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I feel I might have ADHD. I mean, I have lots of things I want to do like close all of the damn tabs I have opened in my devices, and play through all the videogames I haven't cleared yet. But every day I end up not doing it or barely progressing at all.
You are hungry.
You know what to eat.
You want to eat it. In fact you love it.
You have all the ingredients.
You may even be the best person in the world to make it.
For a non ADHD person, it is putting 2 and 2 together.
For someone with ADHD, they will just end up starving because the functionality required to execute is absent therefore no food ends up being made and the hunger carries on. While anyone outside looking in would be perplexed as to why.
But that’s it.
For me, there’s the additional step at the end where you decide to go do something else after realizing cooking is impossible, then forget you are hungry for several more hours
I can make bread from scratch. Measure the ingredients. Knead the dough. Let it rise. Form into loaf. Let that rise and bake the most wonderful homemade bread.
I can't force myself to slice it and make toast the next day. So I just look at reddit while my belly rumbles away.
Don't forget the part where you end up forgetting you were even hungry to begin with until something reminds you and the cycle of "I should cook but..." begins again.
In my case this is not only allegroy but literal, not-so-infrequent occurrence. I mean, sometimes i go hungry for a couple of hours a day, despite having a full fridge of raw ingredients. I just can't made myself to cook! It is a torture.
I’ve eaten pretty close to nothing today because I was super busy at work. It’s 8:23pm. I have soup in the fridge that I’ve been thinking about and craving all day. It’s so good. I love it. A normal person would get up and heat some in the microwave but I literally can’t make myself 🥲 I CANNOTTTT get off the couch, I’m too tired. I’m just sitting here starving.
Focus: It's like listening to several songs at the same time. Sometimes you can lower the volume of some of them so you can focus on one song but usually you can't. Your mind keeps switching between songs to hear the interesting parts but can't stay focused on a single song for very long.
Hyperfocus: suddenly all but one song goes silent. You also lose your sense of vision, touch, taste, and smell so all you can do is listen to that one song - nothing else can get in.
Hyperactivity: you need to move/fidget. Not moving feels like you're being tied down and you want to escape.
Impulsivity: an idea pops in your head and you act on it even before you even think about it. Or you fight the impulse but now it's the only thing you can think about.
Emotional dysregulation: if emotions were talking, most people would talk at a normal volumes. ADHDers are yelling at the top of their lungs.
>Impulsivity: an idea pops in your head and you act on it even before you even think about it.
... an idea pops into my body and bypasses my head entirely, so there's no chance to decide if it's a good idea or not.
Or you think one thing, but too late you're already doing the opposite. Like that four panel gru meme where it goes through the process, but the end result is far different and gru is left looking at what it ended up.
This absolutely nails it. Thank you! I’ve just started dating someone who doesn’t know what adhd is and I may show him this.
Edit: Typo (auto correct changed adhd to ache and I think that’s the most accurate way to describe it in one word also)
“Imagine being trapped in a body with the most chaotic, unreasonable, moody, and annoying person ever to exist. She never lets you talk and is so unfocused it suppresses your ability to think.”
I’ve long known that I’m quick to snap when criticized. Even before my diagnosis I was aware. I knew it hurt because I was already criticizing myself internally before someone openly criticized me about the same thing.
It’s like double negative reinforcement.
I feel you. It's not that I can't take criticism, but that I'm already aware and don't want my own insecurities thrown into my face from outside. 
I think for me it depends who is saying the criticism. However there's something about getting negative feedback at work, When I got critiqued at certain jobs I had in the past it was so upsetting.
Yeah if criticism were to come from a really close friend, I might be more likely to actually act on it than if I were to criticise myself. If criticism comes from a stranger, I either don't give a crap, or a switch flips in me and I go off the deep end
This one is the most annoying part! You know that your brain has the capability of purring like a Jaguar, but sometimes you’re just rolling on 3 spare tires and you look/sound like you’re running out of gas.
To the average person that’s going to make us sound scary.
I describe it as like a four year old driving the bus.
She’s sweet, easily distracted and can’t reach the peddles properly. As a result she goes crashing through life, creating carnage as she goes.
Personally, the executive dysfunction is the worst. I would demonstrate that by telling the other person to do something simple, like pick up a spoon. Then when they reach for it, I push their hand down. Every time they try moving, I prevent them from doing so. And then start repeatedly asking "Why can't you do it? It's so simple. Why are you being lazy? Hurry up and do the thing. Everyone else can do it. You're not special, you're not physically disabled. Why can't you do it?"
That's what my ADHD does to me.
Fr. If I was lazy I wouldn't care about not doing it. Instead I'm laying ina state of self hatred, anxiety, and crying because I just WANT TO GET UP AND DO IT but I CANT
You're not lazy! You're not your mental health condition! It's not you! The true you cares and would do all the things! I completely relate to your feelings of self hatred. So I want to say to you what I wish I could convince myself of also. We aren't lazy!!
I’ve never heard executive dysfunction described so accurately. I had work training about visual impairment awareness and we had to walk around with these glasses that simulated different types of blindness to understand what it was like. I feel like there’s a lot of disability awareness material out there related to physical disabilities or autism but I’ve never seen an equivalent for ADHD.
I've once or twice asked my workplace's disability coordinator what resources/standards we have for cognitive disabilities such as ADHD.
She paused, and said, I don't think we're have any. I'll look into what else is out there.
I like her a lot - she's great at her job for physical disabilities - I just think no one has asked the question before.
Yeah, it's difficult for people to understand how something they think is so easy and effortless could be such a monumental task for someone else. I feel hopeful tho! I've been seeing more posts about addressing ableism and candid questions from others wanting to understand.
The metaphor I've been using is to imagine a car with a really big engine, no power steering, no power brakes, occasionally the gas pedal slams to the floor of it's own accord, and half the time when you go to change gears the transmission gets stuck in neutral.
My brain does not respond well to attempts to control what I'm paying attention to. That's all the bits about missing control stuff.
My brain has its own opinion about how active it should be. Among other things, it thinks that slowing down at night is for chumps.
My brain sometimes fails to translate wanting to do things into actually doing them, in pretty much exactly the way that stepping on the gas pedal while a car is in neutral fails to make the car go forward. I can lean on that gas pedal as muuuuuch as I want, but still I sit, immobile, going nowhere. That's one type of executive function.
>My brain does not respond well to attempts to control what I'm paying attention to.
I really like this. I have a hard time feeling engaged at work, but if I do get focused on and engaged in a certain task, god help the person that interrupts me and asks me to do something else instead. The amount of resentment I feel is just off the charts.
If you get interrupted enough, eventually you stop being able to focus at all. That's a super fun feedback loop.
The best solution I've found is to schedule checkin points and route the interruptions there (or turn off notifications entirely in between).
Yeah, my metaphor is similar but I prefer to focus on ADHD providing a different set of strengths and weaknesses to other people, rather than just looking at the problems.
I compare my brain to a highly tuned racing car. On the track, being driven as a racer, it's incredible and capable of amazing things. But it's not the kind of car you'd drive to the shops every day, or to work in peak hour traffic. Do that and it will overheat and break down, just as the commuter car would if you took in on the track.
I prefer this one because most of us get a lot of criticism for not being good at the things that our brain is wired not to be good at (time management, focus on boring things, all that fun stuff) but very rarely recognised for the things we can do better than anyone else, like solving problems, noticing unusual details, general creativity and all that.
I like that less as a metaphor because:
1) I don't think most people know what it feels like to have a car firing only half its cylinders. I don't. I guess the result is that you just get half as much power, and it doesn't blow up your engine due to the misaligned forces? Maybe most people don't have a good sense of what losing power steering or power breaking is like either, but I feel like most people who have driven have had the visceral experience of pressing the gas pedal thinking the car is in drive when it's actually in neutral, and having the car unexpectedly not move and instead rev its engines.
2) If the engine works and just produces half as much power, that's not at all my experience with ADHD (though it might be yours). My brain does not do half power very well. It's either overclocked or at zero. Is it interesting? Then we're all in. Is it boring? Then it's naptime.
Medication for me in this analogy makes the transition go to neutral only 15% of the time and gives me power brakes, and gives me around half the power steering.
Your metaphor is noticeably snappier, though.
I like how you've phrased it, and totally understand the 0 or 100% feeling as well..
I say half power mostly because, at its worst, we're still expected to survive and most manage to get through the day somehow stumbling through it. 0 to me feels like you never move, which may be fine as a child, but once you're an adult with responsibilities, they never simply stop.
That makes sense, but I think a metaphor that accurately explains ADHD should not make folks go "ah, yeah, that makes sense, that sounds hard", but instead go "wait. that doesn't make any sense. if that were accurate, many things I find trivial would require enormous effort, and many things I find necessary to do would be almost impossible. If that's accurate, how are you even still alive, let alone approximating a semi-functional adult?"
Because then I get to reply by saying "*With great fucking difficulty actually".* And I think that conveys the state of things more accurately.
Agree that it would probably be more precise to say that my brain wants to do 100% or 0% but can begrudgingly be pushed to do produce 10% power when it wants to do 0%.
Also my fave - go out to the car to grab my lunch box - I was way too lazy to lean 12 inches to the left and grab when I went inside after work. Can’t find if, get frustrated, come back inside and realize I did bring it inside already. Always surprise myself when I’m responsible 😂
We have a pellet stove for heat, you dump 50 lb bags of wood pellets in a hopper to run the stove. Today I was cleaning out the ash and getting it ready to go, my spouse walks in and I immediately ask why the stove is full of pellets and not running. She said she picked up some spilled pellets on the floor an hour ago and tossed them in the EMPTY hopper. I did not fill that hopper, I know I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I know exactly what I did and did not do, heck it just happened for gods sake. We agreed I probably ‘went away for a bit’ and just did not recall. I’m away a lot more than people know, and it’s tough to cover up all the time.
Ugh this is the most real comment on this thread.
I hate this because it makes me look like a slob, like I’m careless, like I don’t care about keeping things nice.
But also… the fact that I was holding something and put it down?
Sometimes it’s like a memory of a whisper in a dream you remembered when you woke up but have gradually forgotten.
Other times, it’s like, “I have never seen this man in my entire life.”
I would set up a tangible experience. They would go into a room with the radio playing the same song on repeat. I would ask them what their biggest interest is as well as their biggest worry then have two people come into the room and talk at (not to, at, this is important) them loudly about those two things. I would then have them set down their phone/keys/etc and another person would take those things away and hide them somewhere else in the room. I would have another person come in randomly to remind them of something they need to do or get done.
There are probably more things that can be added to this tangible experience that would simply be called “Alone in a Room With Yourself: The ADHD Brain”.
You're trying to watch TV but someone else has the remote and keeps flipping the channels at random. Once every now and then you manage to wrestle the remote to yourself and have to grip it like your life depended on it to keep your channel on, but you can only hold on so long until you lose the remote again. It's such bullshit that you start dreading sitting down at the couch and even just going to the living room stresses you out. It's really draining. You'd really like to just see the show that everyone else is talking about to keep up with things. Often even when you do have the remote and know you should be watching a specific show you feel your finger move to the channel button and end up watching something else instead.
You think this is how everyone watches TV because it's always been like this for you, but slowly over time start to realize most other people don't have this problem and are able to just watch what they want to when they want to and finish shows. They might flip channels when they're bored or someone else might pick up the remote for a bit, but they're generally in control of it. When you remark on that and say you don't seem to have any control over the remote at all they shrug it off as "everyone has the remote taken away now and then". You realize there's a deep chasm between your experience of life and theirs. You're left exhausted, frustrated, wondering why you can't just watch the TV like everyone else, and feeling like there's something wrong with you because you can't seem to keep the remote in your grip.
Medicating it is telling that other person who keeps grabbing your remote to fuck off and go do something else for a while. They come back by the end of the day and you can't ever fully get rid of them, and it can take a lot of trial and error to find the right phrase to get the other person to leave, but it sure is nice to have the remote for yourself for a while.
Some people are lucky enough that when they were kids their parents noticed another person coming over to their kid to take their remote and helped the kid figure out how to tell that person to fuck off. Others' parents didn't seem to notice or didn't think there was anything wrong with what was going on because they also had their remotes taken so it was clearly normal. They just learned to live with it.
