Three Years of Hacking Your ADHD
For one thing, I’ve learned that I’m never going to stop saying, “wait, that’s an ADHD thing?” - more and more, I’m realizing how much more of an effect ADHD has on me. I know I recently had an episode talking about ADHD acceptance and learning about your ADHD, but truly there are so many things that my ADHD has a role in that I just had no idea about.
Now I do want to temper this with some acknowledgment that we to be cautious about what we read and believe on the internet. Memes are kind of a terrible place to learn about our ADHD, and yet they are just so shareable despite how questionable their sourcing is. Additionally, we have to watch out for overlap with other mental health conditions. It’s incredibly easy to mistake symptoms of autism, depression, or anxiety for ADHD symptoms.
But some interesting connections are being found. For example, I was recently reading a study that found a connection between ADHD and hypermobility, which is where you have joint mobility with an unusually large range of movement. Now I do want to be clear here that they don’t exactly understand why or what the link between the two is right now, with some hypotheses suggesting that it could have something to do with the mind-body connection and how that may affects physical development. And remember that ADHD is a developmental disorder.
And personally, I think this is incredibly interesting… and also may explain why I’ve dislocated my shoulders so many times.
But of course, there is a ton of misinformation out there on ADHD - a lot of it is well-meaning, but sometimes stuff spreads despite its reliability. For example, many people claim that ADHD suffers from object permanence. Now, this absolutely sounds like it could be an ADHD issue; we definitely can have problems remembering things when they aren’t right in front of us. Out of sight, out of mind is kind of a way of life for ADHD. But that does not object permanence, which is actually a very specific developmental milestone that babies go through. It refers to the ability to know that something still exists when an object is out of your field of view. It doesn’t have anything to do with memory; it’s about understanding how existence works. I may have forgotten that salad I put in the back of the fridge, but I understand that when I close the fridge, the salad still exists.
And this is a fairly benign piece of misinformation; the worst that happens is that you’re using the wrong label, and people think they can freak you out by playing peek-a-boo. But it illustrates how we can really get tangled up in the truth of ADHD. And this means we do have to be careful with those a-ha moments and check our sources. And I’m not asking you to do anything super rigorous here; just doing a simple google search to see if there is any basis for the claim works wonders for weeding out the stuff that’s really out there. Also, be cautious of stuff that comes from the wisdom of the crowd. While places like the ADHD subreddit on Reddit can be great places to look for information, also realize that they have over a million and a half members. With ADHD coming with so many comorbidities, it actually kind of likely that someone talking about a related symptom is going to find compatriots just due to the large numbers involved. This isn’t to say that we can’t use these sites, just that we have to temper our expectations and be sure that we’re not siloing our information to these kinds of sources.
Alright, for this next piece, this is going to sound a little strange, but one of the things that has taken me a long time to learn is that I’m not neurotypical. And I think I can be clearer about this idea too, because it’s not just that I’ve realized that I’m not neurotypical, but it’s also more realizing that I’m not just a flavor of neurotypical that’s a bit more disorganized.
I think one of the harder aspects of ADHD is that we are constantly comparing ourselves to others in truly unhelpful ways, and that includes comparing ourselves both negatively and positively to our neurotypical peers. Of course, it makes sense that we are making these comparisons; we are pack animals who are constantly trying to find our place in the pecking order. We make the comparisons because we want to know how well we are doing, relatively speaking. But that last part is what messes us up; we don’t actually need to know how we’re doing “relatively speaking,” what’s important is how we’re doing for us because it doesn’t actually matter how well we’re doing compared to John down the street.
And what I’ve found is that when I’m just viewing ADHD as a sub-variant of neurotypical is that I’m still feeling like I could do something to make me function the way a neurotypical does. For one, that isn’t a good goal, and for two, it just doesn’t work like that. What’s important is finding what works for me. What makes it so that I feel like I’m functioning well and having a good time doing it. When I’m making my neurotypical comparisons, I’m setting myself up to try and find neurotypical solutions to my problem. I’m sitting there asking, “why can’t I just sit down and do the work?” I’m asking, “what’s wrong with me?”
These aren’t helpful questions. What’s actually important for me to focus on is what I’m capable of and, specifically, what I’m capable of on that day. It’s easy for me to get caught up in what I “should” be doing instead of focusing on what actually makes sense for me. And this is an important distinction because when I focus on what I can do, well, then I can focus on doing what is most important.
