Your ADHD Can Actually Be An Advantage

all right so you know there's been a lot of interest in our community about adhd recently and um you know we've been talking we gave up we did a lecture on why adhd people with adhd wind up with addiction so easily we also talked about why people with adhd wind up with depression so easily and like what are the correlations between those two things but one of the key things that i tend to talk to just about all of my adhd patients about which we haven't really talked about here is uh why adhd exists so if you if you guys check out dr k's guide to depression and dr k's guide to anxiety there's sections in there about why depression and anxiety exist like these are essentially illnesses that are hyper activations of existing circuitry so in the case of depression we have this thing called the default mode network which gives us the capacity to self-reflect and it's when our self-reflection capacity gets overblown and turned on stuck in the on position that we wind up with depression so people who are depressed for example always think about themselves like in a weird way right they're like oh the world would be better off without me where it's like the world doesn't really you know it's like gonna be okay if you're there or not there right you start to think like very very you get stuck thinking about how bad you are like literally the thoughts in your mind are stuck on you and your sadness in anxiety for example anxiety is nothing but the ability to predict danger in the future like that's a very useful circuit to have in the brain right like we want the ability to predict problems when that circuit gets stuck in the on position we end up sort of like always seeing danger everywhere because any uncertainty becomes a source of danger and so this is the kind of thing where like you know as we understand depression anxiety and if you really want to overcome them you have to understand like why these things exist in our brains and where they come from to truly like understand how they work and then ultimately master them so what i'd like to do today we've talked a lot about adhd and depression adhd and addiction this and that yadda yadda procrastination whatever but we've never talked about why adhd exists or what is it truly and so my hope today is to share with you all some information about my understanding of like why humans have adhd how adhd is changing over time and how it may not necessarily be a may not necessarily be as maladaptive as people think so the first thing to understand uh before we kind of dive in is that i'm going to be talking about adhd in sort of a broad term and i just want to acknowledge that for example like if we look at the level of adhd across the population that it kind of varies okay and what i mean by that is that there's sort of like a bell curve of attention so let's do this okay so if we want to understand adhd what we want to do we just have to start by kind of acknowledging this so if we look at like people's attention so the capacity to attend to something society looks like this so there's like you know most people like can sort of control their attention this is where like most people kind of exist right so one standard deviation includes 85 percent of the population if my statistics is pretty good but then there are some people over here who have very strong attention and then some people down here who have attention that wanders a lot so what we're going to talk about is why human beings have fluctuating or like a wide span of attention right so if we look at human beings if we look at something like let's say we just look at height as a quality or tendency to get anger angry so like we look at anger or height we see essentially the same thing so most attributes within human populations are going to follow this kind of bell curve where like 85 percent of people are going to be here and then some people get super angry and then some people are doormats and that's just how human beings work so the question is sort of like why and it tends to be that you know human beings have variability in situations that like variability is beneficial for people so if we look at something like anger you know we don't want everyone to be getting super pissed all the time we want some people to be like get angry easily right and maybe they're going to be our warriors and then we want some people who are going to be like a little bit more passive and maybe they're going to be our farmers and so we tend to see across human populations that we have you know a bell curve of cognitive ability and attention is no different so then the question becomes like why wouldn't we want everyone having like a super focused attention you know why do we want people that have attention that wanders and so the the short answer is like there's a very interesting theory about hunters versus farmers so some people did some personality research and essentially concluded that there are two types of people the farmer is someone who like likes routine doesn't get bored so like you know wants stability so the farmer will like wake up at 5am every day like go out to the fields do the same thing like day after day after day after day and they derive a lot of pleasure or enjoyment from like things like routine and stability they really like they dislike being disrupted so they don't want like random events to happen they just want they want to be able to predict things and they derive a lot of like pleasure enjoyment and satisfaction out of routine and then we have hunters so hunters are a little bit different the idea of waking up and doing the same thing over and over and over again is like very very like annoying or frustrating to them they get bored easily so what they need to do is they need to be like more dynamic so they like you know walking through the jungle and paying attention to lots of different stimuli so they're like oh like look there's like something happening over here and then this looks like a animal footprint and what is that that i smell it seems like something's going on i smell something strange and then there's birds circling overhead oh they're like vultures over there so maybe there's like some kind of predator over there so hunters are people that integrate a lot of in information and so what we kind of see is that in like old human society we sort of needed both right we needed some people to go out and hunt and we needed some people to like kind of stay at home and farm and that the more successful societies were the ones that had like both cognitive types okay so in a sense like what we see is that attention variation within populations is selected for is a positive so what does that mean for us okay what that means for us is that our society has been shaped over the last year primarily by farmers right so like if you kind of look ever since the industrial revolution like we've had you know this idea of like fixed time jobs right like as as things got more centralized what we started to see is like okay you go to the same place every day you have your job like even the concept of a job like a thing that you do instead of lots of things that you do is like a farmer-oriented society right because the farmers basically took over and they're like everyone's gonna have a job and this is gonna be your job and i'm gonna do my job and we're all gonna do our jobs and then like society will work wonderfully and then we've got our hunters who are like i'm bored of my job i want to do something else and the farmers were like no you have to if you want to be outside instead of being indoors you can deliver mail become a postal worker and so our society since the industrial revolution got heavily shaped by farmers and so what ended up happening is our society became more and more methodical more structured where everyone is the cog in their you know in in the particular machine that they're a part of and the farmers love that kind of thing they're like fantastic like everyone is a cog there's perfect order there's stability and the world is is going well and then there's a group of people who are the hunters who started to struggle in this society so they actually started to like move into potentially like more um dynamic professions right so as schooling got implemented we started selecting for people who can sit in a chair from eight to three so now we started selecting people for their ability to sit in a chair and then we added college which is like okay who is like farmer enough to not be forced into learning and kind of can kind of learn on their own so then we added something like a gpa right and what we did is we selected for people in college who are like not dynamic they're people who can force themselves to go to class or they don't have to force themselves they like going to class because they're structured they go to their 8 a.m class they study on