I didn't see a thread for this, so if this is a duplicate, please let me know!
Writing this instead of doing the other important task I need done before tomorrow. Currently, I'm recently diagnosed with ADHD (and a few other psych diagnoses) at 40+ and as of yet, unmedicated, but that'll change pretty soon. An entire lifetime of issues that are grains of sand that piled into a weight that has probably burdened swaths of my lifetime that I'm still uncovering. Trying to treat it all as water under the bridge and maintain a positive outlook on what I can do with the rest of my life. Trying not to regret or resent a society that struggled, and still continued to struggle, to diagnose women, girls, and AFAB people with ADHD.
The relationship between ADHD and gaming has been long known, if often misunderstood. TL:DR gaming does not cause or exacerbate ADHD as far as we know; it's seems to kind of be the other way around in that people with ADHD are drawn to the dopamine hit of action and reward within a structured framework of rules and standards that games often provide.
Now that more is being learned and understood about ADHD, there are more later-in-life diagnoses like mine. I know there are folks here who had theirs early in life and others out there, like me, in this community. I wanted to have a thread where folks could share their experiences and how their own ADHD has informed or impacted their gaming and other parts of their lives.
I just want to know what has your experience been like as an adult! How has it been for those of you who had early diagnoses, and what has your journey been like? How many of you had concerns about ADHD in your children to find out you might have it, too? How many of you spiraled through life until you were tired of being full grown but not able to 'get it together?' How many of you spent way too long thinking "yeah, but that's not me," because we grew up with generations who stigmatized mental health?
If you're comfortable, please share your stories. I would love to hear it.
Sometimes it feels like an addiction to dopamine, and I can't get enough.
How many of you had concerns about ADHD in your children to find out you might have it, too? How many of you spiraled through life until you were tired of being full grown but not able to 'get it together?' How many of you spent way too long thinking "yeah, but that's not me," because we grew up with generations who stigmatized mental health?
If you're comfortable, please share your stories. I would love to hear it.
Hello! It's me! I'm one of those adults. I'm actually scheduled to get my first round of testing for ADHD mid-April. I was a bit concerned that I may have had it exactly because my son was diagnosed with it and he was basically me when I was his age at the time. Couple that with doing research into ADHD and again reading about signs of it matching up with a lot of my behaviors (problem focusing/prioritizing, easily frustrated, mood swings, etc) and I started to think that it may be possible, but still never made the jump to get officially tested. Mostly because of the stigmatization.
However, it wasn't until the pandemic where issues that were manageable before started becoming more and more of a problem. So, around sometime last year I finally put myself on a waitlist to get tested. We'll see what happens from here, but I'm glad that I'm finally start taking steps to improving my mental health.
The relationship between ADHD and gaming has been long known, if often misunderstood. TL:DR gaming does not cause or exacerbate ADHD as far as we know; it's seems to kind of be the other way around in that people with ADHD are drawn to the dopamine hit of action and reward within a structured framework of rules and standards that games often provide.
This is absolutely me when it comes to gaming, although I tend to have that action/reward coming from multiple games at once based on the type of action in the game. Some days discovering a new clue in a time loop game like Outer Wilds or The Forgotten City is what I'm going for, other days fighting 1000s of people in a Musuo game is all my brain needs. It's rare for me to really lock into one game for too long because for me the feedback loop starts to lose it's reward after awhile.
How many of you spiraled through life until you were tired of being full grown but not able to 'get it together?' How many of you spent way too long thinking "yeah, but that's not me," because we grew up with generations who stigmatized mental health?
I was diagnosed a year ago, at age 39. I had always chugged along, but at a certain point a toxic work environment + the lockdown brought me to a breaking point. More specifically, the text on my screen started to swim, I became unable to process any information. I had read about 1/3rd of Driven To Distraction before I saw a doctor, and didn't think ADD was a good fit. But I just have the non-jittery version of ADD.
The diagnosis allowed me to view and reassess a lot through a new lens. I realized how many coping mechanisms I had developed over the years: a myriad of tools to help me remember stuff mostly. In college, I studied in complete silence and sometimes darkness, and when I inevitably got distracted anyway I would steer my daydreaming towards something productive. Like a fantasy exam with the teacher on the topic at hand.
