-messing incident or event, regardless of how effective the strategy was being or how good it felt. And then some time later I would [will] try again, under the blissful delusion that this time it will stick overriding the rational memory that I never succeed in setting up a system on which I can rely for the medium-to-long term. Rinse, wash, repeat.
I am now in a low, with no active strategy, and without the mental strength to start working on a new one. Hopefully though I will recover my mojo soon and organise myself again. And I'm sure this time it will stick...
[0] I still try to develop coping strategies, but I used to too.
I do the same. And while it’s frustrating that nothing seems to stick long-term, I think it’s important to be trying. I’ll create a recurring to-do list of errands and I’ll stick to it for a week if I’m lucky. It feels bad when I find all those errands incomplete the following week when there’s a slight change in schedule, but at least those things got done the first week. And I pivot to a new strategy and try it all again.
The cycle stopped bothering me so much when I realized that’s what it is: a cycle. It ebbs and flows with my energy levels. And frankly part of why I can’t keep it up is probably because I’m putting too much demand on myself. If I need to take a break, I guess that’s just what needs to happen. I’ll probably pick up a more productive routine again next week.
I think that seems healthy to me. As folks with ADHD we are typically novelty-seekers. I think it's ok to accept that one's systems will be ever-shifting.
For a decade or two I've gone back and forth between paper and electronic note-taking and I think that's OK, I don't have to find one perfect forever system for everything.
I've recently been wondering if maybe I'm overcrowding myself in this way. I mean I definitely am, but I'm starting to wonder if there are any other options besides burning through tasks whenever I get a good day.
I don't think I've had an empty task list in my entire professional career outside of changing jobs and effectively declaring task bankruptcy. Todoist's end of day notification often says something like "review the 54 tasks remaining for the day".. One day someone will figure out a system that works for every ADHDer in the modern world and we'll have a new tech/space/etc renaissance, haha
Incidentally I saw this meme on Twitter while procrastinating something or other earlier, quite apt https://img.imgy.org/1xkR.jpg
Best of luck to you, me, everyone else struggling with this one!
For me, the biggest takeaway from David Allen's "Getting Things Done" book (which was hugely popular in the early 2000s) was that todo lists require aggressive pruning.
Otherwise they work well at first but quickly become giant guilt piles, aka "54 tasks remaining for the day" syndrome.
(Also then you never get the satisfaction of clearing your daily list, because it is one neverending eternal infinite list)
Which of your 54 daily tasks should be put on a "tomorrow" or "next week" or "next year" list? Which of them truly need to be done in the next 24 hours?
The total system he prescribes is perhaps a little elaborate, in many peoples' opinions.
Some people have great success with his system as described! I don't want to prejudice your thinking!
But I think perhaps 10x as many people found a lot of value from the principles he describes and adopting the bits of his system that work for them. (I am one of them) I'm just mentioning that in case you start reading and think "uhhhh this is overkill".
This is me. I stopped trying to be organized, because I know that as soon as there is some inconvenience or difficulty organizing, I will just get overwhelmed and drop everything I was trying to do. For example, I just cannot take notes or manage a calendar.
I got an e-ink notepad, which helped organize my thoughts better than the 10 different legal pads I would jump between. Still disorganized, but at least now my notes for a single topic are in one place.
For a calendar, my wife hung this acrylic calendar on the kitchen wall and we update it at the beginning of every month. I try to add things as they come up, and I often forget to add things if they are in future months, but it's helped for me to keep track of family arrangements. Any personal appointments I make on my own I try to put immediately into my google calendar, and then my work calendar is completely separate. As I'm typing this I realize I rely heavily on others to manage most of my time...
Remarkable. I really like it. There are a lot out there now: Supernote and Fujitsu Quaderno seem like high-quality products; Onyx Boox has more features; Kindle Scribe is out now, too, and the reviews are good.
this hits home with a caveat: Every time I try a new strategy, even if I drop it later, I end up a bit better than before. It's like with each try, my starting point for the next attempt is a little higher. Once I accepted that this is just how things work for me, I stopped feeling anxious about it too.
And then some time later I would [will] try
again, under the blissful delusion that this
time it will stick
First... damn. I know the struggle. Much love to you and much respect.
Just an idea w.r.t. systems. Have you tried prioritizing "ease of use" over "completeness and awesomeness"?
I made some progress myself that way lately. I was always trying to organize things in some kind of... I don't know? perfect and aesthetically pleasing way? In hindsight, I think I was telling myself I had to get to some perfect system like these garages, where everything is perfectly organized and has a purpose and place.
Instead what worked for me in the end was a bunch of clear plastic bins from Home Depot, with big labels on them. They are not literally childrens' bins but in spirit, the end solution for me was not too far away from this:
That's me too (except I was diagnosed as a kid). Only thing that has worked reliably with me is Dexmethylphenidate, but it messes with my sleep, so I get to choose between my brain feeling like mush in the morning or playing the focus-lottery for the rest of the day.
