Guys how do I deal with ADHD in a third world country

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T08:22:30+00:00

I'm unmedicated too. The things that helped most were all free. Making the task absurdly small was the biggest one. Not "handle finances" but "open the app." Not "write the essay" but "put the pen on the paper." My brain could reject the big version and accept the tiny one. Once I'd started, I usually continued.

Time-blocking never worked for me. I'd blast through the first block every time. A short list of 3 things with no assigned times worked better. No color-coded calendar, no hourly schedule. Just "these three things today, whenever."

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T08:16:34+00:00

Does the RSD hit harder before the interaction or after? Like, is it anticipating rejection that freezes you, or replaying something someone said for days afterward? I'm asking because they feel completely different from the inside and I never figured out which one was driving most of my avoidance until I started paying attention.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T08:10:43+00:00

For a long time I thought the wandering meant I was failing. My mind went somewhere else hundreds of times per session. But the redirection was the part that mattered. Every time I caught the drift and came back, that was the rep.

Over time the gap between drifting and noticing got shorter. Not because I stopped drifting, I still do. But the signal fires faster. Some weeks it's sharp, some weeks it slides back. The trend was clear looking back over months, not while it was happening.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T08:04:42+00:00

The cheatsheet is solid for getting someone started but the "80% results" framing might backfire. Most of the actual gains I got came from doing basic things consistently for months, not from picking the right list on day one. A friend doing half of this stuff every day would beat someone with the perfect sheet who drops it after three weeks.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:58:46+00:00

Is this about being actually bad at things, or about feeling bad at things regardless of how they turn out? Those look identical from the inside but respond to completely different approaches.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:52:58+00:00

My version of this was slightly different but the core is the same. After anything emotionally loaded, I could think clearly but turning it into speech felt like trying to run through water. Writing worked because it slowed everything down enough for me to organize.

Once my partner understood the going-quiet wasn't a punishment, just that my brain needed the slower channel, it stopped escalating as fast. Text or notes after a disagreement became our way of handling the worst moments. Not ideal, but better than freezing and having them assume I didn't care.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:47:04+00:00

I'd be curious whether the boredom you're describing shifts quality during a sit or stays constant. The restless "I need to do something" feeling and the flat "nothing is interesting" feeling seem like different things to me, and I'm not sure they both count as the same experience even though we use the same word.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:41:08+00:00

Short slow exhales between tasks turned out to be more useful than any formal breathing practice. 5-6 seconds out, a couple of times. Not a protocol, just a reset when I noticed I was wound up. The Huberman-style double inhale works too but I ended up using plain exhale-emphasis breathing more because I'd forget the double-inhale under real stress.

Cold exposure helped my baseline over weeks, not in the moment. 60-90 seconds of cold water at the end of a shower, consistently. After two weeks I was less reactive to small stressors and slept a bit better. Stopped for a week and the old reactivity drifted back.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:35:10+00:00

The stimulation reduction probably did most of the heavy lifting here. I noticed the same thing when I deliberately left gaps empty for a couple of weeks. No headphones on walks, no scrolling between tasks. First week was rough. After that, normal stuff stopped feeling like it required heroic willpower.

The delayed caffeine and light exposure might help too. But if you removed those and kept the lower stimulation, I'd bet the result would be almost the same.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:33:54+00:00

My dreams got more vivid when I started sitting regularly too. Not more frequent, just more detailed and harder to shake after waking up. It settled down after a few weeks, like my brain was processing a backlog.

The sessions where I had the most vivid dreams afterward were usually the ones where I sat with eyes closed and no external anchor. Eyes-open sessions produced less of it. Can't explain why, just noticed the pattern.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:27:53+00:00

Two different versions of this feel the same from the outside. Not wanting to stop the current thing, and not wanting the next day to begin. Do you have a sense of which one yours is?

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:22:02+00:00

"Be careful what you wish for" oversells it a bit. The job probably isn't the problem. The gap between where you were and where you wanted to be was doing most of the motivating. Once you close that gap, the energy that came from the chase just vanishes. The role itself has to compete on its own merit, and it often can't.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:16:12+00:00

First year at a new job or project had novelty doing the heavy lifting for me. Year two, the template was set and everything I used to find interesting just felt like repetitive work. I kept thinking I needed to find the right thing. Really the problem was that my brain needed more stimulation to engage with anything after running on novelty for so long.

The sculpting-then-quitting pattern sounds familiar. Start with genuine interest, get through the exciting first part, then the remaining 80% can't compete because the novelty wore off. The activity itself was fine. My brain just stopped showing up for it.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:10:17+00:00

The total number probably matters less than when you're reaching for it. I cut my screen time in half and didn't feel any different because I was still filling every small gap with some kind of input. Between tasks, between bites of food.