time they do everything on time they don't procrastinate and we're going to reward these people so over time what happened is society became pro-farmer and then we did something interesting okay what we did is we took the hunter kids in school and we said oh my god these hunter kids are they're not able to sit and do what they're supposed to right and so then we started diagnosing them with adhd so there's a couple of interesting things here the first is that studies have been done that the student teacher ratio determines the likelihood of getting diagnosed with adhd if you have one teacher to 30 students versus one teacher to 15 students adhd will be like twice as likely to be diagnosed in this group than this group and that's controlling for number of kids so if i have two uh let's put it this way you know like if i have two classrooms one that has 30 kids and two teachers and one that has 30 kids and one teacher like the number of adhd diagnoses in this classroom is going to be way higher and so what we begin to see is something that's interesting about a disorder which is that a disorder especially mental illnesses disorders aren't just disorders by themselves a disorder evolves when there's a genetic vulnerability plus environmental circumstance so what we see in adhd is that if you literally look at the term disorder there's a lack of order or function within a particular environment and so for people who have adhd what it is is their mind is dynamic right so that may be the genetic vulnerability they may be a hunter and what we're doing is we're putting them in a classroom right we're sticking them on a farm and so this is where the disorder the disorder arises between within this gap and this is what adhd is now this is where we have to go back for a second to our bell curve and acknowledge that like for a lot of people that i work with with adhd it's about finding the right environment for them to to thrive in and then their illness no longer becomes a disorder it can actually become a disadvantage i mean an advantage but there are there are certainly people who have very disordered attention to where like they lit like really it is like feels like a very serious like illness to me but i would say that the majority of people that i work with with adhd even though it is an illness or a disorder or uh makes their life hard that i would say like two-thirds of them about 70 of them can function very well with their adhd in the right circumstance and in fact it's even advantageous so there are some professions that we'll talk about so event planner is actually surprisingly one other examples are like twitch streamer esports athlete so actually a lot of professions even working in the emergency room um can that or being a paramedic being a plumber there are several professions that bizarrely enough seem to like work totally fine with people with adhd and there are some situations where adhd in having a dynamic mindset because remember that the reason you're getting diagnosed is because you're unable to sit in a classroom for like seven hours a day right so like there are even some professions which are actually geared towards adhd and if you actually like go back and watch all of the uh interviews we've done with streamers what you'll find is that like like a greater percentage of streamers compared to the normal population have adhd just based on their own self-report right like so many people like will say like oh yeah i have adhd and it turns out that this kind of hunter mentality can actually be advantageous in some some situations so um just to kind of recap i think the key point here is that there are two kinds of people there's like farmers and they're hunters and when you stick a hunter in a farmer's society there you'll create an environmental circumstance that allows their dynamic mind to start to become like a disorder or not function well there's also sort of evidence to this where like when kids get individualized attention they're able to perform better in school and don't get kind of evaluated or diagnosed for adhd so there's a lot of stuff about like you know just the amount of structure that people can tolerate the other thing that tends to go on in a lot of schools is that people will medicate children for the purpose of obedience right so like if i have if i'm a if i'm a teacher and i've got like 30 rowdy kids and i medicate the five rowdiest of them then it's like easy for me to like teach my class right and what we tend to see is like the most disruptive kids get diagnosed with adhd because they can't restrain their attention so next thing that we're going to talk about is like what is attention deficit disorder add or adhd and we're going to talk a little bit about some myths around adhd and some like tricky things about diagnosis so the first thing to understand is that it is a disorder of attention okay so this is where a lot of people get tripped up so disorders of attention basically the way that i think about it is an inability to control your attention so this is this the lack of this understanding is why i think adhd is the most over diagnosed and the most under diagnosed psychiatric diagnosis and you may wonder how can something be over-diagnosed and under-diagnosed at the same time the reason that you can have that is because you get a lot of people who don't have the disorder that are getting a diagnosis and you are missing a lot of the people that do have a diagnosis but you don't catch it because of other things so here are a couple of common misnomers about adhd that people don't get the first is that people with adhd can't focus this is actually incorrect so with adhd we see a disorder of attention so what we see with adhd is actually hyper focus plus a lack of focus so what is actually very common in people with adhd is that they can sit and do one activity for four hours at a stretch provided it is the right activity so what you see is a disorder of attention where once an adhd kid is doing something it is very very hard to get them to change gears so once they almost have like an obsessive quality to their attention okay so this is one of the reasons that it gets misdiagnosed because like parents will be sitting there with their kids and they'll be like he never pays attention to school but once he starts playing with legos like you have to physically pull him away like it is so hard to get his attention once they are doing something that they're super into so this sort of disruption of focus or this like inability to control your attention can result in hyper focus and it's because parents or teachers or other people will see the hyper focus they'll even see it with a particular subject it's like my kid can't pay attention in math but like as long as it's history he can sit there and read books like you can give him like a history book at the age of seven and he'll like read it for four hours at a time so people with adhd can absolutely hyper focus on particular things and in this situation it can also be like maladaptive because you can't change your your focus you can't stop uh studying history and start studying mathematics plus a lack of focus so when it comes to mathematics you have once again like an inability to focus so when i think about disordered attention what i really when i think about adhd i think about disordered attention when i think about disordered attention it is both a combination of hyper focus and lack of focus okay so the next thing to kind of think a little bit about is um let me just think for a second whether i want to say anything about this does this make sense to people okay so the next thing to talk a little bit about i'm going to go over just a couple of other like reasons why adhd is misdiagnosed so the first is that we just kind of talked about is that adhd kids sometimes hyper focus therefore people think oh since they're capable of hyper focus they uh don't actually have adhd so other reasons are good grades so oftentimes what you'll have is kids with adhd who have high iqs plus adhd and what this results in is good grades and just because a kid is like brute force iq their way through things or develops compensatory mechanisms for studying so like they're not actually able to sit in focus but they may develop all kinds of compensatory mechanisms like group studying another example of self-medication with drugs another example is being a night owl and you may wonder what does being a night owl have to do with adhd well let me explain to you so people with adhd sometimes find that a certain amount of fatigue slows down their mind and allows them to study right and so you'll also see this this kind of pattern will they'll do other things to slow their mind down either drugs or they'll even play video games they'll do things that kind of make them like half exhausted so that their mind is able to like sit properly so we see a lot of