Men with ADHD, what is it like?

18 comments

1. It depends on medication. 😁 I am not medicated and it’s more of an “ok look, squirrel” kind of life. I’m all over the place in a healthy way, but I also have an active brain so more assurance from my partner goes a long way.

   People I know that are medicated have more up and down mood swings. They can be super happy and easy half the day and crash and negative or cranky the rest.

2. Imagine every thought you’ve ever had ever in your life about anything going through your brain at all times.

   To put it another way – if I ask you “how many steps is it to do laundry?”, how would you respond?

   Most neurotypical people would say three or four – wash the clothes, dry the clothes, fold and put away the clothes. For someone with ADHD, it’s more like 50, because each step is something we need to think about and actively do (stand up from the couch, walk to the closet, open the closet door, get the clothes basket, dump the clothes from the hamper into the basket, walk to the laundry room, put the clothes in, put the soap in, pick the right settings, hit the button, remember to come back when they’re done, plus dozens of sub-tasks inside that). Every one of those steps is a chance to get distracted and the whole thing to go sideways. It’s exhausting, especially because most ADHD people don’t know / are jealous of just how quiet it is inside a neurotypical person’s head.

3. For what it’s worth, I’ve not been diagnosed by a doctor (getting a doctors appointment is a nightmare and I don’t want medication for it so I don’t really need to see one anyway) but I’ve spoken to a few mental health/psychiatry experts who say I have it and I do line up with almost all the symptoms so, yeah idk.

   Personally, I’m either completely dissociated from whatever is happening or I am totally fixated on it, there is no “quite interested” in anything. At work, I’m either trying to do 15 things at once and getting nothing done (just drifting around doing a little bit of everything in a loop but never finishing anything) or I am doing one thing using 100% of my brain and nothing else matters. Like, a fire could break out next to me and I’d not notice because I’m so engrossed in it. My attention span is 0 or 100. I can easily spend 3 or 4 hours reading about completely fucking random topics because I can’t stop.

   It’s not that I cannot pay attention to anything, it’s that I often don’t even when I try to. When people speak to me, a lot of the time I just stop listening and start thinking about something else and then realise when they stop that I wasn’t listening.

   I have a tendency to just forget what I’m doing while I’m doing it or if I leave a room, when I come back, I’ll have no idea what I was doing before I left. I don’t have it bad enough to where it’s ruining my life, I just struggle with focusing, it’s either all or nothing.

   I don’t feel like I need someones help but if someone was trying to help me, just making sure I’m paying attention and not just looking like I am. Letting me know what I was doing when I forget and leave halfway through or keeping me engaged with things that I’m not interested in but also telling me to relax and not get so invested in certain things. Or maybe if you’re giving me instructions, say them slowly and deliberately and make sure I understood, chances are if I say “Yeah okay” that I wasn’t listening.

4. Basically whenever I stop looking at something I forget about it, so lots of wandering the apartment trying to find things that I put down in a random spot.

   When I can actually focus on something it’s really hard to get me to move onto something else. I can do it for hours without realizing I should have taken a break or moved onto something else.

5. Basically, imagine most people’s brains are automatic transmissions, while your brain is a standard. And you have to make a conscious effort to shift gears every single time to do the same thing other cars do automatically. And if you decide to take it easy for a day, you will stall out and everyone will look at you wondering what is wrong with you.

   I’m the mostly the inattentive type so this might not ring true for everybody.

6. I was asked if i took drugs by teachers a lot, i never did

7. It can be different from person to person. If he has Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), then that might be a big thing to navigate, when he feels hurt over things that may seem minor to neurotypicals, but you’d need to ask how his Adhd effects him.
   Please don’t view him as just having a “learning difficulty,” its just that he’ll process things differently

8. I’m not diagnosed, but I’m pretty sure I am, or at least share enough of the symptoms.

   it’s kinda like just noise in my brain at inconvenient times, for extended periods, and on the rare occasion that’s not going on its less than complete silence, sort of like the absolute absence of thought, like no matter how hard I might concentrate it’s swallowed by nothingness and I can just sit there looking at nothing in particular for hours on end, thinking and feeling nothing.

   but yeah most of the time it’s like “remember that time you breathed in the second grade” and “I wonder what precise measurement of thickness each strand of hair on that dog I saw yesterday is” and “man I should learn the entire process and function of a combustion engine with complete schematics at 3am” and “that bird I looked at 4 days ago definitely hates me”.

