eli5 – Can someone explain ADHD? Specifically the procrastination and inability to do “boring” tasks?
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ADHD has a number of disparate facets, but AIUI it mostly boils down to an impaired ability to control what you give attention to. You can’t just decide to focus on something – or to *not* focus on something – no matter how much you may know you need to. You procrastinate because your brain doesn’t believe that there’s enough of a reward to be gained by doing whatever task it is – usually because it’s boring in and of itself, and any longer-term reward isn’t taken into account – and you can’t override your brain and force yourself to do it anyway. You might also procrastinate because even though what you should be doing would be engaging, what you’re doing now is *also* engaging, and you can’t convince your brain to break away from it.
In effect, it feels rather like being a passenger in your own mind. Your brain thinks about whatever it’s going to think about, and you’re just along for the ride. You can try to give it suggestions, but ultimately it decides where you go. In fact, IIRC studies have shown that the harder an ADHD person tries to force themselves to focus on something their brain doesn’t want to focus on, the more brain scans show their brain seeming to just shut down.
Sometimes it’s possible to work around this – medication can help make your brain consider just about anything rewarding (which sometimes comes with its own downsides!), and often it’s easier to do something for or even just with someone else because of the social reward of helping them or interacting with them. A lot of people with ADHD also use stress and anxiety as ways of coercing their brain into engaging with what they need to do.
People without ADHD struggle to understand this, because they *can* simply decide to do something and then go do it, and the idea that this might be difficult or impossible is very alien to them. As a result, ADHD-related traits often get stigmatised as willful unwise behaviour, when in actual fact there’s little to no will or wisdom involved in the situation at all. It’s just a cognitive impairment.
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