A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with adhd and I’m having a hard time understanding how it works, being a child of the 80s/90s it was always just explained in a very simplified manner and as just kind of an auxiliary problem. Thank you in advance.
In: Biology
It’s a common misconception that ADHD simply means being hyper and/or being unable to focus, when a more accurate way to describe it would be not as an attention deficit, but as an [executive function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions) deficit. That’s why so many parents of children with ADHD are skeptical of the diagnosis–they see that little Timmy has trouble sitting still and paying attention to homework and chores, yet he can sit down in front of a video game for hours at a time! *See, he must be slacking off, he doesn’t really have trouble focusing!*
A true ELI5 on how this actually affects people is ‘ICNU’: Interest, Challenge, Novelty, and Urgency. If something doesn’t meet one of those four categories, someone with ADHD just isn’t going to be able to do it. Let’s use doing the dishes as an example–is it interesting? Not even slightly. Challenging? Not really. Novel? Nah. Urgent? Not *yet*–but once that person with ADHD actually needs clean dishes, *then* it gets done, because it now meets one of those four criteria. In that sense, putting things off until the very last second is essentially a coping mechanism for ADHD, rather than a symptom of it itself.
And on a related note, that’s also why video games in particular are like *the* stereotypical ADHD hobby/addiction–most video games check all four of those ICNU boxes at once. They were practically *made* for us.
Latest Answers