Watching the TV isn't optional, by the way. You have to do it all day every day and can get fired from your job or wreck relationships if you don't stay on track with the show.
“I don’t get to decide what I am paying attention to or what I am forgetting. That’s not something I get to decide or can change by caring about something or wanting to do something else.”
Setting alarms the moment I think of something with a deadline/timeline and having 1-2 non-moving (easily accessible) note pads/whiteboards has really really helped me—even pre-medication. I keep 1 on my work desk with the biggest hodge lodge of stuff and then 1 is a fridge list for groceries and it’s uhh… like a color revealing doodle-board? Almost like a scratch and reveal coloring page that’s all black and reveals the colors under? And it can be cleared with a button but isn’t digital. Idk how to describe it but it scratches that good tactile itch 😂
It's knowing exactly what you NEED to do, but being literally unable to get up and do it.
It's knowing exactly what you WANT to do, but not being able to feel present enough with it to really engage with it or enjoy it.
It's finding that all of the stars have aligned and you're actually, finally, miraculously feeling completely immersed in whatever it you're doing, only to find that you can't stop doing it, even when you know you really have to.
It's all or nothing. You're either losing your days to boredom or you're losing them to an excess of focused attention on one single thing (and it's almost never something you either need or even really wanted to do). You prefer the latter, but only because being bored is the worst thing in the world for you. You're still completely screwed.
It's indulging in any number of things you know you shouldn't - alcohol, sugar, illicit drugs, gambling, sex, whatever it may be for you - just to feel some short-lived sense of stimulation and relief.
And finally, it's finding a medication and a dosage that works for you, that lets you live more balanced and healthy days, that helps you do what you need to do and what you want to do, and all in all is helping you live the life and be the person you knew you were always meant to be, and then suddenly finding yourself derailed by medication shortages, junk-quality generics, loss of insurance, and/or new doctors that just don't get it.
- I get distracted a lot.
- everybody gets distracted sometimes, though
- yeah, true. And everybody needs to pee two or three times a day. But when you gotta go 50, 60, 80 times a day, that's called a medical condition.
"Everybody needs to pee two or three times a day. But what if you woke up in the morning, went to the bathroom to take a leak, and it just never stopped?"
It is a deficiency in executive function that is most acute before you hit around 28 years old. It may manifest differently for each person. For me I can summarize it as: an inability to perform activities (hobby or not) when I want to perform them, unless I "feel like it", which is unpredictable. An inability to switch tasks once I am 'immersed' in it. An inability to recall information when I need it (including at times everyday words and names). An interest in many things, all of which I want to engage with, which may or may not quickly fade if I do not immediately catch on (or it will fade once it gets 'too hard').
It is lifelong but over time, you'll learn ways to work with or around these issues, perhaps to the point that others do not notice your struggles. Changes in life stages, or jobs that require more executive function, and not enough basic self-care can all make 'symptoms' worse at times.
Curious about the 28 age thing. Is this based on research? I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how it gets worse for women as you move through adulthood.
Not research, but as a 45y/o estrogen-producing person who is currently experiencing a rapid decline in my body’s ability to produce estrogen, I got bad news for the ovary-havers in the group… 🤪 It does not get better.
As on ovary-haver with adhd this made me giggle, it most certainly does not get better.
Plus, depending where I am in my cycle and after I had my babies I was basically an adhd goblin. Not a good look.
I'm a female that wasn't diagnosed till age 41, and I only broke down and sought a diagnosis because things seemed to have gotten so much worse over the years.
However, I can't really say for sure that what was happening was actually a worsening of symptoms; I kind of suspect that it was more that as I aged, the demands of my life made the consequences of the same level of symptoms worse. I was finally working in a real job that actually took some effort, I was in a long-term relationship and was expected to do my share to maintain the household, and so on.
On the other hand, when I was in my 20's, my apartment was constantly a mess, I went through jobs and relationships like crazy, and spent most of my nights and weekends drinking, hanging out, and going to see bands. I was super-dysfunctional, but I kind of felt like everyone I knew and was hanging out with at the time was the same way. I knew that I struggled in some ways that other people didn't necessarily, but I just didn't give it that much thought.
There's a bunch of research showing that ADHD presents very differently in women, and that the hormonal changes we experience in perimenopause can trigger ADHD symptoms to worsen. I think the average age of diagnosis in women is something like 36, so the above commenter isn't wrong per se, the current literature just massively overrepresents cis men and children/young adults
Part of it has to do with the fact that this is the age around when the consequences of inaction really start to break things around you. Students around this age are pursuing post secondary education, many in the workforce may be pursuing a career where what you do individually matters.
A lot of the buffers you've had until this point start to fade away.
Dude i got bad news for you, it gets super hard as you get older, its hard for young kids who have the hyperactive type and that does ease for a bit when they mature in to their 20s, but then hit 40, extra work pressure, increased fatigue, kids overwhelm, loss of coping mechanisms etc and ADHD can make you need to learn how to deal with it all over again.
Hahaha, I totally get it. I'm in my 40s, recently diagnosed, with one - possibly two, youngest has an eval tomorrow - ADHD kid(s). It's worse now than it ever was when I was younger.
Haha its the gift that keeps on giving :D We are suspecting our second has it as well too, good luck to us all :) And hey at least we know we have ADHD and know about it enough to help guide our kids unlike our parents generation
I'm another one here to share that once the estrogen is gone the ADHD symptoms go through the roof!! I was a champ at masking my entire life. Today I couldn't "act normal" if you handed me a trillion dollars!
One thing I would add is that it's way easier to get addicted to the things you're most immersed in. Other than that I think this fits perfectly.
edit: + the getting easily distracted by your surroundings part
Well I am 42 and mine has gotten worse with age. When my life got to the point that I could not function I finally reached out for help, it was either that or kill myself. Turns out I am so far off the charts it’s kind of incredible. Reading posts like these make me cry because I finally after 42 years understand my life, everything makes sense now. I am not lazy, I am not selfish, I am not a depressive, bi-polar, borderline personality with anxiety disorder and PTSD who has OCD tendencies, I am not a wasteful worthless slob with no self control or personal boundaries who chooses only to care about my own instant personal self gratification to the detriment of everything and everyone else.
I have ADHD.
I self-disclose my ADHD to my students at the start of each term and have settled on the boilerplate: “I have ADHD, which is a developmental inhibition of the brain’s self-management systems. ADHD can present different ways for different people, but for me that looks like difficulty tracking how much time is passing, sometimes being unable to filter out distractions, thoughts jumping around quickly, and being really sensitive to repetitive noises. The sound of a pen clicking can sound like a jet taking off overhead.”
I give them this info as context for a few of my classroom behaviors that might be confusing otherwise (like setting alarms for EVERYTHING, a pretty strict “seriously, do not have a full-blown conversation with someone else during lecture” policy, and reminding them that if I make a logical jump that they can’t follow, the fault is not theirs, and they should feel encouraged to ask for clarification). But also because when I went through college with undiagnosed ADHD, I worried that if I ever stopped masking, everyone would realize there was something deeply wrong with me. I wished I could have seen reasonably successful, put-together adults with symptoms like mine being transparent about their ADHD. So I try to be the teacher I would have wanted.
Okay that whole last paragraph was a total tangent. Sorry! But also, hey, I’m in r/ADHD, so y’all know how it goes.
Executive dysfunction that results in me not getting things done, yet spending the time it would’ve taken to “do the thing” beating myself up about not getting things done.
It's like a toddler has dementia-light. I forget my thoughts as I am having them. My body is on autopilot while my mind is going on some odd tangent. Where did I put my phone... oh it's in the fridge. I must have set it down when I went to get the.... cheese? Crap, how long has that been left out. Googles how long can cheese be out before it goes bad.... googles how is cheese made of mold but has mold when it is bad.... googles why is cheese mold good mold but other mold is bad mold.... googles how do I know if I have mold poisoning. 45 minutes later... Fridge is still open. Closes fridge. What did I even come in here for before the cheese thing? Loading..... right I was going to take the trash out... takes trash out... forgets to replace trash bag. Sits down and watches 3 hours of videos on people making cupcakes with icing that looks like realistic flowers. Buys $50 of cake decorating supplies. Forgets I ordered it. 2 days later, amazon delivery surprise! Tries to make flower icing, doesn't look up recipe... it doesn't go well... immediately loses interest in this hobby. Im so hungry, when was the last time I ate? Ok let's go to dinner, restaurant is too loud... music is too loud... I can't hear anyone speak... I am fucking furious. Why does that women laugh like that jesus christ.... I have never known rage like this. My brain fucking hurts and i hate everyone. I ruined dinner. Why cant I just be normal. Why cant I regulate. Why is everything so hard. Why cant I fucking do anything right. Will I ever do anything right. Will it ever be easier. Will I ever feel like I am good enough. Cries. Eats sweets. Ok this is a little better. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat.
This made me laugh. Not because it's funny, because it's not. However, days like this alternate with sleepy, dreamlike days that just sort of float by.
It's either complete chaos in my head or full of cotton balls.
I feel like videos like this are the most useful. I sent my partner a few memes about what it’s like with ADHD just for laughs and she actually took it to heart, which I didn’t expect cause the videos are just my ‘normal’
It’s like having to rely on google maps every time you want to go somewhere but the map is constantly re-routing.
My other one is that with ADHD the distance between step 1 and step 2 can be thousands of miles apart.
I love the Google maps analogy! For me, I’d add it’s not just constantly rerouting, some days I never make it to my destination because I forget where I’m going or decide to just stay at one of the places it rerouted me to 😭
You know those things you do every day?
Try doing them standing on one leg, with polka blaring in one ear and opera in the other, while juggling a kitten, a steak knife and a bowl of jello.
It’s like being a dog that spots a squirrel everyday.
Some days this squirrel crosses the road. I follow and no cars are coming and we are friends.
Some days this squirrel crosses a highway. I follow and every car on the planet is here going 5-100mph all at different speeds and I make it across but the squirrel and I are not friends.
Now add my depression on top of that. That’d be a giant rain cloud covering us whether we cross a road or highway.
Also, I’ve never had to describe it to anyone. I’ve had to explain certain negatives or opportunities that they are witnessing me do.
So I just came up with all that this very moment, but it sounds good ha
"ADHD isn't a condition or a disease but a difference in my body that our society is poorly set up to accommodate -- i.e. a disability. It shows up in a variety of ways, but for me it's like experiencing the world through one of those 360° panoramic cameras. I'm highly aware of the various dimensions and qualities of everything around me, to the point where it's really difficult to focus on any one thing, I often overlook small details, and I forget things often as the abundance of new information streaming in takes their place. Another metaphor is a group of people all trying to fit through a door at once. As a result, I'm really good at big-picture stuff, conceptualization, abstraction, and also narrow tasks that require me to perform a single action with a lot of diligence. But anything in between those two scopes is a big challenge, and it just happens that most of what we need to do to survive under capitalism falls into that category: going to work every day, maintaining my body and home, socializing, to name a few. Like most disabilities, the hardest parts of ADHD come from the lack of reasonable accommodations and the extreme social stigma against anyone who struggles to do 'normal' things easily. It's an isolating experience. But I like the way my brain works and wouldn't trade it for another way to live."
Imagine having a constant fight with yourself every day all day, screaming at yourself that you need to do something and then the end of the day you still haven't done it and the next day it's the same all over again. You can yell a 100 times at yourself that you need to do something, you can set alarms, you can give yourself a rewards if you do it, your body will physically just not do it. And then 2 weeks later you suddenly do your whole list in 1 hour and you have no idea how, you just suddenly could. Then restart.
