6 ms·

You should read more about ADHD. I don't want to diagnose you but your problems are very similar.

by tgaj 3y ago

TeMPOraL 3y ago
I am diagnosed. Meds help a lot, but it takes time to catch up with 33 years of dysfunctional coping strategies, some of which interact in surprising (i.e. bad) ways with the sudden improvement in executive functions.
- flir 3y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, can you give some examples of how your coping strategies are clashing with your improved executive function? One I've noticed for myself: I used to leave things until late at night, because I was more "awake" then and the house was silent. The medication's basically forcing me to be a morning person, and that's a hard one to learn.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Sure. Some examples: 1) As I got used to finally being able to decide to do something, and then actually follow through without first having to win a mini-boss fight in my head, my perception of whole classes of tasks shifted - things I assumed were hard, or instinctively avoided, became things I knew I could do. This is good and how it should be, but what I didn't realize is that this state of things is still quite fragile. At some point I overloaded myself with responsibilities, and as I hit my limit, I started to slip up, which cracked my newfound trust in my own reliability - and things quickly spiraled down from there. Even though things got better, and they are better than they were before I was diagnosed, my self-image got seriously damaged. Even after half a year, I still haven't fully recovered. 2) I am a night person. Always have been. Whatever the reason underlying the reasons for this is, the meds didn't do much about it. What they did, however, is allow me to get away with much less sleep. This was super useful when my second daughter was born, as it made it easy for me to take the "first shift", feeding and changing the baby and letting my wife sleep more. Shift the meds schedule around to have one dose at 23:00, and I could do some work and care for the kid until 02:00, then sleep some 5 hours, and feel well-rested in the morning. Of course, this was not sustainable; there were two major bad consequences: - "Sleep debt" kept accumulating, but since it was masked by my carefully-tuned med schedule, it took me way too long to notice I'm getting slower and less focused at everything. - The whole experience broke my internal rhythm that told me when to go to sleep. And with overall improved executive functioning, it only became easier to stay up late. 3) It also took me a while to realize that the meds are "sticky". That is, they make it easy to stay on course - wherever that course lead. While they also make it easier to switch tasks, the improved focus makes it harder to notice that I should switch. As a result, whatever I'm doing when the meds kick in, is what I'll most likely continue to be doing for the next couple hours. Whether that's work, or writing HN comments. 3a) This "stickiness" also makes it easier to waste time going too deep into low-value tangential tasks. Like e.g. that time when I was working on a bug that turned out to be a regex issue - specifically, someone assembled a regex by concatenating some string constants, and didn't notice a subtle bug. As I fixed it, I decided to make sure such bugs don't happen again. I started writing some utility functions, and... few days later, I ended up committing a small library for making regexes via composition, which structurally prevented the class of bugs like the one I was originally fixing. Suffice it to say, those few days could've been better used on some other tasks. After that experience, I learned to pay attention to early signs of going too far off tangents. That's definitely a med problem - before diagnosis, my procrastination would've stopped me from pursuing such tangents too far. (Or, in other words: meds make it easy to do the tasks that, before, I had to fight myself to do - but that fighting also served as a filter, forcing me to repeatedly consider whether the thing is worth doing at all.) All in all, I'm still adjusting. Many of the changes - both positive and negative - take a long time to become apparent.
    - flir 3y ago
      Thanks, that meshes with my experiences. There's definitely a theme of "unlearning" for me. I don't see it as stickiness, I see it more as effortlessness, because it's so easy to continue working on something, but I recognise the description. I'm dealing with it by exporting the "what am I doing?" question to text - in other words, being really really explicit about my thinking by writing it down. I have a log running in a Slack window that often has things like "ok, we're gonna take a step back, and think about the steps we need to take to accomplish the goal. First we X, then we Y, etc". I'm essentially rubber ducking my executive function.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Huh, I'm doing the exact same thing, though off-line - I keep a "running log" in Org Mode. A new file every month, and in that file, a new heading for every day, and under that heading, I just type. 90% of it is just me talking with myself. I do it both at work and for personal stuff (two different set of files on two different computers, of course). It's the only thing that I know can reliably ground me, that can keep me focused to at least some degree, no matter how bad I feel, and that can help me process and deal with emotions.