This is also compounded with the idea that I need to be doing more. The reason I say it compounds with this idea of being neurotypical is that I’m just setting those same unrealistic expectations upon myself. Now, this doesn’t just come from the idea that I should be acting neurotypically - my ADHD also reinforces this idea, and this is where my comparison in positive ways can hurt me. One of my ADHD strengths is that when I’m in crunch time, I am really able to buckle down and focus on what I need to do. In fact, it isn’t even necessarily crunch time that this happens, this is more just a result of hyperfocus. And since my brain doesn’t always like choosing the healthiest options, I can find myself fantasizing about how I should just always be in hyperfocus. Hey, what if I just completely overloaded my schedule so that I’m always in crunch time, think of how productive I would be! I could absolutely 10x what I’m producing now. Except that’s not how hyperfocus works - when I’m going into hyperfocus, I’m borrowing executive function from my future self. As anyone who has had a sustained bout of hyperfocus can tell you, once you exit that state, you feel completely drained, and that drained state can last a couple of days. Trying to maintain a high state of hyperfocus can easily lead you into burnout. And this isn’t going to be a fair deal for you, the scales are not going to tip in your favor.
Nonetheless, I still always find myself looking at ways that I can do more, and it can lead me to feeling bad about the fact that I’m not doing more. I’ve been working on this by trying to replace this mentality of doing more with setting goals to be more sustainable. This certainly isn’t easy in the online content creator space, where many platforms expect you to post multiple times a day so that you can stay relevant. So the thing is, for me, I have to resist the allure of the new shiny thing all the time. Honestly, I think podcasting is the best platform for this right now and
And of course, the issue of wanting to do more is absolutely multifaceted - one of the issues just comes from the disconnection I can feel from time. This is a big reason that I harp so much on writing out your schedule. It’s easy to write out a to-do list of all the things that we want to do, it’s much harder to actually come up with a time that we’re going to do them. Part of that comes from difficulties with executive function and fighting through the I don’t wanna’s, but also it’s hard because we, in fact, don’t have as much time as we imagine that we do. When I schedule out my day, I am constantly reminded about the limitations I have with the amount of time each day consists of. We can also fight this by building some time wisdom and figuring out how long things actually take us to do. It’s easy to overschedule ourselves when we don’t understand how long a particular task is going to take us to complete it. Sure it feels like I could empty out my email inbox in a few minutes when it feels like an email takes 15 seconds to reply to. By timing our tasks and building that time wisdom, it can help us accept some of the limitations we have with time.
The desire to do more also comes from the fact that I just have so many interests - part of this “need to do more” is that there are a lot of things that I want to do. I have endless lists of “someday maybe” and also just a ton of hobbies that I’ve partially picked up but haven’t committed enough time to. And what this comes down to is prioritizing the things that I really want to do and things that I think are going to have a longer-term impact. I have to accept that some of the items are never going to make it off the list, and that’s okay. And this is especially important to realize the things that I’m not going to be able to dedicate the time for. Sure I think learning to play the saxophone would be awesome, but realistically I don’t have the time to dedicate to working on that skill. And this is where we also get in trouble because while I don’t feel like I have the time for it right now, in my head, it’s easy to argue that I’ll have more time for it in the future. And this is a really common misconception that most people have, that they are going to have more free time in the future. Unless you have something that is actually changing in your life, you likely aren’t going to see massive changes in how much time you have in the future. This means that if we want to keep ourselves from overcommitting, then we need to work on saying no more often and especially on saying no to ourselves more often. Yes, that is very hard because, hey, we’re impulsive people, and of course, I’m going to make time for that once I spend the money, right? We know how that actually works out most of the time. The issue is that we have to reverse that thinking; once we commit the time, then it’s worth spending the money. If we can focus on when and how we’re going to implement this new thing into our life, then it’s going to be a lot easier for us to follow through with our intentions. We need to be specific - which I know, it sounds lame. I don’t want to do it, and I try and skip that step most of the time, and you know what, that rarely works out.
Living with intention requires being specific.
This Episode’s Top Tips
There are always going to be more a-ha moments when we go, “oh, that’s an ADHD thing?” but we’ve got to temper those moments with the understanding that there is also a lot of ADHD misinformation out there, and we always have to check our sources.
While it can feel like we’re just a flavor of neurotypical, it is important for us to realize that ADHD has its own way of operating the brain and that we need to look for solutions that work with our brains, not someone else’s.
It’s more than okay for us to do less; in fact, a lot of the time is better for us to take something off our plate because we often take on too much. By doing less, we’re allowed to focus more on the things that really matter.
