Why does taking a sip of coffee make someone who has adhd very sleepy instead of energized?
In: Biology
When a child or young animal is startled, instead of running or fighting, they freeze. In a world where everything is faster and stronger than you, hiding makes more sense than fleeing. This means there are two basic different responses to adrenaline (the hormone that triggers the flight or fight response). In adults, it makes you faster and stronger, on the young, it makes them calm. It appears that people with adhd have an atypical response. Stimulants (like dexamphetamine used to treat adhd symptoms) calm them down, but is used as a drug called speed in non-adhd people. Stimulants like coffee have a similar effect.
Coffee doesn’t energize you much, it just stops you from from feeling sleepy.
However, it also seems to have some effects resembling those of ADHD medications.
So, when you drink coffee it makes you feel normal in terms of sleepiness, and then also cuts down on the symptoms of ADHD, making you feel less energetic.
The idea behind stimulants having the weirdly opposite effect on those with ADHD is sort of in the name: They have “attention deficit” disorder.
First let me say that the brain is super complicated and this explanation is necessarily a severe simplification. In fact it is so complex there are still many things we don’t understand at all!
How it seems our brains work is that various thoughts, goals, interesting tidbits, etc. are all being thrown up from various parts of the brain such as memory, vision, hearing, touch, etc. There is a part of the brain which is in control of basically sorting through all these inputs and determining what is most relevant to pay attention to, and suppressing all that other stuff. In those suffering from ADHD that part of their brain isn’t doing its job adequately. The result is a lack of attention to any one thing and they end up jumping from thought to thought, and being hyperactive from having their attention continually seized by one thing after another.
What caffeine does is sort of wake that part of their brain up a bit so that it starts doing its job. In some cases its job is to suppress everything because the most important thing to focus on is sleep!
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