This article is weak sauce. The tips here might give you 5% improvement (made up number for illustrating) whereas proper treatment can get you a say 75% boost.
These tips aren’t wrong so much as just blaming your ADHD on behavioral or character flaws, something that in my and probably many other cases did as much harm as the actual disorder.
Bro! I just tried the 30 day thing! It only took about ten minutes and now I don’t have ADHD anymore. Plus I now have two girlfriends that know about each other.
And my mind has always been like this even before social media.
If I read a book I hyperfixate on it and don’t put it down until I’m done which can be a whole 27 hours.
If I am talking with my partner or if I am trying to study my mind starts to wander thinking “Hmm. I wonder what we’ll fo for dinner tonight. Oh. But then we need the pan. I better clean the pan. Oh but these trash needs to be taken out but I don’t want to do that now I’ll just chill a bit. Oh were you talking to me?”
Existing is hard sometimes and it’s not because I’m looking at reels two times per month.
A very dear friend of mine, which unfortunately is a bit sheltered, couldn’t really understand how I can’t focus. “I also have to read a page several times to get the information to stick I don’t understand what you mean.”
And then I tried to explain that when I read a page my mind just thinks of other things and after several pages I realise that from like the 3rd sentence I have been thinking about other things. So I try to read them again and again and again. And It’s not like I’m actually reading I just go through the motions of turning the pages of my economy book while my brain is doing the equivalent of taking the ring to mordor.
This friend didn’t really understand how people could be depressed either “I mean. Just don’t be sad all the time. That’s what I do.”
Having ADHD-like symptoms is not having ADHD. They’re different things. I appreciate you sharing, but this article, and the suggestions within it, will not help someone with actual ADHD. They may help someone who has developed ADHD-like symptoms due to a lifestyle not conducive of her/his neurotypical brain.
I don’t mean to be an aggressive anti-capitalist (but I’m gonna), but the suggestion that the solution to “dopamine addiction” is to “throw yourself into your work” makes me extremely suspicious.
This feels like it was written for neurotypicals that think they might have ADHD. If these tips help significantly, then they don’t have ADHD. Except therapy, we can all use therapy.
I have talked about VAST in a previous thread here but this bears repeating: a lot of neurotypicals, especially younger kids who grew up for several years on screen-based learning while the pandemic raged, have environmentally-caused ADHD-like symptoms, and we need to find ways to help them as well.
From ADHD 2.0 (highly recommend this book):
Modern life compels these changes by forcing our brains to process exponentially more data points than ever before in human history, dramatically more than we did prior to the era of the Internet, smartphones, and social media. The hardwiring of our brains has not changed— as far as we know, although some experts do suspect that our hardwiring is changing— but in our efforts to adapt to the speeding up of life and the projectile spewing of data splattering onto our brains all the time, we’ve had to develop new, often rather antisocial habits in order to cope. These habits have come together to create something we now call VAST: the variable attention stimulus trait.
Whether you have true ADHD or its environmentally induced cousin, VAST, it’s important to detoxify the label and focus on the inherent positives. To be clear, we don’t want you to deny there is a downside to what you are going through, but we want you also to identify the upside.
Their journey to addressing their brain issues will be different than ours but we can support each other in the meantime.
Finally, I have a response to my BIL who believes “everyone has ADHD these days” 🙄 Frustrations aside, this is very informative. I’ll check out the book you recommended. My husband might actually have VAST, he sometimes feels like he might have ADHD but his symptoms aren’t consistent or severe, so he minimalises the problems he does have.
Identify the upside? Please give this a watch and reevaluate recommending a book claiming there are positives to ADHD. It is an expert, Dr Russell Barkley, whose career has been spent studying ADHD. youtu.be/26V6LCbKXJU?si=wPsq7S4iulu-cDQj
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