I also have difficulties sleeping, and if I don’t have access to my various strategies I can’t get to sleep because of over thinking, and waking frequently and immediately overthink and can’t get back to sleep.

My main ‘trick’ is finding the right audiobook and playing that as I go to sleep. It’s a bit of trial and error, to find something that works, but it gives me something to focus on as I try to fall asleep so I don’t think about my day or stress or start getting ideas for some project… And when I wake up in the middle of the night, I turn it back on and I fall back asleep in minutes.

Right book (or podcast or whatever) : for me it needs to be a story I know (so that I don’t care about hearing what happens next, and don’t get too confused if I miss sections by sleeping), not too distressing / dark (especially as I’m falling asleep I find violent descriptions can jar me awake), relaxing narration (no music or unexpected noises, nice voice, not too upbeat). Non fiction can also work really well.

Right method : what works for me is playing audiobook on an old phone that i keep under my pillow, with no other apps or WiFi, just the audiobook app and a redshift app (Twilight). To begin with I might listen to the book normally for a bit to get familiar, then I’ll gradually turn down the volume as I’m getting tired and as it gets quieter I have to keep still otherwise I can’t hear it over my rustling the bedsheets. If I feel like I’m too engaged and alert I adjust down the playback speed, so the Narrator gets slower and slower, and that usually makes me sleepier.

If you’re not used to it, I can imagine it taking a while to adjust, but it’s totally solved my issues, and now serves as a immediate sleep trigger for me. When I put on my book, I’m usually asleep within ten minutes. And it’s even faster at returning me to sleep in the middle of the night. And it’s something I’ve done now for years, so I’ve got loads more tips if anyone’s interested but this is already tldr…

Yeah, I think challenge can be a bit motivator for adhd folks. Once I’ve completed the main part of something, I find it really hard to care about the details, to the extent that the unfinished parts sometimes spoil the bit I had completed.

I feel like it’s the dopamine of the chase is actually what’s motivating, and challenge is a version of that. I’ll get sucked into finding some obscure game and getting an emulator working to be able to play it and all the way I’m super engaged. Then I start playing this game I was so excited about and meh, don’t care.

Maybe you could think about ways to refocus that drive? A therapist told me once that adhd people don’t get satisfaction from completing things, but are excited about new things. So, instead of feeling proud of getting into college try and immediately find the new challenge (now I want to get a prostigious internship!) if you succeed at your fitness goals, maybe you can raise the stakes see if you can beat a friend or a record or something?

Yeah, furthest I ever fit with a fitness program is 5x5. It’s such a small amount of individual activities, they’re always challenging because of the increasing weights, and it feels like there’s a really clear goal that you’re moving towards (not just ‘go to they gym until your fit’).

Focusing on getting the movement right kept me fully occupied during the actual rep and there’s only a few different exercises each day so it didn’t take too long. For getting started, I would just do a intense bounce / dance around the room to warm myself up (I had weights at home so I didn’t need to worry about getting the gym or other people seeing me). With warm and focused reps and a bit of a cool down, I could generally do the whole thing in under 45 minutes, so even if I had spent the day lazing around I could often trick myself into “shit, it’s almost six and I need to meet the guys in an hour, I guess I’ll just quickly rush through my reps” (and then I would be late of course, but that’s normal). A workout buddy would be the other ideal for accountability / motivation.

Yeah, I feel weird about “imposter syndrome” cause sometimes I know I’m genuinely doing a bad job, forgetting important things, or fucking soemthing up and causing me / others a bunch of stress. But I’m also aware that there are somethings I do well, that not everyone else does, but because they’re easy for me I don’t value them as much as the things I wanted to do right but screwed up anyway.

Something that sometimes helps, and sometimes just disturbs me, is that I think about all my colleagues who are (mostly) “neurotypical” and how often they make stupid mistakes and fuck ups because they are old and computer illiterate, busy with other commitments, slow, or just apathetic. When I spend four hours getting angry at myself until I can manage to finally spend 5 minutes to send an important but straightforward email… Well, it’s obvious that I’m useless / terrible. But what the hell are all these other supposedly competent people doing? Because often they’re as behind with things as I am. Or doing shit job of a presentation because they can’t be bothered rather than because they only have twenty minutes left before the big meeting.

