There are, of course, levels. For me the difference is between spending 15 hours non-stop programming, or spending two months unable to open a ticket because it's menial, being unable to start important schoolwork that is too menial until 1h before the due date, and so on.

I've been like this since I remember, and I really can't do anything to fix it. It has a large negative effect on my life. But of course, it's not just that, for example often I literally cannot pay attention to a direct interlocutor, or can't keep myself focused during final exams.

If you're in university, then you're probably in a place that has resources that can help. Take advantage of them. For example, you may have access to an occupational therapist who can help you improve how you organize and schedule your work, create effective workplace, avoid distractions, etc. Medication may also help, but it works best in conjunction with active behavioral changes.

There is no substitute for medication. For me a life without medication is a life of hating myself for not being able to do trivial things.

I tried all of those things you mentioned for over a decade and was often driven to tears trying to do simple things. I never did assignments for courses etc, causing some of my grades to stay bad even though I did great on the tests since tests kicks up your adrenaline making it easier to focus. Not because I didn't care about the grades but because I simply couldn't do the assignments. Then I got medication and suddenly everything in college and later work just became trivial. I stay on the lowest dosage and that is still enough for me to stay at normal levels of focus where I can program for a few hours a day when I need to do it to keep my job and earn money.

So, since medication has been so life changing for me I really hate when people say that you can manage ADHD symptoms just with lifestyle changes. Maybe in some cases, but many people absolutely need medication and discouraging such people from receiving it will ruin lives.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it's possible to treat ADHD with just behavioral changes or occupational therapy. That wasn't true in your case and it wasn't true in my case either. In my case, medication has been eye-opening and life-changing. When I went back to school, however, I also found it helpful to work with an occupational therapist to set up specific strategies for staying organized, keeping up with assignments, effectively using my studying time, and minimizing distractions. Working with an OT who understood ADHD was different from just trying to adopt general studying strategies and it really helped me succeed in grad school. If the parent poster is in university, an OT may be an available resource.

If I regret anything, it's not getting diagnosed until I was in my 30s. I wasted years of my life doing poorly in school, being depressed about it, blaming my performance on being depressed, and then dropping out of school. I eventually graduated, only 10 years late and with a 2.2 GPA. After getting diagnosed and treated, I went to graduate school and finished in the top 15% of my class with a 3.7 GPA. I think I've redeemed myself, but I won't get any of those wasted years back.

“Depression, isn’t that a fancy word for just feeling ‘bummed out?’”

But seriously, a lot of conditions are just universal human experiences that are severe enough to impact your daily life. We all get depressed, but we all don’t have depression

Do your motivation problems keep recurring, causing real problems at work/school, at home or in your personal relationships in a way that is beyond your control and that has persisted for more than six months?

If you answer yes to this, I would recommend talking to a professional. No one can diagnose you online (with the exception of professionals offering remote sessions).

The same as with anything else: when it becomes debilitating. Observe other problems that are similar:

* Everyone encounters back pain at some point. It's only an illness when acute or chronic.

* Most people have some desire for ordered patterns so lots of people will do things like avoid cracks in tiles because it is satisfying. Not a disorder until you absolutely must not step on a crack or it will cause you to need to go through some ritual.

> but I've never thought that meant there was anything "wrong" with me

That's a good dividing line between 'actual pathology' as you say and normal experiences.

I always felt like something was wrong with me. From childhood, I was different. Never could put my finger on it, but a lifetime of experiences gave me some intuition that I was different, in a bad way, and that was just my lot in life. Fast forward to my early thirties, and after being fired from every job I'd ever had I reached rock bottom. I was a 'gifted' student, elite engineering degree and a law degree, but just consistently failed to live up to my potential. I finally dragged myself in to a therapist's office because I had intense and intrusive suicidal thoughts nearly all day every day for months. I didn't want to kill myself, I had a lot to live for, but some part of my subconscious was absolutely fed up and done. I never once thought that I was someone who could have ADHD. I was bright, I had a decent academic record, and I had gotten several high paying jobs. ADHD was about jittery kids or losers working menial jobs, not me. By the end of my first session, as my therapist would later reveal, he knew I had ADHD. It took some time for me to accept it. But once I did, and got on board with treatment including medication and regular therapy, my life changed. It made so much sense in retrospect. I did have a good academic record, but that's only because I could hyperfocus and ace exams - I never did homework on a regular basis from grade school through grad school. I wanted to, but never did. I did get high paying jobs, but would wind up being fired a year or two later because getting a job is exciting, keeping a job and, you know, doing a job, is boring. At least to a part of my ADHD brain it is. Everyone experienced boredom, but how many people let that boredom get them to a point of being unemployed when they have a wife and children to support? It's not a choice.

