Some people with ADHD thrive in periods of stress, new study shows

This is not especially surprising. It's not that I can't focus. I can, for hours and hours and hours on end. The difficulty is directing that focus productively. High stress environments provide the necessary motivation, forcing my focus onto the thing demanding that attention more strongly than the usual cacophony of distractions. But high stress also leads to burnout; I can't sustain that for months on end, so I have to cope in other ways most of the time. (Typically by altering my environment to reduce distractions.)

I wouldn't say that I thrive, more that when the flight-or-fight instinct kicks in, I become extremely productive.

Prior to getting diagnosed and medicated, my life was pretty much long periods of nothing, with small bursts where I did everything.

Take college, for example. I was completely unable to partition a project into daily tasks. I'd get borderline anxiety from looking at the problem set, and then get distracted. It was only when the deadline started to get close, that my fight-or-flight instinct would set in. Then I'd sit up 1-2-3 days straight and work on the problem - not 100%, but small bursts of 100% focus and attention, before eventually getting distracted. I'd oscillate between those states.

To outsiders it will look completely ridiculous. You could literally be dealing with life-altering decisions, with the clock ticking down, and then you suddenly start looking at cute cat vids. Before shifting back and grinding away at the problem, but even more stressed.

Luckily medication has worked wonders for me. I'm able to just start on the tasks, and work consistently on them. Work and life now feels like a marathon, rather than a bunch of impossible sprints.

I don’t know if I have ADHD (though I recently had some tests done and am waiting on results), but I found this relatable. If I’m interested in something I will hyper focus on it all day. If I’m not, and there is no deadline, I’ll find it impossible to get started. As a deadline approaches (a real one, not something made up), a point is reached where I think I can get it done if I literally do nothing else, and then I can focus and get it done.

Deadlines that our made up, I know are made up, have no consequences, and the where the whole project seems pointless, do not work the same way. Those are still ignored in spite of the stress and external person might try to apply.

My old boss saw this pattern and if he gave me a project I didn’t instantly latch onto and turn around, he’d give it to someone else and I’d get something I was actually interested in and spent most of my days working long hours because I’d be hyper focused on whatever project I was working on and put in 12+ hour days every day.

It's weird when this is described as surprising. I mean I'm glad that precise research is being done. But this topic has memes about it. We know. It's on the wiki https://romankogan.net/adhd/

This is obvious - stress is motivating.

Give me a deadline in six months and I'll procrastinate for at least five of them, feeling terrible about it throughout. Give me an impossible deadline tomorrow and I become a productivity machine, with no time for anxious overthinking.

> Sibley thought that ADHD patients would experience > the most relief during periods of low stress. What > she found was more counterintuitive.

Did this researcher not talk to anyone with ADHD before starting this project?

Seeing hyperfocus described as a superpower makes me want to flip a table over.

I was today years old when I learned I have ADHD.

Honestly, I knew this before I knew I had ADHD.

I was in a situation that at least felt “life or death” when I was ~15. In retrospect, it wasn’t that big of an issue, but for me at the time it was an absolute emergency. When the situation became apparent to me, it was like flipping a switch: my mind went completely silent, time seemed to slow, and my emotions kinda faded into the background. I knew they were there, but rather than experience them I only saw how I felt about things as data to make a decision.

Since then I’ve been in a handful of situations that made me feel that way. One of those was a potential car accident where I was able to analyze and react to a dangerous situation in time to pull off a crazy maneuver where I drove up on an (empty) sidewalk at ~40MPH and get back on the pavement before hitting a culvert, with about 12” to spare.

In everyday life, the sooner the deadline, the more work I have left to do, and the larger the consequences of not getting it done in time - the less I have to struggle with focus/attention.

Well, duh. And it works, until it doesn't.

Isn't this just another way of saying their environment wasn't boring though?