> In summary, the existing preliminary evidence suggests that exercise can improve cognitive performance intimately linked to ADHD presentations in children with and without an ADHD diagnosis. Based on the findings from both PBC and ADHD children, we cautiously provide recommendations for parameters of exercise.

Exercising seems to help people with ADHD perform better.

Anecdotal, I’ve found this out through years of living with it. I work better after working out in the mornings. If I don’t, I end up being productive in the afternoons when I finally get a bit tired.

I don't know if I have it or not. But exercises also helps me just to focus and I enjoy more the work.

I got diagnosed with it a couple of years back. I knew I had it, but I wasn’t diagnosed.

The evaluation is simple. They gave me a questionnaire with ‘have you ever’ questions. You rank them (think “a lot”, “often”, “sometimes“, “no”). Then they score based on that.

And let me tell you, filling that out made me start crying. All the shit I had put my mom through while growing up, school, college, etc.

But hey, I got the diagnosis. I have meds I can take if I need them. I currently don’t do it everyday because I simply don’t have to for what I do day to day. But if I’m working on something that requires me to hold regular hours at work or on some projects that are more conceptual, I have to.

All this to say, the test is simple and pretty quick. If you are curious, you could take it.

> All this to say, the test is simple and pretty quick.

Just to curb peoples expectations a bit, I started the process of getting diagnosed about two years ago, got the diagnosis less than a year ago, and I'm having the first meeting with a doctor who can actually prescribe meds next week. No part of it has been simple or quick. So I guess YMMV.

Oh wow. I didn’t expect it to vary that much.

I’m actually near a big university and I’ve heard it’s hard to get diagnosed here. I however don’t attend the university so the doctors I went to are outside.

My experience is in Indiana.

Have you ever noticed whether it's easier to be productive late in the evening?

Yes.

Like @disiplus, that happened to me for a long time.

During high school, college and afterwards, it was just easier to work at night and just stay up until very late. Also having a deadline around the corner gave me the right amount of stress to finally code the solution.

It’s not like I didn’t try to work during the day or wasn’t thinking of trying to solve the problem. I actually thought of it and worked out things in my head, I just had trouble sitting and coding it during the day. At night, very late until early in the morning I would just sit and dump it all out.

Side projects can still be like that.

At work, I’ve learned to manage it. I really enjoy the position I’m in. I work on a lot of projects, have a set of tasks that maybe fill half my day during the week but I can be pulled into meetings, called to fix something else, review code, or help other devs.

It’s can be a lot, but it’s working right now.

That's very similar to my experience.

for years that was how i worked, without medicine i cannot work in the morning. but i would regularly stay till 2am working.

I have no diagnosticed mental health issue but I was like that too until very recently. I started running once (sometimes twice) a week since a month and I noticed I can wake up before twelve now, I’m generally happier during the day and I can start doing things instead of just thinking a bit easier, even if it’s still far from perfect.

My advices for people who didn’t run for years like I was:

- starting low (500m or 2min) is the key. Better run a little than not

- increment a bit each time

- an Apple Watch (or other tracker) is awesome to set a goal and track progression during running. You can export health data on a PC and then do geek stuff with it

Something good to know: the tldr is usually on the article itself, in the Conclusion part of the article (sometimes this is on the abstract as well)

A bit on the ironic side, the Conclusion section of this article is very hard to find (it's on page 36 of 86, depending on your zoom level) and this reading mode on the website doesn't work so well

But here it is

> In line with previous research, we find that exercise benefits executive functions and attentional control in children with ADHD. The beneficial effects are comparable to those reported in PBC with substantial and consistent improvement on test of several cognitive functions following particularly long-term exercise. An important notion is also that no study has reported negative or adverse effects of exercise.

I really wish a lot of things started with the conclusion or TLDR. I have ADHD and I have issues reading to the end of an email without skipping and quitting before the end.

I mean, I know there is a certain way to write research articles and that they aren’t exactly meant for people with attention problems, but without people like you I’d never see the conclusion. Hell I might even look for it and then not find it and forget all about it.

I kind of knew exercise was good for me though. I even like doing it. The real issue is to begin to exercising instead of just thinking about starting it for a whole day without actually getting started.

Well, research articles have abstracts for exactly this purpose. They're one paragraph right at the start.

idd long text. One aspect that I found helpful were the references to sources that suggest the timing of exercise is important to lower the symptoms:

> The effects of acute exercise appear less robust. Of great interest, Chang et al., found that only exercise carried out during the first half of the day yielded positive outcomes [66]. This underlines the importance of timing exercise. This is supported by Hart who found that 15 min of exercise provided at the beginning of the day can reduce behaviors associated with ADHD and that while this effect dissipates over time, a short bout of 3–5 min. moderate-to-vigorous physical activity 90 m after the initial exercise, can maintain the benefits [375]

tl;dr it definitely helps, we're not sure how much, a proper large-scale trial is needed.

TLDR Aerobic exercise improves the cognitive function of humans. A tremendous breakthrough.

And yet our schools require kids to sit still in the morning before classes start when a few minutes of running around would do them a world of good. Madness.

They've reduced recess time down to almost nothing. Even for kindergarteners. Ours gets (well, got) about half an hour, and this is full-day kindergarten, none of that half-day stuff. Also they've gotten really lazy/risk-averse about letting kids go outside if it's a tad cold, or a tad drizzly, or a tad snowy, which it is, you know, a lot of days, so then they just have no recess.

How much ADHD is ADHD and how much is humans and especially kids aren't supposed to sit still so damn much and one of the ways the universal ill effects of this manifest is as ADHD symptoms in a lot of people?

This was done in my elementary school... most kids arrived 10-15 minutes early and milled around outside of the building. Teachers would open the doors at a set time to let us in...

Run them around before they get to school?

Yup

Even just the abstract shows pretty clearly that this is a sound and useful scientific inquiry into the hows and the whys that also shows a difference in the effect response of exercise on cognitive function - between an ADHD group vs. the control group. This is good stuff.

Eh. Results weren't conclusive.