If caffeinated drinks like coffee are meant to give you boosts of energy then why is it recommended for kids with ADHD to calm them down?
In: Biology
Your brain produces chemicals which attach to sites on neurons (brain nerves). They are a certain “shape” like plugging a round peg into a round hole. (NOT really but you get the gist).
When a normal person drinks a high caffeine energy drink, all of these round pegs plug into all of the round holes and cause an increase of transmission from one neuron to another.
But it’s not perfect. Sure it fits into the hole, but since it’s artificial, they don’t transmit as efficiently as a natural round peg would.
By placing inefficient round pegs in an a brain that overproduces natural round pegs, it actually slows the transmission of signals down.
Individuals with ADHD have a biological mixup that causes their brain to react to stimulants differently than the “normal” brain. Not sure of the exact chemical reaction, but for those with ADHD, the neurons in the brain are typically firing as if the person was already using a stimulant and when they do use a stimulant it sort of slows and focus that energy because of the way the brain reacts to it.
Source: Niece and nephew have ADHD and this is sort of how the doctor explain it to us when they were living with us.
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I have ADHD. The way it was explained to me was, that everyone has barriers/filters in their brains to help them sort through external stimuli – so for example, when you’re driving, you’re able to pay attention to other cars and pedestrians on the road, but you’re not distracted by the fact that the sky is blue, or the fact that you recognise someone on the road side, or by the random thought passing through your brain.
In people who have ADHD, those barriers are lower than most people’s, so our brains have to deal with a shitload of information at once. Hence the distraction (too much information going through the barriers to focus on a few things), or hyperfocus (brain is concentrating really hard to raise the barriers really high to focus on only one thing – but it’s exhausting), and eventually hyperactivity (side effect when the brain is trying to keep the barriers raised).
When people with ADHD take stimulants like caffeine, it helps the brain raise up the barriers to a level where most people have them, so it isn’t so hard as when the brain tries to do it by itself. Thus less distraction, and less hyperactivity since the brain doesn’t have to work as hard.
What most people don’t understand is that having ADHD is *exhausting*. The hyperactivity you see isn’t from us having too much energy, it’s from our brains trying really hard to filter out all the useless information coming at us.
Edit: wow, thanks everyone for all the upvotes! I had no idea it would resonate with so many people. Shoutout to my psychiatrist for explaining it to me like this in the first place!
There’s a lot of long answers so far but the simple ELI5 is this; it won’t calm them down it will focus them, instead of their attention being split on 7 different tasks they focus it all on one task and are distracted from that task less easily.
Well, “recommended” probably isn’t the most accurate. Caffeine is effective and gets into your system very fast, but it doesn’t last very long. It’s not the best for a daily use, long term solution. If someone with ADHD needs something immediate, sure. But they should not rely on it.
The way I was told it in my psych class is that how stimulants work, more or less, to treat ADHD is by stimulating the frontal cortex (which controls inhibition and memory and such) since it’s the part of the brain that is deficient in ADHD people. This goes for drugs like Ritalin and aderall as well as caffeine and nicotine. To be clear, I could be wrong. I’m by no means a professional. This is simply how it was described to me.
Attention deficits are when the part of your brain responsible for self control is lazy or underactive. This is called the executive function. When people with attention deficits get stimulants, it does make the rest of their brains more active, just like other people, but now their executive function isn’t lazy anymore and able to actually do its job controlling attention and focus.
Basically, it still gives them energy, but it gives them enough energy to have self control.
Have you ever been so tired that you couldn’t sleep? So tired in fact that you were actually really energetic or were thinking about things a lot? Like when babies/toddlers get overtired, they actually are really rambunctious or grumpy or arent able to sleep.
The ADHD brain is understimulated. There are some studies that suggest that ADHD is related to being like a sleep disorder.
So when you give stimulants to a brain that is understimulated, you put it back at base level where it “should” be. Caffeine is a stimulant.
I have ADD. I can drink a cup of coffee or take a few Excedrin and go right to sleep. It comes in handy when I have a splitting headache.
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