Sorry what were you saying? I was busy thinking of what I would do if gravity reversed.
the problems sound similar to “what everyone has” but they arent the same
Yes everyone struggles motivating themselves to do chores but it’s not the same when you have adhd.
Yes everyone has trouble concentrating during a boring lecture/lesson but its not the same when you have adhd.
Yes everyone has the urge to buy stuff they don’t need, but its not the same when you have adhd.
Yeah it’s always „why don’t you just…“ or „why can’t you „
yeah there are only two reasons why someone doesn’t do something and it’s because they can’t or the don’t wanna. If they want to do something but don’t it’s because they can’t and some pedestrian advice like “Just think how much nicer it will feel after you’re done” is not gonna help.
so it’s those but more of them
It’s those but so bad it’s a disability. Like how just because most people don’t hear something from time to time doesn’t mean they’re all hard of hearing
not necessarily more, but more intense. Like it’s borderline physically painful sometimes to force myself to do something. It feels like I’m being very cruel to myself for no good reason, its just a dishwasher after all
people who have never been depressed tend to think that depression is just laziness
YoU jUsT nEeD sOmE fReSh AiR
It isn’t fun.
Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it’s not like that on the inside.
We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren’t bursting with unlimited energy, it’s as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can’t get anything right.
It gets old, man.
It’s comments like this that make me think I don’t have ADHD and I’m just a bit slow.
My therapist says I’m likely ADHD and I align with a lot in this thread, but this description is about 1000% more dramatic than my day to day life. I guess it’s all a spectrum, but I’ve never felt like I’m living in a fog, I’m very very aware of all of the things I’m fucking up, but my mind doesn’t tell my body it’s worth fixing yet.
I never “forget” to finish a task, I remember that task needs to get done every 5 mins after I leave it not finished and it pains me to look at it every time I walk by it. But there are more important things to do. Like scrolling Lemmy or IG.
Your third paragraph is describing executive dysfunction, a symptom of ADHD.
Seriously, neither you nor your therapist knows unless you get assessed by a qualified psychologist with experience doing this. Everyone has some characteristics of ADHD (to put it like that) because ADHD is just exaggeration/minimization/mistargeting of functions everyone has. Whether your pattern fits the disorder can be difficult to know without a good assessment.
Damn dude 100% very well put
“Just do [X]” does not compute, whether X is “yoga”, “sports”, “[specific diet]”, “the laundry”, or simply “it”. It is never simply “just”. The inability to “just” start doing a thing (especially without any immediate reward) is one of the central symptoms of ADHD and if you say “just do [X]”, you’re essentially saying “just don’t have ADHD”.
ADHD also doesn’t mean you are/were bad in school. Not by a long shot.
You must hate Nike
I’ve generally found starting the easy part. Maintaining is where it gets hard. Habit building nearly impossible.
No I’m not trolling you, I literally do not remember what you asked me to do. I don’t care if you asked me 30 seconds ago; I legitimately forgot and I apologize for that.
Yes I know, I should just knock it out now before I forget again, but my low dopamine levels won’t let me. No I’m not just being lazy; you might as well ask me to move a mountain. That’s just how difficult is for me to complete the most basic of chores. It is completely out of my control, and no amount of Adderall will fix it.
The wife and I have this argument all the time and it drives me crazy.
How do I upvote a million times?
Here’s a sampling:
ADHD can feel like you’re putting in 350% of effort 100% of the time but only achieving 50% of what others achieve, and then being treated like you only put in 10%.
My whole childhood & life before diagnosis, my intelligence and literally everything am good at was used as proof up career & academic & household stuff out of spite.
The paradox of #ADHD - being excellent at complex, high-stimulus tasks and fuck- all at routine, “easy” tasks was a weapon in the hands of parents, teachers, & employers and a constant abusive echo in my brain.
What internalized was that accomplishments that were fun or that came easy to me had no value, only the ones that involve effort “count.” But the things that involved the most effort for me were mundane tasks that came easy to others, so they had no value, either.
ADHD involves SO many micromoments of shame. Stepping Over the pile of laundry. Re- remembering the bill you still haven’t paid. The sink full of dishes and the fridge leftovers lurking in the back. The small but recurring should have" is cumulative and it’s painful.
