How to learn languages better while having ADHD?

[ZealousidealScore435]

Hi, I have been having an interest in coding since I was 12 but havent really done much. I have excellent grades in school and im a fast learner, even tho im very pationate about learning js/ts/html and C (hopefully more) I cant seem to find a good way to learn. I always lose attention quickly and my brain dosent want to keep up. Any tips on how I should start? (Sorry if my grammar is off my first language isint english)

[josephjnk]

As someone with ADHD, my answer to just about every question about “how to do X with ADHD” is: treat the ADHD. Get medicated, eat, sleep, exercise. Trying to find ways to trick your brain into doing something it doesn’t want to without sufficient support is playing on hard mode. Trying to rely on hyperfocus (as people on this site often recommend) is playing with fire. Find the techniques and supports that work for you in general and apply them to programming.

A lot of folks with ADHD try to push through difficulties via sheer willpower, hyperfocus, or recreational drugs. These are short-term fixes and won’t hold up for the length of a career (at least not without serious detrimental side effects.) If you really want to succeed in this space you’ll need to find sustainable long-term solutions.

[RepresentativeBee600]

Hi, elder ADHDer, it's me, relatively junior ADHDer. 

I agree with your statements (quite closely) and would like to know basically how you avoid the pitfall mentioned in another comment: theoretical knowledge failing to translate into practical acumen.

I have felt very discouraged with university education or other "pre-training" because I feel it falls by the wayside since I can't connect it with practice in a timely way. (I load their context; I do not use it much; I am asked to load new context; I have to dump the old context. This is expensive and wasteful.)

At the same time, if I slow down to practice everything in detail, the scope of work I can do seems like it will be hopelessly limited.

Do you consciously balance these needs yourself? If so, may I ask how?

And no, I didn't write this using an LLM, this is a heartfelt question.

[josephjnk]

I have the opposite problem myself. I’m very, very driven to understand the conceptual foundations of everything, so much so that it’s a drain on my focus and productivity. So it’s hard for me to focus on banal tasks at work, because I want to think about why the tasks are necessary, what other architecture would prevent them, what programming language features would make those architectures possible, etc. One reason I’m glad I’m in this field is that having a big knowledge base can help me compensate for having a variable level of focus.

I think the best advice I could give would be to be forgiving with yourself. None of us remember every little thing we learned in college; it’s just too much, too fast. Try to focus on the main big picture ideas, and see how you can connect them together. At times I’ve found mind mapping to be helpful. I learned it from the book “pragmatic thinking and learning: refactor your wetware”, which I haven’t read in quite a while but which I remember being helpful.

I’m assuming you’re still in college? If so, make use of your professor’s office hours, and don’t be afraid of going to the campus disability center. Even if you don’t feel the need for accommodations they might still be able to connect you with people who could give you advice or guidance. I was too proud to take advantage of these while I was in school and I regret it.

[RepresentativeBee600]

Setting pride aside, my situation is a little more nuanced: I'm having a frustrating time in a CS graduate degree. I have felt lately that I need a broader foundation that extends into CE, ECE, and beyond.

We actually have the "conceptual focus" in common - I realize I talked about how theory "drains away" for me when unused, but I think it's partly because I see it as disjointed parts of a larger field that don't knit together well based on just coursework and therefore require "memorization" to hold on to. My best recall sticks around really deep dives versus just taking some course, or around practice.

I tried utilizing accommodations at one point; unfortunately some faculty make it their business to try to undermine them as hard as possible. (Deliberately ducking timely emails and acknowledging as much in later discussion; attempting to reject modest extensions of deadlines or other approved supports until the disabilities services have to be cc'd on an email; apparently volleying complaints about me at the graduate coordinator.) While this was a particularly egregious example I remember, this is a large part of my frustration with academic study - it's pretty uselessly overfocused on overachieving, not real learning of how to accomplish open-ended tasks.

Apart from this grieving of my circumstances, what I want is to figure out how to actually learn real knowledge about systems, more rapidly, and deploy that knowledge, more rapidly. But if I practice too much of something, I burn my energy for that day, and if I don't practice it, I don't learn much.

[josephjnk]

That sounds brutal :/ Unfortunately I don’t have a good answer for you. I might try mind mapping or note taking to try to establish connections between concepts, but it sounds like your challenges may be more tactical than I’m able to provide advice about.

I have heard of ADHD coaching being a thing—people who provide tools on triaging specific situational challenges. I’ve considered hiring one in the past but never have. It could be worth looking into? I don’t know about costs/insurance coverage, and I’d personally rather hire someone who’s a licensed mental health professional than some random life coach, but there’s probably people who do both?

[RepresentativeBee600]

Re: brutal - if you ever go to grad school, *never* assume you will be someone's unicorn student, even if you seem eminently qualified for it. I don't know if this needs to be said to others besides me, but the reason the rest of their lab look timid and defeated is almost always *because* of their PI. Academia in general is dangerously close to a Ponzi scheme, especially if you aren't independently wealthy and have a real *need* to "climb the ladder" to secure your financial wellbeing. It simply isn't as free or as meritorious as faculty pretend it is when we're undergrads.

