The problem is that most jobs and almost all schooling is flat out incompatible with being an easily distractible person. I think it's just a phenotype that doesn't work well in the traditional professional environment.
And yes, Adderall will help you focus on boring shit.
[Source: I'm clinically diagnosed with ADHD)
Or I would have hobbies or activities I would want to do. But would end up in the same cycle.
Then at the end of my weekend I would feel down because I spent the entire past two days constantly task switching with zero enjoyment.
But on Adderall I am able to sit down and enjoy the first game / hobby I pick.
I found an exceptional game last weekend that I played through. I laughed, I cried, it was fantastic. I spent a lot of my free time on it, and beat it.
This weekend I was just a little disappointed I couldn’t wipe my brain and play that game again.
I don’t think that’s depression, it’s just being unwilling to put up with a game or activity being boring.
It's also a game you probably should go into not knowing hardly anything about it ahead of time. I've already accidentally spoiled myself on a few things looking for help getting past a couple parts that I wish I didn't know about ahead of time.
What's the game you played that you wish you could wipe your memory of and play it again?
It’s also fun because the source code is all in Python and just sitting there in the folders, which has made me interested in making something similar. Now to just write an interesting branching story…
Since I enjoyed it so much I’ve been branching out and trying games I wouldn’t have considered before, and just downloaded Vampire Coteries of New York.
And ADHD people in my experience aren't worse at activities that do require what I would call simple willpower. Things like race cycling or endurance running, where persisting through discomfort and even pain are necessary.
I'm really happy that ADHD has had such a limited impact on your life experience. However I think your statement is an unfair oversimplification & reads like a dismissal, whether you meant it to read that way or not. Very minor distinction, but phrasing it as 'most of MY ADHD' would have been much better.
So no, it’s not only with boring task. I’d love to. My life would be far easier.
Heck I can have hyper focus on boring task because it’s relaxing.
So no. It’s not only will with boring task :(
The biggest hurdle for me, is management's expectation that I be passably as competent at staying on top of multiple async communication threads, and being on time for things.
Even if I say up front that "I will try and likely fail at following up with things that require me to check back in on things that may or may not have changed in a while, or remembering to respond to people." They eventually end up saying "I'm able to be in n meetings a week and manage k jira boards concurrently, surely you should be able to do x"
Nope. DM me or tag me if something needs a new look.
Give me a challenge, AND all the tools to conquer it, and I can get it done. Give me a lab environment with the servers and scripting tools I need to automate something, and I'll put it all together.
Hamstring me by not giving me the tools I need, make the barrier to accomplishment too much, or give me really boring work without some kind of clear path, and I lock up.
I can play Factorio for 12 hours a day when I get my yearly mood for it. When I am assigned a cool automation task with the tools available to BUILD it, I can run with it. Too bad my current job, a multi-billion dollar software company, can't spare me a few VM licenses without me jumping through hoops.
Oh, and Adderall can help, but it makes me so anxious and even more impulsive once I'm done with work.
I'd like to point out that, at least in the first two cases, the workplace is hoping you will lock up and the system is functioning as intended. This isn't a shortcoming on your part.
If you still feel compelled to be productive in those instances then a fun game is to dig into your employer's policy/security/IT hoops in order to identify the hidden workarounds in which you can get stuff done.
My phone works almost in a pull-only manner - not many things are allowed to cause push notifications there. I can't imagine being able to get through my life with so many things constantly begging for my attention. I have to use ad-blockers and disable JS by default to browse the Web and keep some sanity. Neurotypicals don't seem to mind.
I never considered my self suffering from it, my quirks were individual parts of my character!
But now I highly suspect I have it.
I lose focus all the time. For example, Going from doing laundry, to gathering dishes, and bringing out trash without finishing one of them. Or I can't read long articles with topics that are important for me but don't tickle one of my interests. I've started reading countless books for only 20-30 pages.
Also, it feels impossible to plan for/estimate longer time periods and I'm constantly bouncing my knee or stimm in another way.
I started freelancing because I couldn't get to work at the same time every day and even now I just work 5-10h a week, because my lack of motivation for repeating tasks.
