That's a great way to put a positive spin on it, but be realistic. ADHD is not a super power, it's not all sunshine and roses, it is a disorder. You can sometimes harness parts of it for positive outcomes but it has a lot of negative results too.
Another thing to remember: your ADHD is not everybody's ADHD. Some people have less severe cases, others have more severe cases.
For every time you can hyperfocus on work, imagine every time you've hyperfocused on ants walking by, or a speck of dust, or literally anything other than what you actually need to do.
Hyperfocus is an amazing tool, unfortunately we have no fucking control over it.
Yeah, like I dunno, I think a lot of things I do by accident with my ADHD are super cool. But it definitely hurts more than it helps, and I don't think that's just because "we live in a society". This post feels like huffing a suffocating dose of copium.
"Oh, sorry, I heard literally every word of what you just said, but my brain encoded nothing."
"My sleep schedule is casually off by like five hours because I lost track of time hyperfocusing on learning about competitive Jenga until 4 AM."
"I know I could have been doing things, but I had this thing I needed to be at in 8 hours, so I just couldn't focus on them."
"I either lose everything or create an intricate, tedious framework for where I keep everything at all times."
"I struggle immensely to cope with stress in a healthy way and have issues with my temper."
"If I can focus at all, it will be on exactly one thing, either for unhealthily long periods of time to the detriment of everything else or for so briefly that I accomplish nothing before moving on to the next dopamine rush."
"I have a much higher risk of substance abuse because my body is starving for dopamine."
"I have trouble keeping promises I've made to other people because they vanish out of my mind."
"I constantly miss small details and need to quintuple check everything I do."
"My priorities are constantly fucked, and I consistently put off everything until the last minute."
"It often feels physically painful for me to focus when it's not on the first thing my brain decides it wants to do."
I know this is in response to a post saying your ADHD is not other people's ADHD, but I'm pretty sure your ADHD is my ADHD.
An awful lot of those bullets hit me
"I constantly miss small details and need to quintuple check everything do."
This one is the opposite for me. I'm great at detail work. The stuff I miss is the glaringly obvious giant thing right in front of me.
I went to a wedding this weekend, and bought four drinks from the bar before I noticed half of the bartop was covered in two liter pop bottles I could have been pouring drinks from for free the whole time...
I've had a similar experience too. One time I couldn't find my phone, so I start looking high and low. Not in my bedroom, not in the bathroom, the kitchen... At this point, I'm turning over every stone, looking through cabinets and drawers, running out to my car to see if it's in there. Come back in and decide that it must've fallen under my bed and I just didn't hear it. Can't see under there really well, so I pull out the flashlight on my phone. Start looking under there, still not turning up. The panic is really starting to kick in.
An embarrassing amount of time passes before I realize that I'm holding and using the thing I'm looking for.
The Apple Watch ability to instantly ping my phone has been a godsend. Wish I had gotten one sooner.
I think I can relate to literally all of them. Not competitive Jenga, but some other niche topic that I will be hyper interested for a consecutive 4 hours after midnight. I spent a whole night one time learning about roller derby and watching replays of the women's final for the past few years. I had never watched it before in my life and went all in. The men's version is not as good. They are too fast and strong, so it's more boring and less nuanced.
Imagine how many things that you have to do that only exist because of ridiculous social expectations on what someone else thinks is important.
Being different in a way that would work if conformity was less important shouldn't be a disability.
Implying you can control or induce these hyperfixations in a productive way is disingenuous at best, measurably harmful at worst.
If you work in a job that can use use the chaos in a productive way that's great, but I'm willing to bet you still face abnormally high difficulty with general life tasks, and consistently struggle to enforce a work/life balance.
You're not helping people with ADHD by posting this. You're establishing an unattainable standard for people that are already doing everything in their power just to get by.
Right, not once have I fixated on something by choice.
You think I want to be googling and playing pokemon go at work home and in bed for the past 3 weeks despite only playing it for a week 8 years ago?
Just once I want the fixation on house work or something like the gym
It's also pretty cringe "mom says I'm a genius" shit
Every parent should be gassing their kid up though. Most of our "successful" people are just normal kids that never hit a wall or had help getting around walls. Realistic expectations are what keeps people from jumping jobs for a raise; applying for positions they don't fully qualify for; moving for better job market access; retraining for management roles; and so much more.
Note, I'm not talking about rags to riches, success can be a first generation college graduate getting a professional job; a homeless kid getting a steady job and pulling their family off the streets; a burnt out delivery guy getting a union warehouse job. The point is people with low expectations don't look for new opportunities.