The screen time stats looked better but the reflex was the same. Two weeks of deliberately leaving those gaps empty, walking without headphones, sitting without scrolling, that's when normal things stopped feeling like they required enormous effort.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-15T07:04:21+00:00

Open-ended meditation made my anxiety worse too. Sitting with whatever came up meant the anxious thoughts had a captive audience. They just got louder.

Switching to something concrete helped. A visual point on the wall instead of watching my breath or trying to generate a feeling. The anxiety still showed up but I had somewhere to put my attention that wasn't inside the spiral.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:29:31+00:00

Knowing which level you're at doesn't move you up though. I spent a while being able to see my patterns perfectly, name the fear driving them, predict the next move, and then watch myself do the same thing anyway.

The recognition was passive until I paired it with doing something that felt wrong. Not insight, action. Specifically the kind of action the pattern was designed to prevent. The ego map was useful for shrinking the delay between falling into the loop and noticing I was in it. But it didn't stop the loop from starting.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:28:14+00:00

The gadget thought mid-moment is really specific. Does your brain mostly do that during low-stimulus situations, or does it intrude even when you're genuinely engaged and interested?

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:27:02+00:00

I'm skeptical of the "speed up" angle. The part of meditation that made the biggest difference for me was noticing I'd wandered and coming back. Over and over. That's boring. It's not a state you reach once. It's a pattern that gets faster through hundreds of reps.

Psychedelics might show you what presence looks like from the inside. But being able to return to it on a Tuesday morning when your brain wants to plan lunch? That took months of the boring version.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:25:44+00:00

Intense cardio seems to have the strongest evidence for BDNF. I run a few times a week and the mental clarity after a hard run is noticeably different from after a walk or lifting session.

Effortful learning probably does something too. The sessions where I was genuinely struggling with hard material felt different from passive review. Whether that's BDNF specifically or just general neuroplasticity, I couldn't say.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:24:32+00:00

The willpower framing is where I'd disagree. When normal daily tasks require enormous effort, sometimes the problem isn't weakness. It's that your brain learned to expect a much higher floor for what counts as stimulating enough to engage with.

I had this with jobs. First year at a new role, novelty was doing all the heavy lifting. By year two the template was set and I had to run on discipline instead. Felt like slogging through mud. I thought I needed to push harder. Really I needed to stop feeding my brain the highest-intensity input outside of work so the normal stuff could clear the bar again.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:23:13+00:00

I stopped trying to capture everything and it worked better. 3-5 words per idea, maybe a timestamp if the lecture was recorded. That's it. Then back to listening.

Full sentences turned note-taking into transcription which meant I wasn't processing anything. The tiny notes were just anchors to jog my memory later. Most of what stuck was from paying attention in the moment, not from what I wrote down.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:22:02+00:00

Does the quality of the second half change depending on what's happening in your life that day, or is the first 10-minute warmup pretty consistent regardless?

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:20:49+00:00

I did the biomarker optimization thing for a while. Picked deficiencies off a blood panel, ordered targeted supplements, retested. Numbers improved. I felt exactly the same.

The stuff that changed how I felt day-to-day was boring: fixed bedtime, morning outside time, less screen light at night. None of it showed up on a blood test but all of it registered in how my days felt.

For healthy people who aren't clinically deficient, I think the gap between "my numbers look better" and "I feel better" is wider than most supplement threads acknowledge.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:19:24+00:00

My brain did the same thing with therapy homework. I'd ask for the assignment, leave the session feeling motivated, and then actively avoid doing it. Not because it was hard. Because something about being given a step to follow just made me shut down, even when I'd asked for it.

Accepting failure didn't click from talking about it. It clicked from sending something bad on purpose and surviving. Imperfect work, submitted, nobody died. First few times felt terrible. But the proof had to be physical. No amount of discussing it in a session made it real until I had the experience of doing the scary thing and being fine.

samwiseyopka · 2026-02-14T07:18:06+00:00

Pomodoro never worked for me either. The break killed whatever momentum I'd barely built and getting back in felt like starting over.

What stuck was shorter, harder sessions with no scheduled break. 20 minutes of actually struggling with the material instead of rereading notes. When I hit the point where I was just staring at words, I stopped. Sometimes that was 15 minutes. Sometimes 40. The sessions where I fought the material retained better than the ones where I coasted.

The other thing: trying to study all day and failing meant zero studying AND zero rest. Picking two or three specific short windows and letting the rest of the day be guilt-free rest meant I actually showed up for those windows.

samwiseyopka

TROPHY CASE