@lifewithadhd / lifewithadhd.tumblr.com
truly what is r the main differences like ACTUAL differences not things in common with adhd and autism
Neurodivergent Insights has a good been diagram showing the differences between the two. But there’s not much, gives the two disorders overlap a LOT
I’ll leave the article below if you want to read it:
Hope this helps.
–the Only Mood everyone else knows about: i wanna do THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and–SQUIRREL
–galaxy brain: i was listening to the lecture but the prof said something that reminded me of something else and now i’m not sure how much time i was lost in thought
–the tutorial only comes in video format: i’m sorry, but you’ve thrown off the emperor’s groove *hurls product & its tutorial video into the sun*
–damn you hyperfocus: i went to bed intending to wake up and write but this morning i was possessed by a cleanliness spirit and spent the next 14 hours organizing the apartment
–i dont think u tried at all.jpg: did i seriously spend an entire free day refreshing twitter b/c i didn’t want to spend 10 minutes finishing my hw but wouldn’t let myself do anything else until i finished it???? (yes)
–patrick star: *unlocks phone* time to check the weather. *opens twitter* the weather. *opens messenger* the weather. *opens mobage game* the weather. *opens facebook* the weather. *opens twitter again* THE WEA–
–smells like depression: literally everything is too boring. i’m going back to sleep
Found it.
It’s difficult to tell because *gestures* Tumblr, but this is the post that actually got me to get tested for ADHD. I reblogged it back in late 2018 like “Wait, the video tutorial issue is a symptom of ADHD? Do I have ADHD? Surely not,” and a bunch of readers responded “Did…did you not know? Because you very clearly do, we all thought you were just being discreet about it.”
And then it took me three and a half years to get a diagnosis.
Although being fair to me, if you’ve ever tried to get tested for ADHD as an adult, just getting a motherfucker to call you back about setting up the test is a task. And after spending all of 2019 trying to accomplish that and failing, I then couldn’t get to a testing facility because of a global pandemic.
Anyway, thanks OP for the post, it only took me five years to find it again, but you did a good day’s work.
I used to think I can't have ADHD because I wasn't hyperactive.
Not everyone can allow themselves to act on their hyperactivity, so we find ways to redirect or hide the understimulation.
(Sneak introduction to the new inattentive Alien! A hommage to a collab I did with René ♥️)
If yo u’d like to support my work, check out my patreon :)
Just in case! This is by no means a diagnostic tool nor a list of symptoms that you need in order to be diagnosed with hyperactive ADHD. Just a tool to help you reflect :) also worth noting that I do these things sometimes because of my Anxiety too.
nsfw = nosfewatu
You every see something that makes you so angry you laugh
Anyway adults saying “I don’t know isn’t an answer” is part of the reason I learned to lie and bluff so well.
Really though, what was that about? I don’t know is a valid answer. It communicates very clearly that the child cannot answer your question, and therefore maybe needs more help understanding the question/situation. Why do you try and push them to give an answer they don’t have? That stresses them out and it makes them feel like they’re being punished for not knowing something.
i thought i was the only one with an “i don’t know” problem because my parents made it seem it was the strangest and also most horrible thing in the world. i genuinely didn’t know and they got angry and that only blocked my thoughts more which meant i didn’t know the answer to anything else.
THIS ^^^
Also “I don’t know” is a commonly used sentence for children with ADHD/Autism. We DON’T know why we can’t do our homework. We DON’T know why we can’t eat certain foods sometimes. We DON’T know why we forgot to do a chore. It’s really distressing when you genuinely don’t know and people think you’re just lying or indifferent
This also leads to having really insecure adult children. My mom still wonders why I always assume she’s going to be mad at me. Like oh I dunno mom, maybe because whenever I don’t know why I’ve done or didn’t do something you get “frustrated” with me and refuse to help me and have all my life???
Anyone else has like... The inability to form habits?
Like normal people, they repeat something daily for a couple weeks and it sticks. They might miss a day here or there, but the overall habit is formed.