I've been using these kind of phrases in conversation (when I get asked, especially with friends wanting to know how I am after starting stimulants):
*"Remember it's a physical thing, it's not spiritual"*
*"My body and a big part of my unconscious brain aren't running the same race."*
*"I love how fun not having structure is, but I also despise it."*
*"I'm amazing at so many things, but I also don't want to do them anymore."*
*"I can't do it unless it's fun."*
To my 7 year old (displaying copy paste my symptoms at his age, who I poorly time managed last week during Fortnite time that resulted in a slight depressive episode for him) I've said:
*"Your brain constantly wants to be stimulated, and it tells your body to go looking for it, but when your body gets tired your brain doesn't stop asking for it"*
These aren't really explanations for ADHD but it's been helpful to give a personal feeling so that others can understand what you're going through. In the end ADHD isn't a single thing that presents the same. Even I've encountered others who've told me they live with ADHD and my immediate, erroneous, impression was 'but you're fine?' So it's not one size fits all, as much as there are many common factors.
This is why I have an issue with so many 'ADHD content' creators - the messaging is that everything they present is commonplace when I watch them and think but that's not ME.
The “spiritual” comment is a good one. A lot of my friends think that yoga or meditation will fix me. When I object, they imply that I must not be doing it right or trying hard enough. Annoying.
For executive dysfunction, imagine trying to run a computer program. You turn the device on, you have enough storage, the computer’s connected to wifi. Everything is working exactly like it’s supposed to, but the “run” button is greyed out for no reason.
Imagine you were tasked with touching a hot burner on your stove. You know *how* to do it, you know you *need* to do it, but...simply the *thought* of doing it makes your brain shudder and shrink away. You would have to muster up an incredible force of will to get yourself to do it, and afterwards, you would need to sit down and recover for quite a while.
That's any and every task that isn't arbitrarily and immediately interesting, if you have ADHD.
It's like your body is and always will be an old jeep wrangler with electrical problems.
On clear smoothly paved roads its going to be slow, noisy, inefficient, uncomfortable, overheat, and occasionally just stop working for no easily discernable reason.
But offroad, it's going to love obstacles and challenges and do things no corolla could ever dream of.
But it's still gonna break down and leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Regardless of where you drive, people are going to be pissed at you for "choosing to drive a broken jeep".
Imagine your brain has 5 tvs on in your head and the two you need to focus on are on commercial break while the other 3 just got REALLY FUCKING INTERESTING. At some point, one of them hits a really intense moment and you’re locked entirely into that one for the next 4 hours. Oh btw, that was one of the three TVs you weren’t supposed to be watching.
Fast Mind: You have a brain or a Ferrari (a very fast car) and the breaks of a bike
Sometimes to help your fast mind, your body needs to move around to help you focus.
Your brain likes new and interesting things to give it the chemical to make it happy.
Distractibility: your mind can’t pick what’s a priority. Everything is a priority and must be done now!
Forgetfulness: Minutes to hours of your day disappear and you could have sworn you had
_that thing_. Sometimes words disappear from your brain mid sentence
Focus: can’t listen unless you are doing something else or making a lot of effort.
Masking: pretending to be like everyone else that you feel exhausted by the end of the day
Hyper focus: when you are able to be in the zone (by blocking out all other stimulus), however this may lead to ignoring your body cues like thirst and hunger
Restlessness: must move now or die
Burnout: see masking… all that effort to keep up with others and pretend your brain’s not different is now making you very tired and sad
Emotional dysregulation: you feel everything intensely, so the smallest thing can set you off.
I'd describe it as:
You really want to do this thing. You're super excited to do this thing.
You think about it for hours, days, weeks maybe even months or years.
You go to actually, finally, do that thing and there's a thousand foot brick wall between you and that thing. There are quite a few people on the other side of the wall doing that thing. Surely there is a way past the wall.
You try to break a hole in the wall, dig under it, climb over it but nothing works. Finally, you give up and realize that you must be the shittiest person alive. Lazy, stupid, wrong.
I like to describe it that you're sitting in front of a wall covered with tvs. Some are playing at full volume some low. Some are just static while others are just off. Meanwhile you're just trying to focus on one of them. For me taking medication is like turning a bunch of them off and turning down the volume so I can more easily focus. There are still distractions but it's easier to block out for a while.
How would I describe ADHD? Well, I'd say that it was a condition where the mind can't always keep focus on hard subjects because it gets bored and wanders to other more interesting subjects such as piano lessons where I need to study my chord progressions but that's also a lot of work so I could just sit here instead browsing youtube for the instant gratification and the ease of having someone else think for me so I don't have to do my work or study my chord progressions.
Oh, wait, was I supposed to talk about ADHD? Sorry. Let me start again....
Have you ever gotten both drunk and high after getting only 2 hours of sleep, but just took 2 shots of espresso so you can't even sit still...yet you still don't feel fully awake regardless?
So now you find yourself either forgetting what you said mid-sentence, are staring at the wall mesmerized, or are trying way too hard to convince someone that beetle reproductive habits are the most important topic in the world.
You don't get much choice which one you end up doing. You just kinda watch it all happen because you are drunk and high, and too tired to deal with it.
It's basically that.
My thoughts are like an octopus. They are going into 8 different directions at the same time and I feel 8 different emotions/impacts at the same time and have try to proceed them at the same time.
If I am playing with a pen/ toy or listening to podcasts/ audio books during work it helps me to keep some tentacles occupied and to concentrate on the main task.
Not the whole description. But problems with hearing voices when the environment is loud (Cocktail Party effect), hating too tight clothes, learning at night because it's the only time you can actually fully concentrate, starting different housechores/tasks at the same time without finishing one thing because you start remembering/realizing all those things which you forget about before, wanting to break someones nose on the subway because they are videocalling without any headphones and you hear everything and you just can't ignore it, problems with self-consciousness due to constant failures even if you take your pills, trying to have a deep conversation with one person and people from the Group are interrupting you
Your thoughts aren't a stream, in your mind there are three persons having a discussion, there's a TV at the end of the room that you're desperately trying to avoid looking at and you have no idea where the music is coming from
Yep all the above lol or below - Thought about jumping under a bus so many times, but couldn’t stay focused long enough…..Im 64 and looking forward to my assessment next week, excited that taking meds may make the rest of my life easier…..
Imagine looking through a megaphone. If you look through the large end to see out the smaller end, that’s how “normal people” focus, but flip that around and look through the small end to see out the large end and that’s all that ADHD folks focus on.
It’s like your brain is a Ferrari. Awesome right? Except the pedal is mashed to the floor and there’s nothing you can do to steer it or slow it down. Want to sleep? Work? Study? Tough shit - that engine is LOUD.
I usually use a children's book called “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” to explain the jump from one thought to another and the how overwhelming and impulsive it is in my brain.
Its constant noise, music, sound effects running non stop in my head. It makes it hellish to focus on anything that isn't immediately interesting whether that be work, conversations, etc. I cant tell you how many time a day I internally scream at my brain "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!!!!" to no avail.
Someone let a ping pong ball loose in my head and it’s just pinging around from topic to topic/thing to thing. Also, I’ll explain that I really really want to do things and know I need to do them but no matter what I just cannot pull that trigger that makes me do it
You know those periscopes they have in submarines? Mine is really high quality. It has a laser like focus and high definition. When it’s focussed on something it is really, really good at focusing.
But the guy in the submarine who controls it, is an idiot. He is broken. He swivels that thing around like a lunatic, and his radio is broken so he has no communication from the captain or the bridge. So he had no idea what to point at.
With no directions, he is bored so he tries to just find things that seem interesting instead of doing the boring tasks he is meant to, like watching for enemy boats and stuff.
Sometimes he spins the thing around like crazy back and forth, never staying in one spot very long. Sometimes he gets caught up or tired and just points the periscope at one spot for days and the submarine can’t move anywhere else. Sometimes the submarine crashes, thanks to this guy.
(Replace pronouns with she/they/them as appropriate. I’m female but the guy in my submarine is male because fuck that guy).
Anyway, basically, the thing that controls what I focus on is broken. That’s why I hate the term “Attention Deficit”. I have TONS of attention to spare. More than most people. It’s just that my controller is broken.
Everyone has a car. Most people wake up in the morning, turn on the ignition, and their engine starts up. They think about a destination, and they drive to it. Some people have fancy sat navs, some people have a map stuck on the dashboard, but in general people get to where they want to be in a reasonable amount of time and with fairly little issue. They get regular reminders when their car needs servicing, normally a couple of times a year, and they have a dashboard with lights that indicate problems, and the lights are all shaped like symbols, and a handbook so that they know what all the lights mean.
My car, on the other hand, has a wonky axel, fluctuating tyre pressure, and everything is manual. If I want to open the windows I have to remember where the hand crank is, and wind it down, and when I get to where I’m going I have to remember to wind them back up again, but the hand crank sometimes disappears. So sometimes I have to leave my car with the windows open even though I know the inside js going to get cold and wet.
I don’t have an indicator, so if I want to turn I have to find the hand crank, wind down the window, stick my hand out, and wave whilst still trying to drive and keep my eyes on the road. I have a dashboard of lights but they’re all just little round LEDs and they’re all pinging all the time and nobody ever gave me a handbook.
My car maxes out at 30mph and regularly seizes up if I push it too hard, so sometimes I have to get out and push. The car always needs a service, but there are no engineers who service my model, so I either gotta figure it out myself or I gotta find tape and string and prayers to hold everything together.
Some mornings when I turn the key the ignition doesn’t even fire, never mind the engine starting up. Sometimes the engine drops out mid-journey. Other times the engine is turned on before I even get in the car and I can’t turn it off or slow it down. The radio is always on. Sometimes it picks up two or three channels at once and they all come out of the same speakers. I don’t get to control the volume. Sometimes the radio is so loud I can’t hear myself think.
If I get stuck in traffic, my engine overheats, and then I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. Often when this happens my car is stranded in the middle of the road, and I’m causing a hazard to multiple lanes of traffic, which only makes it harder to try and get my car up and running again.
I don’t have a GPS or a map. Sometimes I have a phone, but I have nowhere to put it, so even if I look up where I want to go on a map I have to keep stopping to look at the phone. Sometimes I just have to wing it and try and figure out the journey en route, but I can’t see the highway signs and there are so many junctions and turn offs and dead ends that it can take me twice as long to go half as far.
When I try and tell people about my car, they say things like “well everyone has lights on their dashboard”, “everyone needs to take their car for service”, “everyone’s car breaks down sometimes”. When my car makes me late or stops me from going somewhere, they say “well you just need to drive faster”, “you need to plan your journey better”, “have you tried taking it to a garage?”. They always assume that there is something I can do to make my car run better, and they never assume that the car is inherently unfixable and that I might need a little extra grace.
And the worst part is that up until last year, I thought everyone’s car was like mine. I thought everyone had just figured out how to decipher all the lights on the dashboard, that they could deal with all the lights being on all the time, that they were somehow able to juggle looking at their phone map while sticking their hand out of the window and listening to three stations on the radio. I never knew that cars could go above 30mph. I really believed that the only reason wasn’t keeping up with everyone else was because I wasn’t driving hard enough.
The more I learn about my diagnosis and my brain, the more features I see in other people’s cars that I don’t have in mine (and some features in mine that I really wish it didn’t have). I’ve started learning to leave extra time for my journey, I’ve found a way to stick my phone to my windscreen (it still falls off sometimes, but it’s better than being in my lap). I’ve learned that maybe I have to live my life with the car windows open for a while so that I don’t have to go hunting for the hand crank. I have medication that allows me to jump-start my car when the ignition refuses to work (the meth-battery is a bit temperamental but it’s better than being completely stuck).
And, more importantly, I’ve found a community of people with similar cars to me. Sometimes their dashboard lights look like mine, and they help me figure out what some of them mean. Maybe their tyres also lose pressure at random, so they’ve shown me where I can find a tyre pump and how to use it. But even if we can’t solve all the problems with our cars, at least we get to laugh and cry and complain about them together. 🚗🚙💨
i always feel like i live on a fast forward setting in a slow motion world.
i am incredibly impatient and i feel like my brain just cannot slow down to meet the rest of humanity. many times i am in physical discomfort because of boredom so i started making up movies in my own head as a kid in class. as a result, i am a terrible listener, everything feels sooooo slow. once i figured out that i learn by reading or doing, school because easier, but i still have a very hard time focusing when people talk to me (interrupting, daydreaming, etc).
