Yeah! Not beating yourself up over this is really important, same with not overthinking it. Some days are hard, some are less hard, some, I’ve heard, are easy.
Some days the best progress/discipline is noticing it’s a day where you need your own compassion to admit you need to let yourself off the hook for a bit.
It’s a good start to a long path :) I’m not a doctor of medicine, and not medical advice, but I know it was really helpful for me when I started recognizing I was on a path to helping myself, not the ADHD, not the trauma, not whatever else it may be diagnosed as, but me, my experiences, my patterns, my brain.
The labels can be helpful for seeing, noticing, understanding, approaching, and getting medical support where needed, but ultimately it’s great that the symptoms were validated, and congrats on taking the steps! It’s hard work to identify the need, hard work to reach out and get support, and it means you’re very likely on a good path.
The remembral is really smart! I might need to find a way that works for me for that one.
Being really open is also great; radical authenticity and openness (with those it’s appropriate and comfortable) has helped me learn and help others, and gotten acceptance from people I’d struggled with. “Let’s assume I’ve been living underground for a while, how exactly do you go about X, if you’re comfortable answering?” Also great for those with absent/developmentally lacking childhood experiences.
Yeah, a lot of my systems have been built up by noticing bad patterns and finding easier alternatives. A frozen curry that takes 10 minutes of effort tops, with pre-made masala paste - it may not be the most satisfying, but it’s costing me about $4, I’ll be eating in less time than ordering in, and I won’t get stuck looking at menus for an hour.
Yeah, I fortunately had a magic bullet (not great for it, but works) from years ago I received as a gift. The other comment nailed it; any time I’ve added water, it’s been bland. While milk, some yogurts, and a healthy mix of fruits is really flavourful, and it might throw the texture, but the oats and spinach add a night nutrient punch.
Less of everything is real. I’ll regularly and unintentionally mentally itemize what I have and what my options are regularly and funding ways to limit that is always helpful. I have a nearly empty fridge, pantry, a mealplan which is more like a two-week menu of options, only a few pieces of each clothing, and on. Fewer opportunities to fall into bad patterns. There was a time where my solution to not doing laundry for two weeks was to buy more cheap “backup” clothes.
Then the purge happened.
Few, good things, that were bought with the intention of easy maintenance, minimizing choice, while allowing a bounded spontaneity.
Yeah, the struggles of this work pattern are real. I’ve been trying to temper it, but also to accept it as much as I feasibly can, because going against the mental grain can be much more exhausting. Some of us are sprinters, not marathon runners.
I really want to see if worker owned cooperatives plus AI could do help democratize running companies (where appropriate). Not just LLMs, but a mix of techniques for different purposes (e.g., hierarchial task networks to help with operations and pipelining, LLM for assembling/disseminating information to workers).
That too, and I can really efficiently manage the items going into bags given I backpack my groceries and want pretty specific configurations…
Totally agree. I forgot about those, as I’ve only encountered the weighing ones once in the past very long time and it was a mess, I can totally get hate if weighing ones are the only experience with them.
I almost exclusivity self-checkout for groceries, and it had drastically sped up my checkout time as most people in my area opt to use traditional checkout and the stores are still keeping lots of lanes open (just closing the express lanes). The last 3 times I’ve used a non-self checkout, each time I was double charged for items or didn’t have reduced prices applied and didn’t notice because I was bagging.
I agree with the recommendation for talking to the doctor; I’m in a similar position. This might be completely unrelated to your situation, so take it with many grains of salt.
What I’ve been learning is that a lot of my own burnout cycling seems to be cycles of intense and constant masking. I struggle with social situations, following “chronos” time instead of “Kairos” (if you will entertain the misuse of these), and eventually get so buried in obligations and actively resisting my natural impulses that my wants and needs get muddied and untended to and the pain of pretending or entering social modes builds up too much. Being in a mode, “professor mode”, “friend mode”, “colleague mode”, “spouse mode”, they all build up the tension and while I can seem socially adept, if I’m not in a mode I’m pretty useless. My Uber drivers can attest. Sometimes I do need a break from social activities while I break down the mask that builds up. A decalcifying of the brain. My friends seem to understand.