I agree to an extent, but also that the parents need to take time to understand how to "gas them up" appropriately. It's not everyone's case, but it became very apparent to me when I was young that my parents would cheer me on over anything, and never take any time to learn about the things they were cheering me on over, and that led to disbelieving pretty much any positive feedback from anyone long-term. The only feedback of substance growing up was the very rare negative feedback, because they would only pull it out when they understood it enough to know it needed improving. That, and emphasizing their efforts as the thing to cheer on, not just the end results.
I've learned to work through that, and maybe it goes without saying for most people, but being a genuine and substantive cheerleader is important.
Yep, kids idolize their parents. So disinterest is devastating.
It's so weird that we have a culture that treats teaching pride to children as a bad thing.
What a weird thing to call pride and narcissism the same. Being prideful is nothing to do with being narcissistic. One is an external thing, the other an internal. The prideful person cares about things other than themselves and shows that. The narcissistic person cares about no one but themselves, and their actions reflect that.
That's not true at all. I have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and I care about others very deeply. And My actions reflect that. For example, recently I shut down a cult discord server run by a pedophile who's dating kids from the cult. This is because I think adults dating kids is bad.
I am so fucked up in part because I was taught that pride is the root of all evil and that it's better to be humble.
I struggle to accept compliments, I struggle to not be intensely critical of myself, and I feel like I have very little drive for just about any form of competition.
I felt like you my whole life. All that shame, embarrassment and guilt. I literally assumed it was just because I was in fact a shitty human.
Holy shit. What a revelation. I told my psychiatrist about this and sent him the article. He prescribed Clonidine. Clonidine is amazing! It got rid of all that shame and allowed me to realize that I do not suck, that everyone does not hate me, and that those horrible emotions were basically fictions created by my shitty brain chemistry.
Oh that's just for normal kids. Like half of what a private school does is teach kids to have pride and confidence. The other half is introduce them to a network of wealthy people so they can get a VP job after their dirt easy business degree that also teaches them they're now experts in becoming experts at whatever their team does
Which is why they're so insufferable and why they think they can micromanage someone who's bringing literal decades of experience and learning to a situation.
As to why conservatives go so hard on it? It's their ideology. If they thought the Walmart greeters had any intrinsic worth then they would feel bad about how they treat them. So nobody's special until they've proven themselves and that just happens to coincide with going to private school where they tell the kids they earned their spot because they did an interview and wrote an essay.
if it's immediately rewarding
Hell of a caveat there.
If more workplaces incorporated performance based snacks it wouldn't be!
Sure, if you want an even greater obesity epidemic.
Cucumbers are a good snack. And peanut butter celery, but that takes more work than just throwing a cucumber in the fridge.
This swerves way into "ADHD is a superpower" territory which is bullshit.
edit: For example, while I have a lot of these traits, I also can't remember to put a new trash bag in the trash bin when I take the full bag out to the garage, which is a 1 minute task. Despite reminding myself AS I'm removing the full bag. Twice a week. For years now. Because I will see something in the garage or think of something while doing the mundane task that completely derails my train of thought.
If anybody here is an engineer, I'd highly recommend applying for jobs at tech startups. It's very chaotic and disorganized; you'll be constantly putting out fires. But you know where you're at when you're putting out fires? Flow state.
This description sounds extremely hirable. I’ll take 5 please.
You can have 4, they'll do the work of 7. But the 5th hire has to be a maid/cook.
Where are these high functioning ADHD people? The adhd person I know I’m my life can’t really get things done in a reliable way.
It's an interesting juxtaposition. I did politics and governance in Afghanistan and was extremely knowledgeable about it. But remembering to shave every morning was hard. I'd come back from lunch and my sergeant would be like, "great work, now when's the last time you washed your coffee cup? Did you remember to empty your desk trash last night?"
To be fair, I also have a TBI and nobody's sure how much of this is TBI and how much is ADHD.
ITT:
"it's not a superpower! i cant even do a boring and monotonous task!"
and
"I love that I found a place where I'm able to utilize the benefits of the way that my brain functions!"
🤔
It's a super power in the same way that being able to mentally move yourself while not being affected by gravity is a super power. In specific circumstances it's awesome. The rest of the time you're just trying to not float away.
You mean my heat vision is not appropriate in all situations?!
Don't post that publicly! We're getting to convince the normies we don't have super powers. Although I must say I do enjoy this invisibility thing.
