There is also brain differences between adhd vs non adhd people

Summary: https://www.woodburnpediatric.com/blog/adhd-brain-different-...

Paper: https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanpsy/PIIS2215-0366...

Thanks for the advise, I'll just stop lying to myself about my non-neurotypical brain that I have since being a child [0]. Who knew it would be that easy to overcome by just trying harder.

https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S22150366173004...

maybe zero discipline and/or work ethic are disorders?

do you believe in the concept if mental health at all?

It's a cool hypothesis of yours, that it's just a discipline issue. Unfortunately your typical lifestyle of a slacker you described was not my life, and I still struggled intensely, daily, with procrastination and getting things done and paying attention. I'm intelligent, had a good upbringing with strong study disciplines instilled in me, as well as a joy for learning and working. I want to be a fantastic worker and be highly productive, but despite all the advantages in life I have had, without meds my adult life is just barely staying afloat.

With ADHD meds, I'm suddenly performing like all my potential and desires suggests I should be.

You might find some mileage reading Behavior: The Control of Perception, which presents a hierarchical control system as a model of human behavior. We act to control our perceptions. From this model some interesting things can be derived based on control theory, like that some disturbances are too large to be overcome (trivial example, hold your hand out level, add an object to it and watch the control system output of your muscles react to the disturbance, add a very heavy object to it), the speed at which the system can react to a disturbance is limited by the speed at which the system can perceive the disturbance, and that lower level systems act faster than higher level ones which have to form higher level perceptions from a composite of lower level ones. (Beliefs don't come into the author's model until the 8th of 9 levels -- and of course changing beliefs is also a lot harder than rotating your wrist (level 3). Also our low level musculature is capable of much higher response rates mechanically yet is limited by perception speeds.)

I'm sympathetic to your argument, but I think it falls on deaf ears for those who need to understand it. There is indeed an issue with "normies" who don't have such extreme challenges and can't imagine them in that they tend to set the policies, but the non-normies arguing with you about how drugs are absolutely necessary either ignore or fight by mischaracterizing other non-normies who have experienced such challenges, yes even at extreme levels, and understand, and nevertheless successfully thought their way out of them. Or at least well enough out of them that they have a satisfying life, and sometimes with more "just happened/got older" mystery than conscious thinking. But these two sets of non-normies form multiple crab bucket mentalities which makes communication difficult. The crabs in the bucket create additional obstacles to escaping the bucket and inevitably when one escapes he tends to look down on (if not resent) the ones still in the bucket, while the ones in the bucket have similar negative feelings for the escapee, even to the extent of thinking he can't imagine what it was like inside the bucket. As an analogy for another kind of crab bucket mentality that can happen, i.e. "there's nothing wrong with me/us", look up some deaf people's thoughts on hearing aids.

An attitude of "I thought myself into this way, I should be able to think myself out of it" is hard to internalize and harder to pull off. I'm not sure you can successfully argue it into someone. Especially someone who is using drugs to alleviate their situation has in some sense already given up, and perhaps rationally so -- there are effectively irreversible processes, if your walk into darkness included a fall down a cliff, you can't just "fall" to get back up, and if you get it into you to at least try becoming stronger and climbing back, you may find the cliff is just unclimbable after all. (Though there may be a way around, or a more climbable slope, that can at least get you incrementally closer even if you may never get back to where you were originally.)

I think your highlight on video games / other modern media is misguided, but there is something underlying it, which I'd summarize as simply that society is sick. A healthy society does a lot to alleviate the individual pressures described all over these threads, often preempts the need for individual strategies to deal with them, but a healthy society is not one just like ours but without games/YouTube/social media/normies controlling drug access/skyscrapers/[whatever one's particular axe to grind]. What to do then, to alleviate your pressures? Sometimes it's "nothing", they'll go away on their own. Sometimes you can make a go at changing society in a measurable way (though you'll probably just make things worse if you have any impact at all). And sometimes it's drugs, or an escape into games/studies/work/farming, or therapy, or religion, or crafting your own philosophy... I don't see a universal answer. I dislike it when people suggest there is one without solid data, whether that's "more drugs!" or "just Be Well!". On the other hand it's important to look at data and recognize when highly effective treatments do exist for lots of things -- vaccines for instance, or for an obese person rather than "put the cookie down!" (were it so easy they probably wouldn't have gotten that way) it's more useful to point at keto. (Still a "horse led to water..." effect there that may have to be addressed first, but a less intensive one, as you don't have to feel starved. Calling the effect an "executive function disorder" may be useful in having a fancy label for the phenomenon, I prefer "akrasia", but focusing on the label too much risks conflating the map with the territory.)