Maybe my comment wasn’t clear enough, I have a job that I find satisfying, teaching at a university. The five year job I had that forced repeatedly forced me off sick was as a health professional in a hospital, and it was very interesting, challenging and satisfying. But the repetition (not of the work with patients, which was endlessly varied) but just turning up at the same building every day, seeing the same collegues, keeping on top of paperwork, etc. was mentally exhausting.

The advantage to being a lecturer is that the commute, paperwork and stress is seasonal, so it doesn’t just feel like an endless Sisyphian task. In a sense, it’s less challenging and less satisfying work than my time in health (teaching a student something interesting isn’t the same as saving someone’s life!) but the work pattern works much better for me. I think that what the OP was describing about cyclical burnout might be something similar. There are lots of careers (many self employed) out there that are intensely busy for a block and then time off or starting a completely different project. When I start finding teaching too much (and I’m sure it’ll happen eventually, but at least it’s longer than a year!) I’ll probably move into freelance coding or seasonal event management type stuff. Stuff where I can use my strengths of picking up stuff quickly and dealing with problems, but don’t need to worry about the long haul.

I don’t know, I feel like it sounds a lot like burn out (or at least how I understand the term, which might be wrong!) I would manage alright at a job for a year or so, and then the combination of repetitiveness and lack of interest (for more low level jobs) or the accumulated stress and exhaustion from trying & failing to keep on top of everything (for more professional jobs) would bring me to a point of anxiety, depression and ‘mental shutdown’.

Mostly I’d walk out on jobs when it started happening, but I’m my longest job (5 years) I just kept getting signed off work for increasingly long periods, and then I’d come back and be okay for another 12 months and fall apart again.

But I don’t think it’s cyclical depression or something. I had a two year period where I was fortunate enough to not have to work and I was in good form for the whole two years. Now I’ve moved in to academia, and the university schedule with four months off in summer seems to be enough that I don’t hit that point. The end of each semester has me worn out and approaching burnout, but then I get plenty of time off to recharge.

Only way I manage it is to use my phone or something that I have with my all the time anyway. And the planner / to-do / calendar or whatever has to be right on the front of my screen so it’s not an app I have to go check, it’s just visible all the time.

Adding stuff is hard, until you get into the habit where it becomes pretty automatic (as long as your planner/phone is always right at hand - if I walk away thinking “I’ll add that in later”, I won’t.)

My one tip is to put everything in it to begin with, it’s more effort but it gets you in the habit quicker. So if you a morning routine, you can have “make coffee / brush teeth / read lemmy” as three separate tasks, and complete them all quickly. Or if random thoughts pop into your head during the day stick them on (“put a spare USB cable in my bag / Google terrapins”). Not only does it help me remember to do stuff, but it stops rando tasks distracting me. If I feel it’s really important to check how much laundry detergent I have left, I can add a task, not stop in the middle of cooking somehting and rush off, only to come back and find dinner burnt.

For me, to-do lists work much better if I have to add and complete dozens of tasks a day. Because then it’s something that feels like it’s working and helpful, while if it’s just “remember to do that big scary important thing” it just stresses me out and I ignore it. Obviously, ymmv, and some people find having lots of tasks distracting or hard to sort (or go down the rabbit hole of categories and color codes). But if it’s something that I get regular dopamine hits from (by completing many small goals) I pay attention to it, while if it’s something that just makes me anxious or feel guilty I won’t.

Not sure that’s an experience I’m familiar with, especially from food / drink. I’ll have to watch out for it. Do you happen to know where the term emerged from? Seems like lots of people here didn’t understand it, is it used more often in different contexts or communities?

In philosophy there’s a term “second order desire” which is “wanting to want” something. So, when you want ice cream it’s a first order desire, you just want it. But when you want to eat healthily, it’s often a desire for wellbeing, long-term goals, etc. Not a sudden urge for carrots.

The challenge for adhd is that second order desires aren’t that motivating. When I’m in a sporadic fitness phase (seems to hit for a few weeks every few years) then I really want to exercise (first order desire). I’d rather do exercise than play on my phone or watch TV. But the rest of the time I want to want to do exercise (to be fit) and if I had a magic wand or a pill I could take I’d prefer that to the exercise, because it’s not something I genuinely want for itself. But going for a walk somewhere beautiful, or going dancing with friends, are things I genuinely want to do, so are easy to achieve. And they have a byproduct of being some physical exercise.

Been a chef. It works pretty well for adhd, if you can find a job that has the right level of business and organisation to keep you in flow. It can be really fun reacting to things and having lots of short goals and dopamine hits.

