I love how my ADHD brain makes so many connections. I feel like it helps me come up with creative solutions to problems
...but it's so hard to write or create sometimes when everything feels like it's connected to everything else ><
Long-term treatment of ADHD requires self-acceptance.
Specifically, we need to understand we're starting at different place than others and have different needs and barriers.
This changes what we need to do to improve and progress. It doesn't make progress or success impossible though
For a lot of ADHD'ers, fighting our executive dysfunction is one of the main places we lose energy.
Spending time in decision paralysis, struggling to get ourselves started, or repeating things over and over just to remember them tires us out more than physical movement ever could
ADHD impacts long-term memory too, but indirectly!
ADHD makes short-term memory worse, and this can impact our ability to form new long-term memories. Basically, if it's in there, it's in there, but it might take us more time, energy, or memory techniques to get it in there
Oh, and the hoops change sometimes, for no apparent reason.
Oh, sorry, we have a shortage at the moment, so can you check back in a couple days?
Oh, and we're going to judge you for needing the medication in the first place because it's on the bad-bad list
Are you able to call today? :)
Call me crazy, but I think ADHD assessment and treatment for ADHD should be ADHD-friendly.
You shouldn't need good executive function to access ADHD assessment and treatment. And the fact that you do shows who's designing these systems
There are very serious inequities when it comes to healthcare access, including for treatment of ADHD and other neurodevelopmental conditions.
Cost, location, and even bias and discrimination are serious barriers that prevent some who need healthcare from accessing it
Emotional distress can be many different things, including panic attacks, meltdowns, shutdowns, dissociation, rage, or depressive crisis.
But they're all characterized by super intense emotions that lead to a loss of control of our thoughts, actions, or feelings in our body
In short: yep!
Nicotine is a stimulant and seems to effect concentration and cognitive performance for people with ADHD.
The down side is that it's HUGELY addictive. Far more than most stimulant medications
Sources: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine
Totally, and that right there is the system failing. It shouldn't be so hard to manage healthcare. I'm sorry that you're going through that
Whether it's a meltdown, panic attack, burnout, or overload, there are usually signs that we're struggling long before we end up in crisis.
The issue is seeing these signs, and actually trusting yourself enough to stop when you see them. That's what helps us avoid crisis
So many of ADHD's core symptoms are related to our struggles with inhibition control.
Distraction, oversharing, interrupting, emotional volatility, even fidgeting can be a result of our impulses being faster than our inhibition can keep up with
Anything that reduces our inhibitions, such as distractions, intense emotions, or substances, generally makes impulsivity much more likely.
This goes double for ADHD'ers, because we already struggle with inhibiting our impulses
Can I just point out that this 100% a form of self-accommodation, and such a helpful one for this exact problem too.
I find that it's so much easier to set up systems that prevent me responding before reading than to respond interrupting
Obviously, this doesn't let us off the hook in terms of accountability when we say something that ends up hurting other people (OR OURSELVES).
But recognizing where it comes from allows us to tune our strategies to fit the actual underlying issue
We need to acknowledge how common it is for people with ADHD to stick our foot in our mouth in conversations.
It's so easy, with our struggles with attention and impulsivity, to say blurt something out, say something we shouldn't, or just end up embarrassing ourselves
There's a lot of unspoken trauma that neurodivergent people carry around with us.
A long history of being excluded for our differences or struggles, for example, this can turbo charge otherwise rational fears, around standing out for our needs or accommodations
All day yesterday I had the big sad and couldn't get myself to do anything I wanted or needed to do... ...so obviously this morning I woke up with a migraine.
Thanks for the warning body, could make it ANY LESS DESCRIPT >.<
Honestly, I don't know how I'd cope. I like to imagine that I'd find some exercise that was still accessible to me, but that's just me coping, and I know that if I'm honest.
That would be so, so hard
Medical guidelines: "You need 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise each week"
Me: That sounds manageable
My squirelly, ADHD brain: "If you don't tire me out every single day, I'm going to destroy your executive function and spiral you into depression"
Me: ...umm... help?
Being autistic means overwhelm is a constant threat. Unfortunately, this overwhelm impacts our ability to function on many levels.
Our processing speed, mental organization, or even verbal ability can become much harder when we're emotionally, physically, or somatically overwhelmed
Just because you think someone would benefit from an accommodation, medication, or coping strategy doesn't mean they'll value it enough to try it or even consider it.
That's okay. People have their own reasons for doing things differently or take different journeys to similar ends. Don't rush them
The ADHD understanding of time is sometimes described as Now and Not Now. Now is basically what we're fully engrossed at the moment, and Not Now is everything else.
This 'everything else' can feel so distant, unreal, or unimportant compared to what we're doing now
In some way, ADHD'ers are great at flexible thinking. We can often adapt more easily to information presented out of order, for example.
But this can also be a barrier. It can make it harder to organize our thoughts or stories in a way that other people can follow
That sounds like success in my books
Everything that we store in long-term memory has to pass through our working memory to get there.
For folks with limited working memory, such as ADHD'ers, this means we might ALSO struggle with encoding things into long-memory in the first place, making recall much more difficult
And the goal is never to not be autistic or appear allistic, but to be comfortable in your experience of your neurotype.
If you can identify and meet your needs, whether those be basic human needs or something that you need that allistic people don't, then you are doing it right, imo
I think that it's similar, yes, but I think the feeling inside is different. From the other autistic people in my life, it sounds like overload is the major threat they exist with constantly, and for ADHD'ers it's internal chaos and inconsistency that's the constant threat.