I have also become more accepting and forgiving of my flaws. When my wife asks whether I really need to write something down, I calmly answer that it beats forgetting the task instead of doubting myself and reacting agitated. The next step would be to actually feel proud of being a somewhat decent and productive person, but maybe it doesn't work that way? I am way more confident now, and I do believe the diagnosis and subsequent self-awareness has been a big part of that process. Realizing that I'm not simply undisciplined and forgetful was a huge step for me, and in the end we all try to get the most out of the cards we were dealt.
All in all, I feel like the different perspective and skills I gained became my strength, especially in the workplace. I'm known (for example) for my kick-ass meeting notes, a skill I honed partially because I needed the ability to quickly parse info in order to "survive". It's more complicated than that of course, ADD is a part of who I am but it's all interconnected (maaaaan).
I remember a story Certis once told, about the first GWJ get-together you participated in. How you made name tags for everyone, made sure that newbies felt welcome, connecting people in general. I think, and apologies if I'm overstepping boundaries here (or stretching mah metaphors), that's an example of how you turned your set of cards into a royal flush.
How many of you had concerns about ADHD in your children to find out you might have it, too?
Concern is not the right word, but I did ask my psychologist for advice. She gave me some telltale signs to look out for, but we mostly see this as useful information on how to be better parents - broaden our toolset to better our chances of our daughters becoming happy, fulfilled women.
The relationship between ADHD and gaming has been long known, if often misunderstood.
I've always known I was drawn to games because it's a more active medium, but hadn't made that connection specifically. I do tend to jump from one game to another, usually after I understand the gameplay loop. If I'm not into the story/characters by that point, I'm out. A few times a year, I'll then find a game that keeps me engaged for months. Right now it's Hades
tl;dr: my diagnosis at 39 hasn't changed my life, but it did put a lot into a new perspective - which helped me grow as a person. I hope (expect) the same will happen for you!
(if you ever want to chat, feel free to hit me up.)
More to come from me as I fit the bill and am currently in the phase of "yeah I'll schedule a test" but have not committed to it yet.
The irony is I am a very disorganized and non planned person. My job, project management...And I do it well! Folks I know are dumbfounded if I let them know I am not this person in life vs what I do for a job. I think I can chase the dragon with work and keeping tasks afloat. In life however, I have to have so many mechanisms to complete daily life and my wife is sure sick of my dumbass excuses for when I botch stuff.
I am sure this could be why I cannot really enjoy games or books 2nd or 3rd time around as an adult. Movies can be different if they are my favorites but games I gotta play something new or a new challenge or else I get real bored. Books take 50 to 100 pages to hook me. Not sure why but it's pretty standard or else I can't keep focus on them.
I think I feel my tools are not appreciated because my father always didn't like the extra distractions I needed to focus on what was needed for studies. Looking back with a different lens it all makes sense. The moment something is out of my view it's out of my mind. A fight often had with day to day tasks or not seeing the sock on the floor I walked over 30 times before it's called out.
I've got the thread in my favorites and would love to add to it, but lord knows when I'll have both the time and spare attention span to compose anything of substance...
CptDomano wrote:It wasn't until the pandemic where issues that were manageable before started becoming more and more of a problem. So, around sometime last year I finally put myself on a waitlist to get tested. We'll see what happens from here, but I'm glad that I'm finally start taking steps to improving my mental health.
VERY much this. I didn't realize how much walking/taking transit to work (exercise) helped calm my brain, the leaving of the house to change my mindset, and the regular work schedule and interacting with people daily maintained my tools and skills for navigating how my brain works. Isolation and work from home did a number on many of us and I was no exception.
So I was lucky to start working from home at the beginning of 2017, be home with my young daughters, be around, help more, all the good things of working from home with a family.
I did very much miss the school like social work atmosphere, hanging over cubes to catch up, my time before and after work to myself even though in traffic. Very much felt all the things I enjoyed being in an office for 15 years. I still don't work with almost anyone local so an office would be me on a phone all day so thank goodness I still work at home and the perks of being at home are great but I am much more isolated. I really miss and need to start working on adding local friends again.
About four years ago, I started seeing a therapist again, because my depression had a major flare up. One of the things that was really frustrating me was that I was completely unable to focus on things. I gave up on reading because I'd get distracted every few sentences by something or other, so it took me forever and nothing stuck. At work, I couldn't get anything done because I just couldn't make myself do it, to the point where I was terrified someone would notice I barely did any real work.