Me? I can push myself to do the same task daily for 8 months, forget one day, and it's gone. I realize 3 weeks later that i have not done it a single time since.
ADHD mood.
Floor time babey
The most valuable thing I learned doing a Masters degree with depression, anxiety and ADHD was to change my “things I’m bad at” list to “things I can’t do on my own.” Stop thinking of them as things I could do if I tried hard enough, and accept that I can’t accomplish them by effort and willpower alone; they’re genuine neurocognitive deficits, and if I need to do the thing, then just like a blind person reading or a mobility impaired person going up a storey in a building, I need to find a different method.
I’m “bad at” working on long-term projects without an imminent deadline or someone breathing down my neck? Okay, let’s change that: I can’t work on long-term projects without an imminent deadline and someone breathing down my neck. So let’s create an imminent deadline and recruit neck-breathers. Find a sympathetic prof who will agree that 3 weeks before the due date they expect me to show them my preliminary notes and bibliography. Get a friend I trust to block off an hour to sit with me and keep asking, “Are you working on your project?” Write a blog post about my progress. Arrange to trade papers and proofread them with another student.
Accept your limitations and learn to leverage them, instead of buying the neurotypical fairytale that they’ll go away if you just try hard enough.
I needed this so much.
The neurotypical fairy tale that they’ll go away if you just try hard enough. Felt that in my soul.
Ok… but I don’t have a friend (irl) who would do this and the teachers don’t care. What’s next?
I’d normally link it, but Tumblr likes to hide replies that have links in them. >.< Anyway, check out my “executive dysfunction” tag; I’ve handled this issue a couple times. Let me know if you have more questions.
Having ADHD is like just now I went to look up salmon recipes but suddenly I’m building a shelf
The transition also came from a purely logical train of thought but that doesn’t mean it was correct
I actually walked away from washing dishes because my train of thought went “I’m tired of cleaning dishes and I have to go to work soon and then I will have to come home and make dinner and I will be MORE tired” and then I thought “wait I can save myself being tired making dinner LATER if I simply put dinner in the slow cooker to cook NOW” and we have leftover salmon that will go bad if I don’t use it soon so I started googling salmon slow cooker recipes but halfway through I thought about how getting the slow cooker out is a hassle because there is never enough counter space and then I REMEMBERED I bought a shelf to put counter things to have more counter space but I’d left the box in the car so I went out and got the box and completely assembled a shelf but I still haven’t started dinner OR finished the dishes.
Hey OP, you are late for work now
FUCK
This is it.
This is exactly what an ADHD train of thought can look like. And I'd bet money that this happened in the span of about 10 seconds.
3 kinds of ADHD distractions:
i just made a really good meme!
advice for my younger self
This is really great advice! Especially because hobbies with tactile elements are also often hobbies that produce a tangible product that you can hold in your hand when you’re done - something you can show off and be proud of!
Here’s a list of hobbies with a tactile element
-flower arranging
-gardening and bonsai
-cooking and baking
-origami, card making, collage, paper mache, and other paper crafts
-knitting, crochet, embroidery, sewing, and other fiber/textile crafts.
-calligraphy, painting, and other visual arts
-wood and metalworking
-playing an instrument!
-photography: both taking and developing photos if you can get access to a darkroom!
-walking/hiking, sports, or attending a gym. Remember to engage all those muscles!
A great thing about having tactile hobbies when you have ADHD is that it can help fulfill a need to fidget as well!
[ID: the “everyone’s dying, bitch” meme. the caption reads: “everyone’s dying, bitch. let’s get you a hobby with a tactile element so you feel more grounded in the world.” end ID]
There’s a youtuber I watch, I won’t mention her cause I don’t want people giving her shit in the comments (not that I think most of you would, but y’know, it’s the Internet) and she’s recently got on this really… anti-tech bend in which she is referring to her enjoyment of cell phone usage as an “addiction”. And while for sure being constantly wired and “on” is harmful, especially doom scrolling twitter, the things she is describing doesn’t sound like addiction to me, but rather ADHD brains seeking dopamine feedback. And honestly? Making broad, sweeping comments like “cell phones are so harmful, and if you can’t just sit still and be present in the moment you have an addiction” is… making me very uncomfortable.
