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Have you ever sat with a list of the things that you hate about yourself? The way you start everything and finish nothing? The way you lose one thing that you actually needed today and it was in your hands 3 seconds ago? The way you assume deep down your slightly worse version of a normal person and you somehow manage to live to this point without getting caught. But what if every single thing that you hated about yourself is actually a symptom of ADHD. I literally lived with that doubt like for 20 years. Then I got diagnosed with ADHD. And as I learned about the mechanism and research behind ADHD, I figured out that every freaking single thing that I hated myself was a literal
symptom of ADHD. And that changed how I actually see myself and also my selfworth. When you understand that it's actually not a personality, but it's a symptom and is actually treatable. The weight on your shoulders kind of lifts because the things that you hated about yourself had a name and a mechanism that helps you to understand this whole time. There are seven major points that I thought that was my personality but was actually a symptom of ADHD. So let's go through them. Okay. So the first thing is object permanence out of side out of mind. This is basically forgetting
things that exist as long as they are visually in front of you. So for example like I once bought the same pair of jeans seven times. The same jeans like seven literal freaking times because every single time I forgot that I purchased them recently. So, I bought the same thing again and again. And it is so crazy. And this shows up in actually everywhere, right? Like duplicate purchases, whether that's groceries, books, jeans, or whatever you name it. As long as they're visually in front of you, like you do not know that they exist and you forget about them. And because they were in my wardrobe,
they just didn't exist in my mind. And this actually shows up in relationships as well. So whether that's a romantic relationship or, you know, just platonic or family, whatever that is, I really don't miss people because if they're not in front of me, they just don't exist in my mind. Like obviously I know that they exist, but they don't really cross my mind like a regular person. So I don't really miss them as long as I'm like calling them with on FaceTime or something, but I just like forget them easily. If they're also not neurody divergent, it's very hard to accept this. And a lot of people think that you just don't care about them or you just don't love them. But it's just that, you
know, I just forget everything that is not in front of me. So it's not really about them, it's about me. But when I say like this, it just sounds toxic. So I always blame myself for being a very coldblooded person. But in reality, it is just something called object permanence. And there's actually explanation behind this. So Russell Brley reframed ADHD actually as a working memory issue rather than an attention issue. ADHD brains hold like three to two items at the same time on their brain where a neurotypical brain can hold from five to seven. So when something leaves our visual field, the slot gets overwritten almost immediately because of how few slots we have compared to a normal person. So that's
basically the reason actually why my house is built around like external memory and not relying on my memory. So I have like labels everywhere around home because I forget where each stuff belongs in my house. So I just have labels so that I don't forget them. And I also have reminders to call people because otherwise I'm just going to forget that they exist. The second one is all or nothing attitude. There's literally no in between for me. The word balance does not exist in my dictionary. Okay. I've been always an extreme person since my childhood and I never enjoyed things moderately. Like there's a no slow build hobby for me. I'm either hyperinterested in that thing and forget
about it in 3 weeks or I'm not interested in that at all. And it also shows up in food as well. So if I'm like hyperfocused or hyper like interested in that food, I would eat that food breakfast, lunch and dinner like for maybe few days and then I get sick of it and I don't eat that food for years and I actually hate it. It's same as with work. There is no work life balance for me personally or even with friendships. When I meet someone new, I'm like hyperinterested in them and I want to learn everything about them. Every single trauma that you have dump on me and I'm really good at this. I'm really good at making people trust me. I mean because I'm a trustworthy person, okay? Like I genuinely am not
going to do anything with that. It's not that I want to use you. It's just that I'm hyperinterested in you. Not necessarily romantically. I just want to know everything about you. And you know, like also with work, there's no such thing as work life balance. If I'm in the work mode, only thing that I do and only thing that I'm interested in is work. I do not care about anything else. And I also like thought I just want balance. I just want more peace. But then I realized I actually thrive in chaos. And when there is no chaos, I'm just bored. This actually reminds me of the philosopher Shopenhawa where he says like life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom. The struggle to
achieve desires and the emptiness once those desires are met. And this is literally what my brain feels like all the time. So I just gave up on the world balance and I just ignore everyone that says you have to have balance. It's too extreme. It's a way that I live. The reason behind this is because ADHD brains actually runs on intensity. The dopamine system rewards novelty, urgency, and a challenge. Right? So the boring middle gear just doesn't exist in our brain. It's either allin or nothing because the boring middle gear doesn't trigger anything in our brain. sub and because our brains actually struggle with dopamine, it just doesn't trigger anything with us. Actually, Russell
Barkley includes intensity regulation as one of the executive functions ADHD impairs. The ability to modulate to dial something to 30% instead of 0 to 100% is the part that's missing in ADHD brains. So, if people are telling you that you're too obsessive, you're too extreme, and you should be, you know, you should balance things out, just ignore them because it's not how your brain is wired. And it's not something to be ashamed of. And it's kind of like same with the third one which is can start, can stop. It's again same like all or nothing attitude. Like for certain tasks, it is extremely hard for me to start. Whereas for some task, I just cannot stop doing them. Like for example, there's an email right now in
