HealthyGamerGG - "Why Does ADHD Make Me Feel Drained?"

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

If you have ADHD it takes you more effort to do one thing than it takes a neurotypical person. Until you train yourself otherwise. In this episode, we take a deeper look into ADHD and how to live with it.  Check out HG coaching: https://bit.ly/47dF7rF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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rated PG-13. Now streaming on, you guessed it, Disney Plus. TLDR, everybody else, seems to be doing so much more with their life and still have energy left at the end of the day. I'm trying my best, but it feels like 10% of what others do, and yet again, I feel like I could sleep for six months straight. I want to do more, help more, work more, socialize more, but I feel like I'm running on the battery of a small alarm clock from the early 90s. 30-year-old male here have been diagnosed with ADHD when I was 10. People forgot about it. Life fell apart.

struggled all my life with depression and anxiety, had therapy, got re-diagnosed at 26. Finally, stuff started to make sense. In the past four years have been the best of my life so far. Lately, though, the past few weeks, I've noticed that I'm becoming increasingly quieter, more tired, and generally meh. I know this could be to a myriad of reasons. Nobody here could definitely tell me what is going on, but apparently I still had the impulse to share. So, yes, I have a lot of stress with my studies at the moment. I don't remember the last time I had a proper break in the sense that I had no, oh, I have to do XYZ until XYZ or I'll get in trouble. I've checked everything else.

I sleep all right, rather active, cycle every day, go for long walks, have stuff to do surrounded by people. Every day relationship is going well. No financial stress or anything. Blood has been checked lately and everything seems fine. Awesome. I might just be stressed, but there are so many people around me that seem to be doing so much more than I'm doing.

I know it's hard to compare oneself to other people, but I just feel like what I'm doing every day is so much less. At the end of the day, many people even seem to have time and space left to socialize. Hell, my battery is drained after three hours of interaction. Oh, interesting. Interesting. I wonder if there is research around this. Huh. Predict mental depletion after a three-hour delay. Fascinating.

After three hours of interaction, I would love to or have the feeling that I should take care of connecting with friends more. But honestly, I just want to be alone with my girlfriend at the end of the day and make some music or go for a walk. What's wrong with me? Am I doing something wrong? Should I be doing more? I'm not doing enough. I am not enough. You know the drill.

Okay. So this is a case of a 30-year-old person. Diagnosed with ADHD did not get treated. Started getting treated at 26. Now they're doing well. It sounds like they're in a relationship. They're advancing either with work or studying. They're in a high stress situation.

So there isn't a day that goes by where they don't think about, okay, I got to do this. There's a deadline coming up, et cetera, et cetera. And they feel like they have no energy left. And other people around them seem to be doing the same amount of work, but have energy left at the end of the day. So why is this? Hey, y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health.

It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose-your-own-adventure format. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. A lot of things going on here. So let's start with this. The first is that if you have ADHD, it takes you more effort. to do one thing, then it takes a neurotypical person, until you train yourself otherwise. So if we look at the nature of distractibility, I've got to work on a paper. Open up a word document, start typing. And then I get distracted. Oh, I need to find this thing.

I need to, I pull this thing out. I start reading it. Okay, this paper is over here. I don't understand what this means. I'm going to look at something on Wikipedia. Once I'm on Wikipedia on the computer, I'm going to alt tab and watch some YouTube, highly distractible. So if you look at the amount of time it takes to complete a task, it takes one hour of work for a neurotypical person and one hour of work for an ADHD person. The problem is that the person with ADHD spends four hours doing one hour of work. And so what happens is at the end of those four hours, you've been like your machine has been running for four hours,

but you only have a one hour yield to show for it. So if we look at it from an objective perspective, until people with ADHD learn otherwise, and we'll get to that, it literally takes them more effort to do the same amount of work. So this person is not wrong. But there's way more to the story. The second thing that tends to happen, and I see this a lot with people with ADHD,

is people tend to flounder for a while. And something happens at the age of 26, very common adult ADHD is an increasing diagnosis. So it gets missed a lot in childhood. Why? Because kids with ADHD are smart. If you are a smart kid with ADHD, you develop compensatory mechanisms so that the ADHD does not affect your life as much. And so you actually don't get the help that you should get if you are faced. completely. So you're able to pull off Cs instead of straight Fs. Because even though it takes

you four hours to do one hour worth of work, you're so fucking smart that you can take that hour and you can actually turn it into two. So the ADHD diagnosis gets missed. Then what happens is as it gets diagnosed later in life and people start putting their lives together, they enter this period and I want to say it's like two to four years in, like really three, four years in, where they start to feel a ton of fatigue. And why? is that? It's because they're ramping up to a regular life. So I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but, you know, when you first start college, it feels overwhelming and then you ramp up to it. Right? Suddenly, like, you're not forced to go to class, so you have to learn time management.