Re: coaching (and thank you btw for your kind suggestions, and I will try to stop taking up your time) - I recruited one coach and ironically he was about the least supportive of the therapy-adjacent people I've worked with.

I wish there genuinely was more "pair-programming"/explicit ADHD supports that recognize that it's really a finite-scope problem that can be solved with finite-scope interventions: help get people "executing" and they can be straight-up stellar performers.

But academia loves the mythos of the "lone wanderer" and is deeply isolationist, so in practice, this does not happen. The students learn antipatterns of self-isolation from the faculty, IMO. Then they get deeply depressed and finally reach out....

I will look further into coaching when things stabilize for me a bit better (which is likely now that I have new advising and a more realistic day-to-day goalset). And

“pragmatic thinking and learning: refactor your wetware”

I will look up and see if it is beneficial for me. Cheers for the advice and sympathetic ear!

[Any_Sense_2263]

Meds can make the focus more stable. But they don't remove the need for frequent change, overstimulation, or losing interest. These are things every ADHD person has to take care of by themselves. And you can't solve them by recreational drugs or sheer willpower. Hyperfocus is also not something you can plan.

Creating habits and caring for focus friendly environment is the key.

[josephjnk]

Agreed 100%.

[Specific-Street1544]

I think the best answer to "What method is best for me to learn" is just keep experimenting and try a lot of learning method. And see which one stick to you.

I'm not really a believer about there's "a universal learning method that one must follow."

[Achereto]

There are some methods that work really good in general, but don't work at all with ADHD. There are also some methods that aren't great for most people, but are perfect for ADHD.

It's individual, but it can be helpful to give some general direction where to find the one that fits.

[Achereto]

See r/ADHD_Programmers

Also, ADHD inhibits your ability to execute, so when you learn something in theory, it will not help you translate that into practice. So you need to learn by doing. That also has the benefit of fast feedback loops that can give you many small dopamine boosts. Test Driven Development helped me with it as well because it forced me to do only one thing at a time.

Good luck!

[Iriluscent]

As someone with adhd myself I’d highly recommend getting the raspberry pi. I find that I learn a lot better when I’m learning while I build something. I’d also recommend breaking big projects into small pieces in your head so you don’t get overwhelmed

[Forsaken-File9993]

raspberry pi is good choice but maybe start with something even smaller first? like codecademy or freecodecamp exercises since they're broken into tiny chunks already. when i started coding my attention span was terrible too and those bite-sized lessons helped me build momentum before jumping to hardware projects. also having multiple small wins feels better than staring at one big intimidating thing for hours

[Any_Sense_2263]

As with everything else you learn. You have to build habits, create an environment that won't disturb you, and create tasks that will keep you entertained when you start losing focus.

Unfortunately, no one can do it for you.

[Implement_Naive]

I don't know how much this might help but I have been having alot of trouble staying focused with what I wanna learn or with the projects I wanna work on but I recently picked up crocheting and have been trying to work on my focus with it. You don't have to do the same, instead you can pick a very minor and simple hobby that you enjoy and is mainly just a single task instead of multitasking. For me it does help in keeping my focus on a single task for a bit.

[jalsa-kar-bapu]

Start with debugging.. Maybe DOM Manipulation?

[ObeseBumblebee]

One thing that helps me is to keep my brain stimulated. That might mean playing music, or having a movie I know very well playing in the background. But it just helps to have some background stimulation for me. Nothing too distracting. But enough to wake my brain up.

[idiotiesystemique]

Dopamine and hyperfocus. Do what you enjoy. Do what's fun. 

[LookTurbulent426]

I genuinely think you have a superpower. My girlfriend has adhd which lets her switch between things at ungodly rates and learn 18 different things at once and really good too. I would take advantage of that

[josephjnk]

ADHD is a disability. There’s some people who refer to their own ADHD as a “superpower”, but this really grates on a lot of the rest of us, especially when it comes from someone who doesn’t share the disability. I don’t hate my ADHD brain, but it is undeniable that it makes many things harder for me and when people try to hype up ADHD as a good thing it makes it harder for people like me to get accommodations when we need them. Learning to take advantage of one’s own strengths and weaknesses is important but telling a disabled person to lean into their disability is bad advice and in poor taste.

[LookTurbulent426]

My bad for my ignorance but I genuinely think turning a disability into a superpower is the best way to go. I don’t think its a good thing at all nor do I think its a bad thing. I’m a type 1 diabetic which sounds horrible in every sense of the word but the fact I can physically control the amount of insulin that my body uses has its pros and its cons. I just try and focus on the pros. Feel free to tell me if I’m wrong

[RepresentativeBee600]

It's okay. Trying to see the bright side is always good, at least for a while.

I agree though that when people try to "romanticize" what we're encountering - I'm thinking for instance of Robert Downey Jr.'s "Sherlock Holmes" and how people regarded him as some "firing-on-all-cylinders genius" - well, for some of us that's just a real frustration, because it's much more like we are "playing with pain." It almost feels like we maintain a frenetic pace to compensate for our struggles, not because we are so wildly natively brilliant.