After a few months, I had a weird convergence of events. First, my therapist asked if I'd ever been told that I might be ADHD, which of course I hadn't, that was just kids. The next day, I was doing my usual reading that day's articles on Cracked, this article came up next, and pretty much saw myself being described perfectly. I started thinking about it and talking with the therapist about it, and viewed through that lens, A LOT of things I'd always done, like procrastinating and doing things at the last minute, since I was little started to make a ton of sense.
A little after that, I started taking medication for both the depression and the ADHD, and it's definitely helped. It's not a magic bullet, and over the years we've tinkered with the medication, dosage, and timing. When it's working, it's not that I don't get distracted, it's that I'm more able to notice, and go "not today, Satan!" and get back in focus.
Since the "diagnosis"*, I've been able to find ways to work in the limitations of how my brain is wired. I've now accepted that I absolutely do need to write down anything I need to remember, because I just won't otherwise. That's had a side effect of I tend to take fairly comprehensive meeting notes, which is helpful for people attending the meetings, and also helps me at the next meeting because I've inevitably forgotten what we talked about a week or two ago. I've also accepted that I work way better with to do lists, though I'm still trying to find a way to get me to reliably look at those lists and do them every day. I think my next solution involves a tiny monitor.
For gaming, I've had to accept that the way my brain works means I'm just not compatible with certain games, no matter how much I want to play them. The Souls games are pretty much the best example. I really like the settings, and super want to explore them and see all the cool monster designs. Here's why I can't:
- I can't remember where I'm going without a map. I can eventually navigate by landmarks, but it takes a LOT of repetition for me to remember, and it takes longer if there's not a lot of visual variety or some kind of overview that I can latch onto. The Souls games usually have areas that are a bunch of gray and brown, no map, and not a lot of places to get a bird's eye view on areas, so I spend a lot of time getting lost and frustrated that I can't remember how to get back someplace.
- I can't remember what I'm doing between play sessions. That's both for immediate quest stuff and for basic "wait, who's this and what happened with them before?" Obviously, the Souls games don't give you quest logs or anything, so if Creepy Dude 1 gives a vague hint about losing a red bauble, and then five hours later, I find a red bauble, there's no way I remember to go give it back to him. It also means that the whole "it's fair because you eventually learn where all the enemies are, and you can wreck them" doesn't happen for me either. It's not just the Souls games either. One of my saddest gaming experiences was finishing Witcher 3. I put a ton of hours into that game, but spread out over probably six months. By the time I got to the end and all the threads were being tied up, they basically had no impact on me, because I couldn't remember what had happened earlier. Then I'd read the forum thread with everyone talking about the decisions they'd made and how it'd played out in their ending, and I could barely remember even getting to all those decision points, let alone remember what I'd done. It was kind of like the entire experience of playing the game, which I'd enjoyed, was just wiped from my memory.
- I can't recognize and remember patterns. All those totally fair Souls enemies where you just have to learn what they do and react? Yeah, I can't. It gets worse the longer it is between seeing a particular attack. All those bosses where you spend a minute or three on the YOU DIED screen and then doing a boring run back to the fight? My brain spends that whole time purging what I'm supposed to be remembering. It makes hard fights even more frustrating.
I've also had to recognize that when my brain actually does get stuck into something, I can hyper focus on it HARD. That can mean that if my wife says it's okay for me to go work in the shop for a while, I need to explicitly ask her when she wants me to stop. If I don't ask, and I get into hyper focus mode, I can easily keep going for hours. Great for getting things done, bad for maintaining family harmony or an eating schedule. The annoying thing is that I haven't figured out how to harness this for good. My brain especially likes to latch onto unrelated stuff if it doesn't want to focus on the boring thing I'm telling it to focus on. I can lose an entire day at work because I say "I wonder if there's a better way to organize my desk", and my brain goes "Indeed! Let's research all the different monitor mounts and peripheral connection an organization options, and maybe you could design and build or print some things too!"
Speaking of hyper focus, I just wrote a lot of words instead of working, so I should go do that. Ironically, I wrote so many that I suspect some of my other ADHD compatriots won't have made it this far.
*I haven't been officially diagnosed because both my therapist and prescribing doc feel confident enough that they don't think it's worth the expense to get the tests for an official diagnosis.
I've also had to recognize that when my brain actually does get stuck into something, I can hyper focus on it HARD.
That's something I've been dealing with myself. One of the big things I like about Magic: the Gathering is it's something that I can focus on. But this past year (my baby turned 1 today!) I have had to seriously dial it back. When I'm focused on the game I'm not at all aware of what my daughter is doing. That's not a good idea when my wife is at work. So I usually don't do much with MtG Arena except refresh my quests and check for free currency in the daily deals. My wife is also ADHD, but she has a different mix of symptoms. She can happily play half games and miss turns while she steps away to deal with the child. Or something she's remembered in the kitchen. So she's spending a bit more than she used to but has more or less kept playing.
Oh yeah, if you want a cute ADHD gamer anecdote, I'll tell y'all about the first year we were dating. I had just finished my masters and she had one more semester to finish her engineering degree. That was right when Skyrim came out. So she told me "I need your help to get through this semester. I need you to sit in my basement and play my Xbox so I don't." I reckoned I could afford to make that sacrifice. That's how I put my first ~100 hours into Elder Scrolls. And got all the Riddler Trophies in Arkham City...
I spoke with my new psychiatrist the other day, and we got to the issue of ADHD, and he was like "one issue at a time.."
... yes, because all of our various mental issues take turns as if they were fight-scene extras in a kung fu movie...
I'm not a psychiatrist so I won't try to armchair quarterback the man, but damn that's frustrating.
When I saw my prescriber for the first time, her first instinct was to start by prescribing an antidepressant, see how that goes for a couple months, then add on an ADD med after. I pushed back and said that if we were only doing one at a time, the depression is something I could deal with for a while longer, but the complete inability to focus was having a massive impact, so I'd rather try and deal with that first. Especially since the ADD meds don't have the same ramp up period before you really feel effects like the antidepressants do. She wound up prescribing both, and it was fine.
I've kind of started thinking of my ADHD brain as basically having no sense of object permanence. If it's not right in front of me, I forget it almost immediately. Which kind of explains why my desk is always messy and I keep a ton of browser tabs open. If I organize my desk or bookmark and close browser tabs, they effectively vanish from my world, so I keep them scattered around so I don't lose them.
It also kind of explains why I'm completely unable to keep in touch with people that I'm not seeing daily, because in my head, they kind of cease to exist. My low self esteem makes it worse, because whenever I do remember they exist, I spend so long telling myself that I don't have anything to say that they'd be interested in and they wouldn't really care about hearing from me anyway, that my brain eventually forgets they exist again.
I feel like we run very similar Chaz except for Souls games
Dang I really want to get to a doc now and get moving.
Not an adult with ADHD, but when my youngest got diagnosed with ADD and got on medication (vyvanse), her life was a complete change for the better.
I think I could just copy+paste CptDomano's post word by word. I believe I got diagnosed some 20 odd years ago and my family and I conveniently discarded the diagnosis because a) it was easier not to deal with the issue, and b) this was mid 90's and diagnosing people with ADD/ADHD was the 'easy answer'.
I'm guessing ADD has a spectrum? because with most posts I identify to the point I feel I might have written this myself, while others describe symptoms I've never lived through.
In any case, I think I might want to get diagnosed again.
Huge kudos and thanks to Amoebic for creating this space.
It's not so much a spectrum as it's a collection of symptoms that any given individual may or may not have. And that's not counting any coping strategies that in individual might have devised, and any other neurological divergences that might be interacting with the ADHD.
Not an adult with ADHD, but when my youngest got diagnosed with ADD and got on medication (vyvanse), her life was a complete change for the better.
That's what my son takes, it was recommended for me as well.
. If it's not right in front of me, I forget it almost immediately. Which kind of explains why my desk is always messy and I keep a ton of browser tabs open. If I organize my desk or bookmark and close browser tabs, they effectively vanish from my world, so I keep them scattered around so I don't lose them.
It also kind of explains why I'm completely unable to keep in touch with people that I'm not seeing daily, because in my head, they kind of cease to exist.
It’s me!
I love the phrase, “I keep them scattered around so I don’t lose them”. It makes so much sense to me, while seeming to make very little objective sense. Very much highlighting the difference between “they are lost” and “I have lost them”.