The last one’s text wasn’t "Select"able on my phone
Gosh, the micromoments of shame really really hits home
It’s the last one for me
‘Just write it down’
‘IT DOESN’T FUCKING WORK!!!’
I can’t count the number of times I start talking about executive dysfunction and someone immediately chirps in with “make a list, chunk it down, say you’re going to do this for 20 minutes and then take a break.” I eventually started asking in response, "Do you suggest to your depression patients simply not being sad? Do you tell your anxiety patients not to worry about stuff? Because that’s what I’m hearing, and it tells me you don’t
I find the practice of making daily to-do lists still helps, not because I’ll be able to necessarily do the thing for 20 minutes on the first try, but after those 20 minutes i might look down at my little note and be able to remember what it was I was supposed to be doing… and then I can have another attempt at maybe doing it in the next 20 minutes.
The amount of misinformation that’s out there about it.
Around 50% of TikToks about ADHD are misleading. I feel like we can expect similar results in other social media.
Please don’t “trap” me and force my attention on to you.
I literally cannot subvert my attention from what I am focused on. Please just say my name and wait a moment for me to context switch myself.
Forcing the attention takes away from what I want to focus on and what you want me to focus on (usually you).
I’d second this as something people don’t get about ADHD.
So I work in IT support. If I’m absorbed in something complicated and you ask me to stop immediately to help you with your “more urgent” issue, please don’t take it personally if I seem annoyed while my brain short circuits trying to deal with the sudden gear change.
Is this an ADHD thing or a normal human behavior?
It’s worse for ADHD. It’s an outsize irritation. Also, once the focus is broken it can be really hard to pick back up the original task.
Also why we endlessly do the hip wiggle to avoid going to the loo until it hurts.
Many adhd symptoms are “normal human” behavior/traits, but in people with adhd they are more exaggerated than in neurotypical peeps. So while something like this might be slightly annoying for a typical person, for someone with adhd it is likely worse.
In general, if someone ND is complaining about X, equating it to NT X doesn’t work. They have the same name, yes. That’s because we don’t have words for X2 or X3 etc. Imagine if house cats, ocelots, pumas, and tigers were all called “cats.”
“A stray cat wandered in and it looks hungry.”
“So, what’s the big deal? We have three cats at home. Just give them some kibble.”
“I think it plans on eating me.”
“Stop exaggerating.”
This also works as a reply to OP’s question.
Normally I’d be ‘that guy’ to call out ADHD vs NT behaviours but for this - particularly when hyperfocus is involved - there is 100% a difference.
Yes
Ever almost shat yourself because you were focused on something else?
It’s really tiring to just exist inside your own head.
I’ve described it before as a box filled with a bunch of bouncy balls just bouncing off on every direction, off the walls, ceiling and floor, all the time. Every one of those balls is a thought, it’s really hard to hold onto just one, it’s hard to keep one once you’ve caught it.
When I’m resting usually I just put in some youtube video/TV show/audio book and play some mindless game for a while. On the outside it looks like it just played solitaire for 3 hours straight, but on the inside I’m just trying to follow one line of thought while keeping the rest of my brain occupied and quiet for a second.
The more I read all this, the more I understand that I should diagnose for ADHD as those descriptions are just too damn fitting.
I was always sort of smart and stupid at the same time, unable to focus on specific things while being hyper-focused on something not always relevant. Procrastinating like crazy, but when it’s really bad, able to do a lot last minute.
Reading one sentence over and over again and still not knowing what it says is definitely something that did happen to me many times, I’m just focused on something else and cannot help it.
The worst thing for me when I got diagnosed was the realisation of how much of me is just ADHD/ASD. I’m very high masking according to my doctor, and now I understand why I often feel completely drained of energy. It’s pretty mad…
If you feel like you have ADHD, getting diagnosed is absolutely worth it. Even though it will probably wreck your perception of yourself, everything will probably make sense in hindsight. It’s very strange yet liberating.
I would be actually happy if I turned out ADHD, because I knew where to look for a help in an attempt to make my life better. Most of my efforts in self-improvement become futile after all. I wouldn’t care being ADHD at all if I was satisfied with the life I created, but since I’m not, it is all but negative.