my inbox that's been sitting like for 10 days for no reason. probably replying it to it is going to take 60 seconds of my time and I'm aware of it, but I just cannot make myself to do it even if the consequences are high. I've actually got myself into trouble multiple times because of these stupid stuff. And the other half, interestingly, is the opposite. I'll sit down to do something simple and then 8 hours later, I found myself like going into a rabbit hole of researching something that is completely irrelevant from the first task that I started. And I didn't even choose that, you know, like it almost feels like somebody is controlling my body and I am just in a I'm I'm just like sleeping
or I'm just like in this hallucination mode and someone is controlling my body and doing stuff that I didn't intended to do, which kind of like sounds crazy, but I feel like you'll understand it if you also have ADHD. And what's actually happening is that Holloway and Raid in Driven to Distraction in a book, they made a case that ADHD is fundamentally about attention dysregulation. It's not that we lack attention. It's more so that we cannot control where it goes. Okay? The top down control over what your brain pays attention is just weaker compared to neurotypical people. The wheel either just won't turn or locks into the wrong direction. So, it's not that ADG people struggle with attention,
it's just that it's uncontrollable, if that makes sense. Even though it's trainable, just the default mode is just way harder than neurotypical people. The fourth one is the ADHD tax. I actually have never came across to this word until recently. So the ADHD tax means that the financial cost of having an ADHD. And for me ADHD tax is actually huge. And it's one of the reasons why I actually have to be successful because my day-to-day cost of living is so high. Not because I'm living a luxurious life because I freaking suck at every single thing that adults are supposed to do. Like for example, knowing the tax deadline. You know, I know the tax deadline, but I still feel late every
single year and I pay fines for that. or forgetting flight tickets. I literally forgot that I had a flight ticket and I realized that I literally have a flight tomorrow. So, I had to like rush and pack. Like, what the hell? Or, you know, buying multiple things, losing things, always paying late fees, forgotten subscriptions, foods rotting in the fridge or hyperfixation on hobbies and abandoning them and having a lot of around my house because I bought every single thing impulsively for that hobby. Honestly, the umbrella feeling is just like being an adult but failing at it and you have to pay the financial cost of being that way. This is actually highly correlated with the executive
function. So, working memory plus time blindness plus dopamine regulation all stacked and the brain charges a premium every time it has to do something boring and we end up paying in cash. That's why actually a lot of ADHD people either struggle financially or they become like entrepreneurs and business owners because they're fixated because they know that it just costs a lot of money for them to live a normal life. So again, all or nothing, right? You either become very successful or you struggle with it and you just hit the rock bottom. What helped me personally is basically assuming that I really don't have any functions of executive function and anything that it's supposed to do is
not going to happen inside my brain. So systemizing every single freaking thing. So if I need to remember something, I'll just immediately put a reminder on that spot in my calendar with a multiple reminders like a week before that deadline every single day to remind myself or like subscription audits every month like having multiple reminders of it and also like trying to delegate stuff and outsourcing stuff and trying to systemize everything essentially. But even if I do that, it's still probably like way worse than a regular person. Another one is now or not now. I basically have only two frames in my brain which is now or not now. Normal people have like past, current and future. So you learn from your past and
you prepare for your future. But for me it does not exist. Okay. I almost feel like I experience time in a different way than other people. And when I talk with my other ADG friends, they actually relate to this a lot where neurotypical people just find it weird. So let me explain. So basically my time perception is messed up. Anything that's like a day from now or a month from now for a normal person will feel different, right? But for me, it just feels the same. It's just not now. And I only focus on the things that are now that are happening right now, which makes you always on fight or flight mode because you're only caring about the things that are happening right now. And you're not
really taking care of the future, neither learning from the past. So you repeat the same mistakes again and again, and you forget deadlines again and again. Every single thing that I have done like literally happened maybe like few hours before the deadline. Every single time I would hyperfocus, finish it right before the deadline and then forget about it again. So this is actually exact reason why every single planner or app or method didn't work for me because it just assumes that some task that is in near future versus in the very far away future are going to be automatically treated differently in your brain whereas it not it's not for ADC brains right and also it recommends like using time blocking for example it assumes
like a smooth gradient between now and not now. It assumes consistent energy. It assumes I can predict on Monday what energy I'll have on Thursday at 2 p.m. But ADHD brains don't really work that way. So, we keep failing at planners and quietly assume the failure is all about us. But what's actually happening is that ADHD brains have what researchers call time horizon dysfunction. Urgency releases dopamine and adrenaline. So, the brain only fires up when the deadline crosses into now, not 3 days from now. So, working best under panic is just the systems default operating mode for ADHD brains. And it just causes a lot of stress, right? You're always stressful. I'm always stressful. And
that is the exact pattern that made me actually build my own system instead of buying other people's system because they just do not get me. And it's called the Kaizen system. And it's actually built specifically for ADHD brains because I built it for myself. One of the biggest difference with Kaizen system is that when you're like inputting a task in Kaizen system, it's actually doesn't ask for an hour. Instead, what we categorize tasks is based on their energy and category. I basically sort tasks into four sprints. So I treat my day as four different chunks instead of times. And I categorize tasks and I batch task in those four different categories of time.
