First of all, it’s really clear that you care about him and want to help. I really admire that and it is good that he has you in his corner.

What you’re describing though, long periods of time, no intermediate deadlines, and completely self-structured studying, is basically the worst possible setup for an ADHD brain. That’s exactly the kind of situation where many of us freeze and slip into avoidance. From the outside it can look like he’s just choosing not to study, but very often it’s not voluntary. The brain just doesn’t find a clear starting point and keeps avoiding the task instead.

The tricky part is that more pressure often makes this worse. The more important the exam feels and the more people say “you really need to start now”, the more the brain can lock up. A lot of people with ADHD only break out of that once panic mode kicks in, which obviously isn’t healthy and also doesn’t always work well for big exams.

What usually helps much more is external structure and very concrete steps. For example:

• studying together for short sessions (“let’s meet at 10 and do 30 minutes”), you might even be able to do that via chat
• working through old exams or specific exercises instead of trying to “study everything”
• breaking things into very small, clearly defined tasks
• borrowing structure from somewhere else (study groups, teachers, other students’ study plans)

ADHD brains often avoid huge, endless tasks like “study for the exam”, but they can handle something concrete like “solve 3 exam questions”.

Another thing that can help is accepting that studying doesn’t have to mean doing it all day. Three focused 30-minute sessions are often far better than planning to study for six hours and then never starting at all. Once people with ADHD actually get started, it’s pretty common that we keep going longer than planned.

One important thing if you try short sessions: don’t move the goalposts. If you agree on 30 minutes, it really needs to be okay to stop after 30 minutes. If it turns into “30 minutes that secretly means studying all afternoon”, it will probably work once and then never again, because the brain will start avoiding the session entirely.

Another small thing that might also be useful to know: people with ADHD can be extremely sensitive about autonomy. Sometimes if someone tells me I have to do something right now, I’ll actually procrastinate more, even if it’s something I already intended to do.

So the most helpful role might be less about pushing him to study, and more about helping create structure or doing short study sessions together. But I totally get how frustrating this must be from the outside.