misdiagnosis actually because kids have good grades because kids are smart so we miss the diagnosis another reason that we've already talked about is things like class size so this is another reason why kids are diagnosed with adhd is because like you know there's just too many kids in the class and so normally like if you think about a six-year-old like a six-year-old is only supposed to be able to hold their attention for a certain amount of time but depending on external pressures class size things like that you can actually get like over diagnosis of adhd there's also remember uh another reason that it's misdiagnosed is like you know uh how can i say this like development idiosyncrasies so remember that the primary reason the regions of the brain that are involved in adhd are the frontal lobes or executive function which if you guys watch either of my other lectures on depression or addiction you'll realize this statement is a huge oversimplification because we go over all the different regions of the brain that adhd affects so executive dysfunction is kind of what we're looking at right and so we also have to remember that like kids develop at different rates so not all seven-year-olds are gonna behave the same right just like height or appetite or puberty or all manner of other like developmental milestones our frontal lobes ability and our executive dysfunction or function develops at its own idiosyncratic rate and so some people are just like you know some people start puberty early some people start puberty late in the same way some people's frontal lobes develop earlier some people's frontal lobes develop later like i see this even in my two kids because my older kid has like a super developed frontal lobe for her age and my younger kid like by comparison it doesn't have frontal lobe that's quite as developed or not anywhere near and that's just like individually the way they are like the younger one will get there and this is going to take her some amount of time so there are developmental idiosyncrasies that will cause people to diagnose kids with adhd and you may get a label and once you get a label you're like oh i have adhd even though as your frontal lobe develops you may grow out of adhd and if you guys kind of think like how is it possible to grow out of adhd just think about the attention span of a 2 year old versus 4 year old versus 14 year old versus 40 year old right the attention span naturally changes over time so even if you get diagnosed at the age of 12 with adhd you may not have adhd when you're 22. it doesn't necessarily have to be a lifelong diagnosis so this is another reason that people get misdiagnosed with adhd so class size or environment so there's another thing that oftentimes like these are the ways in which adhd gets missed this is why it gets misdiagnosed this is sort of how it gets misdiagnosed so what i mean by that is that a lot of times like kids with adhd will be labeled with behavioral problems okay so like you'll get a kid and they'll they'll be like oh they like oh here's another one actually so doesn't listen or is defiant okay this is really really common we remember that the problem with adhd is like attentional control so if an adhd kid is playing with legos their parents will say that this person doesn't listen and oftentimes like like you know let's say you have a kid with adhd and you tell them go wash your hands and then the kid like on the way to the bathroom will get distracted by something because they'll see like a toy on the floor and they'll start picking it up they'll start playing with the toy and the parents will get mad at them right and once they get mad at they're like like you you're not listening to me you never listen bad child bad child bad child and so this not listening thing gets sometimes perceived as defiance and then the punishment that they get then leads to shame and self-esteem problems and a lack of agency so we talked about this in the depression lecture as well where a lot of times like you know kids with adhd will get like punished or they'll have different kinds of experiences either social experiences behavioral experiences like school experiences they're perceived as not being obedient right so that's kind of like the defiant thing so we'll get all these kids who actually have adhd who are labeled as bad kids so they have behavioral problems they don't listen they're defiant you know they're argumentative um there are all kinds of problems that these kids will kind of get labeled as but that's not they don't actually have those problems they're not being defiant it's not like the kid is like walking to the bathroom and is like screw my parents i'm gonna play something what they end up doing is they just get distracted by something and then they like they just get distracted by it and then they get punished for it and then they feel bad because they don't even really realize what they did wrong right they sort of connect the dots afterward but in the moment their mind just like switches gears and they forget there's another thing they get perceived as forgetful right so oh like this person is just forgetful like their memory is terrible i've even had this so i one time had um a dude come into my office and say like i think i may have dementia and the dude was like in his like late 20s and i was like why do you think you have dementia i was like that's bizarre like i don't hear that every day they're like well my memory is just terrible and i was like well tell me about that and he's like well my wife tells me i forget stuff all the time so we started talking about it and then like the more that i realized like oh this guy doesn't have a memory problem he has like an attention problem so this is where if we remember so if we think about like memories stored in our brain let's say this is where memories are stored remember they have to get in they have to get put in somewhere and then they have to get recalled and so if if this is missing or you can't recall it properly we think oh like it it you know i wasn't able to recall it but the truth is it never got planted in in the first place so a good example of this is if someone tells me if i ask like this is a classic example okay the easy example of understanding attention versus recall who here meets a bunch of people at a party and forgets their names right like it doesn't have to be a bunch of people it can even be one person you meet one person you you're like hey my name is olok and they say my name is whatever like it doesn't never even sinks in like and you're like oh i forgot that person's name right and it's like how can you forget that person's name so quickly like within five seconds of introducing yourself you forget their name within two seconds of introducing yourself you're like what was that person's name again and then you just or they just introduced themselves you've already forgotten the name so you don't like think that you're like oh well it's stupid i can't just ask them like right away like what is your name right so why does that happen it's an intentional thing because when you introduce yourselves your attention is on your introduction so you're not listening to them so the name never gets implanted in your brain in the first place right so it's never being entered in and so this is why people with adhd have like they they get perceived as forgetful it's not because they have any problem with recall they don't have dementia it's just that their attention is wandering so the stuff never gets put in in the first place okay so this is like when we kind of look at the misdiagnosis of adhd or let's start from the top so like adhd essentially is a disorder of attention and that attentional disorder can result in hyper focus which leads to a lot of misdiagnosis because parents are like oh like you know he can like do roblox all day long no big deal also gaming right so we'll talk about let's talk about gaming in a second but uh it's both hyper focus plus a lack of focus it tends to get misdiagnosed or missed in a lot of people due to their ability to get good grades which oftentimes has to do with like compensatory mechanisms that they'll set up um can get misdiagnosed due to things like class size or environment because remember a psychiatric diagnosis tends to be a vulnerability plus an environmental factor combined and then um another reason that it gets misdiagnosed is because people just develop at their own pace so it's like you can't expect all seven-year-olds to be able to sit in the classroom at the same level right some kids are going to really love it some kids it's going to be hard and then like people will sort of grow out of it so oftentimes kids with adhd get misdiagnosed with things like behavioral problems problems like oh they don't listen they get punished for defiance or lack of obedience um for being forgetful oh my kid is like they're