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Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

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Re: Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree about caffeine. https://www.verywellmind.com/how-does-caffeine-affect-people... "if you don't learn to focus it." this is nonsensical and harmful

Is the long term consumption of caffeine really a good idea? I would expect the tolerance build up to negate the positive effects fairly quickly. Most people that need to have their coffee in the morning are NOT more awake than a non-coffee drinker but need the coffee to just reach their normal baseline. So you would need higher and higher dosages to see any positive effects and at that point you get nasty side-effec…

Some of the effects of caffeine are subject to diminishing with tolerance, others are not.

People develop tolerance at different rates, and it depends on dose and usage pattern, etc. It's not hard to use caffeine a lot and never develop a strong tolerance. (Probably not true for everyone, And it's a different story if you've already been drinking multiple cups of coffee every day for decades).

There's some really fascinating research on caffeine use out there, highly recommend that rabbit hole for the interested.

Re: Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

#172

Didn't know I had ADHD until I read this. Were you officially diagnosed?

You probably don't have ADHD!

Or more precisely, whether you would get a diagnosis of ADHD if you consulted the appropriate specialist is probably irrelevant to your life.

You are one of the many people who have repeatedly derived pleasure from visiting HN. It is natural for humans to get pleasure from learning new things and getting fresh perspectives from other humans.

And HN is easy and comfortable and very safe. There is nothing at risk: your visit to HN will not end in pain such as the pain of trying hard to achieve a goal important to you and failing. Yes, understanding the implications of something you learned here can require mental effort, and mental effort is painful (at least momentarily), but the mental effort is discretionary: if you choose not to make the effort, the consequences (namely, having a less accurate model of reality than you would have had if you had made the effort) are far away and minor.

Things that are pleasurable and require no effort (and no danger or risk) are bad for people. Specifically it screws up the system in the brain for motivation, drive and reward. Indulge enough in these effortless risk-less pleasures and your motivation becomes weakened such that even if you go cold turkey on the pleasure, it takes weeks and weeks for you to regain the natural human ability to remain motivated by things that require sustained effort, pain and patience.

Actually it is worse than that because pleasure causes reinforcement of the sequence of actions that led up to the pleasure. Suppose for example that you make a mental move in your mind along the lines of, "my situation is hopeless; I'm stuck, and there is no way out," while you are interacting with a web browser. Suppose further that your next move (while in this state of nihilism) is to type "news.yc" in the location bar, then 30 seconds or 60 seconds later you notice a story or a comment on HN that explains some aspect of reality that has been confusing you and nagging at you for years. Your discovery of the explanation is pleasurable (and should be pleasurable). So far so good (you learned something) but pleasure reinforces the mental moves you made that led up to the pleasure, including the nihilistic move. If that nihilistic move gets reinforced enough times in this way, it can take years to correct the problem.

The point is that most of society is probably dealing with this problem. It's not that you have a mental disorder. Well, I don't know you: maybe you do have a mental disorder (ADHD or otherwise) making your problem with HN worse than it would be if you did not have a disorder. But people with a mental disorder have the same mental architecture for motivation as the rest of us, so I have to believe that they should control and pay attention to their participation in effortless risk-less pleasures as strictly as the rest of us should.

Some pleasures are better than others: for example, it is better to get pleasure from learning things than from harming other people (and at least some of the pleasure people get from video games is the pleasure in harming simulated people). But even a good pleasure can be a problem when a person has essentially unlimited access to it; when it does not cost anything and carries essentially no risk; when there is no painful effort or patient waiting between the moment the person decides to pursue the pleasure and when the pleasure comes.

Re: Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

#175
There is a mindset where each bookmark is an implicit obligation, and they of course pile up faster than you can go back and peruse them to your satisfaction, so this understandably leads to an unpleasant feeling of unfulfillable obligation.

After getting into all the second brain stuff and trying out quite a few ways of organizing this kind of information, I've started to think very carefully about what sort of implicit commitment I'm making when I write something down. I use a system of tags for things I need to look at later in some way, and I almost never tag links, but I often search back through them to find something particular that comes to mind, and I'm glad I store them.

Maybe you would have success reorienting your perspective to feel like "just" bookmarking is enough, such that there's not an implicit responsibility to come back and do something particular with the bookmarks? Or if you want that responsibility, that you can have one kind of bookmark that you're "just" saving, and another kind that you are okay committing to review?

Then it might become clearer just by the size of the folders if you're "assigning" yourself an impossible amount of work.

Re: Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

#176

Pi Hole with my own blocklist. That is, I block all of my problem sites, then let someone else set my pihole password and then I delete my ssh key off the server. Then on the phone, remove all apps that allows consumption (social media, games, readers, youtube, even the browser). Debloat it with adb too. Switch off all notification except for your main chat app (like whatsapp) and alarms. If still too distracting, se…

This seems like a very puritanical viewpoint. So much so, that it's a little peculiar and almost feels like a caricature. A life of avoidance does not help an ADHD brain, and the idea that your brain wants stuff to do is not the case at all. You will burn out very quickly going down that path. You'll get much further just taking a few times a day to slow your thoughts via meditation or engaging in a passive activity that allows constructive mind-wandering.

Hell, I'd even recommend medicating over locking your whole life down and living in fear of your own brain.

Re: Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

#178
Medication helps. Lifestyle hasn't changed too much - I still have endless to-do lists, bookmarks, things I need to get to, but medication has helped me in the sense that it doesn't all feel overwhelming at every single moment, anymore. Days feel easier to manage.

Re: Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

#179

Are you medicated? One of my boys has ADHD and it was life changing. When I was a kid ADD as they called it then was highly stigmatized because the meds turned you into a zombie, it's not the case anymore. Basically zero side effects other than appetite loss during lunch.

Isn't ADHD medication basically amphetamine? I experimented when I was younger and it wasn't nice stuff. Couldn't sleep properly afterwards, and loos of appetite (I am already pretty skinny).

Re: Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is definitely how I ended up dealing with it too. I just replaced my computer as the motherboard failed and hadn't setup sync on chrome. I have 1000s of links I no longer have access to and haven't missed them once in 3 months. File and forget is incredibly effective when you have ADHD. There are just too many things that are "interesting" that you'll never have time to do anything about. Just write it dow…

> You'll find in a few weeks time the things that didn't actually matter are gone. What gets me mad sometimes is that when I work on something and hit a road block, then I remember I found an article about it a year or so ago and I definitely saved it. I just have no idea how to find it. I have not looked, but I wonder if there is an indexing tool that would also do an OCR on screenshots, PDFs etc. in the local files…

Yes! Search is an incredibly important tool.

I have recently started using Zotero, which can create offline copies of saved webpages and papers. You can then search their contents.

Last week I bookmarked Yacy, which is a search engine and which seems to allow you to define your own web index. However, I haven't gotten around to seeing how it really works...

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