The ADHD urge to lie about why you didn’t do something because “my brain refused to start on it” doesn’t make sense to a lot of neurotypicals.
This behavior has gotten me into a lot of shit over the years😬🤦♂️
#ADHD #neurodivergent #neurodiversity #neurodiverse #neurodivergence #ADHDmemes
Jokes aside, I’d love to figure out how to help my kid with this. Sometimes shit just isn’t in the cards and it causes a lot of pain between us.
Nah dude from the parent’s perspective this shit ain’t always that funny lmao… I enjoy the humour but I also take it seriously. I’m grateful that so many people with ADHD make memes and shitposts about their experiences because it helps me to empathise with my kid.
I’m with you. My kid has adhd and I read these comics, not for the humor, but to get an idea of what’s going on in his head.
It depends on what specifically you’re trying to get him to do, but something I’ve found very helpful is setting up the environment in a way that will lower the “initiation energy” of something to make it easier to start doing. YMMV on what does or doesn’t work for him, my spouse and I have found labels and organizing by task to be a huge help in making it easier to start things because now I have to devote 0% of my brain power to wandering around finding everything I need and staying on task, and I don’t need to root through drawers to find it.
Sensory adjustments to the environment might also be useful, like changing light levels, noise blocking headphones/ear plugs, or playing white noise/natural noises. And it sounds hippy dippy as fuck, but time in outdoor green spaces has been shown to improve symptoms in kids with ADHD, so if you guys aren’t regularly spending time outside or at the park it could be a good to incorporate it.
You’re already doing a lot more than many parents just by trying to understand and empathize instead of beating it out of him, so fist bump from a former neurodivergent kid. 🤜
What’s helped me is a combination of physical exercise (which helps against feelings of unrest that may be bothering me) and sort of sliding into the subject, tackling the easier parts first and from there riding the dopamine wave.
But yeah, it doesn’t get any easier.
That’s where therapy for you comes in. Gotta figure out how to get used to it, because adhd is for life.
It might help you to think of your son having adhd as being functionally the same if he was paraplegic.
ADHD isn’t a chemical imbalance like depression. It’s a developmental disorder where something happened to his brain while he was a fetus, and now his frontal/prefrontal cortex doesn’t function correctly.
It’s literally a disability, so you don’t cure it, you learn to work around it.
Depending on how old your kid is, it might or it might not improve. The frontal lobe of their brain still has a lot of development left in children; right up until they’re about 25. This may improve things.
Also, please don’t be one of those parents who discounts meds. They can really help a lot. And no, they’re not addictive (in fact, people with ADHD are more likely to forget them than to use them recreationally).
Or because they’re tired of hearing “I just forgot”. You can only say “I forgot (because Zi was overwhelmed, because the task wasn’t interesting, because I got distracted, because I can’t remember lists, because I do a soft reset every time I walk through a doorway)” so many times, even though it keeps being true.
This is why I love my current job and my friendship group’s. In both circles “I didn’t do that because I’ve been struggling with my ADHD” is a completely valid reason.
I mean, at work it’s followed by a short “what do we do to get over that hurdle?” because obviously I can’t just, not do my job.
But at least I’m not having to make shit up, and I can actually get to the root of the problem (being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world) and address it. Even if addressing it is just my boss giving me a fake deadline to put the pressure on the task.
Ugh my current boss is one of those “what’s wrong with that guy calling in suck when there’s work to do” guys, I hate it.
I have anxiety and on bad days like today and yesterday I’m absolutely fucking useless.
I keep getting in trouble at work for calling in sick from anxiety and I don’t even know why I keep getting it. I’m sitting here with nothing to do and I’m anxious. Why is my brain like this?
I can’t tell you why, but I get the exact same thing with my anxiety, and it saps my focus and motivation.
I think I saw a post on reddit along the lines of “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly”, for example doing a poor job brushing your teeth is better than not brushing them at all. It’s different than half assing something because you still care, you’re just doing what you can do.
I’ve kind of adopted that philosophy because it’s better to go to work and be 20% productive than not go and be zero percent and then worry about making up for lost time.
NGL, I’ve just accepted that it won’t make sense to the neurotypicals.
I’ll straight up say “sorry, my brain wouldn’t let me do it” or “the guy upstairs is really fighting me right now” while pointing at my head.
Best case, they understand what I mean. Worst case, they think I’m crazy, which is a best case in and of itself.
ADD/ADHD is an executive function failure related to feedback and it’s relationship to motivation. Normies never experience that on anything approaching a regular basis. As such, trying to explain that to them is like trying to explain what the colour of the number seven smells like. They’ll be all, “well, just do it. How hard could it be?”
