No, you don’t have ADHD just because you get bored sometimes.
No I’m not trolling you, I literally do not remember what you asked me to do. I don’t care if you asked me 30 seconds ago; I legitimately forgot and I apologize for that.
Yes I know, I should just knock it out now before I forget again, but my low dopamine levels won’t let me. No I’m not just being lazy; you might as well ask me to move a mountain. That’s just how difficult is for me to complete the most basic of chores. It is completely out of my control, and no amount of Adderall will fix it.
The wife and I have this argument all the time and it drives me crazy.
How do I upvote a million times?
the problems sound similar to “what everyone has” but they arent the same
Yes everyone struggles motivating themselves to do chores but it’s not the same when you have adhd.
Yes everyone has trouble concentrating during a boring lecture/lesson but its not the same when you have adhd.
Yes everyone has the urge to buy stuff they don’t need, but its not the same when you have adhd.
so it’s those but more of them
not necessarily more, but more intense. Like it’s borderline physically painful sometimes to force myself to do something. It feels like I’m being very cruel to myself for no good reason, its just a dishwasher after all
people who have never been depressed tend to think that depression is just laziness
YoU jUsT nEeD sOmE fReSh AiR
Yeah it’s always „why don’t you just…“ or „why can’t you „
yeah there are only two reasons why someone doesn’t do something and it’s because they can’t or the don’t wanna. If they want to do something but don’t it’s because they can’t and some pedestrian advice like “Just think how much nicer it will feel after you’re done” is not gonna help.
The amount of misinformation that’s out there about it.
Around 50% of TikToks about ADHD are misleading. I feel like we can expect similar results in other social media.
How fucking hard it is to remember daily and recurring tasks. Taking meds, brushing teeth, checking email, cleaning up, cooking, laundry, on top of stuff related to work.
Another one is that we are blind. Unless I expect to see it, I cannot see it. I literally dont see clutter. Only when I force myself to think about what I’m staring at do I realize there is a bunch of crap on a table. Its really easy for my room to get messy because of this. Because it hardly exists for me.
Hey, it’s me! Have you tried one of those weekly medicine pill dividers? I did. I think I filled it once, then went back to my daily routine of forgetting my meds. ADHD fucking blows.
Anxiety over missing my meds keeps me (mostly) on track, I do however forget to request refills until the last bloody moment though, love how the process for ADHD treatment is so anti ADHD…
We I have the fun combination with (undiagnosed) autism and t Which one had primary control at any time is a scrap shoot.
Even medicated I can not see the clutter… Until it’s all I can see and I start AuDHD cleaning.
Executive dysfunction is damn near disabling when I’m not medicated. I struggle with it & decision paralysis even when medicated. It’s an unfortunate issue that I’m unsure I’ll ever work through.
It’s really tiring to just exist inside your own head.
I’ve described it before as a box filled with a bunch of bouncy balls just bouncing off on every direction, off the walls, ceiling and floor, all the time. Every one of those balls is a thought, it’s really hard to hold onto just one, it’s hard to keep one once you’ve caught it.
When I’m resting usually I just put in some youtube video/TV show/audio book and play some mindless game for a while. On the outside it looks like it just played solitaire for 3 hours straight, but on the inside I’m just trying to follow one line of thought while keeping the rest of my brain occupied and quiet for a second.
I will spend ten times as long beating myself up about not doing the thing than it would take to just do the thing, which should make it crystal fucking clear that if I could just do the thing, I would fucking just do the thing.
And then, if I DO do the thing, I will spend twenty times as long as it took to do the thing afterwards replaying in my head exactly how I did the thing and beat myself up over every little imperfection.
Sometimes I have to really hold myself back from editing messages that are perfectly fine because I feel like I’m being too random and thus need to explain myself and add context
And this is while medicated, too.
wow, this sounds like my regular day. Maybe I have that same thing ?
Hello me. Be kind to yourself
A reverse question is actually quite interesting as well:
People without ADHD, but who know others with ADHD: what are the common misconceptions about “being normal”?
Uhh why you hijacking the discussion, go make a new post…
I don’t think this question in itself will attract enough people to be worth posting, which is why I put it here under a related post.
There’s no attempt to hijack anything, I must assure you
… That’s your reasoning?! Good God dude
I’ll begin to get a conversation going
Note: ADHD is very real and very hard on people who have it. This is not my talking point.
