adhd is so embarrassing ur basically like “I have to have fun right the fuck now or I’m throwing myself off the roof” 90% of the time and you also have very little control over this
This was the single most important thing for me to start understanding re: my undiagnosed ADHD, and it’s the thing no one tells you except other ADHD sufferers. My brain’s reward system is so broken that boredom rapidly becomes indistinguishable from a depressive episode. There’s no healthy, normal ability to experience something as simply being a little dull–as soon as my brain isn’t getting regular hits of stimulation, I start clawing at the walls. This is what makes working in a structured environment and initiating tasks so difficult for me, not malice or other character flaws.
boredom rapidly becomes indistinguishable from a depressive episode
Oh my god. Thank you for this. This explains it PERFECTLY. Growing up neurotypical people were acting like doing something boring was a minor annoyance and I couldn’t grasp that because it was a Whole Fucking Thing for me that included physical pain in my chest.
Oh yeah, it’s physiological. For an easier way to understand, the way that autistic people experience discomfort similar to pain from too much stimulation, people with adhd experience discomfort similar to pain from too little stimulation. Especially if during this understimulation we’re expected to still perform uninteresting Important Tasks™️
It’s like when someone says driving relaxes them, or something else sort of insane, and everyone else thinks that’s a crazy way to relax. Relaxing doesn’t mean doing nothing, it means getting to a comfortable level of stimulation. So when you don’t have that level and you’re trying to do something important, the stress of being unable to relax compounds onto the normal stress of the task.
(If you have autism and adhd like me, the window of comfortable stimulation is so small that hardly anything gets done)
fyi autistic people can also have problems with both over and understimulation. as can everyone, with varying thresholds