Problems with attention can come from many places, and from your post I can see you know that.
As for ADHD, the attention thing is not even close to the main thing, but it is unfortunately a main external observable (like hyperactivity), and so that why its so grossly misnamed.
Having ADHD means lots of things, like:
- You either get nothing done all day, manage 3 times 5 minutes of productivity, or do 40 hours of work in 5 wall clock hours.
- Doing on thing, you notice another “problem”, start working on that and then repeat, do that for 8 hours and all of a sudden you have started 20 things, and no progress on the thing you actually wanted to do (see this for a fictional but oh so accurate depiction)
- Constant thoughts, usually multiple streams at once, the only time this stops is in deep sleep (not while dreaming). Feels like sitting with a browser, 100+ tabs open, active tab changes randomly with short intervals, no add blocker, all videos auto-play and volume is on.
- Get unreasonably angry / annoyed for no reason. Quickly revert back to a good mood, for no reason.
- Absolutely no fucking patience with “normal” people.
- Can’t function around other peoples piles of stuff, but no problem with own piles or clutter.
- Task paralysis, for days and sometimes weeks or months. You know exactly what to do, you know exactly how to do it, and yet you cannot do it (feels a bit like anxiety). This is infuriating.
- Hyperfocus, if you can channel and direct it its almost a superpower, if not its just infuriating for everyone around (and a massive time sink, if you end up doing something irrelevant).
- See and hear EVERYTHING or oblivion, no middle ground (infuriating to others).
And so much more.
And in case anyone is wondering, yes I have ADHD or as my Psychiatrist said 5 minutes into our first meeting “I have no doubt you have raging ADHD, but lets do this properly and jump through all the diagnostic hoops”
As for tricks, I really don’t have any to offer, mainly because you really need to know for sure if you have ADHD or not.
If you do, medication is the way to go, and that has to be dialed in carefully. This can take a long time, I know of people who spend years trying different medications and combinations.
Once you get to that point, you now have a baseline for how ADHD impact you, and at this point you can start developing strategies for how to manage the ADHD controlled things.
Lastly living with ADHD is hard, it always hard, its always bone breaking hard, everything has to be fought for.
We know what we should do, we know how we should do it, but we can’t, constant regret, guilt and shame.
We act inappropriately (a lot), and we always know what we did, constant regret, guilt and shame.
To sum it up, ADHD is hard, its guilt, its regret, its shame, and NTs have no idea what lies behind those 4(3) letters (ADHD/ADD)
Nothing all day is rare, but 3*5minutes is very common. Working 40 hours a day would be easier if what I was doing was really interesting, but that hasn’t been the case in a little while.
I just can’t stay focused on doing one thing, although in my experience it’s more about getting sidelined than finding other problems to solve. I mean, can we all agree that looking something up on Wikipedia is a five-hour endeavour that starts with a work-related query and ends with reading something on industrialisation in the Two-Sicilies in the 1850s?
My constant thoughts seem a bit dull. OTOH, I literally have 190 tabs open in my browser as of now. And that’s after I removed some recently. But in practice I’m ‘only’ using five or ten of those at any given time and there are many I haven’t opened in weeks.
I just can’t stand corporate slang, rude people, and other such things, and have apparently much less ability to just accept that it’s a pain in the backside for everyone and let it slide anyway, compared to other people. But it mostly makes me sad rather than angry?
No patience. Well, everyone has that one, right? I’m not the only one who sees a dedicated circle of Hell just for fat chattering middle-aged ladies who take up all the space on the pavement and that you can’t overtake, am I?
Clutter: my room’s a mess, all the other rooms in the house are pristine, vacuumed with unusual ferocity by yours truly, who can’t stand the mess. It was notably more pronounced when I was depressed and didn’t want the extra drag on my nerves from the mess, however.
Task paralysis. I may or may not have that one: I postponed taking driver’s ed for about four years for no clear reason, I’m currently in the process of not doing some fairly important administrative thing that I could have started about a month ago, I’ve been wanting to make a fruit pie (a two-hour endeavour) for about two weeks, and still haven’t bought the fruit, etc., etc. It is extremely depressing.
