lisdexamfetamine is literally a stimulant.

Which has a sedative effect on a dopamine-craving brain of a person with ADHD. ;)

Also anxiolytic. And seeing as anxiety disorders are highly prevalent among people with ADHD, and untreated anxiety can really mess with your life, maybe people should stop stigmatising psychostimulants so much.

Those working environments already exist, but maybe you are not interested in them. People with ADHD are advised to do jobs that require one to be on their feet. Sitting behind a desk is unfortunately one of the worst things you can do if you cannot focus easily.

I mean you can absolutely work behind a desk in certain setups where you dont have that many distractions. Also tech jobs are becoming increasingly less desirable and i also encourage people to consider alternatives.

Easier said than done. Outside of sales, what job on your feet pays 200k+/year?

Hate sitting at a desk, been diagnosed, and not into sales.

Not trying to be combative, would love suggestions. I partly want to go bar-tend or be a plumber, but the wage isn’t there.

I should have gone into medicine, but it’s too late for that at this stage.

Exactly. Doing all my life software development, since I was kid. I don't have any other skills. I have been considering becoming a cook, or going into the military tho. But it's hard to do when your personality wired around computers, and you have to change it.

Same issue, except the cook part. The only viable option is building a product in a niche not yet bastardised by corporate. There are some out there just need to dig hard.

I feel it. I’ve been looking at the FBI. It would still be 80% desk work, but better than 100%.

Wage is still a step back and I’m nearing the age cut-off, so would have to jump on it pretty soon.

I would love to get in with the CIA. Truly. But I made some bad choices when I was younger so I am disqualified out the gate. Same with FBI.

While being a plumber may not pay much, owning a plumbing company could.

Owning a plumber company does not translate into work on the foot. Probably it will be sitting job

I imagine a high quality plumbing company requires someone inspect the quality of work, discussing with potential clients in person, and other such non desk work. Perhaps even getting one’s own hands “dirty”.

This is what the three people I have known that owned umbing companies did. They had someone they paid to handle a lot of the simple repetitive computer stuff (probably could even automate a lot of that now but I don't think they were people who would have though about that) and they would hop to different current job sites to check on work being done, check in with contractors to make sure work is good and employees are good, go to potential new job sites to meet with contractors or home owners, etc.

Yep.

Spent a summer working in a blue collar fashion for a small company. It was fun-ish, but the owner was at a desk all day.

Actually, it does still involve lots of on your feet work. The owner is more often going between current sites to check work that's being done, going to new potential sites to talk with contractors and/or potential customers, etc. Yes, they also are handling the business end but for a plumbing company that doesn't mean you are at a computer all day, there isnt enough atuff for you yo donin that aspext to keep you busy.

You could get a standing desk.

Have one. Doesn’t solve the problem. I need to move and context switch (ideally).

I got involved in myltiple geoups at work. I support several of them with the same domain expertise, but a few others are related or even unrelated donains. I write software for several of them. I don't wfh so this involves walking between areas or buildings on the campus to be with those groups. The complete context switch does help. It is all I had for many years. But Vyvanse has helped a lot too.

Running restaurants was GREAT for this but it was the abolute fucking worst ever. Lol

Management worked for me for a while. I'd sit on my ass all day and context switch via email, intra company phone and at desk convos.

Favorite job I ever had was managing this small country store gas station when I was like 19-21 years old. Also managing a coffee shop. If I could do one of those and make a real living wage and be able to save for retirement and life stuffs I would do that RIGHT now. But.... That ain't happening. So. I sit at my desk yelling at my code. Man it is so hard to get started each day though. Some days it takes a couple hours to really get going on my actual work. And it isn't for lack of trying. It's so infuriating, wearing, and disheartening.

It's a good thing that ADHD has nothing to do with "not being able to focus easily" then.

ADHD means "I don't choose what I focus on", which poses some management challenges, but in an environment where there's always a lot of various interesting tasks to choose from and a team of people where others can take care of things you end up neglecting because your focus has changed, one can still thrive sitting behind a desk. In fact, my ADHD barely ever takes me away from my desk (unless making it too cluttered to sit there and moving with a laptop to a couch counts).

Maintaining your health, house and relationships is not as easy though.

The cause of ADHD has not been confirmed yet, but it is generally claimed to be related to dopamine production and uptake.

I certainly had ADHD before being exposed to work environments. I've had my entire life. But it wasn't until I got my diagnosis, and started taking medication for it, that my square-peg of an existence began to fit in with the round-hole of reality.

Work environments have nothing to do with it for me. In fact, I love my job. Here, my ADHD is something of a benefit. I've excelled at everything I have found enjoyable, and have no qualms with working insane crunch on the stuff I like.

The key word there being like. If I don't like doing it, it's practically impossible for me to do. Or rather, if it's mundane or otherwise just "not interesting", I struggle. Strangely enough, I have an easier time accomplishing things I actively dislike doing. Not sure why.

It's like my body is controlled by an autopilot gone rogue, and the medication helps me override it.

For example, I have trouble going to the bathroom to take a piss. Not because of any phobia or anything. I just cant. Literally. I'll sit and squirm until I'm about to piss myself, and only then will I go to the bathroom. Been doing that since I was a little kid.

One way around it is to trick myself somehow, like by putting on a podcast, even though I'll only hear like 20 seconds of it. Couldn't do that as a kid, tho. Back then, I would wait until it became physically painful, because only then would my rogue autopilot allow me to go piss.

Doing laundry? Impossible. Vacuuming? No. Washing dishes? Well, now I have a dishwasher, but emptying it? No way.

That is, unless I take my medication (methylphenidate). It doesn't make mundane things any less mundane. It's still boring to brush my teeth and piss. It just makes it possible.

I didn't get my diagnosis until I was 28. My entire life I've been struggling with this. It's a primary factor in my lifelong battle with depression. It's lead me down a path of substance abuse ­— alcohol and cocaine in particular.

Despite all of this, I still second-guess myself on whether I truly have ADHD. What if I'm just a drug addict, and I just tricked a psychiatrist into giving me those sweet sweet drugs?

There are varying degrees of adhd, and indeed some require medication. My comment is more against having medication as a default solution. Obviously poorly phrased as it may have offended someone, and i apologise for that. Also thank you for your comment, it does help me better understand the topic.

Judging from experiences of mine and my friends, it may be less about "varying degrees of ADHD" and more about "varying degrees of coping mechanisms one have managed to develop through their life".

If you don't need to spend significant amounts of energy on daily basis to cope with your ADHD (successfully or not), do you have ADHD at all?

> do you have ADHD at all?

Certainly an interesting question. I was told by two people that have it that I do, and by a psychologist that i clearly don't. But I do know that I have symptoms. So the question is rather spot on. Unless you "you don't need to spend significant amounts of energy" do you actually have it? Can it be that the symptoms are caused by something else?

And that brings me back to my initial poorly worded comment. Whereby my worry is that some may be too happy to prescribe medication where its no needed, as opposed to focusing on removing the factors that cause so many people to have symptoms of various traits that they don't actually enjoy. I am just worried that we rely too much on sedating folks just to numb them as a first resort simply because our work patterns and habbits are toxic to varying degrees overall.

One important thing to note is that before you do your research, you have no idea how much the effort you need to spend compares to anyone else. For most of my life I was pretty sure that everyone's mind worked like mine.

Also, it's hard enough to get ADHD meds even if you genuinely need them to function that I'm not worried about people ending up overmedicated at all. I'd rather see meds becoming easier to obtain, since people who actually need them suffer from the obstacles meant to stop people who don't the most.