It’s absolutely true that a lot of modern-day problems with being tired come from bad sleep habits. What I’m talking about is a real phenomenon that isn’t being in front of a screen too close to bedtime. If anyone wants to know more, here’s a 3-minute video from AsapSCIENCE about what research shows.
People desperately finding new names for everything they do even slightly differently for just a glimpse of validation is such a 2020s thing.
It’s super helpful to people like me who have been suffering their entire lives. It’s great to feel heard and validated, but the real value is being able to learn about myself. I’ve never been a morning person and have trouble sleeping at night. It’s really nice to hear something other than “you’re just not trying” or “try counting sheep”. It’s a lot better than just thinking I’m flawed. I wish someone would have told my parents this when they used to scream at me for sleeping in too late or not being asleep when they wanted me to be.
It was the same way with my adhd. My parents and teachers kept telling me I was just lazy, or didn’t care when I felt like I was working my butt off. Being ‘worse’ then everyone else ate me alive and I’m still suffering for it. It was the same with my brothers autism. It was the same with my chronic depression. I wish I was born in this age of self reflection and mental health awareness, and for the sake of all the kids like me I really hope we keep pushing forward.
I’m sure your comment was sarcastic, but I’m hijacking it to dump 20 years of built up trama, and to let the world know how thankful I am that we’re starting to accept these labels as more than just flaws. They’re really, really helpful.
Edit to say, I just read the other comments and realize you weren’t being sarcastic. I hope my post helped point out some of the reasons things like this are becoming so important to people.
I get what you mean, but the video linked uses the term and is 9 years old. Wiktionary claims it was popularised by a book from 2012.
I get why people are downvoting but I agree with your point. You don’t need to be part of a community or fall in a specific identity term to be valid. Just be you. You are valid as you are, no matter if your identity has been given a name or not. All identity terms are made up anyways, it’s just our dumb brain’s way of simplifying and denaturating complex stuff in a way it can understand
Mate, I do not care what people think about me being tired every day I need to wake up early. However, can you imagine the satisfaction when I could finally look my father in the eyes and say to him to can it because it’s actually goddamn proven that this shit is real and unchangeable, no matter how many bullshit methods he thinks of? I had tobput up with his yapping on the matter for most of my life. Goddamn GLAD to be done with it.
Exactly what I was trying to say. You’re not neurodivergent ADHD on spectrum undiagnosed weirdo. You’re just you, we were all different all along.
I mean ADHD, Autism, Dyspraxia, etc. have a specific set of symptoms and specific treatments, and a large part of the population has those (as well as other mental disabilities like MDD, Bipolar, etc.). Many psychology researchers tackling the subject find that ADHD is severely underdiagnosed in the population (despite popular uneducated belief being that ADHD is overdiagnosed due to misinformation being widely spread on TV shows in the 2000s), with around 20% of people likely meeting the criteria for an ADHD diagnosis (diagnosis rates are usually in between 3% and 10%).
It’s postulated that the high occurence of ADHD compared to other disorders comes from our days as hunter-gatherers – then, many of the behaviours of ADHD would have been extremely helpful, such as high alertness/awareness of changes in the environment such as sound cues and slight visual changes, and impulsiveness/drive to be active to seek out berries and prey and such, making a decent portion of members of a group having ADHD be a huge benefit and boost to survival rates. But most of those useful effects have become quite useless in modern society, and many of the symptoms (like dysfunctional working memory & inattentiveness) have become a massive detriment under industrialism. It is likely that in pre-industrial/medieval society ADHD was still a net benefit, at least according to what little we can ascertain from it there.
Genes contributing to Autism Spectrum Disorder have also been positively selected for even since before humans came about, since they also brought benefits throughout primate evolution.
You can really take a lot of common mental disorders and find some sort of evolutionary reason for it; even mood disorders, anxiety disorders, insomnia disorders, schizophrenia, etc. would have had some potential benefits to prehistorical human groups.
Fun fact, there was a study done on prison populations in Estonia and it was determined that 40% of prisoners had undiagnosed ADHD – the symptoms of ADHD are kind of contrary to the core principles of being a capitalist worker, often with it being mistaken for “laziness” or “lack of motivation” (qualities which bring shame and have, for most of modern history, gotten you shunned from society), so they have a much higher likelihood of falling behind in life without proper treatment.