Hyperfocus, in my experience of the last few years, has mostly been used as a time sink. No, it’s an understatement, it’s more like a time bathtub, time swimming-pool, time Mariana Trench. Very infuriating.
‘Seeing and hearing everything’ rings true, but oblivion even more. I am the world-class champion of not being aware what my siblings have been up to, for instance. But I wonder if it has to do with some broader ‘not bothering to go toward people and find out about them’ which is also what made me think of eg. schizoid disorder.
Guilt, regret, and shame: yeah, pretty sure I’ve met these guys quite often. Damn!
My therapist isn’t fully sold on ADHD, since I was more functional as a child, and have always managed to listen to my teachers without chatting or daydreaming even as much as my peers (which, imho, could be that jumping from one thing to another wasn’t so much of a problem then, even if I did as much of it as I do now. And being smart-ish allowed me not to work too long hours. As for not having trouble listening to teachers, that deteriorates massively if I’m not sitting in the front row with no one next to me. Overall, most of what I’ve written above sounds like it was already true then, although it was definitely much less of a problem and ADHD wasn’t something I felt the need to look into).
So, all that seems to suggest ADHD really is a possibility, right?
Yes could be ADHD, but I am not at a professional.
As for your therapist, that is not conclusive and by no means a sign the person does not have ADHD.
10 years before my diagnosis, my doctor had a feeling I might have ADHD, so he presented my file in conference and EVERYONE there reasoned as your therapist, so nothing further happened for 10 years.
Intelligence can and often does a lot of work that compensate for executive deficiency’s in people with ADHD.
Anyway, do the assessment by the book, be objective and hold off on knee jerk calls based on singular things like has a job, has an education.
I have what almost looks like a career with massive responsibility, academic education, married, kids, never in trouble with the law, no abuse of drugs or alcohol—traditional thinking says I cannot possible have ADHD, and yet the by the book assessment was crystal clear.
Problems with attention can come from many places, and from your post I can see you know that.
As for ADHD, the attention thing is not even close to the main thing, but it is unfortunately a main external observable (like hyperactivity), and so that why its so grossly misnamed.
Having ADHD means lots of things, like:
- You either get nothing done all day, manage 3 times 5 minutes of productivity, or do 40 hours of work in 5 wall clock hours.
- Doing on thing, you notice another “problem”, start working on that and then repeat, do that for 8 hours and all of a sudden you have started 20 things, and no progress on the thing you actually wanted to do (see this for a fictional but oh so accurate depiction)
- Constant thoughts, usually multiple streams at once, the only time this stops is in deep sleep (not while dreaming). Feels like sitting with a browser, 100+ tabs open, active tab changes randomly with short intervals, no add blocker, all videos auto-play and volume is on.
- Get unreasonably angry / annoyed for no reason. Quickly revert back to a good mood, for no reason.
- Absolutely no fucking patience with “normal” people.
- Can’t function around other peoples piles of stuff, but no problem with own piles or clutter.
- Task paralysis, for days and sometimes weeks or months. You know exactly what to do, you know exactly how to do it, and yet you cannot do it (feels a bit like anxiety). This is infuriating.
- Hyperfocus, if you can channel and direct it its almost a superpower, if not its just infuriating for everyone around (and a massive time sink, if you end up doing something irrelevant).
- See and hear EVERYTHING or oblivion, no middle ground (infuriating to others).
And so much more.
And in case anyone is wondering, yes I have ADHD or as my Psychiatrist said 5 minutes into our first meeting “I have no doubt you have raging ADHD, but lets do this properly and jump through all the diagnostic hoops”
As for tricks, I really don’t have any to offer, mainly because you really need to know for sure if you have ADHD or not.
If you do, medication is the way to go, and that has to be dialed in carefully. This can take a long time, I know of people who spend years trying different medications and combinations.
Once you get to that point, you now have a baseline for how ADHD impact you, and at this point you can start developing strategies for how to manage the ADHD controlled things.