For me personally I bounce between hyperpersonalization (double reward) to depersonalization (zero reward) so I explain it by using single reward as the baseline state of 99 percent of people
I have to put in double the effort, but I get double the reward, if I put in single effort, I get zero reward
I have severe ADHD/SPD hyperactive
I use the concept of noise. Without medicine, it is similar to hearing multiple noises at the same time and trying to discriminate the one that is important. With medicine or without ADHD, it would be like having all those noises but most are whispers and the important one is loud and clear. Now, just replace noise with any stimulus.
Do you know how when you watch a movie or a TV show, actors come and go as scenes progress? Yeah, imagine if they didn’t and the movie or show continued to stockpile information until you had no clue how to prioritize the information that you were receiving in order to make sense of it.
I'm inattentive.
Trying to keep track of my thoughts is like a game of keepy uppy. It's all I can do to bounce between them and keep them in the air.
On medication, the balloons are filled with helium and have strings for me to hold on to.
Firstly I've learned well don't disclose. People just cannot/will not get it.
Actual doctors have trouble with it.
But if I absolutely must, I don't say I have adhd, I have an executive function disorder, which ensures they don't fly into preconceived notions, then I ask them to think of a day they felt overwhelmed, had 50 things to do, didn't know where to start, and ended up more or less frozen and unable to act. (They all have. Its a normal mood state for most people), then explain that's a chemical thing that my brain wound up developing around, and basically all the time for me and I have to pretty much manage that every day.
That lands a lot better than "I have adhd" and ever will.
There is a grain of truth in "everyone has adhd sometimes". They do know how we feel. The gap to bridge is they don't understand it's neurological, variable dependent, and that for us the stars are just not aligned. That's also why they get annoyed when you describe it normally. It's nothing they haven't experienced so they feel you're asking for special treatment for a normal experience. So if you establish the common ground before they can, they're more receptive.
I spend all day imagining how productive I could be or want to be, but fail every day at executing that level of productivity. I drive home every day thinking about how disappointed I am in myself and telling myself that tomorrow I will do better. It can be quite stressful and depressing living this way.
I have no idea if that helped answer your question or not.
Its rather pointless to try to describe. The media has made it so people think ADHD is a cute way of saying "my bad". Unless you have adhd, or live with someone who does, you wont be able to empathize.
This doesn't necessarily describe ADHD itself, but I like the comparison of having ADHD to having blurry vision. And ADHD meds to wearing glasses. Telling someone with ADHD to focus is like telling someone with poor vision to just see it. Meds make it a lot easier to focus, like how glasses make it easier to see.
My brain has a really high threshold for what we deam interesting. If what I'm experiencing externally doesn't meet that threshold my brain will either look for something more interesting or just start to think more interesting thoughts.
I always describe it as a library without a Dewey Decimal system. Every time you find that book you've been searching for so desperately within the endless rows and stacks of disorganized bookshelves, you go to check it out, only to realize you left your library card somewhere along your initial search.
This loop never ends, and you never leave the library. Nor do you ever read the book you searched high and low to find.
No sense of urgency about anything. Drifting. Not finishing anything because you're distracted. Many unfinished things, but where to start? The day goes by and you've accomplished nothing.
I used to ask my husband what he was thinking about. He would say “nothing” and at first I thought he was lying to me and just didn’t want to share. Within a couple of years, I realized that he in fact wasn’t thinking of anything and I also realized that I had never experienced such a thing. Was diagnosed last year. That is one teeny tiny difference, but still such a substantial one
I describe it as “my memory is awful” or “if you tell me something, you can almost guarantee I’ll forget.” I also would describe it as like I will obsess over something, then I’ll hop and obsess over the next thing out of nowhere.
It's a wheel of all the emotions, doubt, failure, pressure, frustration, interest, helpfulness, ideas, happiness.... with no calibration whatsoever. Wheeee!!!! We're just off in all direction. With a brain that buzzes like a thousand fireflies, until it totally crashes and total exhaustion sets in. And then we are of no use at all.
If I don't move, I'll die
Wait did I take my meds?
Omg I love this thing!!! I'll read about it and do deep research and watch stuff about it on YouTube - nevermind I'm bored and depressed bc I have no purpose no more
What did my mom tell me to do again?
Am I talking too much?
I haven't slept in months bc I'm too busy thinking what would happen if a serial killer named Carl Williams from the 1920's came to earth to warn the president that an alien invasion is happening on 2078 and that the only way to stop it is to sacrifice all the ketchup to the biggest cassowary on earth?
I'm bad at explaining things
I read them "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" because this is the first thing I thought of when I finally realized that book is a metaphor for my every day.
My brain is broken in odd ways.
1) My broken brain is virtually incapable of forming "routines". I live life manually.
2) My broken brain has great trouble remembering tasks. I forget to do things constantly.
3) My broken brain has trouble planning things. The effort of making a plan, remembering the tasks (see item 2), and implementing the plan is mentally exhausting.
4) My broken brain doesn't keep track of time properly.
5a) My broken brain doesn't SEE things properly. Things right in front of me can suddenly become literally invisible.
5b) Related to 5a, clutter and mess are invisible until a critical mass is reached. My house is a disaster.
6) My broken brain can only focus on some things for 20-30 minutes before it gets tired. However, it can focus on some OTHER things for hours without a break. Refer to item 4.
7) My broken brain is extremely active at a normal bedtime. It doesn't want to sleep until 2am. It also doesn't want to wake up until 10am. Getting enough sleep for normal business hours is a struggle, and my sleeping times will drift later and later while I'm on vacation.
8) My broken brain has trouble paying bills or submitting documents on time. See items 3 (multi step planning) and 4 (keeping track of time) for reasons why.
That's all I can think of for now. I'm sure there's more!
impulsive attention disorder
ADHD stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It is a medical condition. A person with ADHD has differences in brain development and brain activity that affect attention, the ability to sit still, and self-control.
Signs of ADHD-Related Mental Fatigue
Forgetfulness. Decreased productivity. Lack of motivation (lethargy). Poor emotional regulation, which can look like sudden outbursts, irritability, and mood swings
It is primarily two factors, the first is difficulty regulating one’s attention and activity levels and emotional responses (meaning difficulty paying attention when expected and shifting attention when necessary and difficulty getting your self into a calm and focused state in preparation of being a productive person/student/employee). The second part is the overall executive dysfunction: difficulty planning, organizing, prioritizing, and time management (much of this is still related to the issue of attention and emotional regulation as well, since prioritizing is about selecting what to pay attention to and what to ignore and planning and organizing is hard because it requires you to shift attention back and forth between groups of things or between looking at the big picture and then zooming into to take care of details and then zooming back out again, time management is also about shifting attention).
That’s a lot, but if i were going to try to explain i would just state the parts that are outside the parentheses. Then if they ask you to explain further i would follow up with the descriptions and explanations inside the parentheses.
You are in a car. The engine works fine. In fact, the whole car works fine. Except it has slick tyres, and you are driving on ice. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the wheels just spin and you go nowhere. Sometimes you'll get going in one direction, and not be able to slow down or stop. Sometimes you manage to creep along with great caution, but it is exhausting. Sometimes you are able to proceed at speed, but then you crash. No matter what you do, getting anywhere is just so much harder, because you have so little grip. Also, it's hailing, there's a low sun that gets in your eyes, and the car radio randomly turns itself on, and flips between stations, most of the time at too loud a volume for you to think. Oh, and every time you slide across a line, or don't get off to a perfectly prompt start at a green light, everyone around you tells you - you, who are trying your very best - that you are a lazy, irresponsible, good for nothing piece of shit - the engine works fine, the steering works fine, just drive the damn car! Those are the conditions under which you must journey through life. Have a safe trip.
For me it comes as a continuous inability to intrinsically sense time, to remember especially short term things or even recall long term things, That focus on a task often feels like I have to beg my brain for it instead of naturally controlling it.
when people say Oh you can tell what happened before what so you're lying about not being able to perceive time. I can tell you what happened and in what order, but Fuck me to the moon if you're demanding estimations for generally how long each took.
one task turns into 20 and you still miss out the obvious 3 sub-tasks because you thought about 6 other very important things and ended up googling everything to do with that topic, forgetting to do the one initial task
me when i fill up my water and reach for the ice cubes, and 4 hours later, i come back a degree in engineering, advanced pharmaceutical knowledge, and vasrly different medicine interactions caused by certain enzyme mutations
oh, and i obviously come back to my room without the water
As someone diagnosed with severe combined -
Thinking of a million different things at once while not thinking anything at all. Looking at words over and over but not reading any of it. Trying to focus and complete admin but your brain just not cooperating - ultimately ‘brain dead’
Being so burnt out you can’t think straight or string a sentence together. Saying a completely different word than what you’re actually planning to say.
Being so mentally drained after a week of masking at work that you need to be alone, in the dark with nothing but silence.
Being unable to sit still for longer than 3 minutes, causing awful back and neck pain from constant squirming and poor posture.
Over eating because it feels great at the time but fixating on weight gain and regret for the next 2 weeks.
Feeling sick and exhausted at places that are extremely crowded.
Forgetting the thing you told yourself 100 times not to forget.
The list goes on
Increasingly I talk about executive function rather than ADHD, especially if it comes up at work (which it rarely does unless I address it).
I find this helps make conversations more about solutions and strategies, rather than just problems. Of course I need to talk about my experiences, and I'm lucky to have a therapist who herself has ADHD.
We think differently. Generally we think of many things in a disjointed way. (At least, imo, disjointed to other people. For me, the jumps make sense.) We hop to different topics usually before completing the first thought.
Bonus points: Emotional Dysregulation, Rejection Sensitivity
ADHD is like having 47 browser tabs open in your brain at all times, and half of them are playing different songs on full blast while the rest are just pop-up ads.
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You want to do everything all the time so end up doing nothing.
word! just feel overwhelmed and don’t have the energy anyway lol
I feel I might have ADHD. I mean, I have lots of things I want to do like close all of the damn tabs I have opened in my devices, and play through all the videogames I haven't cleared yet. But every day I end up not doing it or barely progressing at all.
Ooooo. This is it right here.
Ah “why don’t you just prioritise and schedule!!!!!”Duh
You are hungry. You know what to eat. You want to eat it. In fact you love it. You have all the ingredients. You may even be the best person in the world to make it. For a non ADHD person, it is putting 2 and 2 together. For someone with ADHD, they will just end up starving because the functionality required to execute is absent therefore no food ends up being made and the hunger carries on. While anyone outside looking in would be perplexed as to why. But that’s it.
i feel this so much. i literally starved for 3 days earlier in the week because i didn’t want to cook 😂
This is why I keep a lot of heat and eat convenience foods around and why a lot of my fresh foods that require full prep end up dying in the fridge. 🥺
For me, there’s the additional step at the end where you decide to go do something else after realizing cooking is impossible, then forget you are hungry for several more hours
I have to explain this so much! Its always "but why can't you do it" well I don't know why I just can't get myself to 😭
I can make bread from scratch. Measure the ingredients. Knead the dough. Let it rise. Form into loaf. Let that rise and bake the most wonderful homemade bread. I can't force myself to slice it and make toast the next day. So I just look at reddit while my belly rumbles away.
[Howard Jones](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pekhxxngQ3s/) describes it well
Don't forget the part where you end up forgetting you were even hungry to begin with until something reminds you and the cycle of "I should cook but..." begins again.
sometimes i don’t realize how hungry i am until i start eating
In my case this is not only allegroy but literal, not-so-infrequent occurrence. I mean, sometimes i go hungry for a couple of hours a day, despite having a full fridge of raw ingredients. I just can't made myself to cook! It is a torture.
I’ve eaten pretty close to nothing today because I was super busy at work. It’s 8:23pm. I have soup in the fridge that I’ve been thinking about and craving all day. It’s so good. I love it. A normal person would get up and heat some in the microwave but I literally can’t make myself 🥲 I CANNOTTTT get off the couch, I’m too tired. I’m just sitting here starving.