Frankly, I'm lucky that I happened to meet the right therapist at the right time that recognized the ADHD that was causing so much turmoil in my life, and I am forever grateful because I truly believe that without realizing it was ADHD and treating it, my children would have lost a father. ADHD is real, and it's serious. I ask you and everyone reading this who doubts ADHD is real to please try to find some empathy.

How did you find the right therapist? If you're in the Bay, do you mind dropping the name of them? Email on my profile if you prefer. I resonate with literally everything you're saying, I just don't have kids.

> At what point does difficulty motivating yourself to do something unpleasant become an actual pathology?

At the point where it causes a significant and ongoing problem in your personal or professional life.

"Lost track of time and wasted half an hour on HN" - Not a pathology.

"Wasted half a week on HN and was unable to stop even though you really, truly wanted to get your work done?" - Maybe pathology.

"Did that most weeks for months on end." - See a doctor.

There's a clinical psychologist that describes it as a disorder in large part characterized by a lack of executive function. In other words, you can't necessarily make yourself do what you're supposed to unless you have a desire to do it. So your desires tend to take priority or distract from your wants or needs. And obviously like all disorders it has to be debilitating to some degree–usually interference with two or more areas in your life (home, professional, school, etc.).

ADHD is tough to understand and appreciate for those who don't have it for this exact reason. Everyone experiences all most of the ADHD (except the interal chatter arising from your Default Mode Network / Task Positive Network anti-correlation being broken), so they often dismiss it or say "but everyone has a little ADHD" or "everyone feels that way".

The difference is in frequency, severity and duration.

In my case I've spent north of 1000 nights in the past 5 years doing the dishes at either 1am, 2am or 3am because I cannot stop doing what I want to do and direct my attention towards the dishes until it's the absolute last possible minute of the day. Often then it's just so painful to me to do it. It nearly caused my marriage to break down because I would leave them undone. No matter what I try I can't get myself to do them straight after dinner. Night after night I would wonder to myself "I wish I knew what this was called". I didn't seriously think there was something wrong with me, I just couldn't understand why I couldn't , despite my best efforts, get myself to behave in a different way.

And that's just one facet of my life and how it affects me. There's more and they just pile up. When you add it all up together and you consider pound for pound how I'm doing you start to appreciate the frequency, severity and duration that can be considered pathological.

It presents pretty differently across people, but by and large a diagnosis is a huge penny dropping revelation.

> Are there really people out there who can cheerfully do things they don't want to do?

It isn't about cheerfully doing it, it is about most menial tasks being impossible to do without days or even weeks of mental preparation and/or lifestyle changes. Imagine filling out a paper form causing as much anxiety as proposing to the love of your life and you understand better what ADHD feels like. You can learn to live with that, but if you have it you are pretty sure not everyone feels like that all the time.

There's been a few good responses, but for me, I saw a doctor when I was able to eliminate anything that would arguably be a distraction when I needed to finish my 95% finished essay 2 years ago. The subject was literally Byzantine in nature and all the hard parts were done, but If I recall, I just needed to do a tiny edit or summary to wrap it up. This was a final project worth around 30% of the grade. What might happen once you eliminate all ways to distract yourself, all anxieties etc.. is that you just get it done, because the value proposition is enough to stimulate you to do it. For me? I fell asleep, and idk how I did on it. What happens about a month into any new job? I gradually show up later and later. What happens 6 months into any job? I lose it.

I couldn't possibly read your comment as insensitive, because the opposite is on my mind every day. I fundamentally don't understand how people can consistently do most types of software engineering or any other kinds of boring office job, day in day out, because it's their job. It's so foreign, as to be a completely alien idea.

It's actually a good question. I think the best insight I got on the topic was reading an article once about how to tell the difference between a child being gifted or having ADHD or being both. This is difficult since they often have similar traits, especially having a hard time completing certain menial tasks. The difference is that a gifted child without ADHD can complete these tasks if he likes the teacher giving him the task, while the one with ADHD will still struggle to complete it despite really wanting to do so.

Do you have a link to this article? Asking for a friend (no, really)

It's more with the severity of it.

When it comes to tasks that you don't "want to do", it could be really ANY other task than what you want to do.

Imagine that you have some homework that's due, a work deadline that's absolutely imperative that you can meet, bills that have to be paid, or important call with your doctor - for the discussion, think of any task that's really important that you do.

Now imagine that your brain fees like...looking up some trivial thing on wikipedia, or similar. Just silly stuff that has no real importance - and is orders of magnitudes less important than what you need to focus on.

Now imagine that your brain and body is fighting all it can, for you to continue with the trivial task, and blocking the important stuff. You almost go into a trance.

You might be able to detach from some trivial task for a minute or two, only to get sucked back in.

Because it's such an invisible condition, it's hard to really know how bad it is. In the same way that people that have never suffered from migraines, might believe that migraines must be regular headaches, and that people that suffer from migraines might just be on the softer side.

To me this makes more sense in conjunction with hyperfocus.

