How to Read Books When You Have ADHD

I'll comment on this, as a neurologically tested ADHD 30 year old with 2 decades of on/off medication experience.

"Treatment" is a spectrum, unsurprisingly, and a bit of a misnomer. While I'm not completely on board with the "ADHD is actually a superpower" train of thought, I do believe that there are some interesting tradeoffs that having it can benefit in some ways - obviously that's different for every person. If you start throwing away the concept of being binary "treated" or not, you can start thinking in terms of "what is working for me right now". Sometimes being medicated is a life changing benefit, and other times in my life I'm waaay better off without medication.

It's important to distinct the two, because what medication can get you is a better understanding of the daily patterns that work best for you, and it is (in my opinion) the best way to start building that understanding. Sometimes medication is the only way for me to reach a certain place I want to be, and no medication can do the same, but I firmly believe that the habits I build during medicated periods of time help me make the most out of my non medicated periods.

For what it's worth, when I talk about on/off periods -- I was medicated in middle school through high school, took my first two college years off, got back on the next two, final year of college was no medication, got back on for 2ish years when I entered the workforce, then took the next 4 years off. I'm back on it now. I don't really consider week or weekend breaks an off period.

Occasionally I’ll also use an index card as a bookmark and write page numbers with 1-2 word summaries of big ideas.

More seriously, I think that people have a tendency to mix up broad, high-level symptoms of ADHD with the more specific ways that those symptoms manifest for them.

For some (not all) people with ADHD, acting on their motivations is very difficult; so the technique they come up with to help is to either drastically increase their motivation (moving up deadlines and hyper-stressing about tasks, or rewarding themselves, or whatever), or to try and decrease the barriers of entry to the task (automating parts of it, getting help from another person, etc...)

So it sounds like this author falls somewhat into that category, and one of the specific reasons they've found for them personally that's a barrier to reading is guilt over the idea that they aren't finishing books. And what they've done is given themselves permission not to finish books, which allows them to read more overall. Which, great. Genuinely glad that works, and it might work for other people too.

But lots of people who fall into that category of struggling with executive dysfunction are not going to have the same barriers over reading. For many of them, turning reading into a chore will actually be counterproductive. Having a document that you forget to review every week might increase guilt. "Read to find one improvement" might not even line up with why they're motivated to read books in the first place.

And that's obviously ignoring that ADHD also covers people who struggle with inattentiveness and other problems that could also be a barrier to reading more -- but the point is, just because a solution works for one person with ADHD, it might not be applicable even to other people who are struggling with the same problem, because the general issue "I can't act on my motivations" is still going to manifest differently and have different solutions depending on what the individual's barriers are to a specific task.

My second point is that we have a system where the capitalist incentive structure is driving the drug seeking. People need these drugs to “function” only in the sense of attaining better wages or holding a job. That has nothing to do with medical need. It is capitalism perverting medicine, defining mental health as employability seems misguided at best.

Lastly, neurolink. Do the the math.