> I generally believe that the way behavioral patterns emerge is not instant,

not everything is a habit, some behaviours are impulsive or context driven. lets say that habits take time to form though.

> and therefore the way you get out cannot be instant.

this is only true if breaking a habit, is also a habit. i don’t not certain this is always true.

lets ask, what is a habit? since this is an async convo i will answer myself. i think a habit is a behaviour that you repeat based on some trigger (time of day, previous activity etc). based on that we could call a “routine” a series of habits (or habitual behaviours). we do them, one after the other, in sequence (generally).

yeah i agree, these take time to build! how do you maintain them? because i spent 3 years working on running everyday and then i was ill for a week and immediately stopped. i broke my habit (or routine) that took 3 years to build in 1 week. are you wrong or am i broken?

> In other words, the only way out of the darkness is walking backing through the exact path you came from.

more generally i would say, the only way out of “the darkness” (which i will use to mean a period of time in my life where i am incredibly unhappy) is to deal with my trauma and accept all parts of myself (probably with the help of a therapist). i’ve not found ruminating over the past to be a successful strategy for creating light in my life.

> It takes a long time of not focusing on daily practice and discipline to get to the point where you don’t realize you need to put in at least a few hours of studying per day.

i honestly don’t understand this line. is the realisation that small iterative steps are required for study innate? is this your experience? i had to explicitly learn it. is not one of the greatest productivity strategies to break large complex things (passing an exam) into smaller, manageable tasks (a few hours of study a day). i do not buy this line.

> If you go years and years of studying the week of or the day before the test, you will become a certain way.

what certain way is that?

> I’d wager most Americans do all their major class work last minute since they were kids.

it would be interesting to see a survey of this! i won’t join this wager as i don’t like gambling.

> Along with that, they spend hours and hours playing video games and watching YouTube/Netflix/social media since childhood.

what are you claiming video games, youtube and netflix cause here? I’m not saying they each don’t have they negative aspects! especially youtube, just enough dopamine to keep you watching, so easy to waste a bunch of hours.

> By the time you are 25, you probably have a solid 20 years of insane habits.

i too thought i was late all the time because of the template my mum handed down to me(shes late all the time too). you know what else can be handed down though? heritable traits.

i still object to modelling all human behaviour around habits. the scope is much larger and the insanity is often a lack of behaviour (e.g not washing your butt).

> What few people will admit here is what they did for most of their life. Okay, so you realized you can’t read a textbook in college. Can you describe to me how you passed the time over the last 18 years?

read interesting books? played games? made music? rode bikes? went to parties. i’m not sure what you are attempting to get at here.

>I’m sure you managed to fill the time. You didn’t stare at the all for 18 years.

see above.

> If you literally stared at the wall, fine, here is a prescription to whatever drug you want.

so only if i did absolutely nothing in response to not being able to do something else, do i qualify for medication? i guess no one with any executing function disorders should get anything because sitting still is a real pain. sorry we’re not performing disorder well enough for you, i’ll get all the adhd peeps into a workshop perhaps you could join since you know exactly how someone with a disorder would perform. we really need those meds so any help you can offer is welcomed.

> If you managed to do all of the other bullshit I described above, then please take some responsibility on developing better habits.

man, f*k you. i’ve been taking responsibility for my actions for 30 years. you don’t know me.

> It’s the intellectual version of becoming obese. You know what you ate for the last several years.

so we have resorted to fat jokes. well, i’m not sure what i had hoped for tbh.

tl;dr you don’t believe in this ADD-whatever the fuck and people should grow up and act like ever other adult.

idk if you are a boomer but you should get checked out for alzheimers because your ideas are old as fuck.

NOTE: i had a nice, emotional description of my experience but i forgot how people here like to argue (stupid me), so i took responsibility for my actions and took apart the argument line by line instead.

>And the last thing I want to add is, you won’t have fun doing any of the above stuff. It’s never going to be fun and it never is fun for anyone. The only joy you’ll get is at the very end when you succeed.

You still haven't understood the perspective of people with ADHD. They know all of this intellectually (and depending on age) they have tried more systems, mental models, techniques, strategies, tricks and hacks than you can ever imagine.

This is not something that you can "tough your way" through, or all of this being harsh on myself would have amounted to something.

Your example, with reading just one word a day and the compound effect of repeating that behaviour regularly, hinges on some "axiom" that one will just stick to a habit. With ADHD you just "forget" to read that one word, no matter how many post-its you stick on the monitor or mirror. At best you cycle back to the "word" every few weeks without making progress, like treading water.

