What helps me is to count down from 5, and when I reach 1 I stop what I’m doing and stand up.
The power of medication!!! Thank fucking God for amphetamines. It’s like night and day and you’re not perpetually tired no matter how great your sleep is.
Every day is like that one day two months ago when you woke up feeling normal and good despite a random amount of sleep you had prior lol.
like crapI’m 90% sure the original post said shit. It’s ok, it’s the internet, you can say shitThat…feels more like depression.
Adhd, at least in my experience, is telling yourself you’ll get up and make lunch “in a minute” and then that minute turns into 4 hours. It’s not even a conscious decision at a certain point, it’s just that changing tracks from something you want to do to something you want to do less takes a lot of effort.
So, caveat here that I don’t have ADHD myself, but I have two friends who do.
One of my friends had a mother that was very shaming and critical when my friend with ADHD got distracted or forgot things. Like, “You’re so smart I don’t see why you can’t Do The Thing, it should be so simple!” and “Oh, she’ll forget her house keys and come crying to me to bring them to her!” (As if my friend was entitled or something–but she’s actually one of the most humble and sweet people I know, I have no idea why her mom has adopted this martyr persona where things she does on her own are somehow my friend’s fault. Her mother seems to struggle with anxiety, and projects it on everyone around her–she tries to deal with it by controlling everyone through passive aggressive remarks. Obviously since ADHD has rejection sensitivity sometimes, it hits my friend hard.)
For another person in another family, it might have been different, but for my friend, because her mom was always on the, “You’re so smart, why can’t you Do The Thing, it’s so simple!” train, the distractions and forgetfulness and stuff got rolled up with trauma because not only was her brain distracting her all the time, but when a task WAS remembered, there’s a bunch of shame and trauma getting into the mix on top of the ADHD symptoms. Like, she already had tons of trouble trying to Do The Thing, but her mom made it so there was also shame and anxiety pulling her attention away on top of the baseline ADHD.
So maybe “technically” it’s depression or anxiety or whatever–but it seems a fairly common experience for folks with neurodivergance who are surrounded by family who just “can’t understand” why they don’t “do the thing”.
I don’t have ADHD like I said, but I have C-PTSD and grew up with family that is schizophrenic (I mean this very literally–several family members formally diagnosed, etc.), so when my C-PTSD stuff goes off due to stress, my gut instinct isn’t to Do The Thing to fix it, because in my experience my family was so chaotic that it honestly didn’t matter if I did or didn’t Do The Thing. My status of “in trouble” or “not in trouble” would be in flux according to THEIR mood, not what I actually had done, so it doesn’t register on me when I’m upset that “doing the thing” might fix the bad feelings by appeasing the other person.
So I ran into a lot of issues were my stress response makes me flee stressful things (like school homework when I was young, or cleaning, or paperwork deadlines for dr or whatever), which has a negative feedback cycle of, “Why didn’t you do this, it’s so easy!” kicking up shame, which makes me flee, which makes more shame, on and on and on in a shit cycle.
My friend and I had very different home lives, but the thing we shared here was mental differences (her ADHD, my trauma from a shit home life) getting wound up with anxiety/depression that are intimately attached to the shaming others/society does if it perceives us to be “lazy” when we’re actually panicking/afraid/guilty/hurting inside.
As a counterpoint to the other person, I did actually read it, definitely seems like you understand us!
Wait, that’s ADHD? 😶
I do that kinda stuff all the time. I always assumed it was somehow caused by anxiety.
It’s actually probably the single most common ADHD trait. It’s the “attention deficit” in ADHD; can’t force the brain to change focus from doom scrolling into whatever you actually want/need to do. The anxiety is just the side effect when the “other thing” happens to be important/urgent.
I really dislike the name “attention deficit”. We can totally pay attention to things, what we have problems with is controlling where the attention stays or is directed to. There’s also a problem where our brain doesn’t properly generate motivation from us just wanting to do something because that function became disabled with ADHD.
The actual symptom is called “executive dysfunction”.
I wasn’t sure if it was one of executive functions or if it was something other that was impaired.
Attention, both directing where you want it and stopping attention where you don’t, as well as working memory and planning are what comprise executive functions.
ADHD makes all of these more difficult.
This seems like it’s not a joke, so I’ll choose to take it seriously.
Throw your fucking phone in the toilet if you spend 3 hours with it trying to “convince yourself” to do something.
“Just be productive”-level take here. For clarification, because I see you telling others that you “are intelligent”: that is a really dumb take to have.
yup, getting some real "have you tried not being sick?‘’ energy there. people assume just because they can do something and it’s logical for them, it works the same way for everyone,
well except for the ‘lazy’ part, that doesn’t work the same way (according to them)
shit, even trying to explain it doesn’t make sense
Not in the moment, but overall, if someone is spending 3hrs in the day on their phone (and not enjoying it) they should absolutely install use reduction tools, or have a family member hold on to the device during the workday/non chill-out time.
Illness is real but harm reduction is possible. Cellphones are known attention traps due to the neverending click-scroll dopamine loop
Yes, harm reduction is possible, but it requires motivation to do so, I believe is one side of the argument presented in the comments around here.
