151–160 of 453 posts
Meditation helped me to deal with ADHD immensely. My ability to focus and concentrate is now on par if not better than most of my peers, though it requires me to spend about an hour every day in the morning to meditate. I find that it’s very much worth the time investment, and would recommend anyone struggling with focus/anxiety to try it themselves.
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> Unless it happens to magically coincide with their hyper-focus topic of the moment! It's funny. People with ADHD suffer from attention deficit but at the same time they display hyperattention when they encounter a subject they like. I've experienced it as well: once I start programming I have no problem doing it for 12 hours straight. I've found this trait in many ADHD patients. There's usually something that reall…
The way I've come to describe it with my therapist is that it feels like, internally, I have 12 different brains. All of them are constantly scanning around, interested in different things, making it very hard to focus on one thing, but conversely making me very good at understanding a thing as a whole. The other part of this analogy is that when there is something that grabs my interest, it grabs it with all 12 brai…
I know what you mean. I think if I could click with someone who's really organized and good at execution we could turn one of my 9 billion potentially-pretty-good ideas into an awesome company (I have a pet theory that this pattern is often why it takes 2 to found), but I have never really been able to connect with neurotypicals. They can play along where I can't even tune in, and worse, they are content where I am passionate.
I’m 31 and have ADHD (diagnosed in my teens) and I’m pretty sure NOBODY with ADHD is going to have the wherewithal to read this entire article! Unless it happens to magically coincide with their hyper-focus topic of the moment! In all seriousness, I skimmed parts of the article and kept scrolling and it just kept going and going and going... like the Energizer bunny. I guess the author found a doctor to prescribe sti…
That's interesting to hear about ADHD causing mood swings/anger/irritability and the stimulants doing away with them. Is that a common trait of the illness? I only noticed that after I started taking stimulants my temper became a lot more short. It's to the point that I have to be really cognizant of it lest I inadvertently snap at someone due to some biological response (really not good as a leader in an organizatio…
Poor executive functioning is why I could never make myself start writing a paper prior to the day or two before it was due, despite the rising sense of panic I would get for weeks. (This is key -- it's not laziness, because good lord did I wish I were able to do the work. To me, lazy ~= apathy, and what I felt was just about the polar opposite of apathy.)
Poor executive functioning is also why, unmedicated, it was sometimes difficult to not let my initial emotional reactions just come flying out. It was like there was an express lane between my limbic system and my action system, totally bypassing my ability to control it. I would find myself snapping out something and as it was coming out of my mouth, I would be kicking myself and thinking "Why in god's name am I saying this right now?"
Medication has helped with all of the above and more.
What I will say is that stimulants also can have a tendency to put some people on edge and increase sympathetic nervous system activity, so shorter temper could be a side effect for sure. If it's affecting you that strongly, maybe speak with your doctor about a slightly lower dose?
Or is there a possibility that you only became aware of your tendency to have a short temper once you became medicated? An interesting chicken/egg question; I'm just asking rhetorically, mind, because I have a lot of similar questions.
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> the danger is that they're fun I don't know about others, but fun isn't the word I'd use to describe the ADHD medication which I'm basically chained to for life because I cannot function without it, and yet causes me so many other problems that I need to work around or cope with like loss of appetite (food is no longer a thing I enjoy), insomnia, anxiety, restlessness and mood swings. Where's the fun part again? Ar…
> But in the beginning -- especially if you've never experimented with stimulants recreationally -- you'll feel better than you ever have. Stimulants are euphoric. It's a trap, it wears off. Side-effects are likely. I've said it in a previous comment, but it's profound and interesting until it's not, and once the stimulants are gone a dark depression is very possible. As I said further down. It's most certainly not f…
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How long did it take you to see results? I've battled (manageable) ADHD all my life and have been meditating for around a year. I've seen many positive impacts on my life, but the ADHD is still very much a thing I still battle.
Interestingly enough, it took until I stopped trying to think of meditation as something to game or try and get something out of, for it to finally start working. My personal hypothesis is that the inherent expectation of wanting/needing to feel some kind of effect every time I tried meditating ended up being the very blockade that prevented me from doing so. I kept falling into a negative recursive thought loop of,…
I was diagnosed in my 30s in part by the T.O.V.A. test, which gave me surprising insights. The hardest part of the test for me was to stop pushing the button when it told me to. It's hard to describe how difficult that was for me. By the end I distinctly recall the familiar sense I had in school of feeling dumb, inadequate, and frustrated. In the T.O.V.A. results I was normal range for Inattention and Reaction Time.…
Try other medication. It took me a few years, after being diagnosed in my 30's as well, to find something that helped without side effects.
With all of these types of conversations and threads I am more curious to hear from the disciplined, focused people who seem to be the goal for what Adderiddlinvanse fixes. I have wondered if I have ADD many times in the past. Mostly, because I was in school and being forced to do a task that I didn't enjoy, nor wanted to enjoy. When I have found things that I do genuinely enjoy, I can focus for hours and hours on en…
One of the hallmarks of ADHD is not being able to get started and stay focused on things you do enjoy, not just things anyone would find unenjoyable.
About getting treatment: it's extremely irritating that some people judge using Ritalin is somehow morally wrong. Yes, I get that "lifestyle changes" could help, but I don't want to change my lifestyle. Imagine if there was a pill to reduce risk of cardiac arrest, with some increased risk of something relatively minor. Can you imagine the uproar if cardiologists denied prescribing the pill, instead forcing people to…
There's another weird factor. Ritalin is an upper and it's stigmatized to take an upper - either your performance, judged by coworkers, will be equivalent or below theirs and the stimulant is seen as the only thing keeping you in your job (which can get super depressing internally) - or, if you're doing well in your position, it can breed internal and external doubt as to whether your performance would just be normal…
Meditation helped me to deal with ADHD immensely. My ability to focus and concentrate is now on par if not better than most of my peers, though it requires me to spend about an hour every day in the morning to meditate. I find that it’s very much worth the time investment, and would recommend anyone struggling with focus/anxiety to try it themselves.