Lastly living with ADHD is hard, it always hard, its always bone breaking hard, everything has to be fought for.
We know what we should do, we know how we should do it, but we can’t, constant regret, guilt and shame.
We act inappropriately (a lot), and we always know what we did, constant regret, guilt and shame.
To sum it up, ADHD is hard, its guilt, its regret, its shame, and NTs have no idea what lies behind those 4(3) letters (ADHD/ADD)
Well…
Nothing all day is rare, but 3*5minutes is very common. Working 40 hours a day would be easier if what I was doing was really interesting, but that hasn’t been the case in a little while.
I just can’t stay focused on doing one thing, although in my experience it’s more about getting sidelined than finding other problems to solve. I mean, can we all agree that looking something up on Wikipedia is a five-hour endeavour that starts with a work-related query and ends with reading something on industrialisation in the Two-Sicilies in the 1850s?
My constant thoughts seem a bit dull. OTOH, I literally have 190 tabs open in my browser as of now. And that’s after I removed some recently. But in practice I’m ‘only’ using five or ten of those at any given time and there are many I haven’t opened in weeks.
I just can’t stand corporate slang, rude people, and other such things, and have apparently much less ability to just accept that it’s a pain in the backside for everyone and let it slide anyway, compared to other people. But it mostly makes me sad rather than angry?
No patience. Well, everyone has that one, right? I’m not the only one who sees a dedicated circle of Hell just for fat chattering middle-aged ladies who take up all the space on the pavement and that you can’t overtake, am I?
Clutter: my room’s a mess, all the other rooms in the house are pristine, vacuumed with unusual ferocity by yours truly, who can’t stand the mess. It was notably more pronounced when I was depressed and didn’t want the extra drag on my nerves from the mess, however.
Task paralysis. I may or may not have that one: I postponed taking driver’s ed for about four years for no clear reason, I’m currently in the process of not doing some fairly important administrative thing that I could have started about a month ago, I’ve been wanting to make a fruit pie (a two-hour endeavour) for about two weeks, and still haven’t bought the fruit, etc., etc. It is extremely depressing.
Hyperfocus, in my experience of the last few years, has mostly been used as a time sink. No, it’s an understatement, it’s more like a time bathtub, time swimming-pool, time Mariana Trench. Very infuriating.
‘Seeing and hearing everything’ rings true, but oblivion even more. I am the world-class champion of not being aware what my siblings have been up to, for instance. But I wonder if it has to do with some broader ‘not bothering to go toward people and find out about them’ which is also what made me think of eg. schizoid disorder.
Guilt, regret, and shame: yeah, pretty sure I’ve met these guys quite often. Damn!
My therapist isn’t fully sold on ADHD, since I was more functional as a child, and have always managed to listen to my teachers without chatting or daydreaming even as much as my peers (which, imho, could be that jumping from one thing to another wasn’t so much of a problem then, even if I did as much of it as I do now. And being smart-ish allowed me not to work too long hours. As for not having trouble listening to teachers, that deteriorates massively if I’m not sitting in the front row with no one next to me. Overall, most of what I’ve written above sounds like it was already true then, although it was definitely much less of a problem and ADHD wasn’t something I felt the need to look into).
So, all that seems to suggest ADHD really is a possibility, right?
Yes could be ADHD, but I am not at a professional.
As for your therapist, that is not conclusive and by no means a sign the person does not have ADHD.
10 years before my diagnosis, my doctor had a feeling I might have ADHD, so he presented my file in conference and EVERYONE there reasoned as your therapist, so nothing further happened for 10 years.
Intelligence can and often does a lot of work that compensate for executive deficiency’s in people with ADHD.
Anyway, do the assessment by the book, be objective and hold off on knee jerk calls based on singular things like has a job, has an education.
I have what almost looks like a career with massive responsibility, academic education, married, kids, never in trouble with the law, no abuse of drugs or alcohol—traditional thinking says I cannot possible have ADHD, and yet the by the book assessment was crystal clear.