just completely forgetful like i can't rely on them for you know to remember anything and it's not an issue of recall it's an issue of attention so let's talk about gaming for a second in adhd why do kids with adhd love gaming it's because games demand your attention okay so like this is the cool thing about a video game right like it doesn't ever kind of get boring it just like and and people with adhd will self select for particular video games that um will demand their attention in the right way so the game is constantly giving you stimuli right so it's like oh like there's a random encounter here if i'm playing like fortnite or a battle royale like now there's someone over here or like i can queue up for a game of league and there's always like some kind of thing that is like triggering and pulling in your attention and so this is also where people will get misdiagnosed because parents will be like i don't understand why my kid can't study he can sit there and literally play on you know on a computer for like 12 hours like without stopping for food and that is once again because it is disordered attention right so they can hyper focus so video games are are very very addictive to people with adhd because they allow your mind to be fully focused and it's sort of like a never ending like ability to get focused and this is where we can almost take a quick spiritual detour and we can acknowledge that if you look at like old texts on yoga and meditation they say that focus equals bliss that the happy mind is not an anxious mind or a distracted mind but a focused mind so if you do something like watch a sunset why do sunsets look so cool it's because they like allow you to focus your mind if we look at the nature of like um you know unhappiness in the mind it's usually like unfocused thoughts so a good example of this is anxiety when you're thinking about one thing and you're thinking about another thing and you're thinking about a third thing you may think that it's all the same thought but if you really pay attention to anxiety it's actually rapidly moving thoughts you may be anxious about a party but you may think oh does that mean that i'm focused on the party no if you actually pay attention to your thoughts you're not focused on the party when you have anxiety about going to a party you're like oh what if i'm wearing the wrong thing and then what if people think i'm stupid and then people won't like me and who am i gonna talk to am i gonna be standing in the corner with a drink not talking to myself and everyone's gonna think i'm a loser and then like i'm gonna walk up and try to join a conversation and that's gonna seem super awkward because i'm just like walking up and not saying anything so you kind of think about like all these 15 different things it's not one thought it's not like watching a sunset where you're not like thinking oh like the sunset has this sunspot here and then it's got this and then it's got this and then it's got this you're just absorbed in the experience so yogi sort of figured out that focus equals bliss and if you can be absorbed in one thing that will lead to a mental feeling of like calmness and enjoyment and so this is what's so addictive about gaming is that gaming sort of gives us a sense of focus and so even though the game is rage inducing we find ourselves drawn to it why because we can be absorbed within it right so like a good example of this is like if you if you play something like dark souls like while you're fighting the boss you have like laser focus and it's after you get one-shotted that you throw your controller down and smash everything right but it's it's the sh because when you get one shot at in dark souls what happens it shatters your beautiful focus when you're playing like league of legends or valerant or whatever you're like hyper focused and it's when your teammate ins down mid that it shatters your focus and then you start raging why because this thing gets taken away from you okay so we see kind of that gaming and adhd are like really really great because they take your disordered attention and allow you to hyper focus on it so easily and the mind just loves that from a spiritual perspective by spiritual perspective i mean this is sort of like the way that the yogi's looked at things it's not really like scientific in the sense that they didn't do like you know a randomized controlled trial on ten thousand humans what they did is look at themselves with like ten thousand intensity they took an n of one and explored it all the way down to the core okay so now let's talk a little bit since we're on the topic of gaming so now let's talk a little bit about like being adhd in the modern world okay and why is this important it's because if we look at our world our world is changing rapidly so remember that the industrial revolution basically made us a society of farmers right where everyone is a cog in the wheel or cog in the machine right we have nine to five all this other stuff there's this idea of high school college career even the word career you guys get this the word career implies like one thing that you do for your entire life it's a farmer biased word you guys get that it's not like and then the there's like the opposite is odd jobs right like and so you guys see like the value judgment difference between these two things so if you look at someone like elon musk like he doesn't have a career he's a dude with odd jobs you all get that like bill gates had a career elon musk has odd jobs he's like uh i'm a i'm gonna start a company that sends people into space i'm gonna start an electric car company i'ma start a company that drills into the ground and like high-speed rail transport like on california right so like this is where if we look at the industrial revolution and the consequence of the industrial revolution what we see is that like there's such a heavy bias about what is successful and what is good versus what is bad and it's very very farmer focused it's very anti-hunter okay but now like the world is changing so like i'll just give you guys a couple of examples okay so like what tends to happen is over time our attention can transform so we can you know make our attention more farmer-like or we can go over here and make it more hunter-like so studies that have been done which basically show that like short content makes people more adhd so there are studies that show that like so people will sometimes ask me okay is it okay if my kid like uses a screen and they're like what do you think about screen time dr k and that's where like i know it sounds kind of weird but not all screen time is the same like there's no such thing i mean there is something is screen time but how you use the screen makes a big difference oh my god that's just completely a legible chat even that's too much for me so for example what i'll advise parents to do is long form content on a on a screen is fine so for example a movie is okay but youtube compilations are bad and let's just think about this so like if i spend my days watching movies my brain is literally going to be entrained to pay attention to something over long periods of time if i watch youtube compilations my attention is shifting like every 60 seconds so ads are another thing that makes things like more hunter-like increases the dynamic nature of our mind so now let's look at a couple of different things okay so like let's look at a couple of categories let's talk about content then let's talk about uh discussion okay and then let's talk about dating so let's look at like how these things have progressed over time so back in the day if i wanted content what i had to do was read a book right and this was like a 30 hour endeavor and then what happened someone like invented television where they're like oh look there's a tv show and now it's like a one hour endeavor right and then someone came along and invented youtube and now it's like anywhere from five to 15 minutes right and then someone came along and was like hey let's do this live and they invented twitch now you can watch a stream for like eight hours at a stretch but like you know there's there's an increase in the dynamic nature of twitch right in which which content platform is growing the most rapidly there it is good job tick tock which is like less than 60 seconds bro so what's happening is like we are actually selecting for shorter and shorter attention spans so as kids start watching tick tock and if we kind of look at the adhd diagnosis adhd has been increasing all along right over time if we go down this way we'll see an increase in adhd diagnosis next thing to kind of think about let's think about like discussions for lack of a better term so it used to be like people talking like let's like you know the roman senate and then like people hanging out on porches right so these were like long things like people would talk for hours and