You should read more about ADHD. I don't want to diagnose you but your problems are very similar.

by tgaj 3y ago

You should read more about ADHD. I don't want to diagnose you but your problems are very similar.

I am diagnosed. Meds help a lot, but it takes time to catch up with 33 years of dysfunctional coping strategies, some of which interact in surprising (i.e. bad) ways with the sudden improvement in executive functions.

flir 3y ago
If you don't mind me asking, can you give some examples of how your coping strategies are clashing with your improved executive function? One I've noticed for myself: I used to leave things until late at night, because I was more "awake" then and the house was silent. The medication's basically forcing me to be a morning person, and that's a hard one to learn.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Sure. Some examples: 1) As I got used to finally being able to decide to do something, and then actually follow through without first having to win a mini-boss fight in my head, my perception of whole classes of tasks shifted - things I assumed were hard, or instinctively avoided, became things I knew I could do. This is good and how it should be, but what I didn't realize is that this state of things is still quite fragile. At some point I overloaded myself with responsibilities, and as I hit my limit, I started to slip up, which cracked my newfound trust in my own reliability - and things quickly spiraled down from there. Even though things got better, and they are better than they were before I was diagnosed, my self-image got seriously damaged. Even after half a year, I still haven't fully recovered. 2) I am a night person. Always have been. Whatever the reason underlying the reasons for this is, the meds didn't do much about it. What they did, however, is allow me to get away with much less sleep. This was super useful when my second daughter was born, as it made it easy for me to take the "first shift", feeding and changing the baby and letting my wife sleep more. Shift the meds schedule around to have one dose at 23:00, and I could do some work and care for the kid until 02:00, then sleep some 5 hours, and feel well-rested in the morning. Of course, this was not sustainable; there were two major bad consequences: - "Sleep debt" kept accumulating, but since it was masked by my carefully-tuned med schedule, it took me way too long to notice I'm getting slower and less focused at everything. - The whole experience broke my internal rhythm that told me when to go to sleep. And with overall improved executive functioning, it only became easier to stay up late. 3) It also took me a while to realize that the meds are "sticky". That is, they make it easy to stay on course - wherever that course lead. While they also make it easier to switch tasks, the improved focus makes it harder to notice that I should switch. As a result, whatever I'm doing when the meds kick in, is what I'll most likely continue to be doing for the next couple hours. Whether that's work, or writing HN comments. 3a) This "stickiness" also makes it easier to waste time going too deep into low-value tangential tasks. Like e.g. that time when I was working on a bug that turned out to be a regex issue - specifically, someone assembled a regex by concatenating some string constants, and didn't notice a subtle bug. As I fixed it, I decided to make sure such bugs don't happen again. I started writing some utility functions, and... few days later, I ended up committing a small library for making regexes via composition, which structurally prevented the class of bugs like the one I was originally fixing. Suffice it to say, those few days could've been better used on some other tasks. After that experience, I learned to pay attention to early signs of going too far off tangents. That's definitely a med problem - before diagnosis, my procrastination would've stopped me from pursuing such tangents too far. (Or, in other words: meds make it easy to do the tasks that, before, I had to fight myself to do - but that fighting also served as a filter, forcing me to repeatedly consider whether the thing is worth doing at all.) All in all, I'm still adjusting. Many of the changes - both positive and negative - take a long time to become apparent.
  - flir 3y ago
    Thanks, that meshes with my experiences. There's definitely a theme of "unlearning" for me. I don't see it as stickiness, I see it more as effortlessness, because it's so easy to continue working on something, but I recognise the description. I'm dealing with it by exporting the "what am I doing?" question to text - in other words, being really really explicit about my thinking by writing it down. I have a log running in a Slack window that often has things like "ok, we're gonna take a step back, and think about the steps we need to take to accomplish the goal. First we X, then we Y, etc". I'm essentially rubber ducking my executive function.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Huh, I'm doing the exact same thing, though off-line - I keep a "running log" in Org Mode. A new file every month, and in that file, a new heading for every day, and under that heading, I just type. 90% of it is just me talking with myself. I do it both at work and for personal stuff (two different set of files on two different computers, of course). It's the only thing that I know can reliably ground me, that can keep me focused to at least some degree, no matter how bad I feel, and that can help me process and deal with emotions.