4 ms·
I have ADD. Not ADHD; I'm almost never hyperactive. I do, however, hyperfocus on anything and everything, to the point that it's caused severe problems to my ca
by thequux 4y ago
I have ADD. Not ADHD; I'm almost never hyperactive. I do, however, hyperfocus on anything and everything, to the point that it's caused severe problems to my career, relationships, and personal life. I'm nearly always hyperfocused on something, and I rarely have control over what that is. I'll forget to eat, sleep, talk to people, or really do anything else for several days at a time when it gets bad. Fortunately, over the years I've learned techniques to solve some of the problems, like having somebody to hold me accountable. Even so, it remains my biggest challenge.
However, it's also one of my greatest strengths. When my brain decides to attack a problem, I'm astonishingly productive. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been hyperfocused on implementing a motion control system for a side project. As a result, I've designed a CoreXY platform, designed a control board for it, learned how to use ngspice to tune the power-up circuit, learned how to use Sympy, used it to derive closed-form solutions for jerk-controlled motion, and found a way to implement that solution in which the motion control interrupt takes a grand total of 70 cycles on Cortex M0. And this is just my spare time outside of work, where I had a completely different set of hyperfocii, and similar productivity.
So, I completely agree with the author that if somebody were to offer me a megadollar in exchange for getting rid of my ADD, I'd have to think very hard about that indeed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway6532 4y agoI'm kind of the same. The big problem is never being able to predict when the extreme rough patches will hit.
- luckydata 4y agoADD is just old terminology. You have ADHD, and you should read up on some updated science cause you got some very weird, very wrong ideas about your own condition. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33549739/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33549739/
- davidktr 4y agoYou told someone with AD(H)D to read that document to get a better idea about attention deficit disorder? You cannot be serious.
- luckydata 4y agoI also have ADHD, I can read it fine. Would a better presentation help? For sure. But we're not stupid or incapable of performing simple tasks.
- ysleepy 4y ago[...] 15 The clinical presentation of ADHD can be described as primarily inattentive, primarily hyperactive-impulsive, or combined, depending on the nature of their symptoms (American Psychiat-ric Association, 2013). [...] I assume ADD is nowadays just a shorthand for the primarily inattentive presentation.
- luckydata 4y agoI use it that way too cause my non-native english tongue struggles to pronounce the H but saying "I don't have ADHD, I have ADD" is really specifically and factually wrong.
- klysm 4y agoI find this distinction to be confusing and not particularly useful. Brace for armchair science!: Although it may present as primarily inattentive, the hyperactive stuff can sneak through subtly. I think it becomes un-learned a lot of the time by adulthood such that the DSM criteria don't _seem_ to apply as strongly but it can very much still be there. At least for me, I think I have 'learned' to be more 'chill', but I still can't help myself from interrupting people a lot of the time.