Of course I cannot speak for everyone with ADHD but for me the focus issue generally extends even to typical procrastination behaviour for I can't consistently focus on things that are fun and harmless, like reading a novel (currently The Expanse) or watching a Netflix show or physical activities (BJJ).

I think that ingrained bad habits are only the top layer in a life with ADHD.

no one here can diagnose you. see a professional if you would like a professional diagnosis.

take some responsibility for yourself.

Screw it. Ya caught me. So, you surmise ADHD doesn't exist, and that all the phenomena is is that it's a convenient excuse for people to take performance enhancing narcotics? Is that about what you're at?

I ask, and apologize for the double post, because for every individual that holds the view you seem to, there is at least one stubborn but cursed son of a bitch like me hanging around, waiting to lay down in gory detail after work why you are dead wrong to hold it.

I've been medicated since the age of about 5ish for ADHD. I've gone med-dry for rediagnosis no fewer than 3 times, because skeptical arseholes drive policies that lead people to believe "there's no way they can be handicapped with how successful they are [on meds]" without "proof". Every last time was an unceasing nightmare for the period of time I had to go without. I can barely keep a thought in my head, I can't get out a coherent sentence, my physical coordination is shot, my own sense of self gets completely obliterated, access to memory, skills and executive function is majorly impacted. I'm more a a bundle of physical reflexes and responses to stimuli than a human being at that point. That and one small section in the back of the head that can measure intent vs. Outcome, and can only marvel at the clusterf--- of higher executive going on at the time, routing the memory to the hippocampus and tagging it with every emotional emphasis available as not something to be done again.

Not being on meds at this point is not a viable option for me, and dear God, have I tried. I hate them. I hate the dependence. I hate feeling like a complete person half the time. I hate that my family and friends never get me at my best. I hate that my SO basically gets the least garbage version of me I can muster after work. Over and above the dry spells for re-diagnosis. I've done several month stints between jobs because the meds were costing too much at the time. My family and romantic life suffered, my sanity suffered, and to this day, I still deal with trying to answer what it means for me that every positive quality, nay, the mere capacity for me to perceive and think I have positive qualities is all tied up with a stupid godforsaken pill that the rest of society can at best begrudgingly tolerate letting me take, and only then with massive constraints put on my ability to roam freely without going through the nightmare of arranging medical care at my destination ahead of time because the Dimwit Enforcer Agency and the FDA have deemed it necessary.

Not once has going dry yielded a productive improvement of the condition or resulted in productive avenues of shifted thinking/practices to mitigate the downsides. There is no "learning around it" there is a functioning neural architecture that allows you to painlessly integrate and handle modern society, and there is untreated ADHD. Your (society's) expectations and mores mean nothing to the ADHD individual, because there is no one consistent supervisory thread to pick out an option. There are several hundred, and they all want direct access to the hardware now damnit.

The best way I can think of to demonstrate what the ADHD mind is like is to have someone slip on a set of earphones, pipe in a session of Congress, a cafeteria from each level of schooling, a busy doctor's office's waiting room, all at the same time, have someone talking in front of you while another person pokes, prods or massages you while wearing something you aren't used to wearing, with a box fan pointed at you full blast, in a room with a flickering strobe light that doesn't quite settle into enough of a pattern to filter. Air thick with a perfume you detest, air fillef with a scent you despise mixed with Febreeze, two to four radios in the background on stations you hate, and just loud enough to clash with what's piped in from the earphones. Now with all this going on simultaneously do long division and everything else everyone else has as an expectation for you to do as an adult (nope, children don't get a pass) in society in mind. Also, anytime someone brings up a subject of interest, pipe in about 50 somewhat related factoids in your own voice over those earphones and try to keep straight and make sense of everything.

That's ADHD. Your own personal legion of annoyance. The multiple personality people have it easy. They can blame the other. The ADHD individual is completely aware of all aspects of how badly they're failing right now, what they'd rather be doing and how awesome it would be to do something else, all the excuses they want make but know won't matter, all the possible directions for the current conversation to go, and all the vivid associations and outcomes of conversations that have happened like it in mind. They don't get much if any choice in which of these parallel thought streams takes the fore of their cognition. Even with decades of practice, it doesn't come naturally. It is thinking in manual, but that analogy breaks down because it implies that the medium being automated is not the normal state, where from every attempt to get meta-cognitive neuro-typicals to describe their thought processes to me never even come close to the level of mental noise I have to consciously cut through on a regular basis. That's all with a stimulant mind. Ground state? There are no words for it, it just is what it is; an individual equipped and processing a world in a way completely unfamiliar to what non-massively-parallel people seem to have to have any experience dealing with.