   all at once, for hours on end, just constant noise, upon noise upon noise.

   it’s 12:33 and I have the lyrics for Spandau ballets “gold” playing in my head, but not the whole song, just “gold, always believe in your soul, you got the power to know, your indestructible, always believe iiiiin” on repeat, just over and over.

   then there’s hyperfixation on random hobby collecting.

   gaming helps, but if I get carried away I could spend upwards of 10 hrs without moving, forgetting to drink and eat and only moving to use the bathroom if I’m about to defecate myself.

   then there was the time I really got into taking things apart to see if I could put them back together, nothing too major at first, just my PC and some furniture, but I ended up fully dismantling a broken whipper snipper and putting it back together and i got it to work (I watch hundreds of YouTube tutorial videos on it and knew nothing about them at the time).

   then I picked up editing, guess what I like to edit, videos about the games I play, and that can be just as hazardous as gaming in time consumption.

   thing is, during the hyperfixation I’m not fully entertained or super fullfilled it’s just like this compulsion to do this thing, and sometimes out of nowhere I just, can’t do it anymore, like mid activity I must stop, and never partake in that hobby ever again.

   constant distractions, difficulty conversing and socialising, to easily excited by stuff and my plans fall apart cause I’m just healing more and more things into those plans cause I’m excited for my original plan.

   but yeah, that’s my experience at least, and from what I’ve read it ticks the diagnostic boxes, but I won’t claim anything is definite till I work up the energy and balls to see a doctor.

9. “With ADHD, you brain is like a browser with 20 tabs open, 3 are frozen, and you can’t figure out which one the music is coming from.” That’s the best description I’ve ever heard for it.

   The best way you can help is to be patient and understanding. If it seems like he’s not listening to you, it doesn’t mean he’s actively ignoring you. Give him a minute to switch gears. If he didn’t do that thing you asked, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. He either A. completely forgot or B. the mental to do list is so daunting that he couldn’t do any of it. ADHD isn’t an excuse to be a shitty partner, but it may need working out strengths and weaknesses for what is expected in the relationship. For my marriage, it’s ok if I forget to give gifts for a holiday, but I show my love with gifts and dates without a special occasion. I have set regular tasks for housework, but she takes care of the random one off things that we know id forget.

   One thing about ADHD in relationships that’s also often overlooked is the effect on sex life. This may or may not be a thing for him, but a lot of people with ADHD have trouble with spontaneous sex. It’s hard to get in the mood when your brain is caught on some video you watched on YouTube 10 years ago about how magnets work. Sometimes sex needs to be “scheduled”. It might sound un-sexy, but it doesn’t have to be.

10. it sucks. ADHD is not a super power, she it has quirks that are fun but it’s like an artist who creates brilliance and becomes super successful from their depression or whatever but then ends their own life. E.g. Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams, dozens of muscians.

11. I just want to say that I really respect what you are trying to do. I wish I can meet someone like you. Maybe ask in the ADHD subreddit as well.

12. It’s like having a tv on but not watching it. You hear everything but you don’t at the same time.

13. Hello! I have inattentive ADHD that I only got diagnosed last year. I’m now properly medicated, but figuring out it was ADHD was like… a lightbulb going off.

    So I’ll be more specific below, but you know how if you don’t want to do something, you can just put it off and feel relatively okay about it? Now, imagine being perfectly capable of doing it. You know you can do it. It needs to be done. But you can’t actually motivate yourself to get up off the couch and do it, and you feel like a pathetic waste of space for it. Everyone else can do it no problem, so you must just be lazy or incompetent. In my experience with myself and others with ADHD, a person with ADHD is **VERY** aware of what things need to be done but even something as simple as making a phone call can seem like an anxiety-inducing nightmare because it feels like our inputs are getting ignored, and nobody else can see it. Like we’re button-mashing on a controller but the character just lays there.

    My experience is that I basically just thought I was a bad, incomplete, worthless person. I pick up things relatively quickly, so early on I was considered one of those “gifted” kids. And naturally, once school got tough enough, being gifted stopped being enough. I remember sitting in my room quietly and hating myself because I couldn’t get myself to do my schoolwork, and my parents would scream at me for being lazy and not caring enough. This ended up not being the case, obviously, but that hasn’t made things any easier to deal with, and naturally I still have poor reactions to being told I just don’t care.