And when I do a task, I go from the first chunk. So the time does not exist. It just exists as a chunk. So in the first chunk, I start my day with the first chunk and I go through all of them. And then maybe I eat a lunch and do the second chunk, third chunk, and fourth chunk. When I started to actually treat them as a chunk and align those chunks with my specific energy patterns, I actually started to achieve way more things and start to be less stressful about what I need to do on 11:00 a.m. Because my energy fluctuates and my interest fluctuates, it's impossible to assume that the same task is going to say take the same amount of time next time. So instead of that, we focus on
the energy and we focus on the flow. And instead of time blocking that is designed for neurotypical people, we use a system called sprints. So, I just need it. Okay. And I've been using this like sprinting systems for like about 2 or 3 years now. And it is probably the only thing that works for me. If you're interested and if you want to learn more about the difference between a time blocking and the sprinting method, I actually have a full dedicated video about it which you can watch here like or here. And if you're interested into my Kaizen system, you can go to my website at rudio.com. So, if you're either interested in the video or the product itself, you can check out the link in description below. So the
another annoying thing is starting everything but finishing nothing. So I might like start something right because it pulls my interest but in the middle of it another thing would pull out my interest from there and I would just find myself doing death. So for example I might like start cleaning my room but then there's like a bookshelf. So I'm cleaning the bookshelf and then I see an interesting book and I start to read it and then actually fires up a question in my mind like oh I actually remember this thing from the other book. So I start to read the other book and then I start to think oh what actually does the this author like talks about this topic.
I'm curious about his opinion. Then I check like his Twitter and I'm like I actually want to know about his background that I search about this background and from outside it just looks like I start everything and finish nothing. But for me it's just like a one complete thread. Every action is actually connected to each other but for other people it's not. So in a another third person eye it just looks like I started cleaning my room and I freaking left it. I read a bunch of books and I'm now researching about this person. But actually there's a researcher named William Dawson who coined the term interestbased nervous system to describe how ADHD brains run. So the reward
signal fires for novelty, urgency and interest. So whatever thing that fires one of those things, our just brains just goes there instead of what's being done in front of us. But the great thing about this is that when you actually understand this interest-based nervous system, then you can actually engineer your environment to make things more interesting so that you keep doing that thing. That might be the reason why I actually buy a lot of tools, a lot of productivity tools to keep the novelty high so that I am still interested and enjoy working, which is obviously financially not good. It's an ADC tax, but it just keeps me going, right? For example, this custommade split keyboard.
Do I need it? Absolutely not. But this is one of the novelty and interest that's going to bring to my workspace. Hence, it's going to make me more interested into working. But from an outside, I just look like a weirdo that just can't finish things. And the last one is hyperfocus on performance. And in my opinion, this is one of the hardest ones. Actually, I've been always a high performer my whole life because I've been extremely obsessed with results and being an high achiever. The reason behind this is because I do not naturally fit into society, what society expects from me, especially as a female, a young female. So any of the interests or any of the patterns that I show or
how I behave, how I act, how I function is not necessarily um catered towards what society expects from my position. So I do not naturally have a place in the society. But there's actually a word in Japanese. The word basically goes which basically means if you're a little bit different than other people, you are going to be discriminated. But if you're extremely different and if you're actually a successful, if you're like a genius, then society just accepts you as a person. And when we think about all the historical geniuses, they're all true. They're all weird, but they're only accepted because they show exceptional results. When you think about all the other weirdos, they're not
accepted because they're not showing any signs of the things that society wants. So I realized that when I was a very little kid, how different I was, not in I'm like different than other girls, but like I'm genuinely not suitable for society. I realized that and I also realized that if I'm unless as long as I'm successful, it's actually acceptable. So a lot of neurode divergent people I've realized that have this tendency. They hyperfocus on performance and actually achieving things because they want to feel like they belong or they want to sort of like get their place. And this actually kind of like makes you fundamentally lonely and fundamentally separate from other people. Other people do not understand
you because by definition ADHD is a minority thing. So a lot of people are not going to get in a lot of people are not going to understand the things that you do naturally and it is hard to explain as well because it's a way of functioning. It's not like a preference you know. I figured if I couldn't fit the shapes so I expected I had to be unusually successful to earn my place. So the success was the rent I was paying for being weird or being different. Over the years I became fine with people not understanding me because I realized that what I actually need is not necessarily understanding but actually freedom to be exist in a way that I want. And this YouTube channel is even like my attempt
to do that. Because I was always been weird. I started to put my interest towards online because there are people like me there. because a person like me online is more acceptable than in a 9 to-ive job or in a corporate world or in a regular daily life. So I became hyper obsessed on that. Is that a bad thing or is it a good thing? That's for another discussion. But I would say these are the seven things that I thought that are my personality but actually come and stem from ADHD. I'm actually curious about yours. Let me know in the comments. I actually read them by the way. And if you want to learn why time blocking doesn't work for ADHD people and what you need to do instead, then watch this video