So look, I am not trying to talk down to you or make you feel inferior. The reason I use words with WAY too many syllables tucked into precisely worded sentence structures is because my fucking brain decided it didn’t want to remember the normal damn way of saying it.
Also, our brains glitch. As in it literally feels like some wires crossed. Due to this some situations/days/hours can be torture. Please be kind.
Have you ever considered not paying attention to what people say back?
If it makes you feel better, you can pretend they said good things about what you said.
Have you ever considered not paying attention to what people say back?
I have never considered doing that at all. It happens naturally in the middle of conversations.
Yeah. I don’t actually remember anything they might have said though that reminds me: Do you have a good spaghetti recipe? Cause I’m somehow seeing a correlation between people being jerks and spaghetti right now.
Don’t worry, everyone else. We will actually return to the original topic in about 15 minutes.
Lasagna dreams, spaghetti reality.
That me starting work at 2 am is not my choice, it’s my brain’s choice
At least that point in time exists.
It is hard when your brain decides to start work at √-1am
Aye.
That it is not some magic fucking “gift”. The hyper focus isn’t a super power. It sucks, and gets in the way in all the wrong places, bills, school, career. I would trade places with anyone who doesn’t have it becuase it plain fucking sucks.
Hyper focus is a real problem for me. I don’t even realize I’m hungry or that my bladder is full until I’m feeling nauseous or light headed. What feels like 15 minutes is actually hours.
At the same time, if I don’t complete a project from start to finish in one sitting, it’s nearly impossible to restart.
I don’t get basic things done like laundry or remembering to make appointments because I’m stuck on one task. Sometimes I’m afraid to do things I love because I can’t just do it for 20 minutes. Especially video games. I want to relax after work and play but I know I can’t let myself or I might not eat that evening.
If you do get into hyperfocus on something you need to like work or a project or whatever, someone or something breaking you out of it is incredibly frustrating. Like not because what ever the interruption is isn’t important, but because hyperfocus is difficult to get into on something important, so hard to switch focus from, and there is an almost painful obsessive need to have completed where doing.
Edit: accidentally hut submit too soon… Typos
Communication is difficult for us. Masking is tiring as fuck.
I had a nervous breakdown in university, where I had gotten a huge, highly selective merit scholarship under strict performance conditions. I had thrived - relatively speaking - in a traditional classroom, because it was so structured. I murdered tests because it was quiet, structured, and distraction free. Homework was hit or more frequently miss, I struggled socially, and although clearly not malicious my teachers gently noted that my classroom behavior could be a challenge “to the other students’ learning”, but I was brilliant enough at tests and classwork and highly motivated by my toxic dysfunctional house to get out that I had successfully gotten my golden ticket.
University, where you had to set and enforce your own structure? I couldn’t cope. I got a lot of flack on “you never learned to study”, “you just don’t know how to do really hard things, now that it isn’t easy for you”. I missed deadlines for administrative work, I forgot assignments, I struggled to remember the instructions to follow them.
I remember a day just before I hit that wall - I was in the study cubicles in the library, trying to work on some critical midterms for a challenging course. I only had the cubicle rental for a set amount of time and needed to meet my long-suffering roommate for a ride home at a given time - they were also very busy and I was not helping their life by being late to everything constantly. I checked the time to see how much longer I had and went back to writing, but realized I hadn’t actually internalized the time so I checked again. Within 10 seconds I couldn’t remember how long I had again, so I checked again - tried really hard to remember! Said it out loud, was shushed by my cube neighbor. Looked up at them - forgot time. Checked again, pen to paper to write it down - I had forgotten already.
Frustrated as hell, I got up to get a drink at the water fountain, hoping the walk and the water would “clear my head”. At this point I had forgotten I even needed to check the time. I sat back down at my cubicle, picked up my pen to start writing for this midterm, began brainstorming – I was at the water fountain again, although I didn’t remember choosing to go or any of the not-short walk there. Puzzled but not surprised, I thought “I must have been thirstier than I knew”, and made sure to get a BIG drink this time. Walked back to the cubicle. Pick up pen. “Focus”. Deep breath. Consider the themes of –
I am back at the water fountain. Hand to heaven I did not choose to be here. I do not NEED to be here. I am not thirsty. I return back to my cube without getting a drink because “I am not rewarding myself for wasting time”.