I thought, well it's biological, I can't have it, my relatives are all normal... But wait, my mother did impulse purchases all the time, was switching jobs constantly and even retired with 50, because of that.
Whelp, guess I should get a psychiatrist soon...
Anyways definitely seek a specialist, there are many options and even if it's not ADHD they've got access to a lot of really great resources to cope with what you do struggle with.
This is one of the reasons why I will refuse a job title that is greater than senior engineer. I know in my heart of hearts that being a staff or lead engineer will be bad for everyone. I'm not even particularly stellar as a senior engineer, but I can at least sustain it.
Reaching this point can be astonishing to the undiagnosed ADHD programmer. For the first handful of years into their career, their shortcomings were either dismissed as inexperience or covered for by coping mechanisms. In my experience, the coping mechanisms start to buckle once you're a senior level programmer.
Get a diagnosis ASAP if you suspect you have ADHD. Medication and other things can definitely help. I also think there's nothing wrong in figuring out just how much mental capacity you have to give to your job and not exceeding it, even if that means rejecting prestige.
It's frustrating and makes me often give up. I work in Ops, so it's not a day to day thing for me to write any code. Thankfully with all of the fires and different things to work on in Ops I think it's a very good fit for an ADHD person.
Ops I think can be great for this personality type. But it really depends on the exact ops job, and the person in question. Some ops jobs are more flexible than others, and I think flexibility is really what matters the most. I was an extremely productive sysadmin when I did that as my dayjob, but if you asked me to show up during any block of 8 contiguous hours we were going to have a bad time. If I could randomly show up at 3am to hack out that task I just remembered it was a great fit, since you'd get far more work out of me overall.
Debuggers or things like Sentry and Honeycomb. Basically everything that gives me runtime insights to the software.
Using static types and tests to ensure every dumb change I make gets caught somewhere.
Yes, I'm rejecting well paying jobs constantly because I couldn't bear to be employed and working 40h a week again.
We think differently, and tend to value others with similar "differences". The trick is avoiding an ADHD/Aspie monoculture. You need some people around to do the important, but less shiny stuff.
Can't concentrate on boring things - surely that's normal? It feels like they're casting the ADHD net wider and wider and from reading the internet I'm starting to question whether my behavior fits into the ADHD category. And part of me wants it to so that I have a label that explains and excuses me.
But how do you separate it from this boring hyper-specialized world of bullshit jobs? As someone said it's no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. I love Doug Stanhope's take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKyMvjPJdtM
It's not that I think "Well, this is boring, I won't read it!"
It's like I want to really read it, suddenly I'm on Twitter, Reddit, 9gag, IG, etc.
It happens in a matter of seconds to minutes and I don't even remember how I opened an app/website.
I can dampen this effect a bit by blocking websites and uninstalling apps, but then I zone out in my mind and don't remember what I read.
I'm not saying ADHD isn't real, just that environment-induced distractions aren't it.
The idea being, social media and the like became so bad in the last 10 years, that there is no functional difference between inherited ADHD and acquired ADHD. The only difference is that the acquired one might be curable.
However, at that point it becomes hard to do anything else before finishing that book...
Neurotypical people can get stuff done even if it's of no interest to them or if they find it boring because it has to get done regardless. I've certainly had the experience of assigning something to an intern or trainee that's super boring and they just knock it out, even though they could care less about the subject of task itself.
People with ADHD have lots of difficulty with tasks or subjects that are not of interest to them, which leads to procrastination. They often wait until the last minute (often it's those people who say "I'm good under pressure"); if the consequences are serious enough, that causes them to focus on getting the task done. Pulling an all-nighter to get that report done doesn't scale and it means something else important isn't being attended to.
Dr. Andrew Huberman (Stanford neuroscientist) has an excellent podcast about ADHD [1].
[1]: https://hubermanlab.com/adhd-and-how-anyone-can-improve-thei...
It not only doesn't scale - you develop a resistance. Because you managed to pull it off with that all-nighter, next time you won't leave it for the last 12 hours, but the last 8 hours instead. If you still manage to do it, then next time you won't be able to get to it until it's 6 hours till the deadline. And at some point you start to fail. At the beginning it's not a big deal, as you were always delivering and everybody fails sometimes - but that only makes you even more resistant and eventually, it becomes the norm. You fail hard.