You have to like, you only go to class three days a week or whatever. There's a lot more like optional stuff. So there's like this adjustment period. When I started med school, there was one hell of an adjustment. I just finished college and then suddenly you are learning five times as much information per week. And there's one hell of adjustment in your first year of med school. And then they ramp it up in your second year. And now you're learning 10 times as much as you did in college. And then they ramp it up more in third year. Because now in third year, you're working in the hospital. You don't have time to read all day, but you're expected to know all of this stuff. and that's an adjustment.

So life is a series of adjustments. And what happens with people with ADHD is since they're so behind in life, as they start to catch up and they become somewhere on the level of normal human beings, if you compare yourself to your peers, like they've gone through that adjustment phase

and you're still adapting. So it can feel like it's really, really, really hard for you to like survive. Even though you're surviving, it feels very exhausting. That will get better. And I see this really with people with ADHD, like in year three or four of college, where now they're like playing in the big leagues with everybody else,

and that's just tiring in and of itself. The third thing that's going on here is stress. So if you sort of think about your third or fourth years, those are objectively harder than your first or second years in a lot of ways. Right? Advanced classes, more intensive material. You're writing theses, things like that. There's like other like kind of advanced stuff.

Generally speaking, it can be easier for a lot of people because you enjoy it more, hopefully. But the workload is objectively higher. And so when you're in this position of, I think this person puts it this way, I have a lot of stress with my studies at the moment. Yes, I don't remember the last time I had a proper break in the sense that I had a, oh, I have to do XYZ until X, until X, Y, Z. I'll get in trouble. So what I'm hearing from this person is this person has constant. constant deadlines and hasn't been able to take a break. So how does that affect people?

It affects them through the cortisol system. So what cortisol does is buys me 24 hours of high productivity for a week of exhaustion afterward. That's literally what happens. So what cortisol does is increases, cannibalizes are things like muscle tissue to give us energy over the 24-hour period. So what we're doing is we're chopping down a wall to get firewood to survive for the next 24 hours.

So when you're in a chronic state of stress, because normally what happens is human beings would recover, right? If I'm like hunting in the jungle and I get attacked by a pack of hyenas, I fend off the hyenas, I run away, my tribe comes to save me, we move a little bit, and then it's not like there's another pack of hyenas there the next day.

Then I like rest, I relax, I catch up on my sleep, I recover. But in modern society, we don't get those times. We have chronic stress. So every day, I don't, my body has the system that activates, that helps me get through the next 24 hours, but then I don't rest for a week afterward. And so over time, that depletes your ability to do work.

So why are you more fatigued than your colleagues? Because literally, your body has been chopping down walls for firewood, and then you're wondering, why am I? I getting more cold because your walls are gone. So this is the next thing that's going on. The last thing that goes on with ADHD, why people feel so exhausted, is this. What is wrong with me? Am I doing something wrong? Should I be doing more? I am not doing enough. I am not enough. This is the other problem. So why is it that someone with ADHD cannot realize that this is not me? Why do they assume that the problem is within me instead of, yeah, I'm in advanced courses, I'm working really hard.

I actually objectively have a lot on my plate. Why don't they think that way? So if you look at a population of people who have ADHD and depression, what you discover is that 70% of the people who have ADHD first will develop depression later in life. 3% of the people who have depression first will develop ADHD later in life. ADHD has a causative effect for depression. Why is that? When a child grows up with ADHD, something very important happens. They realize that I'm just as smart as my friends.

They realize that I'm no stupider than anyone else. But they also see when they're the first grade, the second grade, they're six years old, seven years old. They start to realize that I'm not able to do what they're able to do. It's way harder for me to pay attention. I forget my homework. I forgot I had a test. I'm just as smart as they are, but I can't remember having a test. When I sit down to study just like they do, I'm just as smart as they are, but I can't actually read the words on the page. They don't even realize that, right? They just have the textbook open in front of their mind is all over the place. They just realize, I can't do this.

And no one ever explains to them that this is like a problem because you have ADHD. Your attention is different from other kids. There's nothing wrong. What is wrong with you, what's different is your attention?

So what does a six-year-old conclude in the absence of a diagnosis, a compassionate diagnosis, and some amount of explanation? There is something wrong with me. Fundamentally, something's busted because I'm just as smart as they are. But when I put in four hours,

I get a B. And when they put in one hour, they get an A. There's something fundamentally wrong with me. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing.