then what's happening is like the internet comes along and then we have these things called discussion forums which if you still go to places like rpg codex you'll see like discussion forums that are like years old right you'll have a thread that's like years old where people are still talking about it and then over time we even get things like reddit where it's like there's some discussion but the discussion like tends to happen like temporarily or shortly and then we end up with things like twitch and twitter which is like if you blink you'll miss chat right and so we see the same thing oh no we're lagging gg we have to move um we see things like twitch and twitter where like the the discussion rate is very very rapid and let's even talk about dating okay so dating there used to be courtship this is like a long and drawn out process of like balls and meetings and things like that and then after the courtship process like years later centuries later we started this thing called dating right so people will say are you walking out with someone or whatever terminology they used and that like dating is like a little bit more dynamic you meet a couple more people you kind of do you know it takes a couple months maybe a couple years like courtship is like more structured and then after dating you know more recently i'd say in the last 20 30 years like as the availability of birth control kind of increased we sort of have like a hookup culture right where like it's no longer just about getting married like you don't even need to get married you can just like date for the sake of dating and you can like hook up just to have a good time like there's no there's no value judgment attached to it and now we have tinder and in the courtship you're like dealing with one person and the dating thing let's say you're dealing with like three to five people in the hookup culture maybe you're dealing with like five to 20 depending on oh god once again terrible handwriting and then like tinder it's like literally a numbers game so it's like 99 plus right so we see that society is like moving in this direction as we move in this direction we're going to see an increase in adhd like symptoms oh my god chat dr k is on the struggle bus today and as we see an increase in adhd like symptoms like we're gonna see like more people feeling like they have adhd but something interesting is also happening which is that society is moving away from the farmers so if you guys read anything by like charles dickens right like there's like back in the day of like book writing or like tolstoy very very like long attention span authors and long attention span like consumers of content and so what's happening over time is that we're getting like going down this way where like as society becomes adhd the more adhd mindset becomes more advantageous so this is where like it's been my experience for example with twitch streamers that the average twitch streamer is more adhd than the average like person and what that actually does for them is actually gives them a competitive advantage so even this kind of stuck out with me we did an interview with the daily dose of the internet dude so if you you like think about the ddo i guy like what he basically does is like uses his own attention span as like a judge for what the internet will like or not like right so his attention span becomes a tool instead of a problem now remember he still exists in a primarily farmer society where there's like bank accounts and monthly payments and this and that and mortgages and credit scores and all this stuff so we're not saying that like it's necessarily an advantage but i have seen that like as we get more and more twitter oriented our attention spans seem to be shorter so if you look at political discourse over the case over time right so it started off with like let's say the roman senate where people go and construct arguments and like we'll discuss for hours and hours at a time and now we've got like twitter trolls right who will just make like bizarre political statements that no one fact checks has no nuance and just incites emotion so it's almost like being adhd means that you can't be a senator in ancient rome but having adhd in today's society makes you a political pundit like it's easy right so this is like a good example of how our society is actually moving more towards adhd we're sort of cultivating a shorter attention span but bizarrely actually this may serve as an advantage for those of you who feel like you've got adhd and so there are a couple of other trends for example that like some companies have embraced so i don't know if you guys know this but like google for example last time i checked or based on the clients i've worked on does not have a nine to five work culture they're like we don't care when you come in you can work at like two in the morning if you want to just needs to get done on time like we don't care like when you come in and so google also sort of figured out that like okay we're just going to give our engineers like a cafeteria and a place that's open 24 hours and they can come and work wherever they want to so they've sort of selected for the night owls and they did something really cool here because remember in the nine to five work culture like these people would not be able to get a job or they wouldn't be able to keep a job even though they're super talented and could be very good programmers and so by google sort of stepping away from the the farmer culture and moving towards like a more free culture they actually allow these people that may be a little bit more adhd maybe late risers maybe circadian rhythm disorder folks to actually be productive programmers another example of this is actually work from home right so work from home like more and more people are moving towards work from home which is like you may wonder okay what does that have to do with adhd but it's like a less structured environment right so we're moving away from structure towards dynamic work environments and the more that we move in those directions i think the more that the adhd crowd will be like more able to like do a good job so i'll give you guys just a very simple example of how work from home like supports adhd so remember people with adhd have hyper focus or disordered focus or lack of focus right and the problem if you've got adhd you guys may know this is that like you know your typical day is like waiting to get inspired to work panicking procrastinating and then every now and then you get a four hour window you get these four magical hours where you do 24 hours of work you guys know what i mean and so it's like you just like wake up one day and you're like let's go and then you just do all the work and then like for the rest of the week you're trying to figure out why couldn't i do that on monday like when is that gonna happen again and so the work from home culture allows these people to succeed because if you're like an adhd person you have to work from nine to five like what happens if your magical four hours doesn't happen in that window you're screwed you're never gonna get promoted you're gonna get fired it's like gg so as we work from home it's sort of like you just kind of work from home you can be in your pajamas but if you've got a flash of inspiration what used to happen is you get a flash of inspiration oh no gotta change out of my pajamas put on my suit commute for an hour and by the time you get to the office it's like you're hungry over caffeinated and like it's shattered your muse is gone and now in the work from home environment it's like if you get that flash of inspiration it's like you don't even need to put on pants you just sit down and like bang out like you program like a madman for four hours and then you can go and like get some pizza afterward right and so like our society is actually moving in an unstructured environment things are getting more adhd but on the flip side if you have if your attention span is more in this realm you may actually find that you have some competitive advantages questions so just to kind of summarize okay so let's like do major points first of all adhd exists for a reason right and this goes into why society needs farmers and hunters okay generally speaking adhd gets over and under diagnosed okay so it gets misinterpreted in a lot of ways what is it it's a disorder of attention which means hyper focus plus lack of focus and this confuses a lot of people point number three society is increasing adhd but on the flip side if you have adhd you may actually have an advantage as long as you're careful about making it an advantage okay so this is why people are adhd if y'all if this kind of resonates with you like now hopefully you have like a big high order sense of like why things are this way and also like just think a lot about this point especially so when i work with with individuals what i'll