ADD/ADHD/Etc

[sao]

Fkn hour late to a hearing because I forgot about it, of course. Sigh.

[RightMeow]

@sao I’m sorry. I won’t say I know how it feels because I’m not in your particular branch of employment. However, I relate on my own.

[Raaspra]

@RightMeow I forget to eat for many of those same reasons.

And then some days I find myself eating constantly because it’s there, and I’m not paying attention. I’m doing twenty other things and hand-to-mouth is without conscious thought.

[Floof]

I got my official diagnosis yesterday. Not really sure where to go from here, but it at least feels good to not second guess myself about it all the time now!

[L. B. Heuschkel]

This is an issue I really should be debating with a therapist or other professional but, alas, I live in Denmark and I’m still waiting for my adult ADHD assessment to start ‘sometime in 2023’. That’s a long wait ahead so I’m going to poke the hive brain here instead.

I’ve been doing my homework of course and I realise that rejection dysphoria is very definitely a thing. But how do fellow ADHD people suffering from it tell when it’s the dysphoria rearing its head – and when people are actually excluding you, or worse?

Lately, a group of people in my game circles have been very pointedly ghosting me to an extent where other players have started to ask what the problem is. I’m seriously thinking about taking a break from roleplaying because of it; after all, I must be pushing people away or otherwise acting in a way they can’t condone, in order for this to happen. I don’t feel that I’m behaving in a bad fashion but obviously, mileage varies.

This is where I really could use some tools to make it easier to tell when it’s you yourself who’s being a rejection sensitive pile of anxiety who simply needs to suck up the fact that some people don’t like you, and move on – and when people are actually being assholes.

[Mourne]

@L-B-Heuschkel I can only suggest asking someone you trust who is still around.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Mourne said in ADD/ADHD/Etc:

@L-B-Heuschkel I can only suggest asking someone you trust who is still around.

I have asked for reality checks from friends and they’re not telling me that I’ve gone nuts. I am hoping that maybe there might be some reading material or tools out there, though, that can help detect bad patterns – whether in yourself or in others.

[Mourne]

@L-B-Heuschkel The problem with that is everyone has their own trigger points. Some people will trigger at different things and different levels. It’s an individual thing based on each persons patience and what annoys them.

We all have unique tolerance points.

[Aria]

I am usually not a Walmart shopper because ew, capitalism. But…

Walmart currently has some of the official Antsy Labs’ fidget cubes on sale for under $3.

[Kestrel]

I was looking for this thread.

I found myself reminiscing today on the ADHD thread we used to have over on MSB, and contemplating what a shame it is we don’t have one here. I benefited a lot from the camaraderie in that one, before everything spontaneously exploded.

I thought to myself, hey, I should make an ADHD thread over on BMD! Then I (wisely) decided to use the search function first, to check if someone else might’ve already had the bright idea. Turns out we do have an ADHD thread. Yay!

… But on the worrying side, it turns out I already knew that, I’d just forgotten. Because upon finding this thread, I also found I’d upvoted a bunch of posts already, which I don’t even remember having read. I reread them today and then upvoted some more.

I’m too young to be going senile, but I guess that’s ADHD in a nutshell.

---

So as for why I was actually looking for this thread, my tale of derpery aside — I’m sure this question must’ve been posed before, but what the heck is it about MU* that seems to have attracted so many people with ADHD brains? I feel like half the people I know in this hobby have the diagnosis or are in the early stages of looking into one.

Second question, does anyone feel like their ADHD might’ve gotten worse over time, in particular in any part due to their online habits? I feel this way, and I’ve been thinking lately on ways I should maybe try to undo the damage. As a personal anecdote, I was a voracious reader when I was a kid. I was always reading — I’d hide books under my desk in class to read rather than paying attention. Now? My hobbies are still very literary, namely this one, but I feel like I struggle to keep my eyes on a page. What gives? Reading brings me such joy when I’m able to do it, yet I feel like I’ve broken my own brain into only having the capacity for it in the short bursts of social, instant gratification that takes place during RP.

I have a book face-down on the table in front of me this very second, as I type this.

[Raeras]

@Kestrel

I don’t have an ADD/ADHD diagnosis but I’ve suspected for a while I might have it on some level. I just haven’t made the effort to get it looked into because, well, I haven’t.

But I came to say that I also used to be a voracious reader. I was a frequent library visitor and always had my nose in a book. But it was like as soon as I graduated high school I stopped reading?? I don’t know when exactly I realized it. I’ve tried to pick up another book or two over the years but I can’t stick with it - and I do fully believe it’s in part because of this hobby because I would be reading but then want to check what was going on in any of my games. I am one and a half chapters in to ‘Needful Things’ by Stephen King and it’s been like that for almost 3 weeks.

I just had a conversation with my husband (again) recently about the fact I don’t have any other hobbies and it would be a lot healthier to try and work some other ones in and how when I do step away from the MUSHes I want to do things again.