Of course this is simplified a lot - it's not "next time", it may happen over the course of several years, get better and worse periodically, etc. But that's the trend anyway.
It's easy - most people can just decide that they're going to do the work they need to do even if they loath it. They won't be happy, but they'll do it. They may even actually be happy if they're compensated enough.
Other people cry into their pillow hating themselves because they can't manage to do simple things they have to do just because they aren't interesting enough, even though they try hard and may wreck their lives by not doing them.
Not if it happens 24/7 across work, hobbies, and remembering to go to bed on time. (This is about struggling at work with ADHD, but it's more often possible to succeed at work and neglect everything else.)
And "bullshit jobs" are a fake concept. Just because a guy wrote a book saying he doesn't understand a job doesn't mean it's not useful to someone.
I dropped out of high school after moving from private to public, since it was utterly worthless and a waste of my time. I logically knew I could just stick it out another 2 years and party, but I literally could not force myself to wake up to do it. I contemplated suicide over this, so it's not something I was taking lightly at the time or not caring about. I ended up just taking the GED one day on a whim.
Then I went on to have a somewhat successful career. It took me years to realize/internalize I'm not just lazy - something is different about me. Very few folks in my peer group could keep up with my work ethic once I found things I was interested in. For me this doesn't mean I only do the "fun stuff" - it means I need to see results of my effort, and those results need to be meaningful. I also need to work on things with a definitive "end" to them - not a never-ending project that won't see a single real-world result for years.
I describe it to folks that I am literally allergic to busy-work. You could offer me a million dollars to do some busy-work task for a month and I already know I'd fail at it before I started.
If the consequences or rewards are large and immediate enough you can kind of "push through" it - but if it's some concept of a future consequence or reward the brain simply decides it does not care.
This is all pretty difficult to nail down I think because I'm simply describing what other folks have certainly felt to some degree. The difference is I don't know many folks who will trade weeks of mental anguish and lots of money to avoid doing a 30 minute task.
That said, lazy often looks pretty damn similar and it's easy to have an excuse on hand.
You nailed it here - anticipation for results is one of the greatest motivations I can have. If it's not there, things get really hard. I don't think it can be sufficient on its own, but it sure needs to be there.
That said - some kinds of what's essentially busy-work can be pretty rewarding in this regard too. There were periods where I caught myself doing plenty of non-creative and rather trivial distro packaging at work just because it was providing me with a quick feedback loop. It wasn't interesting or challenging, but a meaningful chunk of work could be completed before I got bored and seeing it done was rewarding enough to keep going.
Normal people can concentrate if you pay them money to concentrate. ADHD people can't concentrate with such incentives, they are people who require intrinsic motivation to concentrate and money/other rewards aren't enough.
Every single one of those books hit a point where they stopped being something I could read. I don't know why. The subject still interests me and there's more to learn. I know I should finish them, I consciously want to finish them. And every time I think about sitting down to finish them, my mind will come up with a thousand other things for me to do instead. And it's not just all "interesting" vs "not interesting". My mind will decide that cleaning the dishes, filling up the car or sorting through and deleting all the emails older than 7 years is something more important than finishing any of those books. I assure you the topics of those books are vastly more interesting to me than any of those chores. But for some reason my lizard brain has ranked reading and finishing those books below even the chores.
I finished one such book in the last 10 years of my career, and I only did that because I made finishing it part of a annual goal / metric. And even then it took until the last month of the year and I had to dedicate a fixed time every single day where I forced myself to sit down and read a fixed number of pages no matter what.
That's more than just "can't concentrate on boring things". Those topics aren't boring. Reading isn't boring. The chores my head will convince me to do before reading those books are more boring. And yet those books will remain unread, at least for years, and if past performance is indicative of future behavior, for the rest of my life, because it's impossible for me to sustain the amount of focus and sheer determination it would take to finish those books they way I finished one. Unless and until my brain moves them up the "importance" list, they will forever remain yet another thing I've started and never finished.