I’m a teaching professor, and I love the work, it has high flexibility but strict accountability, lots of room to experiment and find novelty, but a massive social burden and ridiculous workload. The only thing I’ve found to help so far, besides medication, is doing less. Fewer work obligations meant more time to de-mask, it meant I could take the more time on my tasks that I refused to admit to myself I needed compared to colleagues, more time to do stupid random impulsive (but safe) BS which I’ve found is the most relaxing to me, and that naturally led to meditating, exercising, and eating a bit healthier, which made things feel more manageable.
I don’t know what the long term prospects of this realization are for me, but consider that ADHD usually means that tasks will take longer and more effort than typical people. Admitting to myself that it’s a disability and I don’t need to work twice or three times as hard as other people to make up for it all the time has been really important.
You also mentioned trauma; a lifetime of letting people down without knowing why really turned me into an over-supporter as an adult. Fawning response to stress - feeling the stress build up and instinctively doing whatever you can to help other people at cost of yourself, rather than fighting or running away or freezing up - and then when you’re alone you fight yourself, freeze, or run away from everything. I’ve been told it’s a form of invisible self harm, and it’s nefarious because the goal is to make everyone else see things as all right.
So I don’t know if any of this clicks true for you, and I don’t fully know the solution to these, but awareness of my own issues has helped a lot, and I think awareness and recognition is key to getting started. Years of therapy, meditation, medication, it’s all making progress, but it’s slow, and awareness has been key to any of the positives. For me, it seems like working less and admitting to myself I have a disability, undoing years of traumatic people pleasing at my own expense, and learning to unmask more in social interactions and at home are key, however that path is treaded.
Hah, yeah I learned I wasn’t so much a night person as much as someone who indulges in revenge sleep procrastinating and doesn’t get enough alone time in the day.
Every time. Try to get ahead of your work? Well, good for you, that first 20% went really well, now let’s spend the next two weeks on “work” that interferes with your other needs and needs to get thrown out because there’s no way it’s integrating with the other 80% that needs to happen within the next hour and also everything that you did for the other 20% is useless and needs to be redone now that you broke it with that tangent.
It’s been a painful summer “preparing” to teach my fall courses.
Yeah, Barkley’s talks have helped a lot so far. Previous psychiatrists largely wrote off diagnoses because I was successful in work, but overlooked the challenges at home. Some trauma therapy combined with Barkley’s unique focus of adult symptoms of ADHD really opened my eyes to it.
Still doubts, still confusion, but clearing up.
I’m really torn on this, because on one hand the over generalization of ADHD prevented me - and is still preventing me - from taking my own diagnosis too seriously, but that same information got me to at least think about it and get a consult with a psychiatrist on it in the first place.
It helped the diagnosis but not the feelings of being an imposter post-diagnosis.
It’s also tough to reconcile that I may thrive in high pressure situations, but they’re still exhausting and I don’t like them, and definitely not being dependent on them to do anything. Medication helped the minute to minute, but the week to week is still a total blur.
I appreciate the comment, and it’s a point I’ll be making this year in my courses. More than ever, students have been struggling to motivate themselves to do the work. The world’s on fire and it’s hard to intrinsically motivate to do hard things for the sake of learning, I get it. Get a degree to get a job to survive, learning is secondary. But this survival mindset means that the easiest way is the best way, and it’s going to crumble long-term.
It’s like jumping into an MMORPG and using a bot to play the whole game. Sure you have a cap level character, but you have no idea how to play, how to build a character, and you don’t get any of the references anyone else is making.
My guess was that they knew gaming was niche and were willing to invest less in this headset and more in spreading the widespread idea that “Spatial Computing” is the next paradigm for work.
I VR a decent amount, and I really do like it a lot for watching TV and YouTube, and am toying with using it a bit for work-from-home where the shift in environment is surprisingly helpful.
It’s just limited. Streaming apps aren’t very good, there’s no great source for 3D movies (which are great, when Bigscreen had them anyways), they’re still a bit too hot and heavy for long-term use, the game library isn’t very broad and there haven’t been many killer app games/products that distinct it from other modalities, and it’s going to need a critical amount of adoption to get used in remote meetings.
I really do think it’s huge for given a sense of remote presence, and I’d love to research how VR presence affects remote collaboration, but there are so many factors keeping it tough to buy into.
They did try, though, and I think they’re on the right track. Facial capture for remote presence and hybrid meetings, extending the monitors to give more privacy and flexibility to laptops, strong AR to reduce the need to take the headset off - but they’re first selling the idea, and then maybe there will be a break. I’ll admit the industry is moving much slower than I’d anticipated back in 2012 when I was starting VR research.