ADHD gave me an eye that most people donโt have. I donโt just see patterns, I clock red flags and shifts in energy before they even show up. That isnโt common sense. Thatโs a skill most neurotypical brains will never have.
ADHD burnout is a special kind of hell because not only are you burnt out you also feel guilty that you havenโt done enough to โdeserveโ being burnt out.
The urge to bookmark "potentially useful" stuff nonstop is not normal.
Wanting to collect "the perfect resources" and never using them is not normal.
Having a deep internal fear of: "if I donโt save this right now, I will forget it exists forever" is not normal.
Operating from an "out of sight, out of mind" is a classic symptom of profound ADHD(*).
(*)People with ADHD often struggle with working memory/holding temporary information in mind.
When faced with a sea of digital information, the ADHD brain experiences executive fatigue.
Deciding whether a piece of information is useful right now, where it belongs, or if it can be discarded triggers intense indecision and task avoidance.
Saving it for later is a coping mechanism to delay that exhausting decision-making process.
Bookmarking things provides an instant, effortless micro-dose of dopamine.
It satisfies the immediate impulse of the curiosity drive without requiring the heavy cognitive energy needed to actually read and process the information.
Bookmarking stuff is making your ADHD paralysis 10X worse.
You constantly show your brain that nothing has a shred of novelty.
And IF at some point you decide to sit down and go through your bookmarks, you will see that you have 5.000 choices.
So you'll spend two hours going through them, become completely overwhelmed by the decision-making process, and end up.....not doing anything.
You will of course probably ignore this if you have ADHD becuase you struggle with calculating the "best" option, whether that's for a song, movie, video, book or whatever.
And by "best" we mean the option that will give your dopamine-starved brain the most dopamine.
So your brain freezes during decision making and you end up procrastinating for HOURS.
If you are new here, in a neurotypical brain, dopamine acts as a chemical "go" signal that creates motivation to initiate a task or commit to a choice.
But in ADHD brains, there's a lower baseline of available dopamine and a reduced density of dopamine transporters in the striatum and prefrontal circuits.
So when you try to choose between multiple options, the mundane nature of a standard choice does not cross the threshold to trigger this "go" signal.
Npw to generate the missing neurochemical engagement, the brain enters a state of hyper-fixation/over-researching and endlessly calculating to artificially stimulate dopamine release through the novelty of data gathering.
*Yes, you actually self regulate by having 90 tabs open for no reason.
But again, even though it's tremendously unproductive don't feel guilty about it.
It's not a "lack of willpower".
You have measurably lower blood oxygenation and neural activation in the PFC when executing complex tasks or making decisions for example.
Why is this a problem?
Because this under-activation directly impairs the five specific circuits required to execute a choice.
Also when you try to make a decision, your weakened working memory fails to filter out intrusive or irrelevant thoughts.
It attempts to hold all variables, past mistakes, future consequences, and peripheral details simultaneously.
The cognitive load overflows your "mental RAM," causing a total systemic freeze known as cognitive congestion.
Also (yes, there are more problems), because the connection between the emotional centers of the brain such as the amygdala and the regulatory centers such as the PFC is altered in ADHD, the fear of making a suboptimal choice is interpreted by the brain as an actual threat shifting the brain out of logical evaluation entirely and into a state of anxious avoidance.
Your lack of results is not due to a shortage of facts.
It is due to a mismatch between the volume and form of information and the limited, effortful systems the brain uses to turn intentions into sustained action.
Working on these systems is what you need to do.
https://t.co/eXCNhiGzzm