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It's getting harder to focus every day

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Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#381

Post by [deleted] »

CollinEMac wrote: post #302
skinfaxi wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't is well-known that higher education correlates with lower birthrates? At the very least college years are prime child-rearing years. > Educated women delay the onset of childbearing and have fewer children overall compared with less-educated women https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3449224/

Idiocracy's mechanism isn't as solid as it seems though even if high educated people do tend to have have less kid. The movie basically suggests "smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids, repeat forever." But you'd expect kids of very high or very low IQ parents to land closer to average in general. The "compounding" thing the movie relies on isn't really how it works in life. And even if the premise…

[deleted]

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#382

Post by code_biologist »

athorax wrote: post #250
mordae wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please also note that ADHD-like symptoms can present from sleep Apnea/UARS-induced sleep deprivation and the probability of having Apnea/UARS rises with age. Smoothly for men and a with a sudden jump after menopause for women. So if you feel like you are getting more ADHD-like issues, do consider a sleep study. Early tells are easy: you often feel like shit in the morning.

I recently went through this. I was diagnosed with ADHD 15 years ago and have been managing it, but over the last 2-3 years I had been experiencing increased levels of brain fog, fatigue, and by ability to focus had deteriorated to the point I wasn't sure if I would be able to continue working. I had a sleep study done 10 years ago that only found Night Terror Disorder, but no signs of sleep apnea. I did another slee…

What machine and mask do you have? I had a bad CPAP experience 2017ish and navigating sleep apnea treatment with ADHD kinda sucks. I got a recent sleep study done, but the doctor's office seems like a sales farm for a specific CPAP brand/model and they aggressively steered me away from an oral appliance.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#383

Post by QuercusMax »

athorax wrote: post #250
mordae wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please also note that ADHD-like symptoms can present from sleep Apnea/UARS-induced sleep deprivation and the probability of having Apnea/UARS rises with age. Smoothly for men and a with a sudden jump after menopause for women. So if you feel like you are getting more ADHD-like issues, do consider a sleep study. Early tells are easy: you often feel like shit in the morning.

I recently went through this. I was diagnosed with ADHD 15 years ago and have been managing it, but over the last 2-3 years I had been experiencing increased levels of brain fog, fatigue, and by ability to focus had deteriorated to the point I wasn't sure if I would be able to continue working. I had a sleep study done 10 years ago that only found Night Terror Disorder, but no signs of sleep apnea. I did another slee…

Doesn't even need to be a CPAP. I had a sleep study done and it said I basically only had sleep apnea when lying on my back, and my doctor suggested a dental appliance to pull my lower jaw forward.

I got one from my dentist for way too much money, it broke, so instead I got a "snore reducing mouthpiece" from ZQuiet or SnoreRX which is basically the exact same thing but they haven't done a clinical study to show it reduces sleep apnea. I wear one every night along with a nose strip (like Breathe Right, but a different brand that I like better) and my mornings feel like I was hung over are long gone.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#384

Post by avaer »

> Sometimes I live stream what I’m doing just because with a camera I cannot escape from hard challenges by grabbing my phone.

This is a great life hack, I highly recommend it if you need accountability or motivation.

You don't even need an audience, and if your work is the kind that somehow benefits from one, all the better.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#385

Post by dofm »

lrvick wrote: post #379
dofm wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back. Mine are gone for good. But I no longer want to be able to hyperfocus, because it is invariably a sign I am losing control. For me, hyperfocus is dysregulation that benefits others and not me. I just want to be able to think straight, keep my house tidy, and not spend a couple of hours every day wishing it would turn out to b…

I have at various points of my life been diagnosed with downs syndrome, chronic depression, anxiety, ADD, tourettes. Almost certainly undiagnosed PTSD and tests indicate maybe mild autism. I do not think anyone actually knows, and I stopped letting such fuzzy labels define me. I can say for me the drugs never fixed the root causes. They just made me care less about having control. A passenger in my own life. Once I r…

I am not a doom scroller. Like I say, I try to regulate my news intake to things that are valuable and I have for years. I use social media only for creative-interest-based groups — I have no "friend feed" at all and I haven't in more than a decade. I have some places where my limited focus is enough to share expertise, and that is more or less it.

Unfortunately my ability to focus declined precipitously three years ago and despite all sorts of long walks, breaks from the internet, breathing exercises, diet changes and ultimately stopping work entirely for months at a time, I have never got it back. I can no longer really do my job.

I don't want "hyperfocus" back at all. It's a disorder trait: it allows other people to expect more sustained over-exerted effort from me than I can possibly deliver without making myself ill.

I would like to be capable of managing my life on a day-to-day basis, but I am now so burned out that this is a struggle. I don't have any confidence that will return. I am what is left over from who I used to be.

But I am also now over fifty, single, childless, and I don't expect to return to my old job because everything I did has been changed so much by AI anyway.

As much as I try to learn about that AI future I will need to return to, and try to prepare to return to work, there is no returning to who I was, and I don't have the energy or focus to direct into some new version of me, so I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#386

Post by absoluteunit1 »

ckdarby wrote: post #223

It's really not that hard but people are addicted and don't want to admit it. Buy an Amazfit 6 watch, has alarms, clock, health stats, memos, weather, maps, and GPS workout. Turn off nearly all phone notifications. Do not allow any phone to AmaZfit notifications. Don't have your phone physically attached to you. You need your phone with you? Backpack. Never in pockets. All sudden it is incredibly easy to focus.

Is this an ad plug lol

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#389

Post by abalashov »

I don't know that this starts with LLMs, though LLMs are certainly--at least for some people--a way to take their ADHD tendencies further.

It's been obvious to me even since I was a computer-addled kid, in the 90s, that the way computer interfaces and multi-modal notifications affect the nervous system, the capacity for sustained attention and patient reading, and so on is pernicious. The impact has both cognitive and moral valences that reinforce each other, because the instincts reinforced by computer use turn into technocratic, anti-humanistic worldviews, and even cosmologies.

I imagine it's easy to read something Ludditic into this critique, but I mean it quite a bit more matter-of-factly, and from the vantage point of a tech professional who is as passionate about coding and computers as anyone else on HN. Still, it's sobering to consider the ways in which being so computer-bound since age 9 or 10 has altered the development of my habits of mind, my nervous system and my cognition, and speculate about might have been gained and lost.

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