But equally, once it becomes too busy (or the kitchen is poorly organised) it’s easy to become overwhelmed and that can exhausting. If you’re like most adhders I know, you might find keeping you kitchen organised and remembering where you’ve put that small tub with that essential garnish for the next order. As you search everywhere for it, you make even more of mess, and then you discover that it was exactly where you first looked, but because you’re hyper and rushing you missed… And now you are even more behind with the checks and you remember that you forgot to put that vital thing in the oven two hours ago, so you’re going to have tell the wait staff that the one vegetarian dish in the menu is finished.

Also, as everyone else is saying, being a chef is stressful, poorly paid, and easily leads to world of alcoholism and/or stimulant addiction. That being said, it can be fun! And being a good cook is a life skill. So, if you find a job somewhere that seems like a good vibe, go for it. But i don’t think I could recommend it as a career plan.

I often have dreams about having conversations with peoole I know, often abiut really mundane stuff. It’s very annoying, because my memory isn’t great i genuinely struggle at times to figure out if it happened for real or was just a dream. Often I realise because it was impossible, like I’ll be telling my parter that I chatted to X about something and they’ll ask “when did you see X?” and I’ll realise that I haven’t seen them in weeks so I can’t have had that conversation. It’s even come up at work and I’ve had to check with coworkers, “have we spoken about this already?” (although I try and keep the “or did I just dream it” to my self).

I don’t disagree, those kinda things (stimulation, people) can be issues for ASD, but I think they can also be ADHD issues. I love people and am very sociable, but because i struggle to talk about things “normally” and get bored easily I really prefer small groups of close friends.

I’d happily hang out with my close friends pretty much all the time, especially if it was just two or three of us. But if its a big group, I get easily bored and end up interrupting / dominating the conversation, or I just switch off and play on my phone, or just leave.

Even if when I’m having fun in a big group, I will involuntarily start eavesdropping on another conversation that’s happening in the group and stop being able to focus on what the person I’m talking to is saying. If its a fun drunken party, it can be okay to shout across the room to join another conversation, but it’s often very rude, especially to the person right in front of me that is telling me something and I’ve just started to blank… So small groups are easier.

Similarly, I love the busyness and novelty of the city, but since moving to the countryside with my partner, I realise how much background noises and stuff happening was really distracting me and making it harder to be focused and relaxed. So now, I do prefer the country.

Tldr: if you have problems with attention, that can impact social interactions, and how you react to stimulation. This leads to similar behaviour as someone with ASD, but for different reasons.

Lol

Not the op, but I think I get what they’re getting at. I have been scrolling lemmy a lot this last week and everytime I see something about the climate catastrophe, unions being fucked over, terrible politicians etc I up vote it. These are all important things, and by up voting I feel like I’m čsupporting the cause" and “raising awareness”.

But I do wonder if it’s actually very helpful, for whatever cause, for me, or for lemmy. It makes scrolling lemmy stressful and depressing, which is accurate for how the world is, but it doesn’t really make things better. I feel like I’d rather be reading something interesting or informative that might make the world a better place, whether it’s by actually making real chnage, or just me learning something meaningful.

“Starbucks fucks it’s employees!” “Trump lies about soemthing!” “the world is on fire!” are always going to drive engagement because these things upset us and we want to do a small act to make ourselves feel less powerless. But I’m not sure they’re really doing more than preaching to the choir, and leaving said choir frazzled and distracted.

It’s broken if I open it in lemmy (Connect) but if I open in External it works fine. Not sure why!

For me it was very obvious on day 1, both on Xaggatin (an offbrand concerta copy) and ritalin prolonged release. There was just a feeling of a bit more energy, clarity and drive - it was kinda how I felt on a really good day premeds, if I had a day where I was cheerful and excited about something, then the adhd symptoms weren’t as bad as usual. On my meds, that’s basically everyday now.

But I was on concerta for a while in between the other two, and found that they did very little for me. Even though Xaggatin and concerta are meant to be the same, and I was on the same dose, the concerta didn’t really work for me at all (despite being more expensive!).

Not sure it’ll work for you, but I managed to keep going with some habits (after they stop being motivating themselves) by being excited about what I could do after, “as soon as I’m done with my shower I can lie in bed and watch a YouTube while I get dry” or “after I finish my lunch I can have some cake”. It seems to trick me into dopamine anticipation, and it’s easier to switch around what the motivating fun activity is than try to find ways of making chores exciting in themselves.