    In modern life my ADHD is kiiiind of better managed, especially with medication, but it feels like I’m still not quite in control, I can just aim myself better. Hyperfixations are still a thing I deal with, and honestly might even be worse with medication, but at least I can actually consistently do the things that interest me. Otherwise, I often lose track of time, and if I’m in a conversation I’m not all that engaged with I often lose the thread mid-sentence. I still feel like I can’t really form habits; I can do something consistent for a couple of months and then just *stop* one day without meaning to, and that’s it, habit broken. I have to actively remind myself to brush my teeth and clean up stuff, I don’t automatically think about it. People like to tell me “well, why don’t you just make a list about what you need to do?” And that’d be great if it wasn’t another thing I have to worry about every single day, it just adds pressure and I already have anxiety just living normally.

    Despite all of the above, if things need to be done *right this moment* I can get my shit together and do it. But unfortunately, that’s about the only time I can do it reliably.

    So, uh… I guess my advice is to just be patient and understanding. Not everyone experiences things the same, there’s also a lot of people with ADHD who are super sensitive to percieved rejection (to the point there’s a term for it, how exciting: [Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria](https://www.additudemag.com/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-and-adhd/)), but for the most part it’s just difficulty doing things we know need to be done, being unable to choose the thing we’re excited about at that moment, and losing interest in the things that made us happy a few days before.

14. Someone asked a while back what daily life is like with it and this was my answer.

    I was diagnosed by first grade. I learned some coping mechanisms and by my 9th grade thought I “‘grew out of it.”
    Over the past few years (mid to late 30s) I’ve come to see how I’m still being impacted. I tried to go off caffeine and got through the headaches and then lost all ability to focus, I forget about things I was excited about if I don’t keep them out in the open, the endless scroll of apps is terrible for my productivity, working on a project and completely losing time and forgetting to eat or realizing it’s well past time to leave work, if friends or family don’t reach out to me I can go months or years without taking to them and never realize it, I’ve recognized time paralysis in my work schedule and am still figuring out how to deal with that. The list goes on from there. My wife knows that if it’s not on my calendar I don’t know about it and helps me keep track of things with lists. We both have issues with cleaning as motivation to start the process is really hard.

    If you want specifics on anything feel free to ask.

15. Sounds like a shitty time for you. Welcome to life and having regrets.

16. First of all, it is really exhausting, like extremely. During a weekend, especially if I’m not feeling well and I don’t have anything important to do, I can sleep for like 75% of the time just because I’m tired. Being literally just awake exhausts me, the mental pressure can be incredible.

    My mind is constantly racing and sometimes it’s just impossible to focus on one thing/task. If this comes to a thought, I just repeat one sentence all over and over, but can’t finish it, can’t think of the thought.

    Remembering things can be difficult as well.

    One of the most important things is that you probably have to comfort your partner about everything and do it often, so they don’t overthink stuff.

17. Here are my three biggest problems:

    1) Context switching – If I am deep into something, like a book or programming or fixing something, and my wife tries to talk to me, it takes quite a few seconds for me to drag my conscious mind from one world to the next. My wife has the patience of a saint.

    2) Thinking vs doing – This is very difficult to explain, and for people without ADHD it looks exactly like being lazy, but for people with it, it is a terribly frustrating thing to live with. There are things I should do, must do, *desperately want* to do, but somehow, I just…*don’t* do them. There’s a mental paralysis, a chasm between thinking and acting that can only be crossed in certain situations. If there’s something my wife needs to do, she does it. For her, it’s simple. I envy that ability.

    3) Distraction – Let’s say I am getting ready to go out. I will be thinking “keys, wallet, phone, keys, wallet, phone…” And then I see a butterfly and I start wondering whether they retain memories of their caterpillar stage and how thin their proboscis is in relation to my hair and what it would be like to see the world as they do and other such fragmentary thoughts. And then I’m in the restaurant and I don’t have my keys or my wallet or my phone.

    Actually, I am exaggerating for effect. It’s not that bad really. But that is the kind of thing that happens all the time. I get upset when I forget things or can’t finish projects because I’m tired of my brain betraying me. While I like being me, I just wish I had more control over my own brain.

18. I mean I will walk into a room and not know why I was there and if I put something down I will forget about it pretty easily. Focus on non immediate tasks is hard. I have the inattentive type and I choose to be unmedicated since it’s not that bad and medication ruins my sense of humor. All you really need to do is just remember that if you ask for something and he forgets it’s not that he doesn’t care or is trying to spite you. He literally just forgets shit more than the average person and if you remind him he will go do the thing. Just extra patience really