I know two people with diagnosed ADHD, and as with many disorders, it is common that people expect others without it to be completely lacking, or, this case, have only mild experiences of a similar kind.
Regular people absolutely get most of the common experiences of an ADHD individual: they can quickly get overwhelmed, struggle with motivation to do some basic everyday things and then get hyperfocused on something and forget the rest completely, can have impulses they don’t control. They, too, manage to develop a lot of tricks for maintaining motivation and going through the everyday issues.
What matters for diagnosis is the severity of these events and how often they occur. With ADHD, all those events happen so often that it gets impossible or strikingly hard to pursue what you need without using techniques/medication to manage your behavior.
This is why many regular people may not understand or not accept ADHD as something valid and why it may not help to list to them the kind of limitations you have - they have all the same experiences, it’s just that they are less common and severe, and so they manage to force through them while you may get overwhelmed.
A more helpful approach could probably be to come from the fact it’s a real diagnosis, and outlining just what it means exactly to have ADHD, to talk about the severity of the episodes and how they are not only experienced by you personally, but also described in the medical literature. This still probably won’t change the mind of some bigots, but it might help other people to understand it better.
Hope there is some insight in here.
I’m so sorry that bigotry is normal for you
Huh?
Ignoring ADHD is bad, I’m only talking about why people without it are sometimes inclined to behave this way and what could be done to break their arguments.
Maybe I misunderstood the question
Perhaps this is some sort of internalised ableism but I used to have this internal dialogue where I’d reflect on how difficult it was to do “boring” things and a straw man NT person would sarcastically imply that “it must be nice” to have an excuse to get out of “boring” tasks.
Um, fucking no. If you think about it for like two seconds, you realise how much of being a happy, independent and healthy adult relies on being able to complete tasks that aren’t immediately captivating. Those tasks still need doing, I don’t want someone else to do them for me. You’re left with either waiting on when the ‘inspiration’ strikes you, having to improvise some game or arbitrary reward structure just to clean two dishes or you just rawdog your way through the task and you feel every second of the boredom and come out the other side feeling worse than when you started because no satisfaction from completing the task can pay-back the effort you put into completing it.
That’s why ADHD adults burn-out. Without medication, every day you end with a ‘motivation deficit’ where no satisfaction from completing tasks can cover the costs of the determination and focus one spent to start those tasks. Eventually you just ‘default’ and you can’t do anything any more.
Stimulants to me feel like a small loan on every task. It’s a fine balance but they actually let me come out of tasks semi-regularly with more energy/motivation than I started. And when you have a surplus, productivity begets productivity.
What is that medication ? you just described my daily experience, I wonder if maybe I’m suffering from the same exact thing. I knew everybody didn’t struggle like I do
Elvanse (Vyvanse in some parts of the world).
Hello me, that was very succinct. I don’t get how so often they say “oh, everyone dislikes doing x, you just do it” ah, see that’s the problem right there
That they have it
It’s your brain. Advice like “think of what could you have done differently” or “slow down and consider the consequences,” etc. does not help in the least, because the part of your brain that does the thinking and the considering and the slowing down is the part that has the problem.
When there are no more spoons, you need to just go to bed.
What? I wash and reuse cutlery indefinitely
Not those spoons, spoons.
I know those but how would they ever run out?
Thriving on chaos.
Feeling the calmest when in a tempest.
This one exactly, while every normal person loses their mind in s stressful situation, adhd people can be calm and collected.
That it is not some magic fucking “gift”. The hyper focus isn’t a super power. It sucks, and gets in the way in all the wrong places, bills, school, career. I would trade places with anyone who doesn’t have it becuase it plain fucking sucks.
Hyper focus is a real problem for me. I don’t even realize I’m hungry or that my bladder is full until I’m feeling nauseous or light headed. What feels like 15 minutes is actually hours.
At the same time, if I don’t complete a project from start to finish in one sitting, it’s nearly impossible to restart.
I don’t get basic things done like laundry or remembering to make appointments because I’m stuck on one task. Sometimes I’m afraid to do things I love because I can’t just do it for 20 minutes. Especially video games. I want to relax after work and play but I know I can’t let myself or I might not eat that evening.
