5 ms·
Drinking slows down my brain and reduces the number of threads running in parallel. Sometimes very useful to enable normal-passing interaction in social environ
by Blahah 3y ago
Drinking slows down my brain and reduces the number of threads running in parallel. Sometimes very useful to enable normal-passing interaction in social environments. Or just to be able to focus. Lots of people with ADHD drink to achieve a more single threaded experience.
Edit to add: I don't meant to encourage drinking as a tool for managing ADHD. It works but it's a blunt and dangerous tool. If you're at that point, you'll absolutely love the results you get from the healthier strategies: Understanding yourself; developing a suite of tools that don't involve a slippery slope; and curating your social and physical environment carefully.
- fisherjeff 3y agoTook me way too many years to understand this
- TheEzEzz 3y agoInteresting analogy. I feel like I talk and think faster when I'm drunk but am also more focused and can hold less in my mind. I'm wondering if it's because I'm switching into single threaded mode instead of multi-threaded mode, and that single thread is actually faster, but more limited.
- leobg 3y agoInteresting. Ever tried coding when drunk? So far, we’ve got programming languages named after caffeinating drinks, but none named after alcoholic ones.
- meitham 3y agoBallmer Peak comes to mind https://xkcd.com/323/ https://xkcd.com/323/. The right amount of booze to keep that single thread of execution focused on the programming task!
- yamazakiwi 3y agoI'd add that I've done this in a the past and the main issue with treating ADHD with alcohol for me was the weight gain.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoUntreated or late diagnosed ADHD people are ridiculously overrepresented in drug & alcohol recovery programs. It's honestly chilling and it prevents me from taking this in the probably more lighthearted spirit that was intended.
- com2kid 3y agoFun fact! Over 50 percent of people with untreated ADHD will have problems with substance abuse at some point in their life! Oh wait, that isn't fun at all. ADHD is real and untreated it can (and often does) destroy lives. (Also: People with untreated ADHD have 3x the gen-pop rate of car accidents!)
- nucleardog 3y agoCurrent thinking is ADHD is caused (at least in significant part) by a lack of dopamine or an insensitivity to dopamine. They’ve found links between genes that cause dopamine resistance and ADHD. Many current ADHD medications cause increased levels of dopamine. This is a leading theory on why they work. Wanna guess what a lot of other drugs, including alcohol, do in your brain? It’s been amazing since I got diagnosed relatively late in life exactly how many other things suddenly made so much more sense and clicked into place. And amazing how quickly decades old substance abuse habits started to taper off once my brain chemistry was less fucked.
- projektfu 3y agoYep, and thankfully the FAA will allow you to fly with undiagnosed untreated ADHD but not with treated ADHD. Because the NTSB gets bored, I guess.
- dubcee349 3y agoPeople with ADHD tend to be impulsive. you know what drugs are great for? Impulsive people.
- Blahah 3y agoIt wasn't meant to be lighthearted at all. It was just meant to be honest. I've been to the depths of the things, and I wish I knew how to help others not go there.
- kjs3 3y agoThis rings true. I went to a reasonably well known engineering school, so...some selection for ADHD folks. As someone diagnosed with ADHD young, it was frightening to see how many of my fellows were 1) clearly struggling with ADHD, and 2) were destructively self-medicating with alcohol (or worse). And it hasn't stopped. Decades later there's still those folks who are hammered at every social function and a good percentage of them I think "yeah...self medicating the noise in their head". I certainly understand the appeal (I'm no tea-totaller), but long-term, booze is a work-around, not a solution.
- cbau 3y ago> This rings true. I went to a reasonably well known engineering school, so...some selection for ADHD folks. Can you expand on this. Do you think think engineering schools select for ADHD? Just curious, haven't heard this before.
- tokamak-teapot 3y agoThe hyperfocus which is a symptom of ADHD helps give the tenacity needed to make progress when faced with frustrating challenges. In engineering, tenacity is absolutely required to make any progress at all, but there are also seemingly infinite threads to pull on. If you’re in hyperfocus mode and you’re working on something, you don’t run out of interesting side tracks or ways to keep digging down through the foundations under what you’re working on.
- Thlom 3y agoI think he means the other way around. Engineering fits for many neuro-divergent people. Especially ADHD and some types of autism.
- kjs3 3y agoYes, this. Sorry I was being a bit flippant and that wasn't clear.
- NovaDudely 3y agoThis is a very common theme in neuro-divergent communities. Used occasionally it can be great, but if you become dependent on it, it is trouble. In that sense it reminds me of Alan Watts writings on LSD. Get the message and then go away and work on it, don't get fixated on getting the message. As a transient thing some drugs are neat, but to become dependent on them is a dangerous thing.
- bambax 3y agoDrinking drowns creativity. I can do many many things almost properly while drunk, but one thing I can't do is write anything good. It's possible that's what we're after when we drink: stop the flow of ideas. That's one meaning of "stupefy".
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoAnd sometimes, that's just fine; you can't / shouldn't be "on" all the time. Give your brain / creativity a rest, let it relax. Be kind to yourself.
- bambax 3y agoMaybe; but I have a feeling alcohol hurts more than creativity...
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoAre you sure? >Alcohol has played a central role in the creative lives of some of the most famous authors of the last few centuries. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay Alcohol and Poetry that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics, namely William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/booze-as-muse-writers-and-alcohol-from-ernest-hemingway-to-patricia-highsmith-1.2369720 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/booze-as-muse-write...
- bambax 3y agoNo, I'm not sure, but it could go either way. It could very well be that those authors had no other choice than drown their overflowing creativity in alcohol in order to survive / tolerate themselves.
- engineeringwoke 3y agoFrom what I have read, they all wrote when they were sober, not when they were drunk. https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrydevries/2018/12/11/ernest-hemingways-write-drunk-edit-sober-great-marketing-advice/?sh=198cb62e6bb3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrydevries/2018/12/11/ernest-...
- 2-718-281-828 3y agomaybe you should read up about parallelism and (multi)threading https://stackoverflow.com/questions/806499/threading-vs-parallelism-how-do-they-differ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/806499/threading-vs-para...
- Blahah 3y agoIf you think my comment conflated them, maybe you should.
- 2-718-281-828 3y agoi do know the difference but i think i get your point. you use it as an analogy for context switching. the classic adhd "i can't do anything productive when waiting for something".