And it's not just a "maybe you just find reading non-fiction really boring", it happens with other forms of media content. John Winans (John's Basement on YouTube) has a series he's been doing on building a Z80 computer from the board design up. Massively interesting stuff to me, a subject that I've always found fascinating, having grown up after the home brew computer generation and never having gone into hardware even though I really want to know more about it. The original video dropped over a year ago, and at first I was following with each new video and then one day my head decided this was no longer a priority. He's made 54 videos so far and I've made it through 22 of them. I have a tab with the playlist open. That tab has been open since last year, and the last one I watched was 2 months ago, before that it had been another 3 months and 3 more before that. When I finished the last video, I wondered why it had taken me so long, I was really enjoying it. And then I have't been able to get my head to want to start the next one. I've watched multiples of hours since of other videos. I've had days when I was bored or sick and just watching whatever dumb content caught my eye. The list was there there the whole time, and I never could get myself to keep going. Again, I can't explain why, there's nothing boring about the videos, they're certainly more engaging than a lot of content I've watched since I watched the last one. But the list sits there, more videos get added, and the longer I go, the more the act of watching the video feels like an insurmountable boring chore that will take everything I have to sit down and do, even if I know I'll enjoy the content the entire time.
I've mentioned here before I started ADHD meds for myself after the pandemic started. That was the fist time in decades of living that I had ever been able to think about something I wanted to get done, decide I was going to do it and then do it without going through a process of fighting myself into it. It's probably the only reason I've watched the 3-4 videos I did manage after my brain decided they weren't a priority any more.
And all of that self struggle and fighting is for things that I don't consciously think are dull or boring. It's worse for things I do. Imagine a task that you have to physically and mentally psych yourself up for. Maybe it's going to the doctor for a physical, maybe it's visiting family on holidays because they're party green and you're party yellow, maybe you're trying to get in shape and it's going to gym or waking up at 5 AM to go for a run. Call this your big hurdle. Now think of all the things in your daily life that are "boring". Making food, washing dishes, putting them away, washing laundry, putting that away, filling out TPS reports, documenting changes, making appointments, cleaning rooms, paying bills. Imagine that the same effort and energy you have to put into your hurdle also has to go into any mundane "boring" task that isn't in the top 3 things you'd rather be doing right this moment. That's so much more than "can't concentrate on boring things", and so much more exhausting.
I'm undiagnosed, but have already made an appointment after reading a similar topic on reddit earlier this month [1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/z1usgt/advi...
Or if you think about your thoughts calmly, at a distance, what pops up?
When you try to imagine let's say a chess board and the pieces on it, does it look clear to you? Or do you have difficulties controlling your internal visualization?
(if anyone also with ADHD wants to answer, feel free)
When I try to phantasize something to calm myself down for sleep, I often end up thinking about something embarrassing or hurtful from the past. I can't control it, it just happens and when I notice it, I alread ruminates some time about it and don't know how I got there.
But besides that, I don't have problems to visualize things in my mind. I just have to do it consciously, most of the time I think in concepts.
However, I’m not sure if this is an experience exclusive to ADHD.
Statistically that seems rather unlikely, so I wonder if people are being over-diagnosed?
Over the years it's turning out my entire since-college friend group have some sort of mental health disorder that's been missed for 30 years.
If I found a team with a couple other ADHD folks that seemed to be thriving that company would be top of my list for sure.
Some industries and workplaces are better suited for ADHD sufferers as well. My ADHD got in the way in most of my other jobs before I became a developer, where it's actually sort of an asset. Perhaps OPs job attracts a certain type.
Probably because ADHD people have trouble getting along with neurotypicals
In our defense, normies suck.
I have a very small circle of friends and they're all kinda... special. So for me such behaviour feels normal.
One side is motivated to be open and communicative and the other is motivated to be insular and closed.
I know the "us vs them" mentality isn't healthy but I've lived an entire lifetime in a societal warzone and I refuse to just roll over and pretend that I'm not part of a socially marginalized group.
NTs are the problem. Society's intolerance is the problem. NDs aren't the problem, NTs are.