I find it hard to focus on things unless I'm hyperfocused, partly because I'm distracted by the thing I'm hyperfocused on.

I also tend to always be hyperfocused on one thing at a time for a while and then switch over to a new thing.

Things that I may not like or want to do kind of melt away when I'm hyperfocused on something, and feel like they're amplified when I'm not.

I didn't get diagnosed until my late 20s, so I feel like I can articulate some of the differences. One of the things that contributed to that is that I am incredibly lucky in that math, statistics, and computer science are the things that most capture my interest. It never really manifested itself in my school work until now, graduate school, where things become a lot more open-ended and self-driven. I need incremental goals or I start to flounder.

I went to the doctor for depression, but she said that it seemed a lot like diagnosed ADHD (which often manifests itself as depression because of dissatisfaction with many aspects of your behavior). Before I start that I'd like to say something that the psychologist that evaluated me told me. The key aspect to ADHD is the dysfunction it causes. I'm not a psychologist or a doctor, but basically the thing that clearly signifies ADHD is the severity of the negative impacts in different aspects of your life.

For me some things that I always hated about myself and frustrated the hell out of other people:

She would ask me to do things and I'd completely forget about them after she left for the day. She'd call on her way home and it would immediately trigger my list of things I was supposed to do. I'd stress out and rush to do them before she got home. It wasn't that I didn't want to do them, or that I didn't care enough to do them. It was that they literally never entered my mind without an external trigger. I tried writing todo lists, and I would just not look at the todo list.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, if something is interesting, I can literally sit in my chair for 20 hours without eating or drinking. If someone tries to talk to me, I literally do not hear them. I don't ignore them, I just don't hear it. This was a lot worse when I lived by myself. I would regularly sit down in the morning to do something and find that I'd completely forgotten to go to class, eat, drink anything, and that it was now 7 in the evening. If I was lucky, then the original task would be complete or almost complete. If I wasn't then I'd spent the last 10 hours weighing the pros and cons of various ways to properly install python on a fresh computer (venv, virtualenv with or without virtualenvwrapper, etc.). For my uses, it literally does not matter, but I've still done this multiple times. I've spent way too much time responding, in excruciating detail, to Reddit/HN comments when all I'm going to get out of it is, "Cool. Thanks."

I know this can sound like standard procrastination, but I absolutely don't want to do these things. I have been in so many arguments about forgotten obligations or accusations of ignoring someone. It's so frustrating. You start to see yourself as someone that's unreliable and incorporate being forgetful and flighty into your own self image.

I and my wife were pretty skeptical at first, but, after my first month on medication, I took care of so many important things that I just hadn't done for years (like applying for the master's degree that I earned as part of my PhD) and got more done on my dissertation than I had in the last four. It's still not easy, but it makes it easier for me. I can actually remember to look at all the lists I make now, and I can stop myself after 10 minutes of an obsessive rabbit hole now instead of after 10 hours when my bladder is bursting.

It's not about cheerfully being able to do things we don't want to do. It's about actually remembering to do them. ADHD isn't about not being able to pay attention to anything. It's about not being able to regulate the things you pay attention to. It's about being able to even out the deeply obsessive blessing/curse attention black hole that is your natural state.

Also, as you can see. It makes me a terrible editor. I missed several parts where I'd taken out the part introducing my wife into the story, and I made a quite a few silly mistakes. It should read "undiagnosed ADHD" not "diagnosed ADHD".

Saving this comment as a reminder of how my brain works.

No.

You see "hard time focusing" and you think "I, too, find it difficult to focus on things I don't like"

But: you do it. When we say "hard time focusing" we mean things like, oh, driving an unregistered and uninsured car for six months because the idea of going to the DMV is, uhh.

Look it's hard to explain. But it's an inability and one that significantly interferes with living our lives, on a regular basis.

> At what point does difficulty motivating yourself to do something unpleasant become an actual pathology?

For me it was when I actually could motivate myself to do it... and then still didn't because of shiny external stimuli and daydreams. And a lot of "I know you're really upset, so I promise I'll get my act together and next time that you expect me to... wait... what were we talking about?"

> I thought everybody felt that way.

Does it incur any impact on your life? Was it a thought or a challenge?

Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? We have to ban accounts that do that.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.

Your comment promped me to read your previous input to this forum, before flagging it. Please (re?) read the guidelines before making this type of comment.

But more importantly for the sake of informed discussion, please elaborate?

>Fuck commandlinefan because...

I'm not gonna lie, OP seemed pretty reasonable here. Why do you feel so angry about his comments? They seemed to come from a place of curiosity and understanding...

I think many with ADHD have been mentally abused by people thinking that they were just lazy. I was diagnosed with depression most of my life due to people like that, then suddenly medication magically fixed almost all of those problems and I haven't been that depressed since I got diagnosed and got the medicine.

I'm not saying that we should attack people like that, I'm just explaining why it would induce anger in some so you'd understand better where he comes from.