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And why is that? It's because they don't wait their turn on the playground because they're distractible and impulsive. So they don't get invited to places. And then there's social isolation. And then we're also proud of kids for what, for doing well in school? So we're not proud of those kids. In fact, what happens is those kids, like myself, get taken to teacher conferences.

And the teacher would say, you know what? Alok is so smart. He just needs to apply himself. If he just tried harder, then he could do so much more. And so what does the kid feel walking out of that school conference? It means that there's not something wrong with me. It's just a lack of my effort. I'm just like, I'm not, my IQ ain't low, but I'm just stupid for not applying myself.

They don't understand that I'm actually applying myself as hard as I can. And so the feedback that these children get essentially results in this. Look at this statement. This is damning. I am not enough. I am not enough. And when you carry this within you, then it shapes how you look at everything else.

You don't consider the stress objectively because in the back of your mind, you're not enough. So it's not the stress or the external circumstances, even though this person intellectually knows that it's the circumstances. You guys see this? Like, look, intellectually, in their post, they say, I have a lot of stress.

I don't remember the last time I had a proper. or break. Even though they know that, they're unable to connect those dots. One part of their mind is connecting those dots. Hey, the reason you're fucking tired all the time is because you haven't had a break. They even went and got blood tested. Maybe something's wrong with me. Okay, nothing's wrong with me. Let me just check. There's a part of your brain that knows there's nothing wrong with you. The problem is that for 26 years of your life, you've learned that there's something wrong with you. And those two things clash. And now, That's why people with ADHD continue to blame themselves even though they're doing a good job.

So if you are in this pickle, a couple of things that you can do. The first thing that you can do is understand how to be better at working. So if you look at psychotherapy for ADHD versus medication treatment for ADHD, both of them improve ADHD the same amount. I can send someone to a psychotherapist or give them. Adderall or a stimulant, and I can improve their focus by the same amount. I can improve their outcomes by the same amount. The difference is that if the medication stops, the effect goes away. If we stop psychotherapy, the effect lasts for two years after stopping psychotherapy. Why? So what

psychotherapists will do is teach people with ADHD how to function in this world, despite having distractible attention. It means things like get really good with your calendar. Make a to-do list. So one tip that I'll give people is that if you're working on a project, find all of your materials first and assemble them. Don't go and look for materials in the middle of your work. So if you've got some stuff on Google Drive or Dropbox, open it all up and set it to the side or print those papers out and keep them there. Because if you open up a new tab and start hunting for stuff on the internet

when you are trying to write a paper and you have ADHD, you're screwed. All of your work materials need to be organized. Calendar, alarms, all kinds of stuff. You can set up a system that will essentially protect you from your ADHD. We dive into this super, super deep with Dr. K's guide to ADHD

and doing stuff. It's a guide about what is the science of doing stuff? What are the techniques that you need to understand that will help you do stuff? And this is everything from like understanding emotional blocks to organizational systems. So you can get some of that from therapy. You can get some of it from the guide.

Second thing that you need to work on with ADHD is your sense of confidence or the person that you believe that you are, essentially the untreated trauma of ADHD, of growing up with ADHD. That's under-treated. Because then you will form conclusions about yourself that will sabotage your efforts to do better in life. This is something that a psychotherapist will help you with.

And when I work with a patient with ADHD, what I basically do, I have a one-two punch. So I'm going to help with all these organizational skills and I'm going to work on their confidence. So I'm going to treat this patient as if they have depression. And if I can get them to believe in themselves again, it'll change the way that they look at the world. So this is like the key thing to do, right? So you need to learn the organizational tools that will protect you from your ADHD. Meditation is also great.

You can train your executive function and stuff like that. That's what we cover in the guide. And absolutely go see a therapist. Third, four things you can do. You can absolutely like, you know, go get your hormones checked, go see a medical doctor, start medication if that's what you want to do. But the beautiful thing is I work with a ton of people who have ADHD who are very successful. and did not start out that way.

There is absolutely a methodology to this. In this case, is textbook. And if you're someone who struggles with this, where even though you're doing better in life, it feels so exhausting. And other people seem to be playing life on easy mode and you're playing life on hard mode. You can still down the bosses and beat the level,

but it costs you so much more. And you carry around this idea that, like, I'm not enough in some way. this needs to be fixed. Both of them can absolutely be fixed. With some simple organizational skills and like workflow kind of stuff, you can learn how to study with a distractible mind and work on your confidence.

That's what will ultimately help you realize, like, okay, I can do just as well as someone who's neurotypical in this world. I just need to play the hand that I'm dealt. Instead of copycatting, neurotypical kids. that's where ADHD kids get screwed. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax.

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