I learned how ADHD functions, here's the breakdown of it
The short-short-short version is, people with ADHD are generally unhappy, so we seek out sources of immediate gratification and amusement to compensate. This leads to what can be considered erratic behavior, including trying to finish others' sentences and interrupting stories with random thoughts.
The long version is as follows:
Dopamine and pattern recognition.
Dopamine is the feel-good hormone that your brain gives you, both as a constant stream to make you not-miserable, and as a reward for Doing Things.
A neurotypical brain will keep its human relatively happy and give them lots of Happy Juice whenever the human successfully completes Doing a Thing.
The ADHD brain is not nearly as generous.
Here's an example, using percentiles for the purposes of readability:
You have a task to complete, such as cleaning the living room. It isn't a difficult task overall, and you know that. It'll take you less than two hours to get absolutely everything done, and less if you put some effort into it.
For a neurotypical person, this is the basic sequence:
Your brain keeps your dopamine levels at around 40%. Not really happy, but definitely pretty content. Now you have a task ahead of you, your brain gives you a dopamine bump of around 5% to motivate you to do it. You're now at 45%.
So you get to work. Now, while working on anything, your dopamine levels will drain. So it drains. You spend around an hour and a half cleaning before you're done, and it drained around 25% of your dopamine in that time, putting you at 20%. You're now half as happy as you were when you started.
And now that you're done, your brain gives you a hefty boost of dopamine in proportion to how much effort you put into it, throwing you from 20% to 80%.
You just got a 60% boost and ended up twice as happy as you were before you started cleaning, making you feel amazing. You're glad you cleaned. It was definitely worth the effort. Zero complaints.
Now let's go through that exact same scenario with an ADHD brain.
YOUR brain keeps your dopamine at about 25%, already at a significant deficit compared to a neurotypical brain. And now you have to clean the living room, an act that you KNOW is going to make you miserable if you've done it even twice before.
But you have to do it, so you buckle down. And your brain fights you every step of the way, starting with not giving you a boost of dopamine to motivate you to start. You begin at 25%, whereas the neurotypical brain started theirs at 45%.
And then you get cleaning.
You put the same effort into the task as the other person, and it drains your dopamine at the same rate. You're already unhappy, and you swiftly become miserable doing this. But let's say you push through and make it to the end, which puts you at a staggering 0% dopamine by the time you're done.
You are literally as miserable as you can be, and just from cleaning the living room, a task that any neurotypical person would've found easy.
And now your brain rewards you for completing the task with a boost of... 30% dopamine, literally half of what it gave to your neurotypical buddy.
You started the hour-and-a-half task at 25%, and ended it at 30%, whereas the other started at 45% and ended at 80%.
That 5% boost feels awful. You've barely been given a reward at all, comparatively. You put an hour and a half of effort into gaining a net increase of 5%.
You could've gotten that from playing a mobile game for 10 minutes.
So now you know that cleaning, while beneficial, is going to feel awful to you. You're literally going to feel like you're dying every second you do it (because that's what it translates to in the brain, btw, this isn't an exaggeration; dopamine draining feels like dying).
So what, exactly, is the incentive for doing it in the first place? It's going to make you feel awful the entire time and you know it's not going to feel much better when it's done. You're probably going to give up when you get to 10% just because why continue, when it makes you feel so terrible the entire time? And then you're not going to come back to it, either, because why do THAT when you know it's just going to make you miserable AGAIN?
There's a secondary effect to this, by the way.
For a neurotypical person, creating a good habit takes exactly two instances of the same feel-good act performed in a routine, such as brushing your teeth upon waking up. You do that two days in a row, both times feel good, now you're going to do it forever automatically without ever having to think about it.
But for an ADHD person, we literally never get that. Two instances of an action isn't enough to create a good habit. A month isn't enough.
At one point in my life I put in the effort to wash my face and brush my teeth every single morning, and I managed it for a month straight. And it was great, honestly. I saw improvements. I looked and felt better for it. But it required active, conscious thought and self-motivation. I had to tell myself to do it every day.
Then one day, for whatever reason, I didn't do it, and then I never did it again.
Not doing it once broke the streak and that was enough, because in the end, doing this made me no happier than not doing it. There was no tangible, dopamine-related reward.
And that is the daily struggle of living with ADHD. Tasks that feel great and are totally thoughtless for your average neurotypical person are literally miserable for people with ADHD. And why do things that make you miserable? Even if it had amazing health benefits, would you put your palm on a hot burner every single day?
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