really do is work really hard to try to figure out okay like what is your unique like advantage that you can bring to a dif like a particular work environment or your goals or whatever and what i found time and time and time again is that we don't need to medicate them to turn them into like essentially farmers what it's really about and sometimes they still need medication but what it's really about is creating sort of a life or structure that allows your dynamic mind to be an advantage instead of a disadvantage okay questions can you have low attention span without adhd absolutely right so like that's what i'm saying is that as a whole society is shrinking our attention span you all get that because you don't need an attention span the way that you used to like entertainment used to involve reading a book so like think about this every time that like 200 years ago every time someone read a book what they're doing is in training their attention span to be longer and now if like if i'm just like chain watching stuff like and that too you can you know you can tell they're different kinds of content consumers there's the long form podcast content consumer there's the high energy twitch chat consumer and there's like something in the middle which is like the 25 minute video essay on youtube and so depending on where your attention span is you may gravitate towards a particular kind of content and depending on which kind of content you watch you will be in training your attention span a particular way if all you watch is youtube compilations of memes a podcast is gonna feel super boring what if i watch both well that's like that's totally normal right so like the mind doesn't always want the same kind of thing so there's also a variation in like how consistently you like your content like some people only like to read books and can't stand movies and some people are like i like game of thrones books i like game of thrones tv show and season 8 is the best tv is the best season of television that has ever been created in the history of humanity there's variation within populations right it's truly a masterpiece right so now we understand like the advantage this by the way so i love lecturing like in person so like i love teaching but like i can't make a youtube video for the life of me like i just can't sit down like i've tried it a thousand times where i'm just like talking to the camera i just can't do it i need some amount of like actual energy to like keep my mind going uh so someone's saying i thought drugs were a big part of treatment for adhd so oftentimes medicine is used for adhd so let's go over like basic evidence around adhd treatments okay first thing to understand is that medication is as effective as therapy so if you go to like a cognitive behavioral therapist who teaches you how to focus your mind and like map things out and all these other skills you can learn skills that are just as effective as taking like adderall or methylphenidate or whatever it's taking adhd medication this is something that is very very poorly like understood in society is that you can get the benefit of medication without medication like the effect sizes are the same second thing to understand is that the reason that people do medication is because it's easy right so it's like very easy especially if you've got a 13 year old like taking your 13 year old to therapy twice a week so they can entrain the right kind of skills is like very expensive and cumbersome it's like you gotta get in the car drive them to their appointment they have an hour-long appointment as a parent you have to wait around pick them up and bring them home so it's like a two-hour investment twice a week which is like four hours and it's just easier to medicate them and it's like the medication works right away right the kids love it too you guys are just bashing on the parents like the kids love it they're like i take a pill and suddenly my mind works like everyone else's that's easy i don't want to sit here and map out my week for an hour twice a week it's torture does that make sense other questions uh is that why adults get meds since their brains are already developed it's harder to train those skills no so sort of so the reason that adults get meds is because their brain is naturally developed maybe as much as it will but even then your frontal lobes develop until the age of about 30 or 32 and i suspect that we're even delaying the amount of time that it takes our frontal lobes to mature so i think that if you do a study in 10 years about when the frontal lobes mature it'll like they'll mature by 35 so i think that's changing so our frontal lobes are maturing slowly than before or there's more maturation to be had the reason that adults get meds sure you're not you just can't count on your frontal lobes developing more if you're like over 32 but they can train those skills in cbt just as well as kids can argue yeah so most of the studies are done in adults so that's not the issue the issue is once again if you're an adult it's just easier right uh what's the link to uh is there any link between giftedness and adhd that's an excellent question and one that we're actively researching right now so we do a lot of different research here at hg and we're actually looking into that question so we've noticed that there's a lot of people in our community who are gifted kids and there are a lot of people in our community who have adhd so is there an overlap it's something we're actively investigating how do i confirm if i have adhd or not you go get a professional evaluation so someone saying dr russell barkley makes the point that medication for adhd is like providing a wheelchair to someone with a mobility issue i completely agree and let's just look at that statement more closely so providing a wheelchair to someone with a mobility issue is like more complicated than it seems so depending on the mobility issue is this person able to walk like if they've been in a car accident and they need to go to rehab and learn to walk again or are they missing their legs can they learn to use prostheses so much like adhd is providing a wheelchair sometimes you need a wheelchair and sometimes that person will need the wheelchair for the rest of their life but there are populations of people that we are sticking in wheelchairs and we're never teaching them how to walk again and so that's a problem because i think much like mobility issues there's a differential diagnosis for what's causing your mobility issue and there are different treatment options to see that to address your mobility issue it may be a prosthetic it may be a wheelchair it may be that you can walk without either you just have to train it up the right way why do people say adhd is fake so you'd you'd probably have to ask them first of all but i'd say it has to do with a lot of the misdiagnosis stuff that i talked about earlier so adhd is oftentimes perceived as a different kind of problem like oh this person is defiant or isn't listening the other reason that i think people say adhd is fake is because they have a neurotypical brain and so like it's easy for them they take it for granted that their mind is able to focus and they cannot imagine a world in which their mind just like gets unplugged at random times or switches the channel on you right so like imagine that you're watching television and you control what channel you're watching and then like imagine a different scenario where like your channel randomly changes if you've had a remote control your entire life it can be very hard for you to understand that like other people's channels are just randomly changing and they have no control over that it's such a given in their life that they have some degree of attentional control what are the downsides to meds there are some downsides it it's very kind of individualistic so like remember that prescribing medication is about a balance of benefits versus hindrances so i try to steer clear of medications in general like so about 30 of people in my practice have medication i have no value judgment like i'm not saying that you shouldn't be on medication i prescribe this stuff after all but i think that oftentimes like i was saying with the wheelchair analogy that medication will sometimes be a substitute for some amount of like growth or change which sometimes people just don't have the bandwidth for like i have a patient for example who's got like you know two teenagers and they just don't have the time to like do yoga and like a juice cleanse right so it's like just take your ssri like don't worry about it like you can take care of yourself like down the road but right now you have like more important things to worry about so so medication is like useful because it is easy right so with adhd for example some of the things that i get concerned about are is the brain development but we don't really know