> straight people are the problem for not wanting to date gay or trans people
It just is. Everyone has challenges, people with ADHD have challenges that can be particularly difficult for sure, but blaming others for not being like you is and telling them it's their responsibility is the same thing just reversed. It doesn't improve your situation.
Society forces everybody to interact socially. In a society where everybody is expected to date anybody, forcing somebody to date is still abhorrent.
No, the premise you require in order for me to be wrong is that society forces this on everyone, but I live with a woman who has crippling anxiety to the point of being on disability for it and I can tell you that's emphatically untrue. Even SSI related meetings happen over the phone because of her disability.
Those with ADHD have many challenges that other people don't have, but asking the whole of society to suddenly be able to understand them better is like asking all women to be start preferring short men. It just is, and those with these challenges will have to learn how to deal with them (and you see posters on HN all the time talking about how they've done just that). For those for which it's truly debilitating, we need to make sure they don't fall through the cracks (and for the most part we do this).
It's as much a part of reality as the person with 2 missing thumbs having more difficulty grasping things than someone with both thumbs.
Yes, society changed to help people as much as possible. With changes your living-mate can interact with society as well as possible. Sure, the missing thumbs are disabling, but somebody insisting on hand-written instead of typed notes is an asshole. At some point, people who ignore a disability or disorder because of general ignorance or worse are the problem.
I mean, I get it. Every time I point out other groups have challenges too, you're going to attempt to explain why those challenges are not relevant to this conversation.
And when you're done with this conversation, you'll be in the same spot you were before.
That might be a lot percentage-wise, but it's also a really small number of people to draw conclusions from, isn't it?
I mean, if you look at early 20th century jobs most similar to office jobs today, they look from the outside, and are depicted by contemporary media, as crushingly dull—but, they had the benefit of also being highly repetitive, stack of papers to go through, do the thing you do, put it in the outbox, move to the next stack. Now everything's every bit as dull, but we're also expected to juggle a much broader set of not-terribly-similar tasks, often taking on little bits of what used to be the jobs of entire, dedicated humans before computerization "freed" companies to smear those tasks across their entire workforce. That seems like a recipe for failure for someone with ADHD-brain.
However, the term does come up with other meanings. The international narcotics control board (UN) deems opioids as narcotics, but also cannabis and cocaine: https://www.incb.org/incb/en/narcotic-drugs/index.html
But typically amphetamines are not classified as narcotics, even though you could argue they are based on dictionary definitions, i.e. "a drug (such as marijuana or LSD) subject to restriction similar to that of addictive narcotics whether physiologically addictive and narcotic or not" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/narcotic
Maybe a mistranslation or you're conflating narcotic with "controlled substance"?
And unnecessary specific example goes here. In russian language, every (99% of the time, illegal) drug that is associated with abuse is called a narcotic (including cannabis). There isn't a russian language equivalent word for "drugs", "drugs" is a synonym for "narcotics" there. There is "medicine" and there is "drug"/"narcotic".
Which is why I saw, more than once, middle schoolers there in an English language class giggling once they saw a "drug store" sign in a photo, as it led to the "hehe, why do they sell drugs/narcotics at pharmacies there, US is a weird place huh" jokes.
As school kids we had the same thought about 'drug stores' - and I even found it amusing when a Pharmacy/beauty shop opened called 'Superdrug' - seemed such an odd turn of phrase to someone who had only heard of drugs as the illegal and dangerous things...
Not that a drug being scheduled is proof of harm in and of itself, but it seems like many people (particularly on HN for some reason) are in heavy denial that they are addicted to amphetamines and that it maybe isn't such a healthy way to solve behavioral problems. If you're an adult then fine you can make your own decisions, but the fact that people give amphetamines to children because they cant focus in school seems very sick to me.
You've coasted into the territory of self-appointed expert on ADHD. To me, this reads as "I have no idea what ADHD is like or how to manage it. My mind can't imagine that other minds may work differently, so what would work for my mind must work for all the other minds."
> behavior problems
Whether or not you're aware of it, that's an ableist dog whistle for "why don't you just stop being _______?" usually followed by a JBP reading list about lobsters and room cleaning.
Yes there is. You're mischaracterizing a disorder and thereby marginalizing people who suffer from it while making normative statements about it despite not being an expert. That's offensive.
