ADHD is about the Voluntary vs Involuntary actions
The way I conceptualize ADHD is as a constraint on the quantity and magnitude of voluntary actions I can undertake. When others discuss actions and planning, their perspective often feels foreign to me—they frame it as a straightforward conscious choice to pursue or abandon plans. For me, however, initiating action (especially longer-term, less immediately rewarding tasks) is better understood as “submitting a proposal to a capricious djinn who may or may not fulfill the request.” The more delayed the gratification and the longer the timeline, the less likely the action will materialize.
After three decades inhabiting my own mind, I’ve found that effective decision-making has less to do with consciously choosing the optimal course and more with leveraging my inherent strengths (those behaviors I naturally gravitate toward, largely outside my conscious control) while avoiding commitments that highlight my limitations (those things I genuinely intend to do and “commit” to, but realistically never accomplish).
ADHD exists on a spectrum rather than as a binary condition. I believe it serves an adaptive purpose—by restricting the number of actions under conscious voluntary control, those with ADHD may naturally resist social demands on their time and energy, and generally favor exploration over exploitation.
Society exerts considerable pressure against exploratory behavior. Most conventional advice and social expectations effectively truncate the potential for high-variance exploration strategies. While one approach to valuable exploration involves deliberately challenging conventions, another method simply involves burning bridges to more traditional paths of success.
My partner has ADHD. She and I talk about it often because I don’t, and understanding and coordinating with each other takes a lot of work.
Her environment is a strong influence on what tasks she considers and chooses. If she notices a weed in the garden walking from the car to the front door, she can get caught up for hours weeding before she makes it into the house. If she’s in her home office trying to work from home and notices something to tidy, same thing.
All the tasks her environment suggests to her seem important and urgent, because she’s not comparing them to some larger list of potential priorities that apply to different contexts—she’s always working on the top priority strictly with reference to the context she’s in at the moment.
She is much better than me at accomplishing tasks that her environment naturally suggests to her—cooking (inspired by recipes she finds on social media), cleaning, shopping, gardening, socializing, and making social plans in response to texts and notifications on her phone.
I am much better than her at constructing an organized list of global priorities and working through them systematically. However, I find it very difficult to be opportunistic, and I can be inflexible and distracted from the moment because I’m always thinking of the one main task I want to focus on.
I don’t think explore/exploit is quite the right frame in our relationship. I’m much more capable of “exploring” topics that require understanding complex abstract interconnections because I can force myself to keep coming back to them over and over again, whatever they are, in any environment, until I’ve understood them. By contrast she’s more capable of “exploiting” unpredictable opportunities as they arise. But the opportunities she and I are exposed to are constrained by our patterns of attention.
I have ADHD, and also happen to be a psychiatry resident.
As far as I can tell, it has been nothing but negative in my personal experience. It is a handicap, one I can overcome with coping mechanisms and medication, but I struggle to think of any positive impact on my life.
For a while, there were evopsych theories that postulated that ADHD had an adaptational benefit, but evopsych is a shakey field at the best of times, and no clear benefit was demonstrated.
>All analyses performed support the presence of long-standing selective pressures acting against ADHD-associated alleles until recent times. Overall, our results are compatible with the mismatch theory for ADHD but suggest a much older time frame for the evolution of ADHD-associated alleles compared to previous hypotheses.
The ancient ancestral environment probably didn’t reward strong executive function and consistency in planning as strongly as agricultural societies did. Even so, the study found that prevalence was dropping even during Palaeolithic times, so it wasn’t even something selected for in hunter-gatherers!
I hate having ADHD, and sincerely hope my kids don’t. I’m glad I’ve had a reasonably successful life despite having it.
I’m slowly accepting that my ADHD sucks to inhabit, but that it is objectively working and my feeling that it is a secret superpower isn’t entirely cope. Certainly I miss deadlines and raise my advisor’s blood pressure, but at this point I’ve got multiple CVPR papers.
The question is: do my research results trace back to me involuntarily exploring the beautiful research directions, even when I am trying very hard to focus on the work in front of me, that I am expected/required to be doing?
Or, do I have innate ability that is being held back by ADHD, and I would be far more successful if I could just have self control? I think fear of this possibility contributes an unhealthy level of ambition: if I’m successful enough, it wouldn’t leave room above for the “far more successful” version of me without ADHD to eclipse me.