To which I will say I have pulled back a lot in general and am only down to about 1 very active game and two games that are kind of on the back burner but I know he’s right and so I’m trying to start incorporating again a couple things I had enjoyed doing or been in the process of learning.

It won’t change overnight, but I just have to keep at it.

Can we also talk about how hard it is to really stick with any kind of habit-forming routine? It’s insanely easy for one little thing to knock me off weeks of progress in a routine and having to start from scratch again.

[Faraday]

@Kestrel said in ADD/ADHD/Etc:

Second question, does anyone feel like their ADHD might’ve gotten worse over time, in particular in any part due to their online habits?

It’s definitely possible for ADHD to get worse under certain conditions: stress (and who hasn’t been stressed the last few years), illness, sleep, and many more health or life situations. Age can bring some of those through increased responsibilities.

It can also be related to your environment. One of the (many) reasons ADHD diagnoses shot up during the pandemic was because everyone’s environments shifted, and their coping routines vanished. (They’d always had ADHD, but the effect it had day-to-day increased.)

I don’t believe that online activity is inherently good or bad; the devil’s in the details. Spending my days scrolling TikTok (essentially bite-sized dopamine junk food) or arguing with strangers is probably not going to be great for my overall brain nutrition, ADHD or no. But there are plenty of healthy things one can do online.

ADHD symptoms and online activity can both be driven by stress, rather than one causing the other. It can be murky, so I’d be leery of drawing conclusions about cause/effect.

I’m sure this question must’ve been posed before, but what the heck is it about MU* that seems to have attracted so many people with ADHD brains?

I don’t know that there’s enough data to conclude that there’s a higher prevalence of ADHD among MU players than among the general population (estimated about 5% of adults). We don’t even have a good handle of how many of us there are.

It could also be a ‘flock together’ effect. I know that most of the folks I’ve connected with well over the years (RL and online) have been neurodivergent in some way. There are plenty of other anecdotal reports of folks with similar experiences, though I’m unaware of any studies about the subject.

[iota]

@Kestrel said in ADD/ADHD/Etc:

does anyone feel like their ADHD might’ve gotten worse over time, in particular in any part due to their online habits? I feel this way, and I’ve been thinking lately on ways I should maybe try to undo the damage.

Opening this with the context that: I don’t see it as ‘damage’, just a drift in priorities / framing / opportunities in which to place attention.

Focus is not infinite, and the capacity for holding multiple threads effectively can be lessened when one has ADD/HD. All the ‘free’ space that can be filled up as an adolescent with reading is pretty much effectively exhausted by all the little and not so little responsibilities of being an adult. Even in our downtime, the impact of having ‘so many things on the go’ - relationships, bills, projects, jobs, obligations - even if they’re on the back-burner, can take up cognitive bandwidth. Zap that focus.

So really it’s no personal failing, if someone has trouble keeping focused on the page.

The wider world’s sort of been designed - horribly - to syphon off attention as much as possible. It generates a lot of capital that way for itself, at least in the short term. We’re just left with the shit end of the stick, because ADHD further complicates that individual capacity to keep engaged -and- disengage with focus. Prioritise, and all that.

Mindfulness is not for everyone, neither is meditation or ‘no mind’ techniques so I won’t talk about that. But… One thing which has helped me, is thinking of the environment I’m doing whatever things – personal or professional – and trying to optimise the design of its layout and how I use it; ‘is this functional, is this comfortable, is this contributing to doing what I want without interruption’.

If I’m reading, my phone and laptop are out of hands reach. People are told not to bother me unless someone is on fire. I keep a notebook and sticky-tabs for annotation and jotting random thoughts. I put on a very specifically non-lyrical playlist, which helps me ‘keep time’ and quiets background brain noise with music/a beat, so I can just take in whatever’s on the page and process. If I want/need there to be an actual timeframe, 30m hourglass is a silent and casual visual indicator - it’s also rather good, if the pomodoro technique is being used to fit in reading (or whatever hobby) – and it can be good to release the pressure/obligation of any ‘big set task’, just by being like: ‘I will read for five minutes / two pages / whatever’. A nice trick (and all my coping mechanisms feel like tricks), because I can commit to five minutes and then oh look at that: it’s been two hours and what a wonderful book this is.

So yeah. ADD/HD can get worse, but from my perspective it’s a matter of external pressures / stress of existing, lessening the capacity to hold multiple threads or not become derailed by obligations – so not that I am getting worse, but just that the demands of life are irritating and constant. Old techniques of managing stuff might no longer hit like they used to, and new ones might need developing. But…

There’s pretty much always room for change. It doesn’t mean that change can be implemented smoothly or it will be particularly pleasant - but if one understands what their actual underlying priorities are (‘I want to do X because Y because I value Z’), it can help move things along.

[Floof]

Age is particularly relevant for those of us in estrogen-dominant bodies as we start feeling the effects of perimenopause in our (sometimes) 30s and (more often) 40s, too.