ADHD

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A casual community for people with ADHD

Values:

Acceptance, Openness, Understanding, Equality, Reciprocity.

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Mark NSFW content accordingly.
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Respectful venting, including dealing with oppressive neurotypical culture, is okay.
Discussing other neurological problems like autism, anxiety, ptsd, and brain injury are allowed.
Discussions regarding medication are allowed as long as you are describing your own situation and not telling others what to do (only qualified medical practitioners can prescribe medication).

Encouraged:

Funny memes.
Welcoming and accepting attitudes.
Questions on confusing situations.
Seeking and sharing support.
Engagement in our values.

Relevant Lemmy communities:

Neurodivergent Life Hacks

lemmy.world/c/adhd will happily promote other ND communities as long as said communities demonstrate that they share our values.

founded 2 years ago

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How common is it to need to know the absolute inner workings of something in order to do it? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by applemao@lemmy.world to c/adhd@lemmy.world

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Im wondering if this is a common adhd thing.

For example, I have always wanted to program, but I can't let myself start with some easy gui building block code. I need to understand how the code is interacting with the computer itself and know how they did it in the 80s. Then of course it's too hard for me and I give up.

Or if im making music, I need to do everything from scratch the hard way, making it as hard as possible (and killing any creative effort i had in the beginning).

It's the same with anything. I can't progress if I dont know the absolute reason why something is being done. And if I do it the easy way, I didn't do it right and took shortcuts so it was worthless.

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[–] wpb@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I don't know if it applies to people with adhd, but there is this theory that people with autism have weak central coherence. That is, they have a tough time dealing with broad strokes and assembling context into a comprehensive picture of reality. This manifests in simple things like preferring instructions like "buy one dozen eggs" over "buy some eggs", to more complicated things like understanding that someone is joking when there's a thunderstorm out and they say "nice weather". Oftentimes, people with autism are very detail oriented, and uncomfortable with missing puzzle pieces.

For me, this reveals itself very similarly to what you describe. If I want to center a div, there's a good chance I'll be looking up how css works, then at the eBNF form of css, and then probably the Chomsky hierarchy, and then probably set theory bc the formal language theory book I picked up uses it, at which point I'll probably be lead to learn about Russel's paradox and so on. It's debilitating.

I don't know if you're autistic (although there is like a 60% comorbidity with adhd), but I do know that folks with autism experience the same thing. I don't have a solution for you, but you could potentially find tips on dealing with this on forums for autistic people.

[–] applemao@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Definitely could be. A specialist only deemed me mildly adhd. But I feel like I cover it up super well. And it's worse than they think