I certainly agree with calendars/alarms but todo lists for me are a place to put things instead of doing them and then they become a separate problem all of their own
They help me. At least the physical, paper ones do.
I keep my days on track by taking time in the early morning and reviewing the previous days accomplishment/misses/notes and then writing down an outline of today's goals and reminders. Notes throughout the day get jotted in the margins. Something like maybe 70% blogging, 30% to-do list?
Can't say I've ever used an app that felt 1/8th as helpful. It feels like there's some extra brain magic going on in the process of putting thoughts on actual paper that results in more retention and effort of thought put into writing.
For me the most important function of a todo list is to remind me what I am supposed to be doing _right now_. I often get distracted and veer off to do something else, but a quick glance at the top of my todo list gives me that little nudge to go back. Anything further down the todo list will possibly stay undone.
Yeah, prioritizing tasks is also part of the problem for me. I use the TickTick app to save my tasks and it has a feature called the Eisenhower Matrix, which allows me to prioritize my tasks in a visual way like a kanban board. Sometimes that's not enough. Keeping to a schedule to form a habit is also a challenge, so I prepend a number to the most important tasks and set up reminders for them. Once I have the big tasks laid out in the app, I revert to old school pen and paper to break the tasks down into smaller parts because it's faster and reduces friction.
Maybe that sounds like overkill, but I've found that having a system for writing down tasks, prioritizing them, and creating a daily schedule/habit are all equally important for people with ADHD.
and then they become a separate problem all of their own
I struggle with it too.
There are an infinite number of possible todo systems and different systems will work for different individuals at different times. But, I do feel there are two immutable truths w.r.t. successful todo list tasking.
1. You have to aggressively prioritize and prune them.
2. You should have separate daily/weekly/monthly/"someday" lists. Or some variation on this them. Maybe you do weekly/monthly/someday. Or today/tomorrow/someday. Whatever.
Point is it can't be a single infinitely expanding list or multiple infinitely expanding lists. Otherwise it's just a giant guilt pile that is 50% full of crap you don't even care about any more.
I still struggle but I think embracing those two principles is table stakes
I used to think they didn't. It is entirely pointless and even something of a distraction if it's something that's currently part of my hyperfocus/obsession.
If it's something I might forget (e.g. an admin task), then if I don't put it in a list and have either a habit to pluck it out of the list or a reminder prompting me then it is usually forgotten.
I also rely very much more heavily on checklists (especially templated checklists) than the average person. If I'm traveling and I don't set a reminder for 7pm the night before a trip with a packing checklist then I will either forget 4 critical items or I will be frantically packing at the last minute or both.
Todo lists help me deal with tasks not worth doing. I feel anxiety over forgetting things, even if they're ultimately not important - it can be hard to tell what's important in the moment.
Putting it in a todo list allows me to let go of the anxiety of forgetting, because I know I'll triage and prune my todo list soon enough.
That's a feature of todo lists I think. Well, perhaps not for ADHD per se, but it's a way also to offload and let go of things. At least that's what I remember the lifehack character on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy said.
I recently started talking to a therapist again after several years not, this time focusing on ADHD. I never realized until now the sheer number of little tweaks I've integrated into my thinking and behavior, nor the degree to which I've optimized them all for maximum likelihood of actually getting stuff done. No one approach works consistently, but every now and then I get lucky and one does, and that's a real improvement over not doing them.
> For instance, someone might excessively rely on calendars, to-do lists, or alarms to compensate for forgetfulness."
Holy objects. Can't survive with any of these things.
I have 2 calendars running (it's actually only one, but I have Outlook mobile installed, plus Apple Calendar- they sync to the same calendar , I get two separate notifications for everything so I can't just dismiss them as easily).
I don't see why any of that would be excessive or exclusive to people with ADHD. Neurotypical people forget important stuff all the time and would also benefit from good organizational skills and reminders about important deadlines.
Is ADHD a real thing? I see too many SV engineers diagnosed with ADHD to the point that it feels like a large scam run by psychiatrists that they lowered the threshold of the actual ADHD.
It's real but most people don't have ADHD, they can't focus because they aren't actually interested in what they are doing but blame ADHD and take drugs.
A simple Hack that still works for me after years:
1. Place a tiny LED (red or yellow) by the side of your monitor or virtually on the screen corner. Basically anywhere almost bordering your field of view.
2. Make it blink like a fast heartbeat (120-150 bpm) and gradually slowdown to around 60 bpm (or your slow heartbeat base). Make the slope approx 20 to 60 minutes (you can adjust the best rate by testing in 10m increments after a few days in one setting).
Now...
3. Get to work regardless if distracted and agitated. Close all apps except what you need to work and BOOM!, let the magic happen. Without realising, your brain will try to sync with the light that you can barely see, calming you down and allowing you to go focus-mode with the task in had.
Works like hypnosis!
It is also a cheap hack... I build my unit with a cheap ESP32 and heart-rate sensor to sync deeper and dynamically adjust the slope...
Will explain better if any interest.
No science behind (only principles), I just hammered a solution like any Ape with the shakes would need!