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
The brain of a child with ADHD is looking for more stimulation than normal. So the child is constantly moving, distracted, etc. because it is trying to gain this extra stimulation from their environment. The “energy”(stimulant) in caffeine (or whatever stimulant they’re taking) feeds the brain’s need for more stimulation so now the brain is happy and fulfilled, reducing the need for the child to look for it in their environment thus being able to calm down and focus better.
Source: completing master’s in early childhood mental health
Imagine the brain like an office. There are lots of people doing the day to day tasks and some managers to make sure that the employees are working on the proper projects and accounts.
In the brain of someone with ADHD, those managers are less effective because they don’t have enough energy to fully function. The workers bounce around between lots of different tasks and don’t see any one task to completion. Drinking coffee(or taking Adderall/Vyvanse) gives more energy to those managers, enabling them to wrangle the workers beneath them and get them back to task.
This is also why ADHD people are often able to focus on things like video games but not on homework or chores. The adrenaline rush from playing games causes those middle managers to perk up and enable focus.
ADHD is a disorder of your executive function, which is basically your brain’s ability to control itself (ELI5 level). As such, people with ADHD have difficulties directing their attention, hence the name. But it’s not just attention, it’s a lot of other things like motivation and emotions. One common symptom is procrastination, which has to do with only getting the motivation to do something once it’s crunch time, whereas people with normal executive function are better able to motivate themselves based off of a future consequence. Some people with ADHD have drastic mood swings because their brain isn’t regulating emotions well, leading to impulsive behavior as well.
Caffeine and other stimulants improve executive function, so if you have ADHD and take the ‘right’ dose, you can more or less have a regular person’s ability. Now they can regulate their emotions, which in many people results in a calming down because now they can regulate all of those impulsive thoughts coming into their head. Also, caffeine helps many people with ADHD sleep for a similar reason. Instead of falling asleep with your mind going all over the place, caffeine can restore focus and allow your brain to tune out those thoughts and actually go to bed.
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.
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.
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.
Dopamine. ADHD is a lack of dopamine. Dopamine is your reward drug in your brain that lets you focus. It keeps you motivated. It let’s you function as a normal person. Caffeine activates dopamine. That’s all it is.
The part of the brain responsible for concentration is under stimulated in people with add/adhd. This makes it seem as though they are over stimulated but we just can’t pay attention because that part of the brain don’t work so well. When we take a stimulant, for me Adderall, it speeds up that part of the brain bringing us closer to normal to paying attention. People that already have a normal working brain that add stimulates now have an over stimulation causing them to look like tweakers.
Folks with ADHD have an underdeveloped area in the brain called the prefrontal cortex. Basically think of it like the secretary of the brain. It’s job is to tell you what’s important to pay attention to and to generally organize incoming stuff. When this area is underdeveloped, your mind basically doesn’t know how long it’s supposed to pay attention to something, kinda like scheduling meetings. It’s not struggling to engage attention with something, it’s also struggling to disengage. When a nonADHD person sees a squirrel, they know whether or not they need to keep focusing on the squirrel thanks to the secretary. When you give a person with ADHD a stimulant like caffeine, it stimulates the area, essentially getting the secretary to do its job. When the secretary is doing its job, the person with ADHD doesn’t have to anymore, which means they can work better and don’t have to work as hard.
I strongly felt an urge to pitch in here, given what people were posting.
Psychostimulants such as amphetamines and methylphenidate which many of you are probably aware of, are first line drugs used to treat ADHD. It may sound counter-intuitive to say a stimulant drug can treat a “stimulant”/”hyper” condition, but these drugs increase certain chemicals (neurotransmitters) between nerve endings (synapses) that control attentional function.
The drugs will increase dopamine and norepinephrine in your brain that interferes with attention negatively, thus bringing the patient back to perceived “normalcy”. It is similar with caffeine as well.
PS I am a doctor.
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