EA - Inside The Minds Of ADHD by lynettebye

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Inside The Minds Of ADHD, published by lynettebye on April 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post is crossposted from my blog. If you liked this post, subscribe to Lynette's blog to read more. (I only crosspost about half my content to the EA forum.)I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) last winter.I’m a productivity coach who frequently works with people who have ADHD. I’d studied diagnostic questionnaires and read about the official symptoms of ADHD.I’ve also been struggling with those symptoms for decades. I was unable to consistently focus on demand, felt constantly tired, and often needed to force myself to get started on my projects. Yet I never seriously considered that I might have ADHD.Why not?Because my experiences didn’t match the picture of ADHD in my head. I thought I understood the symptoms of ADHD, but I didn’t really. (How much trouble focusing counts as “difficulty focusing” anyway?)I missed out on the benefits of stimulant medication for well over a decade because I didn’t understand what ADHD actually looks like. I’m guessing there’s a good number of adults (maybe including you!) who are also missing out on that benefit because of similar misconceptions.So I collected stories from six people who were diagnosed with ADHD as adults (including myself). These people are intelligent, high-performing individuals who nevertheless struggled for years with undiagnosed ADHD.I’ve structured the first half of this post around my interviewees’ responses to a typical ADHD questionnaire, so you can see what kinds of experiences you might expect if you have ADHD. The second half covers their stories prediagnosis and with medication. If these responses feel familiar to your experience, I encourage you to consider whether you might benefit from ADHD medication.So, what does adult ADHD actually look like?Hint: Adult ADHD is dominated by what I’m calling the Terrible Trifecta: trouble getting started, keeping focused, and finishing up projects. Every one of my interviewees struggled with these three areas, while most said that the other symptoms had less of a detrimental impact on them.Note, I mainly focus on the ‘inattentive’ presentation of ADHD, since it’s easiest to miss. If you’d like to learn more about the other types of ADHD, I recommend the youtube channel How to ADHD.When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?Every person I spoke with thought this was a major problem. They described procrastinating, trying to get started but being unable to focus, or spirals of feeling motivated and wanting to make progress but then.just not doing the task.This isn’t just for tasks that people dislike. People would bounce off even tasks that they enjoyed once they got into them.For me, this is especially likely when a project is distant in my mind. Resuming drafting a post after a weekend feels aversive. I can’t remember exactly what I was planning or why I wanted to write the post. If I don’t sit down and mentally “boot up” the project, it’s tempting to start something easier instead, which means that I don’t tackle the planned task until hours later.For some respondents, procrastination was particularly likely when they were trying to meet really high standards. If they didn’t feel that they were able to do a great job right then, they would instead go do something else until a deadline forced their hand. (I definitely resonated with this!)It felt like I would have such a high standard for each sentence that it felt like any word choice was totally wrong. I would try and make myself start, and then it wouldn't feel on fire enough to actually start doing it. Then I very easily get sucked into some other internet distraction. This would keep going until it w...