And yet, add some stimulant, and suddenly, peace, normality, and a semblance of synchronicity, order, and a kernel of normality arises out of the sea of chaos ensues. At least as long as the dose holds out. You have a stable base state for a time to learn the skills you need to employ to somewhat compensate, but once you remove that foundational state, you're right back to internal uncoordinated chaos. That meditation trick is no match for that one lady's perfume, that pomodoro is more distraction than anything else because you keep looking at the clock. You try to plan your day, but end up throwing that out the door because to hell with it. Now for something completely different.

Not on occasion, mind, but...all...the...time.

You can feel or perceive yourself as a god on meds, if you're prone to that sort of thing; someone you think is worthy of being looked up to, someone you can feel great for being, and at the end of the dose, end up feeling like a wretch, a moron, and an incompetent who can't possibly be the same person they were just a few hours earlier.

I will, and have told people with your viewpoint that they are free to hold it, but not in my presence. I am absolutely intolerant on this matter as a living bloody example of the condition with just about every diagnostic criteria checked off at its most severe, and want to make it unambiguously clear you are making the world worse for every sufferer of ADHD, myself included.

I have lived with this curse my entire life. I've grown distant from family because a family member refuses to treat his, and it compounds his other difficulties. That was his decision, he made it, and I made mine to stick with treatment, to do the best, and make the most of what gifts I have, and that the medication grants me the capability to meaningfully exercise.

I will not sit here and let anyone make light or doubt the suffering I and others experience every day without response. I won't say my bowl of shit is any worse than anyone else's, but it is damn well nevertheless there, and it damn well is something no one with a brain that just-werkz will or even likely has the capability to understand or deal with with in a way that makes it tolerable. Sad thing is, I wish you were right. I wish it was just me being lazy. I wish it was my lack of discipline. Alas, not a one perso who doubts it have I found that could even posit how to fix it, never mind learn to deal with it.

Now I won't say there isn't some level of people using an ADHD diagnosis to get access to the meds. That absolutely is a thing, and I despise it with every fibre of my being. I have been on them so long, and built up tolerance as a result, that I've exceeded most therapeutic literature, making my life a living hell of dealing with an insurance company that went out of it's way to make my treatment's as difficult to come by as possible. I've been on enough of the meds to know what works for my chemistry, and what doesn't; and I've voluntarily cut back my dosage to the relief of my therapist, but to the detriment of myself, and to the worsening of a relationship, because an old regimen was too prone to causing aggression spikes, and at this point, I'm just tired of being fully cognizant all the time of how the world is actively orchestrated to make everyone's life difficult, but not in possession of enough body or output device to do anything about it.

Call it mental suicide if you will. I broke my vow and took an extra dose, just for you. You lucky individual, because even if I hate everything about how this affliction has ruled and continues to ruin my life, I hate only one thing even more.

People who think ADHD doesn't exist. Go to hell, sir. I have seen, overcome, and been things you cannot even imagine. Just as you undoubtedly have done the same from my perspective. I have had to sacrifice and work harder than just about anyone else just to fit in well enough to be mostly ignored and left to be, and held myself to do all the more with the stupid meds for whatever degree of imagined superhumanity you reckon they must confer so that in addition to telling anyone off who doesn't figure they just level the playing field, that for any unfair tilt in my favor those pharmaceuticals may afford me, that it find a constructive outlet to the benefit of someone else.

Good day to you sir/madam/whatever floats your boat. You got a rise out of me. You win 10/10.

To all the other ADHD folks out there, I hope I've done your struggle justice, but if not, please chime in.

> Hey I never ran a day in my life. I found out if I take steroids I can jump start my running in 3 months. Turns out I’m a great runner, so I must have been a great runner all this time and just need a therapeutic dose of steroids to show that I had chemical deficiency that easily solved it. Now life is much more fair for me.

what is the purpose of this line of argument. do we agree that this is good? because this feels good.

> Look, once your life depends on a decision you know was a trade off (you feel entitled to whatever it is you don’t have from not putting in the actual work), it’s going to take intense mental gymnastics to feel sound as a person.

i struggle to understand what you’re saying here. could you provide a concrete example of a life depending on a decision that was a trade off?

i feel so much more sound as a person now that i can off load some of the guilt for being so bad at the simple things onto something else, i am infact much more sound than i have ever been. this doesn’t diminish my responsibility to change myself and my environment so that i can do those simple things, it simply changes my map and thus the strategies that i should use to accomplish my goals.

i’m sure you would agree that nothing comes for free. i am not saying that drugs will make me super man or that neurotypical people are super human.

though, to a person with glasses, 20:20 vision does seem pretty super human. as does the ability to do contact sports without massive preparation (goggles, contact lenses etc). in this metaphor the person with glasses is like the person with adhd fyi.

