Revision and exams are a really difficult challenge for many ADHD people. I’ve done completed multiple degrees, and still don’t think I’ve mastered it. And other folks have said, everyone is different, so it’s more about finding out what works for your son than general advice… Apart from, perhaps, that “just try harder” is terrible advice for everyone. So I’m just going to speak about own experiences, but hopefully it can get you thinking about what might click with your son.

Getting started and sticking with it - Even if its something I enjoy, I can find it hard to get started and if it’s something I’m anxious about or don’t enjoy or have had a bad experience with, it can be almost impossible. **Suggestions **- Having someone help me start and stay with me (so I don’t just give up and do something else) is really helpful. Depending on the task it might enough for them to just sit by (maybe doing their own focused work, as a good model) or to be there for me to ask questions and bounce stuff off every time i get stuck. Its also important to learn what time of day works best for the individual, my brain works much better in the morning and if I try and work on something in the evening its 10x harder.

Focus and Engagement - Even if I’m really motivated, and supported, I can read the same page ten times and not take it in. For me, reading sequentially through something and trying to remember it, even if take notes, is not enough to engage my brain. Suggestions: Stupid stuff like starting partway through a book section so I find it a bit confusing, then flick back and forth trying to understand it makes it more engaging and stops my brain tuning out. Similarly, instead of trying to memorize a bunch of information, I respond well to questions/problem solving - if I’m trying to prove a point to someone, suddenly I’ll be great at skimming through textbooks to find the info I need. Learning about the different states of matter could be mind-numbing, but trying to explain to someone “why turning into either steam or ice could make a container of water explode” would get me thinking about a bunch of relevant topics.

Memorization and Notes - I spent a lot of school struggling to write notes, then never reading them. Since then I’ve found non-linear approaches much more effective: mind maps, brainstorming with post-its, even drawing pictures. Stuff like mind maps reward brains that jump from one idea to another, rather than being expected to work through an ordered list. Being asked to write down all the ideas that come to mind on “Why did the Civil War happen?” is more interesting than reading a chapter on someone else’s answers. Even if you don’t know anything about the subject, you can put down some vague ideas (“ugh, slavery? something about states rights?”) and then quickly look up stuff about it to flesh it out. When it works well, I suddenly realize, “shit, i’m meant to be studying and making a mindmap, not getting distracted and reading ‘the myth of the Lost Cause’… oh wait, this IS studying!”

tl;dr - what helps is unique, but helping your son get started, making studying interactive and conversational helps, and maybe try mind-maps and non-linear approaches. If he can find a way to become genuinely curious he will motivate himself!

Yes, I guess I take the different perspective with that. I’m fine sticking with my own arbitary rule for what is coffee, and judging people (in a very mild and irrelevant way) for not liking “real” coffee. But I’m also totally fine with someone judging me for doing it wrong. Or putting cream in my carbonara or whatever. I don’t think people judging each other and having arbitary standards is a bad thing, and I’m aldoy happy for people to disagree with that belief.

A cappachino is coffee and frothed milk, a mocha is coffee and chocolate and milk, etc. If you make something by mixing A + B + C then the result can’t be C. Personally I like just coffee on its own, but I’m happy to make others sweet and milky coffee drinks if they desire them. They smell nice and look pretty!

Defintely agree about the beans.

Sure, it’s gatekeeping coffee - the reason we build walls with gates is to keep the barbarians out! I wasn’t trying to ‘gatekeep caffeine’ in the slightest, those concotions are defintely cafffinated hot drinks. And of course, by some standard they’re ‘coffee’ and so is tiramsu.

Apple jacks pop tarts are made from apples (apple powder, but apples nothertheless), and while it might be a small fraction of the total, the point where it stops being fruit and becomes a snack is an arbitary line. I assume you consider a drink made with instant coffee powder still coffee?

Obviously, it’s a silly semantic debate, and someone could equally judge me for wanting my coffee beans roasted and ground “why not eat the berries fresh if you say you love coffee‽”.

Everyone’s entitled to as much caffeine as their bodies can handle, but it is pretty odd to ‘love coffee’ but actually love ‘coffee-flavoured hot milkshake’. Like saying ‘I love fruit’ but really meaning ‘I love apple jacks pop tarts’, it’s not wrong, just a bit odd.

Mediknet felt like that for me, but I had good responses to Ritalin LP and Xaggatin (an off-brand Concerta, which was good despite Concerta not working well for me…)

I looked into it and Mediknet has a much shorter duration than other extended release methylphenidates. My experience was it started too strong, making me feel too racy, and then finished early leaving me exhausted. What made things better was eating breakfast first, and splitting the dose (take half after breakfast, and other half 3-4 hours later).

Yeah, when life wasn’t going well I’d sometimes buy a lottery ticket just to indulge in a fantasy of what would happen if I won. But then I’d find myself focusing on what would happen if I died and how I’d write my will…

Who was that? Or any more details? I’m intrigued!