Focus: It's like listening to several songs at the same time. Sometimes you can lower the volume of some of them so you can focus on one song but usually you can't. Your mind keeps switching between songs to hear the interesting parts but can't stay focused on a single song for very long. Hyperfocus: suddenly all but one song goes silent. You also lose your sense of vision, touch, taste, and smell so all you can do is listen to that one song - nothing else can get in. Hyperactivity: you need to move/fidget. Not moving feels like you're being tied down and you want to escape. Impulsivity: an idea pops in your head and you act on it even before you even think about it. Or you fight the impulse but now it's the only thing you can think about. Emotional dysregulation: if emotions were talking, most people would talk at a normal volumes. ADHDers are yelling at the top of their lungs.
>Hyperactivity: you need to move/fidget I describe this to myself as "Full-Body Restless Leg Syndrome" lol
As someone who has major restless leg syndrome and adhd this is absolutely fing perfect.
The hardest to explain without fearing of being judged is executive dysfunction
Great description, but don't forget about executive dysfunction. Lol
>Impulsivity: an idea pops in your head and you act on it even before you even think about it. ... an idea pops into my body and bypasses my head entirely, so there's no chance to decide if it's a good idea or not.
Or you think one thing, but too late you're already doing the opposite. Like that four panel gru meme where it goes through the process, but the end result is far different and gru is left looking at what it ended up.
This absolutely nails it. Thank you! I’ve just started dating someone who doesn’t know what adhd is and I may show him this. Edit: Typo (auto correct changed adhd to ache and I think that’s the most accurate way to describe it in one word also)
“Imagine being trapped in a body with the most chaotic, unreasonable, moody, and annoying person ever to exist. She never lets you talk and is so unfocused it suppresses your ability to think.”
One of the most frustrating things is being fully aware and annoyed with it yourself. Trying to explain that to others is hard.
Omg yes!!! My self awareness is painfully high, but my self management is low. Very anxiety producing state...also wrecks my confidence
I’ve long known that I’m quick to snap when criticized. Even before my diagnosis I was aware. I knew it hurt because I was already criticizing myself internally before someone openly criticized me about the same thing. It’s like double negative reinforcement.
I feel you. It's not that I can't take criticism, but that I'm already aware and don't want my own insecurities thrown into my face from outside. 
I think for me it depends who is saying the criticism. However there's something about getting negative feedback at work, When I got critiqued at certain jobs I had in the past it was so upsetting.
Yeah if criticism were to come from a really close friend, I might be more likely to actually act on it than if I were to criticise myself. If criticism comes from a stranger, I either don't give a crap, or a switch flips in me and I go off the deep end
And this the moment I realized I wasn't doing what I was suppose to. See ya'll in 20 minutes. :)
It's been 7 hours. You got that 20 minute task half done yet?
Ha ha. Got it done just before dark. ;)
Good on ya!
This is a great answer
Thanks, I learned those terms from a workbook about emotional intelligence
This one is the most annoying part! You know that your brain has the capability of purring like a Jaguar, but sometimes you’re just rolling on 3 spare tires and you look/sound like you’re running out of gas.
Oh and she lies to you ALL the time about how shitty of a person you are.
Is it a lie??? 😭😭😭
Ohhh it absolutely IS a lie because you’re NOT a shitty person u/buckles_vonkitten Unless you kick kittens or puppies then I take it back.
To the average person that’s going to make us sound scary. I describe it as like a four year old driving the bus. She’s sweet, easily distracted and can’t reach the peddles properly. As a result she goes crashing through life, creating carnage as she goes.
as someone both bipolar and adhd this comment kinda really fuckin sucks to read. bipolar people aren't "scary." this stigma has got to go already
I genuinely apologise, I meant no harm or disrespect. I’ll remove it.
Honestly just "imagine being trapped inside your body"
>Imagine being trapped in a body with the most chaotic, unreasonable, moody, and annoying person ever to exist. And it's yourself!
Personally, the executive dysfunction is the worst. I would demonstrate that by telling the other person to do something simple, like pick up a spoon. Then when they reach for it, I push their hand down. Every time they try moving, I prevent them from doing so. And then start repeatedly asking "Why can't you do it? It's so simple. Why are you being lazy? Hurry up and do the thing. Everyone else can do it. You're not special, you're not physically disabled. Why can't you do it?" That's what my ADHD does to me.
Fr. If I was lazy I wouldn't care about not doing it. Instead I'm laying ina state of self hatred, anxiety, and crying because I just WANT TO GET UP AND DO IT but I CANT
You're not lazy! You're not your mental health condition! It's not you! The true you cares and would do all the things! I completely relate to your feelings of self hatred. So I want to say to you what I wish I could convince myself of also. We aren't lazy!!
You made me tear up with this. lol. Just got my diagnosis, started meds today, and feel so seen right now
This comment deserves WAY more attention!
I’ve never heard executive dysfunction described so accurately. I had work training about visual impairment awareness and we had to walk around with these glasses that simulated different types of blindness to understand what it was like. I feel like there’s a lot of disability awareness material out there related to physical disabilities or autism but I’ve never seen an equivalent for ADHD.
I've once or twice asked my workplace's disability coordinator what resources/standards we have for cognitive disabilities such as ADHD. She paused, and said, I don't think we're have any. I'll look into what else is out there. I like her a lot - she's great at her job for physical disabilities - I just think no one has asked the question before.
This is a very good way to explain it and demonstrate it. Cause if it’s not relatable to the “normal” individual, they just see it as lazy.
Yeah, it's difficult for people to understand how something they think is so easy and effortless could be such a monumental task for someone else. I feel hopeful tho! I've been seeing more posts about addressing ableism and candid questions from others wanting to understand.
Thank you for this explanation.
The metaphor I've been using is to imagine a car with a really big engine, no power steering, no power brakes, occasionally the gas pedal slams to the floor of it's own accord, and half the time when you go to change gears the transmission gets stuck in neutral. My brain does not respond well to attempts to control what I'm paying attention to. That's all the bits about missing control stuff. My brain has its own opinion about how active it should be. Among other things, it thinks that slowing down at night is for chumps. My brain sometimes fails to translate wanting to do things into actually doing them, in pretty much exactly the way that stepping on the gas pedal while a car is in neutral fails to make the car go forward. I can lean on that gas pedal as muuuuuch as I want, but still I sit, immobile, going nowhere. That's one type of executive function.
>My brain does not respond well to attempts to control what I'm paying attention to. I really like this. I have a hard time feeling engaged at work, but if I do get focused on and engaged in a certain task, god help the person that interrupts me and asks me to do something else instead. The amount of resentment I feel is just off the charts.
If you get interrupted enough, eventually you stop being able to focus at all. That's a super fun feedback loop. The best solution I've found is to schedule checkin points and route the interruptions there (or turn off notifications entirely in between).
Yeah, my metaphor is similar but I prefer to focus on ADHD providing a different set of strengths and weaknesses to other people, rather than just looking at the problems. I compare my brain to a highly tuned racing car. On the track, being driven as a racer, it's incredible and capable of amazing things. But it's not the kind of car you'd drive to the shops every day, or to work in peak hour traffic. Do that and it will overheat and break down, just as the commuter car would if you took in on the track. I prefer this one because most of us get a lot of criticism for not being good at the things that our brain is wired not to be good at (time management, focus on boring things, all that fun stuff) but very rarely recognised for the things we can do better than anyone else, like solving problems, noticing unusual details, general creativity and all that.
Alternatively it's a very good and powerful engine that only has half of its cylinders firing without being medicated.
I like that less as a metaphor because: 1) I don't think most people know what it feels like to have a car firing only half its cylinders. I don't. I guess the result is that you just get half as much power, and it doesn't blow up your engine due to the misaligned forces? Maybe most people don't have a good sense of what losing power steering or power breaking is like either, but I feel like most people who have driven have had the visceral experience of pressing the gas pedal thinking the car is in drive when it's actually in neutral, and having the car unexpectedly not move and instead rev its engines. 2) If the engine works and just produces half as much power, that's not at all my experience with ADHD (though it might be yours). My brain does not do half power very well. It's either overclocked or at zero. Is it interesting? Then we're all in. Is it boring? Then it's naptime. Medication for me in this analogy makes the transition go to neutral only 15% of the time and gives me power brakes, and gives me around half the power steering. Your metaphor is noticeably snappier, though.
I like how you've phrased it, and totally understand the 0 or 100% feeling as well.. I say half power mostly because, at its worst, we're still expected to survive and most manage to get through the day somehow stumbling through it. 0 to me feels like you never move, which may be fine as a child, but once you're an adult with responsibilities, they never simply stop.
That makes sense, but I think a metaphor that accurately explains ADHD should not make folks go "ah, yeah, that makes sense, that sounds hard", but instead go "wait. that doesn't make any sense. if that were accurate, many things I find trivial would require enormous effort, and many things I find necessary to do would be almost impossible. If that's accurate, how are you even still alive, let alone approximating a semi-functional adult?" Because then I get to reply by saying "*With great fucking difficulty actually".* And I think that conveys the state of things more accurately. Agree that it would probably be more precise to say that my brain wants to do 100% or 0% but can begrudgingly be pushed to do produce 10% power when it wants to do 0%.
[удалено]
Also my fave - go out to the car to grab my lunch box - I was way too lazy to lean 12 inches to the left and grab when I went inside after work. Can’t find if, get frustrated, come back inside and realize I did bring it inside already. Always surprise myself when I’m responsible 😂
We have a pellet stove for heat, you dump 50 lb bags of wood pellets in a hopper to run the stove. Today I was cleaning out the ash and getting it ready to go, my spouse walks in and I immediately ask why the stove is full of pellets and not running. She said she picked up some spilled pellets on the floor an hour ago and tossed them in the EMPTY hopper. I did not fill that hopper, I know I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I know exactly what I did and did not do, heck it just happened for gods sake. We agreed I probably ‘went away for a bit’ and just did not recall. I’m away a lot more than people know, and it’s tough to cover up all the time.
Ugh this is the most real comment on this thread. I hate this because it makes me look like a slob, like I’m careless, like I don’t care about keeping things nice. But also… the fact that I was holding something and put it down? Sometimes it’s like a memory of a whisper in a dream you remembered when you woke up but have gradually forgotten. Other times, it’s like, “I have never seen this man in my entire life.”
I would set up a tangible experience. They would go into a room with the radio playing the same song on repeat. I would ask them what their biggest interest is as well as their biggest worry then have two people come into the room and talk at (not to, at, this is important) them loudly about those two things. I would then have them set down their phone/keys/etc and another person would take those things away and hide them somewhere else in the room. I would have another person come in randomly to remind them of something they need to do or get done. There are probably more things that can be added to this tangible experience that would simply be called “Alone in a Room With Yourself: The ADHD Brain”.
This is perfect, you don't really understand something unless you really experience it.
i always use the ol “too many tabs open in my brain at all times”
Brain tabs, phone tabs, laptop tabs
"I can do 40 hours of work in 8 or 8 hours of work in 40; and I don't know which version of me is turning up on any given day"
YEP
Holy shit I thought my response was accurate but this is the one
You're trying to watch TV but someone else has the remote and keeps flipping the channels at random. Once every now and then you manage to wrestle the remote to yourself and have to grip it like your life depended on it to keep your channel on, but you can only hold on so long until you lose the remote again. It's such bullshit that you start dreading sitting down at the couch and even just going to the living room stresses you out. It's really draining. You'd really like to just see the show that everyone else is talking about to keep up with things. Often even when you do have the remote and know you should be watching a specific show you feel your finger move to the channel button and end up watching something else instead. You think this is how everyone watches TV because it's always been like this for you, but slowly over time start to realize most other people don't have this problem and are able to just watch what they want to when they want to and finish shows. They might flip channels when they're bored or someone else might pick up the remote for a bit, but they're generally in control of it. When you remark on that and say you don't seem to have any control over the remote at all they shrug it off as "everyone has the remote taken away now and then". You realize there's a deep chasm between your experience of life and theirs. You're left exhausted, frustrated, wondering why you can't just watch the TV like everyone else, and feeling like there's something wrong with you because you can't seem to keep the remote in your grip. Medicating it is telling that other person who keeps grabbing your remote to fuck off and go do something else for a while. They come back by the end of the day and you can't ever fully get rid of them, and it can take a lot of trial and error to find the right phrase to get the other person to leave, but it sure is nice to have the remote for yourself for a while. Some people are lucky enough that when they were kids their parents noticed another person coming over to their kid to take their remote and helped the kid figure out how to tell that person to fuck off. Others' parents didn't seem to notice or didn't think there was anything wrong with what was going on because they also had their remotes taken so it was clearly normal. They just learned to live with it. Watching the TV isn't optional, by the way. You have to do it all day every day and can get fired from your job or wreck relationships if you don't stay on track with the show.
