eli5 – Can someone explain ADHD? Specifically the procrastination and inability to do “boring” tasks?
In: 2637
Something that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is decision fatigue. This is something everyone has, but for people with an executive function disorder like ADHD it’s even stronger.
Decision fatigue is pretty self-explanatory. The idea is that decisions are taxing to the brain. The bigger the decision, the more taxing it is. The more decisions you make in a day, especially important ones, the more difficult it gets to make good decisions subsequently. This has been studied multiple times in interesting ways. For instance, studies of judges and the sentences they hand out have shown that judges are more likely to give less thought to sentences for crimes later in the day, and more often choose to simply impose the maximum penalty.
It’s also taken advantage of by stores. You’ve gone through the store doing your shopping, making decisions about brand name vs generic, what to make for dinner next Thursday, will your kids eat that or not, and then you get to the register where they have low cost but relatively high markup items. You’re more likely to give in to impulses at that point and buy something you might not otherwise to treat yourself.
People with ADHD get fatigued from decisions much faster. it doesn’t help that ADHD can make it hard to grasp thoughts, and the more stressed you get the harder that gets. A really good example of this is when my wife would ask me to help clean the house or something. Multiple times she would just say “Hey we need to do some cleaning” and then move on about doing it. I would freeze and literally be unable to make a decision about where to start. It sounds incredibly dumb to be honest, but making that decision about where to start was REALLY hard. My wife has learned that specific instructions are better for both of us. “Hey, can you vacuum?”
To people who don’t struggle as much with these things it can all seem like excuses, but ADHD can really be like having someone lead you around by the nose and dragging your attention away from what you really should or want to do.
Latest Answers