> But I can help you,

bold claims sir. given our conversation, i am doubtful of your ability to help anyone.

> repeat after me. This life wasn’t going great, so I made a decision. It’s better now, and I can live with it and fuck anyone else.

i’m not sure what this is supposed to do for me. do i say it into a mirror and Frederick Hayek will appear and save me from serfdom?

my life was difficult. i discovered that there are reasons a touch beyond my control that were causing that. i took medicine, adjusted my ways and asked others to help by adjusting how they help me. it is still difficult but i feel less bad about it. fuck anyone that tries to diminish the work it took to achieve that.

the map is not the territory.

> All I’m saying is, don’t you dare sell that confirmation bias back into the zeitgeist.

what confirmation bias? which zeitgeist?

> We can be friends, I’ve been there (probably still there).

i feel that, and beyond this ultimately stupid argument i hope stuff stays good for you.

> Certainly don’t try to sell it to the person that put in 3 years running, and the only difference between you and that person was an unprovable chemical deficiency.

i’m not sure exactly what you’re saying here. the person who ran for 3 years was me. i didn’t sell anything to them. now i’m less depressed and anxious about my life excersizing is much easier. i can strive now there is hope again. why do you thin the source of that hope shouldn’t exist (in the face of some pretty good science that says otherwise).

> The guy waking up everyday to run never felt like it was never going to amount to anything once, right? They just had it in them, just like you.

yes i did and yes i did!

> It’s all in you, like magic, just needs to brought out.

this i can get down with. totally true.

> Just own your decision in it’s entirety. No one is a saint here.

what decision? to take medication? i didn’t decide that, my doctor did.

Edit:

> > is not one of the greatest productivity strategies to break large complex things (passing an exam) into smaller, manageable tasks (a few hours of study a day). i do not buy this line.

> This retort is a dead give away of entitlement. Everyone breaks down studying like this, Jesus.

wait, so you’re saying that this is in-fact innate and doesn’t need to be taught?

> How special do some of you think you are? This is all supposed come freely to you?

no, i said that i had to explicitly learn it. it would seem that it is you who thinks it should come freely. i specifically stated that i do not think this practice is innate and that many of us need to learn how to apply it (i.e it is a skill). thus, it by definition requires work to learn, develop and apply.

is it special to hope that the community i exist in as a sentient being would teach me these learnable skills? i don’t think so but if that’s entitlement call me entitled and bring some more of it!

> Read a chapter a day,

before you can know how to read a chapter, you must know how to read a book ;).

to be explicit, you’ve got to be able to see a big thing and break it down first, before you can plan the execution. then you need to organize (combine resources and time) to execute the individual tasks. the organization part is the hard bit for people like me btw. can make a plan. can do a task. struggle to translate from the first to the later (get myself, the resource, to start the tasks at the appropriate times). i’m an asynchronous job queue with 1 worker and a queue size of 1, new jobs have the highest priority.

> and if some of you truly exhibit the impulsivity of dogs (the wind can distract you apparently), then read a page a day, and if you can’t do that, read a word a day. This is how people do it. Bunch of hidden brainiacs think they can just take a book and place it near their forehead and instantly absorb it and then cry foul when it doesn’t happen.

just lol. people with adhd aren’t dogs, come on. that straw man you constructed is so absurd. im not saying neurotypical people can magically consume the information in a book (though who doesnt want that power right!!!) and meds wont magically enable me to.

i don’t actually have much of a problem with reading tbh. it’s not stopping reading. my problems are not around attention and tasks that can be done in flow. i would just like to be able to stick to a multi day plan without waking up tomorrow and being totally unable to do so.

> And the last thing I want to add is, you won’t have fun doing any of the above stuff. It’s never going to be fun and it never is fun for anyone. The only joy you’ll get is at the very end when you succeed.

if nothing is fun, what is the point? im lucky, i found the hyperfocus on my studies super fun! so fun i sort of burned myself out on them (less fun).

the way i see it, success is either now or never because there is no end state. we live and we die. you either enjoy living or don’t. you can trade time now for time later, sure but that’s a gamble and like i mentioned, i don’t like gambling.

> Yep, classical delayed gratification. Now we get closer to the truth, yeah?

you’re about as far from The Truth (tm) as we can get though i think you’ve shown us you truth.