exactly how that how stimulants affect brain development over time um it's not clear that it's really harmful at all there are definitely concerns for a lot of stimulant medication with being underweight and appetite suppression so remember when you take a medication it gets dissolved and distributed throughout your entire body so medications will have effects in many places besides your brain and so one example of like stimulant medication is that it suppresses appetite so if you have a 13 year old who is going undergoing a growth spurt and normally they're consuming a high amount of calories and you give them like adhd medication sometimes they won't feel as hungry how will that affect their long-term growth so it does appear that there are weight changes that happen with adhd medication which you have to be careful about that's just one example so would you recommend a forcefully extended tension span it depends on where you are on the spectrum so i'd recommend that you should be in control of your attention span and so if you tell your mind to do something it should listen so if i tell it hey it's time to stream forget about dota it should listen it can kick and scream a little bit like mine did today but then it sort of gets in gear if you tell it hey it's time to study it should sit and listen that's what i'd recommend how do you deal with an inferiority complex caused by adhd so i don't know if you've seen the the um adhd and depression lecture but i'd start by watching that you can also check out dr k's guide to depression so for those of y'all that are dealing with inferiority complexes so the guide to depression has a lot of stuff about some scars and like the way that those complexes form which maybe we can talk about today but there's like more detail about how to digest those dissolve those etc in the guide we'll talk about that today though some scott is excellent someone's doing their homework okay shall we move on so bro i'm dealing with every complex and it ain't pretty like i get that that's why in the guide we talk about how to deal with all of the complexes so this is something that i like about eastern psychology more so than western psychology so western psychology is really good at like diagnosing the content of the mind so i'll say like oh this person has an ethical edible complex this person has narcissistic personality disorder this person you know like has borderline personality disorder this person is a sociopath or psychopath so they'll they're really good at like describing the content of the person's mind but i think eastern psychology has a better handle on the process of mind so how fundamentally does a complex form where do complexes come from and how do we get rid of them and then the particulars of it are like whatever you want but that's why like we kind of go into detail we'll talk about this today i'll teach something about it but if you guys are interested in this that's why we have five of the common some scars that lead to depression so these are five complexes that people experience that cause them to be depressed one example is like i'm hopeless therefore like there's no point in doing anything it's almost almost this nihilism doomer complex another example is falling behind i've fallen behind therefore you know like it's too late so there are a lot of different things that you can kind of examine um so if you guys are interested in the nature of how complexes form like definitely check out the depression guide okay let's talk about uh uh how do i deal with micromanaging parents and the consequences in my mid-20s we'll talk about we'll do a holiday stream about parents and micromanagement or something let me think about that so someone saying structure and discipline are hard need tips so this is why where i'd say agreed structure and discipline are hard but remember that you don't necessarily have to rely on structure and discipline right you can rely on like inspiration and environment so what i'd say is if you guys have difficulties here's like a quick nutshell if you have difficulties with structure and discipline and that's not what you're good at just don't bother in a weird way so all the discipline you need is like set up a study group for example and then like just make all the discipline you need is not to study for eight hours because if you're studying by yourself right like you are going to yeah if you you're studying by yourself every hour you have to make a check like a willpower check and if you fail your check you start playing a video game but if you're studying with a group of friends like you just have to make one willpower check to get there and then they will keep you involved when i say inspire that's where your company is very important if you're around a bunch of people who are like you know entrepreneurs like you will naturally have a more entrepreneurial bend if you're around a bunch of people who are like game developers and like there's a discord server for game development and you hang out on that discord instead of like a league of legends discord you're more likely to develop games in one than the other right though all discord is going to cause you to play games the development discord server is going to cause you to make games uh what effect does weed have on adhd not a good one in essence all right so like like weed is like not a very good drug especially if you have a developing brain like if you want to get if you want to become 35 you have your life established and then you want to like use weed and it's legal and stuff i'd say go for it so i'd say that most we'll do comparison we'll answer questions for like 10 more minutes then we'll do comparison okay um so like cannabis is one of these why does cannabis feel like it helps because it does help certain things and it screws you over in other ways so like the reason that cannabis feels like it helps is because it helps it just also hurts right so like here's the it's almost just like the adhd medication in the wheelchair analogy where let's say you use cannabis for your anxiety like it can help with your anxiety but then not only will you potentially get rebound anxiety which is when and so if you use substances to regular treat anxiety and you take the substance away you will actually worsen your anxiety so you get stuck in this cycle of being dependent on the substance and that doesn't even help anymore it's like caffeine where your body develops a tolerance and then there's no net positive you become dependent on it to function and then it's not actually helping your anxiety it's just like you've developed a tolerance so weed is a problem because it is very very effective at making your problems go away the problem is that it only makes it makes you feel like your problems go away it doesn't actually make your problems go away it makes your problems usually worse so like people who drown themselves in substances well like oh like once i'm drunk like i can forget all all of my cares but like they're your cares for a reason right so you can do that and you can delay the clock by 24 hours but all the problems are still going to be there um and and this is where you know a lot of people think that so that's the basic problem with weed it also tends to mess with your habit formation circuitry so like the ability to form good habits is more difficult while you're using marijuana so there's a common misconception that weed like causes iq problems i don't think it causes iq problems what it does is far far more insidious which is that it causes motivational problems and habit formation problems right that's why there's sort of this idea of a pothead which is like someone who sits around all day and does nothing now chances are there's a little bit of a reciprocal relationship there that people who who sit around and do nothing gravitate towards pot and pot makes people want to sit around and do nothing so it's not all the pot the other general thing that you should be careful about is like if you have a developing brain and you add substances to it how does that affect the development of your brain the short answer is we don't know so i'd say like steer clear that stuff especially if you're like a teenager or even your earlier early 20s um so one person saying how do i deal with the imposter syndrome of whether i might actually have adhd or i'm just normal and lazy especially since the waiting list for formal assessment is so long here so if you're stuck between trying to figure out am i lazy or do i have adhd really common problem excellent question what do you do about it and this is where it's kind of interesting but the short answer is it sort of doesn't matter right so like i know it sounds kind of weird but whether you have a diagnostic reason for being the way that you are or you are lazy you still have the same shared problem which is that you're unable to do things that problem