| ▲ | thewebguyd 5 days ago |
| > "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I have to use this trick to help manage my ADHD. Of course, just actually starting for 5 minutes is a challenge in itself but while medicated at least I can. Giving myself a time limit as an easy out works wonders, and after 5 minutes I'm probably going to keep going. |
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| ▲ | _boffin_ 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Here’s a fun one I given many years ago: I had a friend/client who was professor. We’d talk about ADHD, issues, and other things. One day, I came to him saying, “a lot of times, I’ll read a paragraph 20 times, but not remember a single thing from it. It’s drudgery and almost painful to read it. It’s a fight.” His response was profound to me: “instead of you reading it how you are, try to understand why the author spent their life, time, and effort to learn that material and then convey it to you. What made them fascinated in it?” By flipping the script… changed my world |
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| ▲ | braebo 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | This comment gave me pause… because it’s novel to me, while seemingly adjacent to my current worldview in a way that makes me suspect it’s an important missing puzzle piece. That makes me nervous.. yet excited. I’ll have to meditate on this a bit more. Thanks for sharing! |
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| ▲ | mhurron 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wish you the best with that, but by the metric of 'if I can do it for 5 minutes I can probably keep going because I wanted to do it' would mean that I don't want to do, very literally, anything. To be fair, I only just recently (past month) talked to my doctor and started treating it properly so I'm still in the tweaking the dosage phase. |
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| ▲ | jnovek 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Another thing to consider is that, once you are medicated, you have a whole new set of skills to develop. I remember when I started taking ADHD meds and I was like “wow I can focus now” and proceeded to focus with all my might on the wrong thing. | | |
| ▲ | sotix 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That interesting. I can hyperfocus without medication just fine. It's the choosing what to focus on that I take medication to solve. | | |
| ▲ | gtirloni 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I think "just fine" would imply you can invoke hyperfocus whenever you want. In my experience, it happens with the most undesirable things at the most undesirable moments. | | |
| ▲ | virtue3 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | But I know so much about randomly WW2 battle and military boats and airplanes that was critical to know at 3am when I had a full docket of stuff to do the next day... | |
| ▲ | sotix 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That seems to contradict my third sentence. Hyperfocusing does not mean choosing what to focus on. My point was, ADHD to me is not an issue in focusing. It's an issue with choosing what to focus on. | | |
| ▲ | gtirloni 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Understood, thanks for clarifying. In my case, my hyperfocus sessions (sometimes on useful, sometimes on useless things) are in between absurd levels of distractions so I can't totally relate. |
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| ▲ | Aeolun 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think that’s true. If I want to focus on the thing that is my current obsession I can invoke that focus whenever I want. Never mind if I’m at work, in the shower, or at a birthday party. It’s just not very useful to achieve the goals you probably have at those places. | |
| ▲ | myth2018 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I can relate. Also, sometimes I can even invoke it on things I want to. However, I just can't turn it off when needed. |
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| ▲ | directmusic 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My rule of thumb is: Whatever I am doing when the meds start working is what I'm going to be doing. | | |
| ▲ | thewebguyd 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Same. When I first started taking meds this was a hard lesson to learn. Yay I can actually focus on a task now. It just so happens that task needs to be whatever I'm doing when they start working. |
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| ▲ | gtirloni 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Another thing to consider is that, once you are medicated, you have a whole new set of skills to develop. Exactly. Once I got diagnosed, the doctor wanted to remove the SSRI's that had been treating the side effects and not the root cause... but that happened too quickly in my case. I had constant episodes. After a few months, I had to go back to them while I was still learning about everything, how I had to change habits, what would work now, etc. |
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| ▲ | metabagel 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example? Suggest thinking as if you already accomplished the thing and then work backwards from there. Start with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, because it’s already done. Now, you just need to do it. Or whatever approach works for you. Everyone is different. | | |
| ▲ | raducu 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example? Looking for other reasons behind procrastination is very important, indeed. There can be many, many core beliefs that hold you down. This will sound cliche and 70's pop-psy self-help, but people think about themselves as an adult of age XX and don't realize many core ideas about themselves are not those of an adult, but those of themselves at age 7. My example is that since my daughter was born I was using on her a blessing my grandma was always using on me, and I did not realize I was miss gendering her -- I was using the masculine form and my daughter eventually asked me about it -- why was I using the masculine form on her -- it then struck me I heard the blessing from my grandma when I was very young and it just became a core part of me. That's cute, until you realize you internalize A LOT of stuff by the time you're 7 and unfortunatelly it's not always positive stuff. My father did a lot of good things for me, but he was very competitive, he almost NEVER let me win at anything to the point he became visibly distraught when I was about to win against him, so I struggle to capitalize on my insights, especially when I have strong "about to win" feelings which turned into a life long self-inflicted "Cassandra curse". |
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| ▲ | otikik 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hyperfocus is an interesting one. You can now focus on a single thing so profoundly that you forget to eat or sleep. Slight caveat: you don’t have control over what you hyperfocus on. | |
| ▲ | metabagel 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Suggested books which I found helpful. There may be audiobooks available, if that is more your thing. https://bookshop.org/p/books/learned-optimism-how-to-change-... https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-now-habit-a-strategic-progr... | |
| ▲ | DrewADesign 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Mitigation strategies start to look a lot different when you have a better sense of adjusted capability. I expected it to be something I felt when I started a task, or how I felt about starting tasks— like if you’re stronger it’s easy to sense that you can pick up heavier objects, and picking up heavy things doesn’t feel as burdensome. That’s not what it was like for me. It still feels just as shitty and annoying to do things I don’t want to do, but once you realize how much better you are at staying on task and doing the work to completion, and doing things that might have been a cognitive challenge before, giving up/avoidance doesn’t feel like the only choice anymore. |
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| ▲ | abustamam 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How do I get diagnosed with ADHD? My sister just recently got diagnosed in her 40s (in another country though) and I'm like, well maybe I have adhd too, but I don't know who to ask, and the online quizzes all seem set up to sell you stuff. |
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| ▲ | SequoiaHope 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I took an online quiz, then told my doctor, then my doctor administered an online quiz to me and subscribed me Adderall. It has taken me a year and a half to make sense of what Adderall means to me but it’s quite helpful. I’m 40. I had never had stimulants like that before! Be careful with the euphoria. For a while my dose was too high and it felt great at first but I crashed on the weekends. Now I keep my dose lower and it’s helpful without being too much. Mindfulness and self control are important here. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Be careful with the euphoria. For a while my dose was too high This is a scarily common problem. For some reason, a lot of primary care doctors are jumping straight to very high doses of Adderall. Most patients love the feeling at first. They think they're going to conquer the world and that they've become an entirely new person. The euphoria never lasts, though. When tolerance erases the euphoria they start complaining that their medication "isn't working any more". The good practitioners will actually titrate upward: Start with a low dose, then incrementally increase it on future visits. | |
| ▲ | abustamam 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thanks! I like to think that I have mindfulness and self control, but I might be overestimating myself. | | |
| ▲ | SequoiaHope 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah honestly I have good self control for a lot of drugs, but this one was pretty tricky. It took me a while to realize what was happening. I had been on Adderall for almost a year when I started a new job at a fast paced startup, and only then did my usage patterns become an issue. My golden rule now is I only ever take the same dosage at the same times of day (morning and afternoon). For a while I took extra on busy days and this led to poor sleep, additional use subsequent days to keep up, and then a crash. The crash was characterized by feeling extremely sad to the point of ruining my weekends when it happened. Now for the past few months I’ve never exceeded my daily dose and I feel much better. Sounds like with this simple guidance and your mindfulness you will do great | | |
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