#adhd symptoms

my earphone fell off my desk and i cannot find it for the life of me. but the thing is my carpet is red. and so is my earphone. i’m never gonna find it am i

of course i found my favourite black shirt that has been missing for 2 months under my desk just camouflaging into the background. i looked everywhere for that stupid thing. and it was right there.

me being awake at 2am: wow it’s such a good time to be productive!! i feel so motivated!! girl that is the adhd talking. go to bed

something funny about running a blog about symptoms of adhd is seeing people in the tags go ‘THAT WAS AN ADHD THING?’ and ‘people with adhd need to stop being so relatable or i need to see a doctor’ every. day. and i know the more they read into it they just spiral deeper and deeper and realise. what the fuck. why didn’t i know i’ve apparently had this condition that literally affects my whole life. and that’s exactly what happened to me.

don’t look don’t look don’t look!!!!

maybeitsfriendly:

adhdpie:

adhdpie:

(the majority of this post is pulled from an older reblog I did on my main, @vantasticmess.)

it’s ADHD Awareness Month so here’s a post about it. :D

I’ve gotten sooo many ‘#not adhd but man i feel this’ tags on adhd posts i’ve made, and tbh tags of this type drive me nuts (b/c they make me doubt the validity of my diagnosis.)

but if you, a not-adhd person, see a post about adhd experiences and relate to it, please consider the following: 

• maybe you do have adhd?
  
• maybe it’s because most things that adhd people experience are things that most everyone experiences sometimes, only they experience it all the time.

at its heart, adhd is theinability to pick what your attention is locked onto, sometimes combined with a need to move constantly (hyperactivity).  This manifests as:

• lively internal life + rapid thought & intuitive leaps of cognition - good when being creative, bad when trying to make a logical decision
  
• overthinking things
• impulsive behavior
• short attention span + being easily distracted
• unnaturally long attention span + inability to notice outside stimuli
• short term memory dysfunction
• executive dysfunction
• no sense of priority (everything is equally important)
• no sense of time in relation to self (cannot effectively tell how long an activity will take or develop a sense of urgency based on a deadline until the deadline is perilously close or already passed)
• failure to follow through (leaving work incomplete)
• forgetting to remember/remembering tasks at inappropriate times
• intrusive thoughts

And pretty much everyone experiences one or all of these things at times, and these symptoms can spring from other causes than ADHD (for instance, executive dysfunction accompanies depression and anxiety as well).

But adhd people have this happen so constantlyandso intrusively that we cannot complete basic tasks, even if we want to:

• The only thing consistent about us is inconsistent results: sometimes we’re on time, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re reliable, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re studious, sometimes we’re not … (and trust me we’re not enjoying it any more than you are)
• We fail classes, we drop out of college, we lose jobs, and no matter how much we try, we cannot fix it.
• We can’t just remove distractions - our brains are a distraction.
• We can’t just ‘try harder’ - our wayward mind might be focusing on our studying today, but tomorrow it might not. The same effort level will have wildly different results on different days because our attention cooperated … or didn’t.
  
• it is literally impossible for us to choose our focus. pretty much ever.

it pisses off our friends, it pisses off our bosses, it pisses off our family, and it even pisses off ourselves. it affects every part of our life.

So adhd shitposts can be pretty relateable, even if you don’t have adhd.  But if this list sounds familiar - if the contents of it happen to you to the point that you’re getting in trouble at school or your job and you’re pissing off your friends? might be worth looking into what’s going on with you.

bringing this back b/c at least 1 of every 15 rbs of the 7 ADHD Moods post is tagged ‘#i don’t have adhd but’.

Can I add that you don’t have to be failing classes or other things in order to have ADHD? I’d rather not conflate those two things. You can succeed and still have ADHD. In fact, people can fail to receive a proper diagnosis for ADHD because they’re doing just fine in school. It’s an unfortunately common side effect, but notarequirement.

(#ok yes#but pls stop equating failing classes to adhd#so many people dont get diagnosed#bc they do well in school#i had to fight for a diagnosis bc my psychiatrist#saw me having ok grades a d being in college#as a sign i must not have adhd#regardless of my constant inattention#constant forgetting#like i am definition of attention defecit#but bc i learned to live with it and do well in classes#oh no you cant have adhd#it prevented me from getting medicated for years bro#so yeah#stop that shit pls (via@thefloralpeach​ ))

hi yes! both these people are very right: 

you can have ADHD (or ADD, aka ADHD-PI) and still get good grades/do well, overall, in school!

If ADHD ppl find school/your subjects interesting, your coursework/homework keeps your brain engaged, and you have sufficient coping skills* &/or a decent support system to bridge the gaps where your brain disengages, you can be a star student despite having ADHD.

(*’sufficient coping skills’ might simply be ‘spend 5 times as many hours studying as everyone else & do every major research paper in the 24 hours before it’s due’. these aren’t GOOD coping methods, but if you get a decent grade nobody will care how you did it.)

this was me, in fact, through all of elementary/middle school. I was top of my class, and earned a seat at a special sci-tech high school because of it! (College was where I utterly fell apart.)

now that said:

the reason I described ADHD/ADD ppl as ‘failing classes & losing jobs’ is because all too often, ADHD does cause people to lose a job or fail a class … even if it’s not a constant, repetitive thing. 

In fact, all too often those failures seem to be totally at random. there was no apparent reason for your sudden drop in performance, so what happened?

ADHD happened. (the only thing consistent about us is inconsistency.)

Or to be more specific: the amount of invisible-to-others work that goes into maintaining our usually high level of performance is so great that when we stop that work, our performance utterly crashes. & if the setting is unforgiving enough or the timing bad enough, we suffer severe consequences.

not every ADHD person suffers those consequences at work or at school! and not everyone’s consequences are as severe as failing a whole class, dropping out of college, or losing jobs.but:

all ADHD people are doing a lot of invisible work to keep meeting expectations, and we all fail at that work from time to time.

k-dhd:

crystaltoa:

k-dhd:

Even saying ”I’m so sorry, I completely forgot” sounds marginally better than ” I’m so sorry, I didn’t completely forget, I actually completely remembered. I thought about it the whole time and it stressed me out so much my brain built an insurmountable wall around it.”

k-dhd: