Having ADHD Can Be Debilitating, But Also Wonderful

Let me start with a disclaimer: I’m not writing this for your sympathy, or because I’m a ‘poor me’ kind of person. Whatever it is I go through, I am the kind of person to get up, rub some dirt on my wounds, and move on. The “I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve genuinely cried out of pain” kind of person. I’m writing this because I don’t think people take ADHD seriously enough. Dig around on social media, and you will find posts about how ADHD isn’t a serious thing to have, or that everybody has it. I wanted to talk about what it is like to have ADHD. Also as part of this disclaimer, I am going to talk about my own subjective experience of ADHD. Other people’s experiences may be different.

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. It is a neurodevelopmental condition of the brain (different wiring and structure). The science of it is that in an ADHD brain, dopamine gets lost traveling between neurons, so a person with ADHD experiences dopamine deficiency (and I cannot stress this enough) almost all the time. This is the main neurological difference, but there are other structural differences in ADHD brains. Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter. It affects mood, concentration, memory, and most importantly motivation.

The poster child of ADHD is a young boy who “won’t settle down”, hence the name hyperactivity. The ‘attention-deficit’ part is a bit of a misnomer. ADHD’s poster child is often observed having difficulty paying attention to things for a normal prolonged amount of time, which is where the name came from. But if you ask me, the main problem isn’t that you can’t pay attention for prolonged periods, but that you have difficulty regulating your attention. It is as if your attention is on autopilot, and you have to exert an insane amount of effort to direct it onto something specific you want to focus on. My attention switches automatically to any odd thing, from cycling through the various strands of my own thoughts, of which I constantly have several of (think of it as having many different tabs open), to things I should be able to ignore, like background noise. People with ADHD can actually focus well enough on several things at once, but they have little control over what those things are most of the time. To the outside eye, it might seem like someone with ADHD (I’ll call them ADHDers henceforth for brevity) has attention deficit, and in some sense they do, but trust me, they have the tab for the thing you want them to focus on open, they just aren’t looking at it presently and need a lot of effort to shift their focus and fix it there.

Because of this inability to decide what tab to focus on, ADHDers have trouble focusing on things for prolonged periods. Dopamine is crucial for concentration, and we have so little of it swirling around. I can’t tell you how difficult it is for me to focus on something, especially if I already have a low interest in it i.e. it doesn’t excite me. You could offer me a million dollars to do a task and somehow I would still have trouble sitting still and doing it. You could have the person I love most at gunpoint and I would hesitate a bit. I may be exaggerating, but I’m trying to get a point across. It is a full-on war to do even the most basic of things at times. There are two caveats. The first is if whatever I’m supposed to do will result in a spike in dopamine, and the second is if I have a high level of interest in the thing; if I’m excited by it. Otherwise, it is a Sisyphean task. The closest analogy I can think of is this: You know those times when you wake up, your arm is numb and you can’t get it to move no matter how much you try to. You give it your best, and you feel like you have done something, but you know it wasn’t enough and you haven’t actually moved the needle one pip. That except in this case you are either trying to focus on something (even if it’s something banal and simple) or get motivated to do something.

So ADHDers tend to look for boosts of dopamine just to get to baseline and do things the way a normal person would. There are many things that can give you a dopamine boost. Some are harmless, like listening to music, or eating delicious food, or spending time with people you love or just fun people, or watching a funny movie, or engaging in a hobby—the list is endless. But some of the quickest ways to get a ‘dopamine-fix’ tend to be potentially harmful. Like reckless shopping, gambling, porn, drugs, casual sex, and reckless driving, to name a few. If you ask me, I would tell you that ADHDers have a different kind of motivation system; we are motivated to first look for dopamine and then we can do pretty much anything. The problem with any of these quick fixes is that eventually the dopamine wears off (even ADHD medication wears off at some point, and after some time, it is less effective), and then you have to do something else to get your fix. If you can’t tell, some of the ways to get these dopamine fixes involve taking some kind of risk because taking risks increases adrenaline and dopamine. Adding to the problem, there is the issue of the baseline level of dopamine. If you use something like caffeine to get a dopamine fix, you have to use more and more next time to get the same effect.

The funny thing is, once you get your dopamine fix, you become ‘normal’. After taking a strong coffee and a nicotine pouch, I feel calm, relaxed, and able to initiate tasks and see them through. If anything, I become a bit of a superhuman. Incredibly, I find that I can do things a lot quicker and more efficiently than a neurotypical (NT) person. I’m not bragging, it’s really a thing. But then the effect wears off and I need another dopamine fix. I would say that most dopamine fixes have a different effect on ADHDers than on NTs. Coffee, in large amounts, relaxes me enough to sleep. In dangerous and chaotic situations, when NTs lose their calm, I am relaxed. I have little trouble taking risks and doing things people seem to be scared to. I can walk up to that girl and chat her up (even though I probably have no idea what I’m saying as I ramble across various topics, and make connections between things that you wouldn’t imagine had a connection, and remembering this fact, and telling that joke, and that other thing that happened the other day… btw did I remember to let her talk?). In the same vein, I am quite relaxed whenever I have a trade on. It is often better for me to first put on the position and then do my research as I will be a lot more relaxed, interested, and counterintuitively, more rational (basically I will think better), than if I had nothing on. If instead, I decide to do research first, I end up in what feels like an infinite rabbit hole, and by the time I get to the trade ideas, there are new developments to consider and the market may have already moved. This kind of getting lost in a rabbit hole is part of the reason I struggle with research for this Substack but I will explain later.

All this dopamine-seeking takes time, but somehow over the long-term it evens out because when you are active, you get a lot done, and I mean a lot. ADHDers have a very weird relationship with time. Sometimes, seconds feel like years, and sometimes, hours feel like minutes and days feel like hours. Whatever I’m doing with either take 3-5 business days, or a few hours or minutes, with no in-between. Part of the 3-5 business days are spent building up the motivation and focus to do the thing, even if it takes minutes. Sometimes I do something that in what feels like an hour, I look up and it’s been 30 minutes, other times I look up and it’s been four hours. Almost every day, there are large portions (typically a few hours, but sometimes a lot of hours, and sometimes the hours turn to days) of time I simply have no idea where they went. This is, in my experience, the worst thing about ADHD—all the time wasted doing random shit to get some dopamine, or to try and just focus on one damn thing, and all the anxiety and depression you feel the whole time.

Every day, I wake up with a blank mind, and then suddenly the tabs reopen along with a laundry list of things I need to do, and I can’t (for the life of me) decide what to do first. I live in a perpetual state of having a million things to do and no idea what I need to do right now. The only time I get respite is when I (involuntarily) hyperfocus. Every now and then, sometimes randomly, and sometimes because I am actually interested in what I’m doing, all the tabs close, and only one is left, and I feel like it is the most important thing in the world. More important than food, water, sleep, sex, relationships, other important things—basically anything. Then I spend as much time as need to get it done. Some days I wake up and have a burning urge to clean the whole house immediately, which I do in record time, and then I have time to do something else and at the end of such a day I’ve done so much that I wonder why is every day not like that. Some days, I do a week’s worth of work in about 18 hours, forgoing food, sleep, and any distracting messages. Other times, I stare at the monitor for hours, and can’t do a single thing if my life depended on it. However, I can’t decide what kind of day I will have beforehand. The only thing I can do is notice what kind of activities I can hyperfocus on. I can hyperfocus on a drawing, a piece of writing (as long as I’m the one who chose what to write about), coding (if it is a personal project), any hobby/interest, and on people I love/care about. If ADHDers had total freedom to choose what to do with their time, you would barely notice they had it. Anyway, this ability to hyperfocus on things you like is in my opinion the reason most people think everyone has ‘a little bit of ADHD’, except for ADHDers, it is the only time you truly focus, like ever.

Basically, the way I see ADHD is that I have a bigger-than-normal ‘attention gun’ that can either be focused on many things at once, changing quickly from one to another without my say-so, or focused on one thing and one thing only.

When it comes to relationships, I am either intense, obsessive, very present, or distant, a bit cold and unbothered. Not because I don’t like the person anymore, although in some cases like infatuation or limerence, that can happen. Usually, it’s all the open tabs or something I’ve hyperfocused on that ends up taking my undivided attention. This may sound harsh to say, but I will see your text, but have difficulty breaking my focus (if hyperfocused) or garnering enough motivation to reply. You have to do something big to get my attention. Bait me with a meme, or just use lots of emojis, and then when you have my attention, tell me what you want to talk to me about. There are even ADHDers who lose interest in the middle of sex because something else came up, sometimes just a mere thought that the brain decides is ‘more important’ but if you asked them what it is, it would sound ridiculous to you (i.e. I finally remembered where that thing I’ve been looking for is and I have to go check right now!).

One thing I’ve realized about ADHD is that the problem sometimes is about form rather than content. Learning to turn boring things into fun things goes a long way. Some ADHDers will gamify their tasks, or give themselves rewards and other incentives along the way (or before i.e. eating the damn cookie first as a quick dopamine fix). I owe a lot of my knowledge to the ability to find teachers who either taught in a fun way or were so enthusiastic about the subject that I absorbed some of their enthusiasm. Most ADHDers are fun (even if they are experiencing a horrible depression). If they feel safe around you (a lot of ADHDers have been bullied most of their life, especially by people who misinterpret their actions and behavior), they can give you the best of times. When they do pay attention to you, they do it in buckets, and notice many details and nuances about you. They are very deeply and genuinely interested in you and will have a hard time faking their level of interest/attraction/friendship with you. However, you need a lot of patience to deal with an ADHDer and you will have to learn ways of interacting with them that are different from how you would interact with someone without ADHD. For example, how to gently guide their attention back to the topic if they wander off. These videos are a caricature of the relationship dynamics involving an ADHDer.

I can only describe my life with ADHD as a comedy. I’ve experienced both the good and the bad. In school, I either got all A’s or failed the class. School, regardless of how smart you are, requires some kind of consistency which is difficult for ADHDers. Sometimes I studied in the last minute and passed with flying colors, sometimes I hyperfocused on a subject all semester but lost interest in the final weeks and failed to prepare adequately. I often sent in assignments at the very last minute or did the entire group’s project all by myself because I was super excited about it and did more than just my part better than those who had been assigned those parts. Working close to the deadline boosts adrenaline and dopamine, which gives you a dopamine fix, and then you end up doing the thing quickly and efficiently. Sometimes it was enough; sometimes it wasn’t.

A large portion of people with ADHD end up starting a business. It is very difficult to work for someone else. How do you explain to your boss that the project will be late because you had to binge-watch half a season of a new sitcom before you started the project to get the necessary dopamine to even start the task, let alone focus long enough to finish it? And even if you had the most patient and kind boss, if you get a task that you are not very excited about, you will struggle to do it. Most jobs, especially the best and high-paying ones, have important deadlines and responsibilities that you must meet. A business works well for ADHDers. You get to decide when to do what, and you get paid to do things you already love doing. This newsletter, and the website with the live models (when I launch it) is my version of this. I truly enjoy writing and researching stuff about markets if I think there’s some edge there, and my ADHD virtually disappears when I’m doing stuff for the Substack.

Now you might be wondering: Say Brian if you love researching and writing Quant (h)Edge, what’s with the low output? Why haven’t you published research in weeks? I’ll be totally honest with you. I do enjoy writing this substack. I’ve moved a lot of things around to ensure that I work on this substack full-time and on the website with all the live models. I have a lot of ongoing projects. But here’s how my publishing process typically goes. I get an idea for some quantitative research, like “What should I be looking at when I look at CFTC data?”. I decide I’m going to backtest some ideas using the CFTC data and read some research for more creativity (Tab 1 and 2 opened), I then start the backtest. In the process, I realize that there are several versions of a particular idea and I then start backtesting those (a few more tabs opened). Then I read some research and decide to try out a few other things (more tabs). Then I decide to include different assets (more tabs). Then I realize I’ve done too much work for one post; I’ll break it into several posts; or not, I’ll do a dashboard; no, a dashboard isn’t enough because I can’t include new information, what I need is a website; but I was going to do a website anyway, might as well start it now (more and more tabs). Then I have to attend to other things in my life (more tabs).I then come back to unfinished backtests, and an unfinished website, and partially read articles, and wait, I have a new idea for research, better get started… and weeks pass, and there’s progress here and there but nothing is done, but it’s all leading somewhere, and weeks have passed since I published, and I still have to do other important stuff.

You might be wondering, why not just finish one thing? Just finish one damn thing and post. I think that all the time, every day. But I have ADHD! I try so hard to just sit and finish one thing, but it’s a constant battle. The only advantage I have with this newsletter is that I get to do it my way. Everywhere else I have to struggle to find the motivation and focus to do things, but here, I have it in buckets, but then I also have to follow the rabbit hole to the end or it turns into yet another area of my life where I struggle with motivation and focus. The downside for you, the reader, is that you have to wait for the results of my crazy process, but the upside is you get something truly worthwhile. I’m not trying to excuse myself, by sweeping it all under the ADHD rug. But believe me, I trying my very best. I can think of many ways I could do things better and quicker but when it comes down to it, my ADHD gets in the way. So here we are.

It isn’t always bad. There are many perks to having ADHD. The lows are crushing and the highs are exhilarating. Some ADHDers deliberately stop taking their meds because they prefer to take the good with the bad to the mundane ‘normalcy’ they experience while medicated. When you have ADHD, it is not like you are you and then you have something else preventing you from being you as is the case with some disorders. It’s very much a part of who you are and how you experience life. Some day, I will tell you crazy stories about both the good and bad things I’ve gone through due to ADHD but I wanted to try and give some sense of what it’s like. Funny enough, I only know what it’s like (for me) to have ADHD so I have no idea how other people experience life. But I am very jealous of people who can just get up in the morning and do stuff, especially those who first make a list of said stuff.

A dopamine fix for you