> I take adderall sometimes when I have a lot to do
Are you saying that you have a diagnosis? Or are you just taking it illegally / in a country with lax drug laws? It's a prescription medication that's currently in short supply, so unless your healthcare provider is proscribing it for you you're really being a douche canoe.
By all means try without it first but it's going to cost you time or money you may not have. With any luck future gains in understanding the human brain will lead to medication that has the pros without the cons but today we have to use the tools we have.
Is this a generational thing? I mean, are these people in their early 20s? I'm in my 30s and would never say anything about my mental health in a phone call with a stranger unless my boss is bringing up this subject with me on a one-on-one.
That said, I still haven't brought it up with anyone at work because of the stigma around it. It's tiring pretending it's not a problem for me though.
I think you're right that it's a generational thing. More people know what it is, are less judgemental, or know they have it themselves. Also, a lot of people don't see it as about mental health in the same way e.g. depression or BPD is. (Unsure if that's what you were implying though!)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8042533/
And of course, there is the issue of drug-seeking - for increased concentration and focus, for fun, or some other reason. And many doctors suspect patients of drug-seeking. Symptoms can easily be faked and are difficult to spot.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3173757/ https://healthland.time.com/2011/04/28/faking-it-why-nearly-...
"Overdiagnosis is defined here as occurring when a person is clinically diagnosed with a condition, but the net effect of the diagnosis is unfavorable. Misdiagnosis (when a child is incorrectly labeled with an ADHD diagnosis instead of an alternative condition) and false-positive diagnosis (when a subsequent clinical encounter reveals a wrong initial diagnosis) are not the focus of this article."
Unfavorable here is:
- medication can have side effects
- it might be used as an excuse to stop trying/caring
- there's a social stigma
2) Your second link provides no evidence of drug-seeking behaviour. It only claims that it's possibly to get a high score on an ADHD checklist with fake answers. It makes no claim that people without ADHD actually seek an ADHD diagnosis to get prescription stimulants.
Note that I'm not claiming they aren't, just that this article doesn't support that claim.
3) The third link is just an article on time with the headline that 1 in 4 adults who seek treatment are faking it. I can't find any reference to this number in the article body, nor a link to the paper.
I think this is the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46282569_Effectiven...
Color me surprised: this one does actually support the claim that 22% are exaggerating symptoms. There are of course some limitations to this study. And it makes no claim that those that are exaggerating symptoms are doing so to seek medication (again, I'm not claiming otherwise).
The good news is that there are methods to identify these patients. And given that this study is from 2010, I hope that those are in use to aid with (mis)diagnosis today.
Mitchdoogle, do you have any other evidence to support your claim of overdiagnosing and drug-seeking? In the future, please take the time to read through the articles you link. And please take the time to read the last paper before you reply.
... So if, let's say, the existing treatments for some disease are bad and often make the problem worse, then the people designing this terminology consider the problem to be "the disease is diagnosed too often" rather than "doctors treat this disease badly"? And the solution to be "avoid diagnosing this" instead of "change the way doctors treat or don't treat it once it's diagnosed"? I mean, that's what the term seems to imply.
Wiki agrees with you... and with me:
> Overdiagnosis occurs when a disease is diagnosed correctly, but the diagnosis is irrelevant. A correct diagnosis may be irrelevant because treatment for the disease is not available, not needed, or not wanted. Some people contend that the term "overdiagnosis" is inappropriate, and that "overtreatment" is more representative of the phenomenon.
>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8042533/
That's for children and adolescents just fyi
So far I've had "nice to meet you" calls with six or seven of the people on this team. And nearly half of them mentioned "by the way, I have ADHD, just so you know."
And since I share so many characteristics with these individuals, now _I'm_ wondering if I have ADHD. Certainly the never-ending Instagram ads want me to think so. Or is this becoming a blanket term for "I'm easily excited and a bit weird"?
Personally, I went almost my whole life with mild depression and didn't even know it - I just thought depression happened to other people, and that what I felt was normal. Then when a doctor gave me the questionnaire during a routine checkup and put me on SSRIs, it was basically life-changing.
So I wonder if this is another case of that?