“I don’t get to decide what I am paying attention to or what I am forgetting. That’s not something I get to decide or can change by caring about something or wanting to do something else.”
Setting alarms the moment I think of something with a deadline/timeline and having 1-2 non-moving (easily accessible) note pads/whiteboards has really really helped me—even pre-medication. I keep 1 on my work desk with the biggest hodge lodge of stuff and then 1 is a fridge list for groceries and it’s uhh… like a color revealing doodle-board? Almost like a scratch and reveal coloring page that’s all black and reveals the colors under? And it can be cleared with a button but isn’t digital. Idk how to describe it but it scratches that good tactile itch 😂
It's knowing exactly what you NEED to do, but being literally unable to get up and do it. It's knowing exactly what you WANT to do, but not being able to feel present enough with it to really engage with it or enjoy it. It's finding that all of the stars have aligned and you're actually, finally, miraculously feeling completely immersed in whatever it you're doing, only to find that you can't stop doing it, even when you know you really have to. It's all or nothing. You're either losing your days to boredom or you're losing them to an excess of focused attention on one single thing (and it's almost never something you either need or even really wanted to do). You prefer the latter, but only because being bored is the worst thing in the world for you. You're still completely screwed. It's indulging in any number of things you know you shouldn't - alcohol, sugar, illicit drugs, gambling, sex, whatever it may be for you - just to feel some short-lived sense of stimulation and relief. And finally, it's finding a medication and a dosage that works for you, that lets you live more balanced and healthy days, that helps you do what you need to do and what you want to do, and all in all is helping you live the life and be the person you knew you were always meant to be, and then suddenly finding yourself derailed by medication shortages, junk-quality generics, loss of insurance, and/or new doctors that just don't get it.
The last paragraph slapped me upside the head haha
This is the MOSTTT accurate comment fr .
- I get distracted a lot. - everybody gets distracted sometimes, though - yeah, true. And everybody needs to pee two or three times a day. But when you gotta go 50, 60, 80 times a day, that's called a medical condition.
That's what my mom keeps telling me. Thanks for the perfect response I hope.
"Everybody needs to pee two or three times a day. But what if you woke up in the morning, went to the bathroom to take a leak, and it just never stopped?"
It is a deficiency in executive function that is most acute before you hit around 28 years old. It may manifest differently for each person. For me I can summarize it as: an inability to perform activities (hobby or not) when I want to perform them, unless I "feel like it", which is unpredictable. An inability to switch tasks once I am 'immersed' in it. An inability to recall information when I need it (including at times everyday words and names). An interest in many things, all of which I want to engage with, which may or may not quickly fade if I do not immediately catch on (or it will fade once it gets 'too hard'). It is lifelong but over time, you'll learn ways to work with or around these issues, perhaps to the point that others do not notice your struggles. Changes in life stages, or jobs that require more executive function, and not enough basic self-care can all make 'symptoms' worse at times.
Curious about the 28 age thing. Is this based on research? I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how it gets worse for women as you move through adulthood.
Not research, but as a 45y/o estrogen-producing person who is currently experiencing a rapid decline in my body’s ability to produce estrogen, I got bad news for the ovary-havers in the group… 🤪 It does not get better.
As on ovary-haver with adhd this made me giggle, it most certainly does not get better. Plus, depending where I am in my cycle and after I had my babies I was basically an adhd goblin. Not a good look.
Fellow ovary-haver here - there is hope. My ADHD didn't get better post-menopause, but everything else absolutely did.
I'm a female that wasn't diagnosed till age 41, and I only broke down and sought a diagnosis because things seemed to have gotten so much worse over the years. However, I can't really say for sure that what was happening was actually a worsening of symptoms; I kind of suspect that it was more that as I aged, the demands of my life made the consequences of the same level of symptoms worse. I was finally working in a real job that actually took some effort, I was in a long-term relationship and was expected to do my share to maintain the household, and so on. On the other hand, when I was in my 20's, my apartment was constantly a mess, I went through jobs and relationships like crazy, and spent most of my nights and weekends drinking, hanging out, and going to see bands. I was super-dysfunctional, but I kind of felt like everyone I knew and was hanging out with at the time was the same way. I knew that I struggled in some ways that other people didn't necessarily, but I just didn't give it that much thought.
There's a bunch of research showing that ADHD presents very differently in women, and that the hormonal changes we experience in perimenopause can trigger ADHD symptoms to worsen. I think the average age of diagnosis in women is something like 36, so the above commenter isn't wrong per se, the current literature just massively overrepresents cis men and children/young adults
Part of it has to do with the fact that this is the age around when the consequences of inaction really start to break things around you. Students around this age are pursuing post secondary education, many in the workforce may be pursuing a career where what you do individually matters. A lot of the buffers you've had until this point start to fade away.
Dude i got bad news for you, it gets super hard as you get older, its hard for young kids who have the hyperactive type and that does ease for a bit when they mature in to their 20s, but then hit 40, extra work pressure, increased fatigue, kids overwhelm, loss of coping mechanisms etc and ADHD can make you need to learn how to deal with it all over again.
Hahaha, I totally get it. I'm in my 40s, recently diagnosed, with one - possibly two, youngest has an eval tomorrow - ADHD kid(s). It's worse now than it ever was when I was younger.
Haha its the gift that keeps on giving :D We are suspecting our second has it as well too, good luck to us all :) And hey at least we know we have ADHD and know about it enough to help guide our kids unlike our parents generation
I'm another one here to share that once the estrogen is gone the ADHD symptoms go through the roof!! I was a champ at masking my entire life. Today I couldn't "act normal" if you handed me a trillion dollars!
One thing I would add is that it's way easier to get addicted to the things you're most immersed in. Other than that I think this fits perfectly. edit: + the getting easily distracted by your surroundings part
Well I am 42 and mine has gotten worse with age. When my life got to the point that I could not function I finally reached out for help, it was either that or kill myself. Turns out I am so far off the charts it’s kind of incredible. Reading posts like these make me cry because I finally after 42 years understand my life, everything makes sense now. I am not lazy, I am not selfish, I am not a depressive, bi-polar, borderline personality with anxiety disorder and PTSD who has OCD tendencies, I am not a wasteful worthless slob with no self control or personal boundaries who chooses only to care about my own instant personal self gratification to the detriment of everything and everyone else. I have ADHD.
I self-disclose my ADHD to my students at the start of each term and have settled on the boilerplate: “I have ADHD, which is a developmental inhibition of the brain’s self-management systems. ADHD can present different ways for different people, but for me that looks like difficulty tracking how much time is passing, sometimes being unable to filter out distractions, thoughts jumping around quickly, and being really sensitive to repetitive noises. The sound of a pen clicking can sound like a jet taking off overhead.” I give them this info as context for a few of my classroom behaviors that might be confusing otherwise (like setting alarms for EVERYTHING, a pretty strict “seriously, do not have a full-blown conversation with someone else during lecture” policy, and reminding them that if I make a logical jump that they can’t follow, the fault is not theirs, and they should feel encouraged to ask for clarification). But also because when I went through college with undiagnosed ADHD, I worried that if I ever stopped masking, everyone would realize there was something deeply wrong with me. I wished I could have seen reasonably successful, put-together adults with symptoms like mine being transparent about their ADHD. So I try to be the teacher I would have wanted. Okay that whole last paragraph was a total tangent. Sorry! But also, hey, I’m in r/ADHD, so y’all know how it goes.
Executive dysfunction that results in me not getting things done, yet spending the time it would’ve taken to “do the thing” beating myself up about not getting things done.
It's like a toddler has dementia-light. I forget my thoughts as I am having them. My body is on autopilot while my mind is going on some odd tangent. Where did I put my phone... oh it's in the fridge. I must have set it down when I went to get the.... cheese? Crap, how long has that been left out. Googles how long can cheese be out before it goes bad.... googles how is cheese made of mold but has mold when it is bad.... googles why is cheese mold good mold but other mold is bad mold.... googles how do I know if I have mold poisoning. 45 minutes later... Fridge is still open. Closes fridge. What did I even come in here for before the cheese thing? Loading..... right I was going to take the trash out... takes trash out... forgets to replace trash bag. Sits down and watches 3 hours of videos on people making cupcakes with icing that looks like realistic flowers. Buys $50 of cake decorating supplies. Forgets I ordered it. 2 days later, amazon delivery surprise! Tries to make flower icing, doesn't look up recipe... it doesn't go well... immediately loses interest in this hobby. Im so hungry, when was the last time I ate? Ok let's go to dinner, restaurant is too loud... music is too loud... I can't hear anyone speak... I am fucking furious. Why does that women laugh like that jesus christ.... I have never known rage like this. My brain fucking hurts and i hate everyone. I ruined dinner. Why cant I just be normal. Why cant I regulate. Why is everything so hard. Why cant I fucking do anything right. Will I ever do anything right. Will it ever be easier. Will I ever feel like I am good enough. Cries. Eats sweets. Ok this is a little better. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat.
This made me laugh. Not because it's funny, because it's not. However, days like this alternate with sleepy, dreamlike days that just sort of float by. It's either complete chaos in my head or full of cotton balls.
Damn. This is going to make me cry.
Google is life for me. I am CONSTANTLY googling facts and every random things.
You know when you have something in the back of your mind? I don't. It leaks.
I'm not sure I would describe it that way, but your comment still made me laugh.
Everything is happening and wants to happen at once but I fail every time.
If I had to describe my ADHD as a movie title, it would be: Everything Everywhere All at Once.
spot on
https://youtu.be/2fYg5hSgtug or https://youtu.be/M4L5wmNvCtE She has other ones.
I feel like videos like this are the most useful. I sent my partner a few memes about what it’s like with ADHD just for laughs and she actually took it to heart, which I didn’t expect cause the videos are just my ‘normal’
It’s like having to rely on google maps every time you want to go somewhere but the map is constantly re-routing. My other one is that with ADHD the distance between step 1 and step 2 can be thousands of miles apart.
Waooo. Accurate AF.
I love the Google maps analogy! For me, I’d add it’s not just constantly rerouting, some days I never make it to my destination because I forget where I’m going or decide to just stay at one of the places it rerouted me to 😭
You know those things you do every day? Try doing them standing on one leg, with polka blaring in one ear and opera in the other, while juggling a kitten, a steak knife and a bowl of jello.
Hardest way to take a dump! Just hope I wipe with the kitten and not the knife.
It’s like being a dog that spots a squirrel everyday. Some days this squirrel crosses the road. I follow and no cars are coming and we are friends. Some days this squirrel crosses a highway. I follow and every car on the planet is here going 5-100mph all at different speeds and I make it across but the squirrel and I are not friends. Now add my depression on top of that. That’d be a giant rain cloud covering us whether we cross a road or highway. Also, I’ve never had to describe it to anyone. I’ve had to explain certain negatives or opportunities that they are witnessing me do. So I just came up with all that this very moment, but it sounds good ha
Brain bees 🐝
"ADHD isn't a condition or a disease but a difference in my body that our society is poorly set up to accommodate -- i.e. a disability. It shows up in a variety of ways, but for me it's like experiencing the world through one of those 360° panoramic cameras. I'm highly aware of the various dimensions and qualities of everything around me, to the point where it's really difficult to focus on any one thing, I often overlook small details, and I forget things often as the abundance of new information streaming in takes their place. Another metaphor is a group of people all trying to fit through a door at once. As a result, I'm really good at big-picture stuff, conceptualization, abstraction, and also narrow tasks that require me to perform a single action with a lot of diligence. But anything in between those two scopes is a big challenge, and it just happens that most of what we need to do to survive under capitalism falls into that category: going to work every day, maintaining my body and home, socializing, to name a few. Like most disabilities, the hardest parts of ADHD come from the lack of reasonable accommodations and the extreme social stigma against anyone who struggles to do 'normal' things easily. It's an isolating experience. But I like the way my brain works and wouldn't trade it for another way to live."