Edit: do you just mean marx? That’s less intriguing, not wrong, but less intriguing.

Been rebinging Warehouse 13 (dumb but I love it). It stayed as an attempt to trick myself into doing some long overdue paperwork - even doing it slowly while half watching show is better than continuing to avoid it completely. That worked for a day or so, but now I’ve descended to just cycling through savoury and sweet snacks and watching a season a day…

If drinking less isn’t actually your priority at the moment, it shouldnt be the focus of your therapy sessions. And if your therapist doesn’t follow your lead, then you should get a different one.

If you find opening up and admitting shit in therapy hard, then make that your new focus in sessions. As someone who’s seen my fair share of therapists, most of them are very thankful if you start with “I almost didn’t come to therapy, because I kinda don’t belive it works” (but maybe it’s also that I feel hopeless about changing my life in general) or “I often lie in therapy because I want you to like me” (does that pattern appear in other parts of your life?)

Start with first obstacle, not the biggest or even the most harmful. Then you can work on those things first, rather than waste time, money and frustration pretending to be doing something else.

I think he’s suggesting that if someone doesn’t know their world ranking, then they might be quite good, but not seriously good. And if they are world ranked, they wouldn’t claim “they could beat anyone” unless they were the world champion. In which case they would know.

Bur he can’t really know anything about your skills from a comment, so who cares. Either way, you’d both certainly smash my sorry ass.

How not? Is it mildly infuriating that people keep posting actually infuriating stuff to the community. It’s not a huge problem, but it’s definitely mildly infuriating.

Absolutely. Words change, and it’s not an unhelpful term, but we already had a word for ‘ruled by the best’, aristocracy. Over time it became very apparent that aristocracies did not promote leaders who were objectively ‘best’ or often even ‘adequate’, so it began to mean a small group of privileged people who used their power to keep that privilege for themselves and their peers.

So although meritocracy started as a joke, it could be used sincerely. But unless it’s pretty clear how ‘merit’ is assessed its hard to take it more seriously.

Totally agree.

Yeah, this happens to me. On ritalin lp it’s not that bad because it happens just before I actually go to bed, but whatever I was on before was awful for a few hours of constant snacking.

The main thing I tried to keep in mind is that I’m not in any sense hungry (although it can feel like that) and that’s why having one more snack won’t stop the feeling (even if it feels good at the time). Instead, I’m craving simple sensation and easy dopamine so I try to replace the cravings for unhealthy snacks with alternatives.

My cravings are for salty, crunchy things and that normally ends up in me eating bags of chips or crackers/toast and thick butter. But anytime I’ve had left over roast vegetables, that are a bit blackened and carmalised and well-seasoned I discovered that I’d just as happily eat a piece of roast cauliflower or carrot as a bread stick. the key is that they’re a satisfying texture and salty / spicy. If I just had a bag of carrot sticks I’d eat one or two then want something more intense and reach for the bag of tortilla chips.

I’ve even had some success recently with crushed ice and a dash of lemon juice. With a cupful of tangy ice I can relax in the evening and keep reaching for another piece to cronch down on. And because it’s cold and hard it recreates that “I shouldn’t have more, I should wait, oh what the hell” that I get with snacks I’m “not allowed” and I think that the giving into temptation is itself a dopamine hit.

The use of a pretend quote is one thing, but what is the middle quotation mark doing?

Manny’s Milk “We’ll deliver that white cream” that puts a smile on your wife’s face"

Is everyone too distracted by the cringe to be infuriated at the punctuation? Wtf is happening with those quotation marks?

Doesnt work for me. 25 is too long if I’m struggling, and if I start getting into it, a five minutes break spoils my flow. I’ve had more success with “I know you don’t want to do this, so let’s just do as much as we can in 10 minutes”. And sometimes ten minutes is all I need to break a tasks back (writing some email I’d been avoiding), or I kinda get into it and am fine to continue. And if I’m really stressed and just want to escape even after starting, then I go spend some time de-stressing and try something else.

I just meant upvote, but I half remembered some lemmy folks hating certain terms because they’re from reddit (like calling communities subs) , and I thought upvote was one of them. However, I couldn’t remember the lemmy equivalent, so I said uplemmyed. But taking time to do a quick search, upvote seems to be widely used, so I’m not sure what term I was thinking of…

Absolutely. Movies are often slow, and because they rely on visual storytelling more than tv, so I can’t even be doing something else while watching them. A trick that worked for me was starting 15/20 minutes into the movie, that way stuff is actually happening rather than some slow setup, and I get the extra challenge of trying to figure out what’s happening and what I’ve missed which keeps my brain busy. Then, if I enjoy the movie, I’ve got an extra 15 minutes to watch later as a bonus!

I commented at the same time as you, otherwise I’d have replied to you directly. It is a real tweet, but satire, Jack Kimble is not a real politician (he purports to represent California’s 54th district, out of 52).