The phone is maybe a bad example as something that can be removed in one swoop.
Picture a student (with no phone, they use their desktop computer in 2007) having an exam in 7 days and carefully planning on the first day - I’ll have to get through 350 pages before this exam. 50 pages a day is more than easy mode. Then they start on the first batch and suddenly get the urge to clean their room. Once that’s almost done, they start wondering if penguins actually have knees or not, so they go online and check. Then they see the book lying on the bed, 6 pages / 50 done. Get back to the book but realize they stopped in the middle of a long paragraph, time to go back to pages to remember what was said. 10 more pages. Maybe they should have some coffee. They suddenly have the urge to find out in detail how coffee is roasted. At this point some 4 hours have passed, the room still isn’t fully clean, nobody knows for sure if penguins have knees and there’s a bag of open coffee grounds lying somewhere in the dorm room. Where the hell was it? And they needed to pee for like 30 minutes now but how is coffee roasted?
Exam is coming and this shit has been going on for 3 days. The dread now sets in, with the needed amount of work doubled. Must avoid the dread. Brain goes back to old tricks and pulls a quick one to distract from dread.
2 days left - brain goes into oh shit mode. Dread-distract-repeat. All nighter time. Somehow it works.
I do agree with you that phones are attention-traps and would say that they make make it easier to mask this sort of behaviour by just staring at a screen, because the sheer amount of stuff you can do on your phone from browsing pictures of cats to finding actually interesting content (video or otherwise) to ordering food or cleaning supplies or chatting with friends means it’s now easier than ever to get distracted while appearing outwardly otherwise unoccupied, but the brain is firing in random directions like a dog chasing s fleet of scared squirrels.
All this to say that yes, you can throw the phone away, but never underestimate the ability of a distraction-prone mind to keep itself distracted.
No, not at all. If your analogy is sickness, I would say “have you tried not eating feces all the time?”
No, not at all. “Just be bored” is my message. The effect of lying on the couch with a phone is that you’re low key entertained for the whole time. That’s highly damaging.
I think that’s a misunderstanding of how ADHD, and in fact mental illness in general, works. Perhaps for some people removing the distraction will work, but more often in my experience another will just fit in its place. The phone is not the problem, it is a symptom.
Phones are a very powerful attention trap. I’d be curious to hear an argument of a more powerful and accessable one
Literally fucking anything that seems more pleasant than thing I’m procrastinating
Man just read the meme again. The whole point is it looks like an attention trap but in ADHD it’s just a facade.
The phone isn’t what causes this issue in people with adhd, I do it with or without a phone. You’re just misunderstanding how adhd works.
I’m aware how ADHD behaves, I have it. I’ve been medicated for years.
It is obvious to me and many others who have it that things of great dopamine satisfaction are ESPECIALLY distracting. Cellphone distraction is a known attention sink and such things are even more powerful for folks with attention/focus issues.
I guarantee any of us locked in a blank room and a sink full of dishes would be faster to complete the chore if we were without engrossing distraction.
Those with ADHD have an even higher responsibility to themselves to remove distractions and keep a “clean” lifestyle. It’s a cop out to not acknowledge massive distraction triggers or traps.
I’m not suggesting those struggling are lesser. Only that they may be not meeting their own self care needs, willfully or otherwise.
I agree on phone usage restriction apps. You can also extend the usage as a reward for achieving things which would work as an external motivation that ADHD people need. I also agree with other people that it won’t even be close to solving ADHD problems, people were just arguing with you about different thing because they thought that you have the same perception of ADHD as the top level comment.
If you’re aware of how adhd works then you of all people should know that “throw your phone in the toilet” is shite advice that only someone who doesn’t know how adhd works would give. If you have adhd then you should know better than that.
Well my doctor advised me to limit intense distractions to allow me to focus on my wellness and accomplish tasks. I never said throw the phone away.
It took a lot of work to limit and change my habits, and help from my wife to help me block out stimuli and keep it away.
Executive function is fucking hard enough without bullshit attention sinks.
People are incredibly fast to claim that somebody doesn’t understand how ADHD or procrastination works, just because they said something they don’t quite agree with.
“throw your phone in the toilet” is not and has never been the solution to this problem in any universe under the sun, so no, it’s not just because they said something I don’t like. They’re just backpedalling.
A lot of people seem to wear disorders like add/ADHD like an identity. At least online…
Like, I’m not a lesser person for my disorder, but I HAVE a disorder. It’s my responsibility to myself to maximize my outcomes, and minimize the impacts.
Being critical of what distracts me, or triggers a tangential behavior track is so important to my being successful. In the case of cell phones, that is a known trap for even non ADHD folks, so my sharing it as relevant here isn’t some wacko suggestion hah
When there perfect fixes aren’t available (which is almost always), partial fixes are golden.
The phone is not the problem, it is a symptom.
And part of harm reduction is removing symptoms. Say, if you have a bad headache, you might not cure whatever is causing it by taking pain meds, but at least you’ll function.
Oh you misunderstand, the same thing happens without a phone. It just turns into laying on the couch not looking at a phone for 3 hours
I misunderstand nothing. Laying on the couch for 3 hours without a phone (etc) is way better.