…and now I’m back to wondering if I have a thing that is diagnosable/treatable/affectable and if I should find someone to confirm or deny that…
I also had childhood ADD & ADHD, and took Ritalin in the era before it became unpopular because everyone was doing it or whatever. Now, reading this thread, as an almost 43-year-old adult I am wondering if I "outgrew" it or just learned to cope/compensate for it....
I've only ever needed medication* when I was in school. Outside of that I've been fortunate enough to be able to arrange my life so that it's more compatible with the way my brain works. And we just tend to learn more coping mechanisms as we get more experience.
*My morning coffee is necessary when I am not on meds...
I agree Amoebic. I've had OCD/ADHD and the accompanying anxiety all my life. It's easy to see with knowledge of the conditions but given that I'm almost 60 I went through my formative years without any institutional or personal understanding that these conditions existed, so I developed a set of self-care attitudes that somehow navigated me through life without killing myself or others. Still, it was sub-optimal, wrecked relationships and academic and work crises galore, over-achieving in the end to pull out of them. I hurt a bunch of people without understanding why.
I will write about this in some detail later but I wanted to share one thing. I remember in the late 70's a psychology researcher who was constantly criticized by his peers for his messy office. He set up some tests between people who kept everything in its place (file cabinets and such at the time) and those who stacked things in piles around a room. He found that the latter could find requested items in shorter or similar times than those who stored them, BUT that the people who were comfortable filing everything could not adapt to the stacking method easily. He argued that both are "normal" for different types of thinkers. In retrospect... ADHD AF Professor!
I was very lucky to have a psych consult like twice a week for a few months where the doctor diagnosed me as normal and said what I needed to do was to get out of the home and go somewhere else for college (which was my plan anyway). He reasoned I could learn about myself and "recreate" myself without the influence and strictures of the adults in my life, who had very different expectations. And he was largely right. It was still an exhilirating, bewildering, punishing, painful experience, but so was the rest of my 20's and much of my thirties. But at least I learned how to ride the wave and took the tumbles along with the monsters that I successfully rode to the beach.
Even after diagnosis, ADHD Alien has helped me understand so much about myself. (My doc found out I was basically happy so I don't think he felt going into too much detail would be useful, might upset the apple cart I had filled or something.) Practical advice on how to live with ADHD as well as explanations of what it feels like and what symptoms those feelings relate to. If you find these unbearably accurate and emotionally affecting, time to talk to a psychiatrist (those are best for initial diagnoses, then treatment can proceed by agreement in various forms).
I wish all of you the best in your adaptations to your unique and valuable manifestations, and much success taking advantage of them in your life.
BTW, isn't this more "ADHD Experiences Discussion" than "ADHD and Gaming"?
I'll say I took Mixy's comment more that ADD/ADHD was the solution to a group of issues in the 90s and medication was just tossed at it when we really didn't understand it well early on. Just my two cents.
For me I am able to focus amazingly on said thing. However, if something falls out of my circle of influence and my wife and I have discussions about it, man is it out of sight out of mind. She is very organized and procedural. I am absolutely not this and go hard by my life long stacking method. I can usually play well by her everything has a home rule around the rest of the house but my office looks like a bomb went off. Despite my several efforts to organize, add homes, do something different that's just not me. I continue to try as I want to but you can see my brain all over this room as I know the contents of the stacks all too well. Sure I have lost things but overall I can keep a very organized messy as hell room and I hate it!
I need to really have an accountability partner and make sure I write everything down but my systems often get lost or not used after a little bit. Whatever I have is both my superpower and my Achilles heel.
Seeing it all so clearly now my Dad who has his own whole set of issue always tried to hold me to his set of reality rules in school and wondered why I who could do it all wouldn't or didn't follow his exact styles. That's a whole other bag of issues too. However, I really question why if so many symptoms were there they didn't talk to me more about it and get me help. I have learned it was brought to their attention several times and no one ever talked to me until I was later in life. My sister has ADD as an adult and get's treatment, that was when I looked it up and it made so much more sense, I saw myself as I read about the symptoms.
Whatever I have is both my superpower and my Achilles heel.
Exactly!
BTW, isn't this more "ADHD Experiences Discussion" than "ADHD and Gaming"?