ADHD is about the Voluntary vs Involuntary actions
The way I conceptualize ADHD is as a constraint on the quantity and magnitude of voluntary actions I can undertake. When others discuss actions and planning, their perspective often feels foreign to me—they frame it as a straightforward conscious choice to pursue or abandon plans. For me, however, initiating action (especially longer-term, less immediately rewarding tasks) is better understood as “submitting a proposal to a capricious djinn who may or may not fulfill the request.” The more delayed the gratification and the longer the timeline, the less likely the action will materialize.
After three decades inhabiting my own mind, I’ve found that effective decision-making has less to do with consciously choosing the optimal course and more with leveraging my inherent strengths (those behaviors I naturally gravitate toward, largely outside my conscious control) while avoiding commitments that highlight my limitations (those things I genuinely intend to do and “commit” to, but realistically never accomplish).
ADHD exists on a spectrum rather than as a binary condition. I believe it serves an adaptive purpose—by restricting the number of actions under conscious voluntary control, those with ADHD may naturally resist social demands on their time and energy, and generally favor exploration over exploitation.
Society exerts considerable pressure against exploratory behavior. Most conventional advice and social expectations effectively truncate the potential for high-variance exploration strategies. While one approach to valuable exploration involves deliberately challenging conventions, another method simply involves burning bridges to more traditional paths of success.
My partner has ADHD. She and I talk about it often because I don’t, and understanding and coordinating with each other takes a lot of work.
Her environment is a strong influence on what tasks she considers and chooses. If she notices a weed in the garden walking from the car to the front door, she can get caught up for hours weeding before she makes it into the house. If she’s in her home office trying to work from home and notices something to tidy, same thing.
All the tasks her environment suggests to her seem important and urgent, because she’s not comparing them to some larger list of potential priorities that apply to different contexts—she’s always working on the top priority strictly with reference to the context she’s in at the moment.
She is much better than me at accomplishing tasks that her environment naturally suggests to her—cooking (inspired by recipes she finds on social media), cleaning, shopping, gardening, socializing, and making social plans in response to texts and notifications on her phone.
I am much better than her at constructing an organized list of global priorities and working through them systematically. However, I find it very difficult to be opportunistic, and I can be inflexible and distracted from the moment because I’m always thinking of the one main task I want to focus on.
I don’t think explore/exploit is quite the right frame in our relationship. I’m much more capable of “exploring” topics that require understanding complex abstract interconnections because I can force myself to keep coming back to them over and over again, whatever they are, in any environment, until I’ve understood them. By contrast she’s more capable of “exploiting” unpredictable opportunities as they arise. But the opportunities she and I are exposed to are constrained by our patterns of attention.
I have ADHD, and also happen to be a psychiatry resident.
As far as I can tell, it has been nothing but negative in my personal experience. It is a handicap, one I can overcome with coping mechanisms and medication, but I struggle to think of any positive impact on my life.
For a while, there were evopsych theories that postulated that ADHD had an adaptational benefit, but evopsych is a shakey field at the best of times, and no clear benefit was demonstrated.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32451437/
>All analyses performed support the presence of long-standing selective pressures acting against ADHD-associated alleles until recent times. Overall, our results are compatible with the mismatch theory for ADHD but suggest a much older time frame for the evolution of ADHD-associated alleles compared to previous hypotheses.
The ancient ancestral environment probably didn’t reward strong executive function and consistency in planning as strongly as agricultural societies did. Even so, the study found that prevalence was dropping even during Palaeolithic times, so it wasn’t even something selected for in hunter-gatherers!
I hate having ADHD, and sincerely hope my kids don’t. I’m glad I’ve had a reasonably successful life despite having it.
I’m slowly accepting that my ADHD sucks to inhabit, but that it is objectively working and my feeling that it is a secret superpower isn’t entirely cope. Certainly I miss deadlines and raise my advisor’s blood pressure, but at this point I’ve got multiple CVPR papers.
The question is: do my research results trace back to me involuntarily exploring the beautiful research directions, even when I am trying very hard to focus on the work in front of me, that I am expected/required to be doing?
Or, do I have innate ability that is being held back by ADHD, and I would be far more successful if I could just have self control? I think fear of this possibility contributes an unhealthy level of ambition: if I’m successful enough, it wouldn’t leave room above for the “far more successful” version of me without ADHD to eclipse me.