Are there things we can do to take advantage of this? Even on my meds I struggle to write my documentation, but the initial period of trying to find a solution and making a working POC is so great
I use copilot to draft all my initial copy. It’s FAR too time consuming for me to try to produce original copy myself. Once I have the copilot results though, then I can analyze and optimize from there. That said, I fucking hate writing documentation and I procrastinate too much.
I use chatgpt for most of my non technical copy. It didn't a decent job on my resume too, though it lied.... A lot. So had to clean it up
50% done work kills team productivity. Having to micro manage sucks for everyone involved.
These are challenges that must be addressed in most roles.
That's a great way to put a positive spin on it, but be realistic. ADHD is not a super power, it's not all sunshine and roses, it is a disorder. You can sometimes harness parts of it for positive outcomes but it has a lot of negative results too.
Another thing to remember: your ADHD is not everybody's ADHD. Some people have less severe cases, others have more severe cases.
For every time you can hyperfocus on work, imagine every time you've hyperfocused on ants walking by, or a speck of dust, or literally anything other than what you actually need to do.
Hyperfocus is an amazing tool, unfortunately we have no fucking control over it.
Yeah, like I dunno, I think a lot of things I do by accident with my ADHD are super cool. But it definitely hurts more than it helps, and I don't think that's just because "we live in a society". This post feels like huffing a suffocating dose of copium.
I know this is in response to a post saying your ADHD is not other people's ADHD, but I'm pretty sure your ADHD is my ADHD.
An awful lot of those bullets hit me
This one is the opposite for me. I'm great at detail work. The stuff I miss is the glaringly obvious giant thing right in front of me.
I went to a wedding this weekend, and bought four drinks from the bar before I noticed half of the bartop was covered in two liter pop bottles I could have been pouring drinks from for free the whole time...
I've had a similar experience too. One time I couldn't find my phone, so I start looking high and low. Not in my bedroom, not in the bathroom, the kitchen... At this point, I'm turning over every stone, looking through cabinets and drawers, running out to my car to see if it's in there. Come back in and decide that it must've fallen under my bed and I just didn't hear it. Can't see under there really well, so I pull out the flashlight on my phone. Start looking under there, still not turning up. The panic is really starting to kick in.
An embarrassing amount of time passes before I realize that I'm holding and using the thing I'm looking for.
The Apple Watch ability to instantly ping my phone has been a godsend. Wish I had gotten one sooner.
I think I can relate to literally all of them. Not competitive Jenga, but some other niche topic that I will be hyper interested for a consecutive 4 hours after midnight. I spent a whole night one time learning about roller derby and watching replays of the women's final for the past few years. I had never watched it before in my life and went all in. The men's version is not as good. They are too fast and strong, so it's more boring and less nuanced.
Imagine how many things that you have to do that only exist because of ridiculous social expectations on what someone else thinks is important.
Being different in a way that would work if conformity was less important shouldn't be a disability.
Implying you can control or induce these hyperfixations in a productive way is disingenuous at best, measurably harmful at worst.
If you work in a job that can use use the chaos in a productive way that's great, but I'm willing to bet you still face abnormally high difficulty with general life tasks, and consistently struggle to enforce a work/life balance.
You're not helping people with ADHD by posting this. You're establishing an unattainable standard for people that are already doing everything in their power just to get by.
Right, not once have I fixated on something by choice.
You think I want to be googling and playing pokemon go at work home and in bed for the past 3 weeks despite only playing it for a week 8 years ago?
Just once I want the fixation on house work or something like the gym
It's also pretty cringe "mom says I'm a genius" shit
Every parent should be gassing their kid up though. Most of our "successful" people are just normal kids that never hit a wall or had help getting around walls. Realistic expectations are what keeps people from jumping jobs for a raise; applying for positions they don't fully qualify for; moving for better job market access; retraining for management roles; and so much more.
Note, I'm not talking about rags to riches, success can be a first generation college graduate getting a professional job; a homeless kid getting a steady job and pulling their family off the streets; a burnt out delivery guy getting a union warehouse job. The point is people with low expectations don't look for new opportunities.
I agree to an extent, but also that the parents need to take time to understand how to "gas them up" appropriately. It's not everyone's case, but it became very apparent to me when I was young that my parents would cheer me on over anything, and never take any time to learn about the things they were cheering me on over, and that led to disbelieving pretty much any positive feedback from anyone long-term. The only feedback of substance growing up was the very rare negative feedback, because they would only pull it out when they understood it enough to know it needed improving. That, and emphasizing their efforts as the thing to cheer on, not just the end results.
I've learned to work through that, and maybe it goes without saying for most people, but being a genuine and substantive cheerleader is important.
