"Why Does ADHD Make Me Feel Drained?"

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 6 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 M male here have been diagnosed with ADHD when I was 10 um for people forgot about it life fell

apart struggled all my life with depression and anxiety had therapy got rediagnosis 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 everyday relationship is going well no Financial stress or any anything blood has been checked lately and everything seems fine awesome um 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 3 hours of interaction oh

interesting interesting I wonder if there is research around this huh predict mental depletion after a 3-hour delay fascinating after 3 hours of interaction I would love to um 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'm 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 26 now they're doing well it sounds like they're in a relationship they're advancing in 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 I got to do this there's a deadline coming up etc etc 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 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 than it takes a neurotypical person until you train yourself otherwise so if we look at the nature of distractability 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 distractable 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 4 hours doing one hour of work and so what happens is at the end of those 4 hours you've been like your machine has been running for 4 hours but you only have a 1H 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 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 failing completely so you're able to pull off C's instead of straight FS because even though it takes you 4 hours to do one hour worth of work you're so 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 you have 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 adust m 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 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 thesis things like that there's like other like 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 XY Z I'll get in trouble so what I'm hearing from this person is this person has

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 what cortisol does is increases cannibalizes our things like muscle tissue to give us energy over the uh 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 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 you're your body has been chopping down walls to for firewood and then you're wondering why am 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 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 object L 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 in 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 positive 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 in the first grade the second grade they're 6 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 you're there's nothing wrong what what what is 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 belief starts at the age of 5 6 7 remember that often times kids by the

the by the age of seven or so with ADHD many of them will not get invited to a single birthday party and why is that it's because they don't wait their turn on the playground because they're distractable 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 Alo 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 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 tired all the time is because you haven't had a break they even went and got blood tested maybe something's wrong with you 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 that's why people with with ADHD continue to blame themselves even though they're doing a good job so if you are in this

pickle 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 someone to send someone to a psych therapist or give them Aderall 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

2 years after stopping Psychotherapy why so what psychotherapist will do is teach people with ADHD how to function in this world despite having distractable 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 H 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 8 PhD 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 of ADHD of growing up with ADHD that's undertreated CU 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 when I work with a a patient with ADHD what I basically do I have a onew 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 worked with a ton of people who have adh2 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 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 distractable 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 typical 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