Like, you want me to pay attention to something? Sure, I can do that. For limited amounts of time. You want my sustained attention for hours? Not gonna happen. Unless I’m hyperfixating, nothing is going to hold my attention span for hours on end. And generally speaking, people enjoy the initial upswing of my fixations, but they don’t enjoy the prolonged outcome of me neglecting to self care for eight hours straight because my brain decided this is the only thing I’m going to focus on to the point where I forget to eat, drink, sleep, or even go to the bathroom. So when people tell me they want my undivided attention, I like to tell them they really don’t.
What I can give you however, is a rational amount of attention with the aid of things like stim and fidget toys to keep my brain from wandering for the duration of whatever we’re doing. Sometimes that can even look like scrolling mindlessly on my phone. Speaking personally, most of my attention will be on what you’re saying. I’m just giving my brain background noise to focus on while I actually process what you’re saying/doing.
And you know what? Learning to both do this and accept that I need to do this and I’m not a horrible person for not being able to 100% focus unaided, has been actively helpful and healthful for my mental health. I get fewer ADHD meltdowns, which yeah, can occur with both over stimulation and under stimulation as well.
My brain needs some of that instant gratification because it’s dopamine starved. And what might be a problem for some people, and I genuinely believe it is… Making these sweeping statements about addiction, which is a very serious mental health issue, and making it part of your “I shun technology” spiel you’re on while running a business through YouTube is… not as sincere as you perhaps hope it is. But of course, it’s the shunning of technology as evil, so the comments are just filled with “god, you’re so right, we should all go back to before we had smart technology”, inevitably posted from an iphone with absolutely zero self awareness or sense of irony.
And then when I brought up ADHD and neurodivergency in the discord it was liked I’d just asked “who wants to kick puppies?!” and ended up muting the thread because it was easier to peace out than listen to the whole “you don’t have ADHD, sweety, you’re just highly sensitive” bullshit that is becoming more and more common in these types of groups.
Idk, the whole thing just… rubbed me the wrong way. Especially because the things she were labeling as “signs of addiction”, said in such a scandalized manner, were actually hallmarks of what I now recognize as neurodivergency. And while addiction is a major problem with ADHD—specifically with unmedicated and undiagnosed individuals who have been forced to try and rectify their lack of dopamine on their own—shunning what are honestly harmless coping mechanisms is not going to help those people.
So you check twitter while watching TV. So what? Oh, you checked your phone ten times a day? So what? Is it actively harming you? Is it harming your mental health? Are you doom scrolling? Is it harming those around you? Are you idealizing Instagram too much and putting yourself down? Then yeah, those are bad. Maybe work on that.
But also maybe consider you might just blaming the phone for other problems in your life you’re not addressing cause it’s easier to blame technology than it is to even consider for one second you might have ADHD.
Idk. Thanks for coming to my rambling TED talk. I’m off to read a book while listening to a podcast about a different book.
wait, checking twitter while watching TV and/or checking your phone ten times a day is considered a sign of addiction?
In my opinion? No. Addiction is far more severe than casually opening your phone up and flicking through things while you do other stuff. But the way she was framing it, it was on par with serious substance abuse, proving to me that she actually has no idea what addiction actually is and has swallowed the neurotypical bullshit pill about how anything that gives your brain dopamine is bad for you, actually. Which ignores the fact that a lot of neurodivergent folks are starting off at a much lower dopamine level than they are and we need more of it to even get to their baseline level.
And like, maybe checking her phone ten times a day is harmful to her, maybe it’s distressing. In which case, she’s doing the right thing in taking care of herself. But saying all cell phone usage is bad and a sign of addiction? Waaaay not cool.
Lmaoo
It's disrespectful
This is SPECTACULARLY done
Just ADHD things