Yep, kids idolize their parents. So disinterest is devastating.
It's so weird that we have a culture that treats teaching pride to children as a bad thing.
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/why-reactionaries-hate-pride-and-narcissists-938d39261f13
What a weird thing to call pride and narcissism the same. Being prideful is nothing to do with being narcissistic. One is an external thing, the other an internal. The prideful person cares about things other than themselves and shows that. The narcissistic person cares about no one but themselves, and their actions reflect that.
That's not true at all. I have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and I care about others very deeply. And My actions reflect that. For example, recently I shut down a cult discord server run by a pedophile who's dating kids from the cult. This is because I think adults dating kids is bad.
I am so fucked up in part because I was taught that pride is the root of all evil and that it's better to be humble.
I struggle to accept compliments, I struggle to not be intensely critical of myself, and I feel like I have very little drive for just about any form of competition.
I felt like you my whole life. All that shame, embarrassment and guilt. I literally assumed it was just because I was in fact a shitty human.
Then I read this: https://www.additudemag.com/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-and-adhd/amp/
Holy shit. What a revelation. I told my psychiatrist about this and sent him the article. He prescribed Clonidine. Clonidine is amazing! It got rid of all that shame and allowed me to realize that I do not suck, that everyone does not hate me, and that those horrible emotions were basically fictions created by my shitty brain chemistry.
Oh that's just for normal kids. Like half of what a private school does is teach kids to have pride and confidence. The other half is introduce them to a network of wealthy people so they can get a VP job after their dirt easy business degree that also teaches them they're now experts in becoming experts at whatever their team does
Which is why they're so insufferable and why they think they can micromanage someone who's bringing literal decades of experience and learning to a situation.
As to why conservatives go so hard on it? It's their ideology. If they thought the Walmart greeters had any intrinsic worth then they would feel bad about how they treat them. So nobody's special until they've proven themselves and that just happens to coincide with going to private school where they tell the kids they earned their spot because they did an interview and wrote an essay.
Hell of a caveat there.
If more workplaces incorporated performance based snacks it wouldn't be!
Sure, if you want an even greater obesity epidemic.
Cucumbers are a good snack. And peanut butter celery, but that takes more work than just throwing a cucumber in the fridge.
This swerves way into "ADHD is a superpower" territory which is bullshit.
edit: For example, while I have a lot of these traits, I also can't remember to put a new trash bag in the trash bin when I take the full bag out to the garage, which is a 1 minute task. Despite reminding myself AS I'm removing the full bag. Twice a week. For years now. Because I will see something in the garage or think of something while doing the mundane task that completely derails my train of thought.
If anybody here is an engineer, I'd highly recommend applying for jobs at tech startups. It's very chaotic and disorganized; you'll be constantly putting out fires. But you know where you're at when you're putting out fires? Flow state.
This description sounds extremely hirable. I’ll take 5 please.
You can have 4, they'll do the work of 7. But the 5th hire has to be a maid/cook.
Where are these high functioning ADHD people? The adhd person I know I’m my life can’t really get things done in a reliable way.
It's an interesting juxtaposition. I did politics and governance in Afghanistan and was extremely knowledgeable about it. But remembering to shave every morning was hard. I'd come back from lunch and my sergeant would be like, "great work, now when's the last time you washed your coffee cup? Did you remember to empty your desk trash last night?"
To be fair, I also have a TBI and nobody's sure how much of this is TBI and how much is ADHD.
ITT:
"it's not a superpower! i cant even do a boring and monotonous task!"
and
"I love that I found a place where I'm able to utilize the benefits of the way that my brain functions!"
🤔
It's a super power in the same way that being able to mentally move yourself while not being affected by gravity is a super power. In specific circumstances it's awesome. The rest of the time you're just trying to not float away.
You mean my heat vision is not appropriate in all situations?!
Don't post that publicly! We're getting to convince the normies we don't have super powers. Although I must say I do enjoy this invisibility thing.
Are there things we can do to take advantage of this? Even on my meds I struggle to write my documentation, but the initial period of trying to find a solution and making a working POC is so great
I use copilot to draft all my initial copy. It’s FAR too time consuming for me to try to produce original copy myself. Once I have the copilot results though, then I can analyze and optimize from there. That said, I fucking hate writing documentation and I procrastinate too much.
I use chatgpt for most of my non technical copy. It didn't a decent job on my resume too, though it lied.... A lot. So had to clean it up
50% done work kills team productivity. Having to micro manage sucks for everyone involved.
These are challenges that must be addressed in most roles.