Comment by FinnLobsien
4 hours ago
I think another cause is our media environment.
Assuming ADHD is to some extent a chemical thing (I.e. brain didn’t properly develop impulse control or attention span or whatever), we now live in a world that enables those exact things.
If you lived in a world where the principal media were written articles/books and long-form TV shows/movies, your brain was still trained to focus.
Most media is now basically an ADHD simulator, with constant context switching, intense stimuli etc. which only reinforces whatever ADHD traits one may have.
I would guess it’s somewhat similar to the interaction between smoking and asthma.
ADHD results in a dopamine imbalance which results in the sort of novelty seeking behaviors they tend to exhibit.
Part of pubescence is incrementally transferring your reliance on your parents to reliance on your peers. Which is why teenagers test boundaries constantly. They have to divorce from their parents incrementally, and on their own timeline, not the parents’. Your brain has reward systems to encourage that, but can also be hijacked by substances, which is why we pay special attention to substance abuse in children. But there are many reasons for children to fail to socialize, some of them environmental, and a biological drive to fill that with something (including The Internet and “engagement” in particular) if it can’t be filled with social safety. And once it has begun it can be a feedback loop of intentionally choosing one over the other.
There are some models of addiction medicine that say that people with hope and connection have a much easier time giving up physical addictions than people who don’t. There isn’t enough stick in the consequences of addiction to get you out of the cycle. You need carrot to transition, and the bigger the carrots the easier the journey.
> Part of pubescence is incrementally transferring your reliance on your parents to reliance on your peers.
Is it? That’s a theory, but for the vast majority of human history there was a very different pattern and I don’t think we’ve changed enough since then evolution-wise to have instincts for a completely different life pattern.
Like, in hunter gatherer bands, there aren’t really “parents” in the modern sense through a child’s development. And then they don’t start relying on their peers, they’ve been with a mixed age group of siblings and cousins since the age of 3 or so. And then they slowly transition into being a member of the adult male or female group.
I don’t really know how what you’re describing would map into instincts from that ancestral life pattern.
> There are some models of addiction medicine that say that people with hope and connection have a much easier time giving up physical addictions than people who don’t. There isn’t enough stick in the consequences of addiction to get you out of the cycle. You need carrot to transition, and the bigger the carrots the easier the journey.
I totally agree with this. And I think this is the part that's easy to miss in the narrative around how trauma and ADHD connect. Wherever ADHD traits originate, someone's desire to change matters.
If you love your job, but inability to concentrate is hampering performance, you're much more likely to WANT to change than if your job is merely a nuisance required for economic sustenance.
Yes, our modern world is perfected to provide as much distractions to ADHD brain as possible, while working life has become more mentally demanding. Lots of people who struggle now would have done okay 50, 100 years ago when there were less distractions, and larger share of population did physical jobs instead of knowledge work.
Exactly. Even if we assume the distribution of traits on the ADHD spectrum in human brains has been constant over the last 100 years, today's media and work enablements have massively increased the share of people (and part of the spectrum) for whom ADHD traits inhibit their way to live the way they'd like to.
Meh, I think this is the impression people who don't have it tend to get, or maybe it's like that for some people deep into the hyperactive dimension. While I do find some of it problematically engaging for a little while, I think it's the people around me who don't have ADHD that get more fixated on that stuff. It wouldn't be as chronic as it is if it wasn't much more broadly appealing than there exists a population of people with ADHD.
For me, I need something more deeply stimulating and long-form. A good weekend outing for me is a 14 hour hike with a sketchy scramble. I don't get any value out of constant context switching, constant bright flashing lights like rythym games or any of that, and I'm way more comfortable than most literally just sitting quietly and thinking.
I think the big divergence between how I respond to my environment and how normal people respond to their environment is that normal people tend to be problematically attracted to artificial gamified stimulated experiences, like academics, slot machine style social media, scary movies, sports, stuff like that. My biggest difficulty is that I just don't really care about arbitrary competition, benign social threats, existential danger etc.. I'd much rather be in a position where I'm actually in real danger if I mess up, or if I write some program incorrectly and risk leaking sensitive data. That's where my brain works at its best.
Right now I'm hesitating to go back to school because I have no idea if I—as a man in his mid-thirties—will be able to trick my brain into being stressed appropriately when exams come around, at least enough to show up and complete them.
I do have ADHD, and inability to control my attention is a big issue for me.
What you describe sounds like you have the condition managed extremely well and perhaps don't tend too far into the hyperactive dimension of it.