needs to be fixed whether you have adhd or you're lazy like that's sort of in a weird way it's almost irrelevant it does become relevant because adhd may open up additional ways to fix it so i'm not saying it's truly irrelevant but what i'm saying is that the situation is what it is the adhd is just a label that you put upon it right it may give you some amount of tools may give you some amount of options but this is where i'd say that you know if there are tools to organize yourself with adhd they may help you even if you're lazy so this is where you know your situation is what it is irrespective of what label someone will give you and so there are things that you can do irrespective of what label you have right so what is the nature and experience of your inability to work ask yourself that question that question is the same whether you have adhd or don't have adhd and then you ask yourself okay so like what is like what is it that makes it hard for me to work is it is it i feel unmotivated what does that mean what does unmotivation mean like what does that mean to feel unmotivated is it that your mind is distracted is it that you're afraid of the consequences is it that when you start to work like you you automatically compare yourself to other people and you think there's no point in studying because this person is going to do a better job than i i am there are all kinds of things that can impact your motivation and so you have to understand the nature of your experience you're going to get more answers studying yourself than you will from like getting a particular label and finding external answers and that may sound weird you're like but wait if i have adhd doesn't that mean that there are all these solutions out there news flash is someone who treats people with adhd they're all on the struggle bus anyway it certainly can help and there can be transformative uh you know interventions that you can do for adhd i'm not downplaying those but i'd say like 70 of people that i diagnosed with adhd still have to go through the process of like self-discovering and figuring out what works for them and that's because adhd isn't homogeneous it's heterogeneous right so not everyone's adhd is the same way it's at the end of the day like that personal exploration of what is holding you back i think is worth way more than getting a label that applies to a mass of people for whom different things may work right because not all it's not like there's one medication for adhd there's like half a dozen and why is that it's because different people need different things so even the label does not fix your problems and magically make them go away so dr k i limited my my caffeine use to one drink per day and now i'm having trouble with motivation and focus i was self-medicating with it and i now realize it was helping me function what else can i do cut out that last cup of caffeine bro or girl you're fatal dave so i assume you're a dude but you never know so this is where like just cut out the rest of it get completely off of it that's the right move either go to two cups a day or no cups a day so if you needed to so here's okay so people are wondering why two or none so caffeine has a half-life which is the amount of time it takes to like metabolize the caffeine okay so when you drink a cup of coffee there's a period of time where like you have a high level of caffeine in which it probably gives you like a work debuff i mean sorry work buff but then over time it like the buff declines and then you may hit this point where it no longer buffs you and then can actually you can enter a period of caffeine withdrawal which is a debuff which is why people sometimes need caffeine twice per day right so you like you get that first buff and as your level wanes you get that second afternoon cup of masala chai and then like that carries you like through the rest of the day so you got these like two peaks so for some people one cup of coffee is enough to where like they get a mild buff and they kind of like their half-life is such that it carries them through the day without a problem but depending on your individual metabolism if you're like me and you're avata one cup is never enough so it's either two or bust so that has to do with your individual metabolism dr k do you think diagnosing adhd during drug addiction is possible yes i think it's possible but it's hard so what i would do to so the people that i've diagnosed with adhd who are on drugs are the ones that i usually make a historic diagnosis so i won't send them for neuropsych testing i'll ask them or their parents like what was this person like as a kid and so you can sort of get enough from a history to see oh this person probably had a has adhd even though they're on substances now and that becomes very very important because oftentimes adhd itself being under diagnosed can keep someone from ever becoming sober so there's a whole video on this we did a lecture on adhd and addiction where we kind of explored how adhd is a vulnerability for for drug use right so if you are impulsive because you have adhd and your ability to like restrain your impulses and act more emotionally we go through a bunch of neuroscience and stuff like that there are a lot of reasons why having untreated adhd makes sobriety very difficult and so interestingly enough sometimes what i'll have to do is prescribe people stimulants get the adhd under control even while they're like abusing marijuana or opiates and then like once the adhd gets under control then they can actually like get control of their substance use so sometimes you have to do it like that it's tricky alcohol can be really bad too for adhd absolutely like we said some people with adhd use alcohol as like a cognitive like depressant right so it slows your mind down so that you can like focus more easily so do i have adhd myself no i don't think so i probably would have gotten diagnosed if i was a kid in today's school system with adhd so i have a high level of vata which i think is quite adhd but i don't think that my function is impaired that's partially because of the way that i've structured my environment i am about that so i think if i was like if i was if i was in school now i would like there's a 50 chance i would get diagnosed with adhd based on like i could never study i could never like if i was interested in something i could pay attention to it if not and i was just like kind of smart so it wasn't that bad of a deal that big of a deal can adhd patients become top students at competitive universities and scientific fields absolutely absolutely i've had those students as my patients do indian schools diagnose adhd a lot i don't know i don't think they they definitely don't go by doshas um it's interesting like in india like the understanding of ayurveda is so like divided like some people are into it and some most people are not so they don't understand like most indian people don't even understand what dosha is based on the people i've talked to okay let's move on someone's asking about ox-carbazapine or trilepto causing adhd or depression that's definitely a question for your provider that's the kind of thing where like ox-carpazzipine and trilaptal can definitely cause depressive kind of symptoms right but like that's definitely something you should in concentration problems sure but that's the kind of discussion you should be having with your provider that's the specificity of like if you guys really want to do a lecture on pharmacology we can but you know because trileptil is a mood stabilizer right so it's going to like slow down your action potentials and stuff which can have a side effect of being depressed and can lead to concentration problems but i would expect trileptal to cause people to have like slow concentration as opposed to like like rapid stuff is it normal for a psychologist to ask for blood work to be checked before they diagnose you with adhd i don't know if it's normal or not is it smart absolutely what do you look for in blood work so we did we did a lecture on this chat there are like six lab tests that everyone in chat should get you guys should get evaluated for six conditions because one out of two human beings will have one of these problems fifty percent of chat will have one of these problems anemia thyroid problems sleep apnea uh what else b12 deficiency may be vitamin d deficiency what was the other one anemia sleep apnea thyroid vitamin d diabetes thanks chad lab tests for gamers yes thank you tech teller yup vitamin d more than b for us chatars you

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 875,684

Keywords: adhd, adhd advantage, adhd dr k, doctor k, dr k adhd, dr kanojia, drk, healthy gamer gg, healthygamergg, mental health, psychiatrist, twitch, your adhd is actually an advantage

Id: HN5BoBlY0MU

Length: 77min 59sec (4679 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021