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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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