When you invite a bunch of ADHD folks to come talk, you're going to get tangents.
The way to bend it back towards ADHD and gaming is to post something about ADHD and gaming. This is the point where I ought to model this behavior, but I have to go make sure my 1 year old doesn't get into the dog kibble again and once I've accomplished that I'll forget...
Something I've struggled with lately is how to handle short windows of "available" time, both at work and outside work. At work, the problem happens when I've got a bunch of meetings, but scheduled so that I've got 30-60 minute gaps between them. I have a hard time convincing myself to spend that gap working on a task, so I wind up just...not, and I wind up wasting half the day.
Outside work, it's lately been trying to grab some time in the shop. I have about a 40 minute gap between getting back from kid drop off and when I log into work. I've been trying to use that to do a little something in the shop, but what I've found is that either I have a hard time stopping and get frustrated about having to log on, or I spend too long out there, log on late, and feel unsettled because I have to make a hard context switch.
Thinking back, I can remember as early as when Final Fantasy came out, I wouldn't play it unless I knew I could play it for at least an hour or two, because less than that "wasn't worth it."
Thinking about it now, this all sounds a lot like manifestations of the hyper focus thing. It can be a good thing sometimes, but it'd be really nice if I could convince my brain to focus, but only a little.
I also had childhood ADD & ADHD, and took Ritalin in the era before it became unpopular because everyone was doing it or whatever. Now, reading this thread, as an almost 43-year-old adult I am wondering if I "outgrew" it or just learned to cope/compensate for it....
I saw no ill intent in the hand-wavy comment. A big part of why I got diagnosed but not treated was the fact that everyone and their dog got diagnosed with ADD/ADHD at the time (late 80s and early 90s for me in Mexico). It became the go-to explanation to everything.
As per gaming and content in general, I think I might have gotten worse with age. I was about to start the 3rd season of Snowpiercer and for the life of me, I have no idea where the story was at. So now I'm looking through YouTube to find a good not too short (> 3 minutes), not too long (< 7 minutes) recap because I don't feel like watching the 2 seasons again. Same thing happened with the Heist. Same thing happened the 3 times I bounced of The Witcher Season 1.
I love gaming, mostly because the rules and reward-systems are easily grasped by my mind. As Amoebic so elegantly puts it "each dopamine hit of action and reward within a structured framework of rules and standards that games often provide." I can play for hours and my brain will enjoy every second of it, my brain high on the dopamine drip to realize how tired I am or how many hours have passed.
And then there's my dependency on two specific games. League of Legends and Counter Strike. My brain gobbles them up like chocolate-covered crack. The feedback loop is very short, very rewarding and I can't control it. At all. With most games, I will eventually see the design mechanics and the game loses it's 'magic'. That's how I got bored of Hades and Rogue Legacy 2 over the past year. With these two? yeesh, I'm getting excited only thinking of them.
Exact same for me when coming back to the next season of a show. I'm actually okay with rewatching the previous season (or at least the last episode or two), but my wife isn't. There are some shows that we watch, but that I stopped actually paying attention to because I lost track of what was happening. Recently, it happened when we watched Fate of the Furious. I couldn't remember who a handful of the characters actually were, or what their relationship to each other is, other than family, obviously.
Thinking about it, this is pretty much exactly why I tend to binge TV shows, and implemented my rule of playing one game at a time, and playing it until it's done. If I don't do things that way, I either completely forget I was playing/watching it, or I just forget what was happening. It happens all the time that I'm scrolling through Netflix and coming across shows that make me say "oh yeah, I totally forgot I was watching that", but really it's "oh yeah, I totally forgot that show existed." It's nothing to do with how much I'm enjoying it, it's literally that I forget it's a thing at all.
I'm trying something. I've got myself a 8.5"x11" whiteboard and mounted it on a gooseneck tablet holder beside my monitor. For the past few days I've been keeping a running to-do list there. The idea is that when my brain slips out of gear and starts looking for a tangent to run down, having an external visual reminder might prompt me to go put a dent in one of them. It's working pretty well so far, though it's too early to tell how it'll go when the novelty wears off.
I bring this up, here, in this thread, because I'd like y'all's opinion on something...
Should I put a game or two from the pile up on the board? It's not productive productive, but video games sure beat refreshing social media for the umpteenth time.
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