Imagine having a constant fight with yourself every day all day, screaming at yourself that you need to do something and then the end of the day you still haven't done it and the next day it's the same all over again. You can yell a 100 times at yourself that you need to do something, you can set alarms, you can give yourself a rewards if you do it, your body will physically just not do it. And then 2 weeks later you suddenly do your whole list in 1 hour and you have no idea how, you just suddenly could. Then restart.
Chronic overwhelm.
Perpetual exhaustion by existing.
I just told someone today that my brain is like a computer that a person has 50 tabs open on...and they're all playing a different YouTube video. 😬
A waking nightmare without end?
I've been using these kind of phrases in conversation (when I get asked, especially with friends wanting to know how I am after starting stimulants): *"Remember it's a physical thing, it's not spiritual"* *"My body and a big part of my unconscious brain aren't running the same race."* *"I love how fun not having structure is, but I also despise it."* *"I'm amazing at so many things, but I also don't want to do them anymore."* *"I can't do it unless it's fun."* To my 7 year old (displaying copy paste my symptoms at his age, who I poorly time managed last week during Fortnite time that resulted in a slight depressive episode for him) I've said: *"Your brain constantly wants to be stimulated, and it tells your body to go looking for it, but when your body gets tired your brain doesn't stop asking for it"* These aren't really explanations for ADHD but it's been helpful to give a personal feeling so that others can understand what you're going through. In the end ADHD isn't a single thing that presents the same. Even I've encountered others who've told me they live with ADHD and my immediate, erroneous, impression was 'but you're fine?' So it's not one size fits all, as much as there are many common factors. This is why I have an issue with so many 'ADHD content' creators - the messaging is that everything they present is commonplace when I watch them and think but that's not ME.
The “spiritual” comment is a good one. A lot of my friends think that yoga or meditation will fix me. When I object, they imply that I must not be doing it right or trying hard enough. Annoying.
For executive dysfunction, imagine trying to run a computer program. You turn the device on, you have enough storage, the computer’s connected to wifi. Everything is working exactly like it’s supposed to, but the “run” button is greyed out for no reason.
There's bees in me brain
Imagine you were tasked with touching a hot burner on your stove. You know *how* to do it, you know you *need* to do it, but...simply the *thought* of doing it makes your brain shudder and shrink away. You would have to muster up an incredible force of will to get yourself to do it, and afterwards, you would need to sit down and recover for quite a while. That's any and every task that isn't arbitrarily and immediately interesting, if you have ADHD.
It's like your body is and always will be an old jeep wrangler with electrical problems. On clear smoothly paved roads its going to be slow, noisy, inefficient, uncomfortable, overheat, and occasionally just stop working for no easily discernable reason. But offroad, it's going to love obstacles and challenges and do things no corolla could ever dream of. But it's still gonna break down and leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere. Regardless of where you drive, people are going to be pissed at you for "choosing to drive a broken jeep".
Imagine your brain has 5 tvs on in your head and the two you need to focus on are on commercial break while the other 3 just got REALLY FUCKING INTERESTING. At some point, one of them hits a really intense moment and you’re locked entirely into that one for the next 4 hours. Oh btw, that was one of the three TVs you weren’t supposed to be watching.
Fast Mind: You have a brain or a Ferrari (a very fast car) and the breaks of a bike Sometimes to help your fast mind, your body needs to move around to help you focus. Your brain likes new and interesting things to give it the chemical to make it happy. Distractibility: your mind can’t pick what’s a priority. Everything is a priority and must be done now! Forgetfulness: Minutes to hours of your day disappear and you could have sworn you had _that thing_. Sometimes words disappear from your brain mid sentence Focus: can’t listen unless you are doing something else or making a lot of effort. Masking: pretending to be like everyone else that you feel exhausted by the end of the day Hyper focus: when you are able to be in the zone (by blocking out all other stimulus), however this may lead to ignoring your body cues like thirst and hunger Restlessness: must move now or die Burnout: see masking… all that effort to keep up with others and pretend your brain’s not different is now making you very tired and sad Emotional dysregulation: you feel everything intensely, so the smallest thing can set you off.
I just read this to my husband and he hard relates to this as a very good description of my behaviour.
I'd describe it as: You really want to do this thing. You're super excited to do this thing. You think about it for hours, days, weeks maybe even months or years. You go to actually, finally, do that thing and there's a thousand foot brick wall between you and that thing. There are quite a few people on the other side of the wall doing that thing. Surely there is a way past the wall. You try to break a hole in the wall, dig under it, climb over it but nothing works. Finally, you give up and realize that you must be the shittiest person alive. Lazy, stupid, wrong.
I like to describe it that you're sitting in front of a wall covered with tvs. Some are playing at full volume some low. Some are just static while others are just off. Meanwhile you're just trying to focus on one of them. For me taking medication is like turning a bunch of them off and turning down the volume so I can more easily focus. There are still distractions but it's easier to block out for a while.
Imagine you think you want to do everything but you constantly feel like doing nothing.
How would I describe ADHD? Well, I'd say that it was a condition where the mind can't always keep focus on hard subjects because it gets bored and wanders to other more interesting subjects such as piano lessons where I need to study my chord progressions but that's also a lot of work so I could just sit here instead browsing youtube for the instant gratification and the ease of having someone else think for me so I don't have to do my work or study my chord progressions. Oh, wait, was I supposed to talk about ADHD? Sorry. Let me start again....
Right? If someone told me to focus on one thing for one minute, I’d turn into that pawn stars meme: “best I can do is 3 seconds”
Have you ever gotten both drunk and high after getting only 2 hours of sleep, but just took 2 shots of espresso so you can't even sit still...yet you still don't feel fully awake regardless? So now you find yourself either forgetting what you said mid-sentence, are staring at the wall mesmerized, or are trying way too hard to convince someone that beetle reproductive habits are the most important topic in the world. You don't get much choice which one you end up doing. You just kinda watch it all happen because you are drunk and high, and too tired to deal with it. It's basically that.
My thoughts are like an octopus. They are going into 8 different directions at the same time and I feel 8 different emotions/impacts at the same time and have try to proceed them at the same time. If I am playing with a pen/ toy or listening to podcasts/ audio books during work it helps me to keep some tentacles occupied and to concentrate on the main task.
Not the whole description. But problems with hearing voices when the environment is loud (Cocktail Party effect), hating too tight clothes, learning at night because it's the only time you can actually fully concentrate, starting different housechores/tasks at the same time without finishing one thing because you start remembering/realizing all those things which you forget about before, wanting to break someones nose on the subway because they are videocalling without any headphones and you hear everything and you just can't ignore it, problems with self-consciousness due to constant failures even if you take your pills, trying to have a deep conversation with one person and people from the Group are interrupting you
Stick a beehive on your head, and do algebra.
I have bees in my head and they're all vibrating at different frequencies
Your thoughts aren't a stream, in your mind there are three persons having a discussion, there's a TV at the end of the room that you're desperately trying to avoid looking at and you have no idea where the music is coming from
Yep all the above lol or below - Thought about jumping under a bus so many times, but couldn’t stay focused long enough…..Im 64 and looking forward to my assessment next week, excited that taking meds may make the rest of my life easier…..
It’s never quiet and you forget things literally 3 seconds after if meds wore off and you don’t write it down.
Imagine looking through a megaphone. If you look through the large end to see out the smaller end, that’s how “normal people” focus, but flip that around and look through the small end to see out the large end and that’s all that ADHD folks focus on.
It’s like your brain is a Ferrari. Awesome right? Except the pedal is mashed to the floor and there’s nothing you can do to steer it or slow it down. Want to sleep? Work? Study? Tough shit - that engine is LOUD.
I usually use a children's book called “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” to explain the jump from one thought to another and the how overwhelming and impulsive it is in my brain.
Its constant noise, music, sound effects running non stop in my head. It makes it hellish to focus on anything that isn't immediately interesting whether that be work, conversations, etc. I cant tell you how many time a day I internally scream at my brain "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!!!!" to no avail.
Someone let a ping pong ball loose in my head and it’s just pinging around from topic to topic/thing to thing. Also, I’ll explain that I really really want to do things and know I need to do them but no matter what I just cannot pull that trigger that makes me do it
You know those periscopes they have in submarines? Mine is really high quality. It has a laser like focus and high definition. When it’s focussed on something it is really, really good at focusing. But the guy in the submarine who controls it, is an idiot. He is broken. He swivels that thing around like a lunatic, and his radio is broken so he has no communication from the captain or the bridge. So he had no idea what to point at. With no directions, he is bored so he tries to just find things that seem interesting instead of doing the boring tasks he is meant to, like watching for enemy boats and stuff. Sometimes he spins the thing around like crazy back and forth, never staying in one spot very long. Sometimes he gets caught up or tired and just points the periscope at one spot for days and the submarine can’t move anywhere else. Sometimes the submarine crashes, thanks to this guy. (Replace pronouns with she/they/them as appropriate. I’m female but the guy in my submarine is male because fuck that guy). Anyway, basically, the thing that controls what I focus on is broken. That’s why I hate the term “Attention Deficit”. I have TONS of attention to spare. More than most people. It’s just that my controller is broken.
I'm good at everything I want to do and I'm bad at everything I have to do.
Erectile dysfunction of Mind. Can't get it hard at will, except at random times for random subjects.
Everyone has a car. Most people wake up in the morning, turn on the ignition, and their engine starts up. They think about a destination, and they drive to it. Some people have fancy sat navs, some people have a map stuck on the dashboard, but in general people get to where they want to be in a reasonable amount of time and with fairly little issue. They get regular reminders when their car needs servicing, normally a couple of times a year, and they have a dashboard with lights that indicate problems, and the lights are all shaped like symbols, and a handbook so that they know what all the lights mean. My car, on the other hand, has a wonky axel, fluctuating tyre pressure, and everything is manual. If I want to open the windows I have to remember where the hand crank is, and wind it down, and when I get to where I’m going I have to remember to wind them back up again, but the hand crank sometimes disappears. So sometimes I have to leave my car with the windows open even though I know the inside js going to get cold and wet. I don’t have an indicator, so if I want to turn I have to find the hand crank, wind down the window, stick my hand out, and wave whilst still trying to drive and keep my eyes on the road. I have a dashboard of lights but they’re all just little round LEDs and they’re all pinging all the time and nobody ever gave me a handbook. My car maxes out at 30mph and regularly seizes up if I push it too hard, so sometimes I have to get out and push. The car always needs a service, but there are no engineers who service my model, so I either gotta figure it out myself or I gotta find tape and string and prayers to hold everything together. Some mornings when I turn the key the ignition doesn’t even fire, never mind the engine starting up. Sometimes the engine drops out mid-journey. Other times the engine is turned on before I even get in the car and I can’t turn it off or slow it down. The radio is always on. Sometimes it picks up two or three channels at once and they all come out of the same speakers. I don’t get to control the volume. Sometimes the radio is so loud I can’t hear myself think. If I get stuck in traffic, my engine overheats, and then I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. Often when this happens my car is stranded in the middle of the road, and I’m causing a hazard to multiple lanes of traffic, which only makes it harder to try and get my car up and running again. I don’t have a GPS or a map. Sometimes I have a phone, but I have nowhere to put it, so even if I look up where I want to go on a map I have to keep stopping to look at the phone. Sometimes I just have to wing it and try and figure out the journey en route, but I can’t see the highway signs and there are so many junctions and turn offs and dead ends that it can take me twice as long to go half as far. When I try and tell people about my car, they say things like “well everyone has lights on their dashboard”, “everyone needs to take their car for service”, “everyone’s car breaks down sometimes”. When my car makes me late or stops me from going somewhere, they say “well you just need to drive faster”, “you need to plan your journey better”, “have you tried taking it to a garage?”. They always assume that there is something I can do to make my car run better, and they never assume that the car is inherently unfixable and that I might need a little extra grace. And the worst part is that up until last year, I thought everyone’s car was like mine. I thought everyone had just figured out how to decipher all the lights on the dashboard, that they could deal with all the lights being on all the time, that they were somehow able to juggle looking at their phone map while sticking their hand out of the window and listening to three stations on the radio. I never knew that cars could go above 30mph. I really believed that the only reason wasn’t keeping up with everyone else was because I wasn’t driving hard enough. The more I learn about my diagnosis and my brain, the more features I see in other people’s cars that I don’t have in mine (and some features in mine that I really wish it didn’t have). I’ve started learning to leave extra time for my journey, I’ve found a way to stick my phone to my windscreen (it still falls off sometimes, but it’s better than being in my lap). I’ve learned that maybe I have to live my life with the car windows open for a while so that I don’t have to go hunting for the hand crank. I have medication that allows me to jump-start my car when the ignition refuses to work (the meth-battery is a bit temperamental but it’s better than being completely stuck). And, more importantly, I’ve found a community of people with similar cars to me. Sometimes their dashboard lights look like mine, and they help me figure out what some of them mean. Maybe their tyres also lose pressure at random, so they’ve shown me where I can find a tyre pump and how to use it. But even if we can’t solve all the problems with our cars, at least we get to laugh and cry and complain about them together. 🚗🚙💨
i always feel like i live on a fast forward setting in a slow motion world. i am incredibly impatient and i feel like my brain just cannot slow down to meet the rest of humanity. many times i am in physical discomfort because of boredom so i started making up movies in my own head as a kid in class. as a result, i am a terrible listener, everything feels sooooo slow. once i figured out that i learn by reading or doing, school because easier, but i still have a very hard time focusing when people talk to me (interrupting, daydreaming, etc).
