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
At a technical level, it takes a lot more stimulation to maintain psychological arousal.
You know how velociraptor vision is based on movement, and if you keep still, they can’t see you?
ADHD brains are a bit like that. If it’s not ‘popping’, if it’s not reactive, if it’s not clamouring for attention or scurrying away or generally on fire… then it fades into our mental background and becomes incredibly hard to stay aware of – like having a big blurry floater that inevitably moves in to blot out whatever you look at for more than a few seconds.
Think of the number 3 for five minutes. Not things there are three of, not triangular things, not multiples of three, not that song about three being the perfect number, not how you’re trying to think about 3, not *anything else*, just 3. Keep thinking 3, and don’t let your mind wander or slip off it.
You won’t last one minute, let alone five. The longer you go, the less traction you have – and the harder you scrabble to keep your position, the worse it gets. It takes increasing effort for decreasing results, and after a while all you’re thinking about is the effort you’re making to think about 3, instead of thinking about 3.
Okay: now imagine that *everything is like that*. Every single damn thing that isn’t actively jumping up and down or that doesn’t yelp when you poke it.
Your mind gets fatigued to hell staying on-task, if that task takes active concentration but is not reactive.
A task you can autopilot, like tidying up, cooking, sorting stuff, etc is fine because you don’t need to be mentally present for it. You just start going and you can be miles away down some weird-ass chain of thought, but your hands keep doing the work. And even for the bits you do need to concentrate for, there’s some interactivity that keeps it changed up.
But a job that needs your ongoing mental involvement, without giving anything back – like, say, copying numbers into a spreadsheet – is absolute hell. You can’t park your attention elsewhere, because you need to think about the numbers, look over here, remember the number, click on the box, type the number, cursor down, rinse and repeat. After a few minutes, you *just can’t make yourself* keep thinking the same thing; it simply doesn’t work. Try as hard as you want, your effort has no effect.
And of course *literally any distraction*, either internal or external, becomes infinitely louder, clearer and easier to follow. Any stray thoughts or sensations get sucked into the mental vacuum, and just take over.
This means that our short-term working memory is constantly getting overwritten, so our task management is *utterly fucking nonexistent*. It’s not that we don’t want to do the thing, it’s that it’s been *completely wiped from our awareness* until something reminds us of it. It’s not a matter of effort, or of wanting to – there’s just nothing there for volition to act upon.
Imagine being in a 24/7 Skype call with a bunch of 7yos who are being paid in sugar to loudly comment on and argue about everything they see or hear, and you can *never ever shut them up even for a minute*. And imagine that you’re trying to do your taxes in the middle of this, or keep track of a list of verbal instructions from your boss, or ensure that you pick up the shopping on your way home, or pay the phone bill on time.
We rely *heavily* on autopilot and routine. Once we can make something a background habit, we can do it without having to remember it – unless someone kicks us out of our routine, and then everything goes to hell.
I’ve been successfully distracted out of taking my lunch to work by my wife reminding me to take my lunch to work. I’ve walked into and out of a supermarket chanting ‘must buy milk, must buy milk’ to myself, only to walk out without buying milk, because I was so focused on reminding myself that I forgot to actually do it.
One time my wife called and asked me to take her notes to her at uni. I agreed, picked up her notes… then she called me again and asked me to bring her jacket as well. So I grab it, take it to uni, hand it to her…
“My notes?”
“… Fuck.”
That incident was hilarious, but a lifetime of shame and disappointment and being called inconsiderate and selfish and lazy… can really add up.
Other less-fun stuff is that we can be prone to sensory overload, a bit like the ASD folks. We have to work a whole lot harder at filtering out irrelevant stuff, and it’s pretty much a conscious process for us, so it’s easy for us to get overwhelmed in noisy or crowded places, if a bunch of people are talking to us at once, if we’re in too many people’s eyeline… it can all get way too much, very quickly. You’ll notice that if we go to parties, we’re the ones that stay at the edge of the crowd, and probably spend a lot of time helping in the kitchen.
And similarly we can just spontaneously get into this unpleasant state that’s not quite anxiety, not quite excitement – it’s just wound up and jittery and pacing, without anything to pin it on.
The meds do help. They’re mild stimulants that lower the threshold for that psychological arousal, so things don’t have to be quite so on-fire for our brains to track them. The blind spot takes longer to settle in, we’re a little harder to distract, we can keep at least a couple of items in working memory without getting crowded out by irrelevant shit.
From the outside they *look* like we’ve been sedated because we’re able to calm down – but that’s not the case. We’re calmer and steadier *because* we’ve been powered up, so we’re no longer flailing for context, we’re no longer running to catch up all the time, we’re no longer losing track of our thoughts, so we’re able to think in straight lines instead of zigzagging all over the place and teleporting around like we’re lagged to hell.
They aren’t a magic wand, and they take discipline to make use of – but they let us carve out a little tiny place to stand, instead of getting blown around like leaves on the wind.
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