I walk back to the wrong cubicle because I have forgotten the cubicle number I rented.
I end up back at the water fountain trying to remember my cubicle by retracing my steps - it’s not like I haven’t walked that path half a dozen times today already, how did I just now forget??
I get another drink. I finally make it back to my cubicle. I start working on the midterm again, but in the-reading the prompt sheet realize I have not been working on the prompt I actually signed up for this whole time - not that I have written even a paragraph yet. Frustrated to tears after years of this constantly and feeling like a failure, my phone buzzes angrily - somehow during all of this NOTHING, 4 hours came and went, and I am now late to meet my roommate, who is threatening to leave without me.
When I finally finish the paper, it is submitted by my professor for a “best paper of the semester” award and places second.
2 months later, seeing the campus psychiatrist after my mental breakdown due to “overwhelming anxiety”, he listens to me for 45 minutes. He promises we will talk about the anxiety, which is very real and distressing, but also maybe I should consider this other thing. He takes a paper from his filing cabinet, folds over the top so I can’t see what the title is, and presents me with a questionnaire asking me to rate myself from one to five on every moral failing that has ever disappointed and frustrated me and everyone who claims to love me. I am sobbing within 5 questions – there is a name for this?? This is treatable?? I’m not just a lazy failure?? No, I have no idea what the title of this questionnaire would be.
“Adult ADHD Assessment”.
Most people, it turns out, DON’T have a childhood nickname of “space cadet” or “nutty professor”, can finish a sentence in a linear fashion, can sit relatively still, don’t interrupt their psychiatrist 5 times in 20 minutes, and can remember what they have and have not discussed in a 45 minute time window. It also turns out that being a high achiever in a strict scholarship program as a member of the honors college in a challenging major at a prestigious university with “the WORST case of ADHD I have ever seen” is not super easy, although I can’t imagine why.
Within days I am on my first day of Adderall, although I am told not to expect much at this dose. I almost forget to take it, but my roommate forcefully reminds me as we drive, and I never remembered to take the prescription out of my bag so I still have it. I walk the 15 minutes from the lot to the library.
As I pass the student union building next to the library, I realize something absolutely insane - I know where I am right now, and I remember getting here. Not that I remember every leaf or face I passed, but it isn’t like the water fountain where I only know that I went somewhere because I am now there. Despite having the same routine every day of walking to the library to rent my cubicle first thing, I often “overshoot” and accidentally walk past it and head to the buildings for my major without getting my rental and storing my bag, usually only remembering where I am and what I’m doing once I go to open the door of my first class and see that it isn’t my class in there yet - I’m supposed to be studying in the library for a few hours more.
But not on Adderall - on 10 whole mg of Adderall I successfully went right where I was supposed to be on purpose at the right time and I remembered doing it, and it was so unfamiliar an experience that I cried on a bench in the quad about it.
Mine isn’t this bad, but I can relate to the first-day-on-Adderall thing. It was wild when I walked into my messy bathroom an hour after that first dose and my brain just went: “It is possible, even reasonable for you to clean this bathroom, in a finite amount of time, without every moment filling you with dread. This task will not consume your whole
lifeday.” My brain had simply never done that before. I could just choose to do something and–perhaps more importantly–to stop doing something. I remember I washyperfixatingworking on a hobby project at 11 PM on a work night and my brain went: “If you stop working now, brush your teeth and go to bed, this fun project will still be here for you to work on tomorrow. You don’t have to keep at it until 6 AM and then go to work without sleeping.” That seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. It was weird to hear that from my own brain, not in a “you’re being bad” way, but in a “it’s going to be okay” way. There was a lot of happy crying those first few weeks.Just wish I’d been diagnosed in college instead of in my mid-30s. I might have graduated.
People like to throw around the word ‘lazy’ but it’s more like I can’t turn it on OR off unless I’m medicated. Once I’m in the zone I will work until I grow a beard, then wither away, then my crumbling skeleton grows a beard. It would be a powerful thing if I could aim it.
jesus fuck these comments can i try it? … I want to see if adderall is right for me. Can this waitinglist for a doctor hurry the hell up