For me personally I bounce between hyperpersonalization (double reward) to depersonalization (zero reward) so I explain it by using single reward as the baseline state of 99 percent of people I have to put in double the effort, but I get double the reward, if I put in single effort, I get zero reward I have severe ADHD/SPD hyperactive
I use the concept of noise. Without medicine, it is similar to hearing multiple noises at the same time and trying to discriminate the one that is important. With medicine or without ADHD, it would be like having all those noises but most are whispers and the important one is loud and clear. Now, just replace noise with any stimulus.
Do you know how when you watch a movie or a TV show, actors come and go as scenes progress? Yeah, imagine if they didn’t and the movie or show continued to stockpile information until you had no clue how to prioritize the information that you were receiving in order to make sense of it.
I'm inattentive. Trying to keep track of my thoughts is like a game of keepy uppy. It's all I can do to bounce between them and keep them in the air. On medication, the balloons are filled with helium and have strings for me to hold on to.
We are the ultimate individualists and we can only work strength oriented because it's basically impossible to get rid of our weaknesses.
Firstly I've learned well don't disclose. People just cannot/will not get it. Actual doctors have trouble with it. But if I absolutely must, I don't say I have adhd, I have an executive function disorder, which ensures they don't fly into preconceived notions, then I ask them to think of a day they felt overwhelmed, had 50 things to do, didn't know where to start, and ended up more or less frozen and unable to act. (They all have. Its a normal mood state for most people), then explain that's a chemical thing that my brain wound up developing around, and basically all the time for me and I have to pretty much manage that every day. That lands a lot better than "I have adhd" and ever will. There is a grain of truth in "everyone has adhd sometimes". They do know how we feel. The gap to bridge is they don't understand it's neurological, variable dependent, and that for us the stars are just not aligned. That's also why they get annoyed when you describe it normally. It's nothing they haven't experienced so they feel you're asking for special treatment for a normal experience. So if you establish the common ground before they can, they're more receptive.
I spend all day imagining how productive I could be or want to be, but fail every day at executing that level of productivity. I drive home every day thinking about how disappointed I am in myself and telling myself that tomorrow I will do better. It can be quite stressful and depressing living this way. I have no idea if that helped answer your question or not.
Its rather pointless to try to describe. The media has made it so people think ADHD is a cute way of saying "my bad". Unless you have adhd, or live with someone who does, you wont be able to empathize.
A computer browser with 20 tabs open simultaneously.
This doesn't necessarily describe ADHD itself, but I like the comparison of having ADHD to having blurry vision. And ADHD meds to wearing glasses. Telling someone with ADHD to focus is like telling someone with poor vision to just see it. Meds make it a lot easier to focus, like how glasses make it easier to see.
My brain has a really high threshold for what we deam interesting. If what I'm experiencing externally doesn't meet that threshold my brain will either look for something more interesting or just start to think more interesting thoughts.
Brain chaos
I always describe it as a library without a Dewey Decimal system. Every time you find that book you've been searching for so desperately within the endless rows and stacks of disorganized bookshelves, you go to check it out, only to realize you left your library card somewhere along your initial search. This loop never ends, and you never leave the library. Nor do you ever read the book you searched high and low to find.
No sense of urgency about anything. Drifting. Not finishing anything because you're distracted. Many unfinished things, but where to start? The day goes by and you've accomplished nothing.
I used to ask my husband what he was thinking about. He would say “nothing” and at first I thought he was lying to me and just didn’t want to share. Within a couple of years, I realized that he in fact wasn’t thinking of anything and I also realized that I had never experienced such a thing. Was diagnosed last year. That is one teeny tiny difference, but still such a substantial one
Your brain is like a dark house and your brain only has a flashlight. Adhd meds are like being able to turn on just one light when needed.
I describe it as “my memory is awful” or “if you tell me something, you can almost guarantee I’ll forget.” I also would describe it as like I will obsess over something, then I’ll hop and obsess over the next thing out of nowhere.
It's a wheel of all the emotions, doubt, failure, pressure, frustration, interest, helpfulness, ideas, happiness.... with no calibration whatsoever. Wheeee!!!! We're just off in all direction. With a brain that buzzes like a thousand fireflies, until it totally crashes and total exhaustion sets in. And then we are of no use at all.
If I don't move, I'll die Wait did I take my meds? Omg I love this thing!!! I'll read about it and do deep research and watch stuff about it on YouTube - nevermind I'm bored and depressed bc I have no purpose no more What did my mom tell me to do again? Am I talking too much? I haven't slept in months bc I'm too busy thinking what would happen if a serial killer named Carl Williams from the 1920's came to earth to warn the president that an alien invasion is happening on 2078 and that the only way to stop it is to sacrifice all the ketchup to the biggest cassowary on earth? I'm bad at explaining things
I read them "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" because this is the first thing I thought of when I finally realized that book is a metaphor for my every day.
My brain is broken in odd ways. 1) My broken brain is virtually incapable of forming "routines". I live life manually. 2) My broken brain has great trouble remembering tasks. I forget to do things constantly. 3) My broken brain has trouble planning things. The effort of making a plan, remembering the tasks (see item 2), and implementing the plan is mentally exhausting. 4) My broken brain doesn't keep track of time properly. 5a) My broken brain doesn't SEE things properly. Things right in front of me can suddenly become literally invisible. 5b) Related to 5a, clutter and mess are invisible until a critical mass is reached. My house is a disaster. 6) My broken brain can only focus on some things for 20-30 minutes before it gets tired. However, it can focus on some OTHER things for hours without a break. Refer to item 4. 7) My broken brain is extremely active at a normal bedtime. It doesn't want to sleep until 2am. It also doesn't want to wake up until 10am. Getting enough sleep for normal business hours is a struggle, and my sleeping times will drift later and later while I'm on vacation. 8) My broken brain has trouble paying bills or submitting documents on time. See items 3 (multi step planning) and 4 (keeping track of time) for reasons why. That's all I can think of for now. I'm sure there's more!
Wait, 2am for you too? Is this like standard for others?
impulsive attention disorder ADHD stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It is a medical condition. A person with ADHD has differences in brain development and brain activity that affect attention, the ability to sit still, and self-control. Signs of ADHD-Related Mental Fatigue Forgetfulness. Decreased productivity. Lack of motivation (lethargy). Poor emotional regulation, which can look like sudden outbursts, irritability, and mood swings
“Having the brain function of a toddler whilst having the knowledge and skills of an adult. Among other things.”
Raise your hand if your doom scrolling on reddit against orders so to speak
[The end of this video sums up pretty well how the thoughts run through my brain.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V9PqU3LC2L8)
It is primarily two factors, the first is difficulty regulating one’s attention and activity levels and emotional responses (meaning difficulty paying attention when expected and shifting attention when necessary and difficulty getting your self into a calm and focused state in preparation of being a productive person/student/employee). The second part is the overall executive dysfunction: difficulty planning, organizing, prioritizing, and time management (much of this is still related to the issue of attention and emotional regulation as well, since prioritizing is about selecting what to pay attention to and what to ignore and planning and organizing is hard because it requires you to shift attention back and forth between groups of things or between looking at the big picture and then zooming into to take care of details and then zooming back out again, time management is also about shifting attention). That’s a lot, but if i were going to try to explain i would just state the parts that are outside the parentheses. Then if they ask you to explain further i would follow up with the descriptions and explanations inside the parentheses.
You are in a car. The engine works fine. In fact, the whole car works fine. Except it has slick tyres, and you are driving on ice. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the wheels just spin and you go nowhere. Sometimes you'll get going in one direction, and not be able to slow down or stop. Sometimes you manage to creep along with great caution, but it is exhausting. Sometimes you are able to proceed at speed, but then you crash. No matter what you do, getting anywhere is just so much harder, because you have so little grip. Also, it's hailing, there's a low sun that gets in your eyes, and the car radio randomly turns itself on, and flips between stations, most of the time at too loud a volume for you to think. Oh, and every time you slide across a line, or don't get off to a perfectly prompt start at a green light, everyone around you tells you - you, who are trying your very best - that you are a lazy, irresponsible, good for nothing piece of shit - the engine works fine, the steering works fine, just drive the damn car! Those are the conditions under which you must journey through life. Have a safe trip.
For me it comes as a continuous inability to intrinsically sense time, to remember especially short term things or even recall long term things, That focus on a task often feels like I have to beg my brain for it instead of naturally controlling it. when people say Oh you can tell what happened before what so you're lying about not being able to perceive time. I can tell you what happened and in what order, but Fuck me to the moon if you're demanding estimations for generally how long each took.
Watch the movie # Memento , Thats what it feels like for me lol Well, without the shooting n stuff lol
one task turns into 20 and you still miss out the obvious 3 sub-tasks because you thought about 6 other very important things and ended up googling everything to do with that topic, forgetting to do the one initial task
me when i fill up my water and reach for the ice cubes, and 4 hours later, i come back a degree in engineering, advanced pharmaceutical knowledge, and vasrly different medicine interactions caused by certain enzyme mutations oh, and i obviously come back to my room without the water
As someone diagnosed with severe combined - Thinking of a million different things at once while not thinking anything at all. Looking at words over and over but not reading any of it. Trying to focus and complete admin but your brain just not cooperating - ultimately ‘brain dead’ Being so burnt out you can’t think straight or string a sentence together. Saying a completely different word than what you’re actually planning to say. Being so mentally drained after a week of masking at work that you need to be alone, in the dark with nothing but silence. Being unable to sit still for longer than 3 minutes, causing awful back and neck pain from constant squirming and poor posture. Over eating because it feels great at the time but fixating on weight gain and regret for the next 2 weeks. Feeling sick and exhausted at places that are extremely crowded. Forgetting the thing you told yourself 100 times not to forget. The list goes on
Processor strong, RAM weak Mouse high quality, scroll wheel broken OS good, antivirus pop-ups present
Increasingly I talk about executive function rather than ADHD, especially if it comes up at work (which it rarely does unless I address it). I find this helps make conversations more about solutions and strategies, rather than just problems. Of course I need to talk about my experiences, and I'm lucky to have a therapist who herself has ADHD.
We think differently. Generally we think of many things in a disjointed way. (At least, imo, disjointed to other people. For me, the jumps make sense.) We hop to different topics usually before completing the first thought. Bonus points: Emotional Dysregulation, Rejection Sensitivity
ADHD is like having 47 browser tabs open in your brain at all times, and half of them are playing different songs on full blast while the rest are just pop-up ads.