What Everyone Gets Wrong About ADHD

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
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**Dr. Alok Kanojia** (0:58)
Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Doctor Alok Kanojia, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.
On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.
So this is an ADHD assessment, okay? I'm gonna take some notes. And we're gonna understand what is going on here and what to do about it. We're 45 minutes late. Yeah, sorry, there was like a ton of trap. I forgot it was today. That's okay. Let's review your answers to the questionnaire I sent over. Didn't do it? Okay, let's just dive in then. Question one, where are your sunglasses? I don't know. And when was the last time you did know? 2017 Okay. Are you thirsty?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:47)
Yes.

**Dr. Alok Kanojia** (1:47)
Do you have water? Got it. Will you drink it? Nope.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:50)
What was that noise?

**Dr. Alok Kanojia** (1:51)
A reminder. For you to? Wish my best friend a happy birthday. Today? Two months ago. And you forgot. For the? Seventh year in a row. And how many times have they forgot in yours? Zero. Which makes you feel like? A terrible friend. Even though your?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:02)
Friends are super important to me.

**Dr. Alok Kanojia** (2:03)
And when was the last time you started a new hobby? This morning. Pottery or pizza making? Pottery. Say more so that I can make custom plates on which to put my homemade pizza. And your pizza oven has been? Outside.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:13)
For three years.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:14)
Filled with? Cobwebs. And you are?

**SPEAKER_5** (2:15)
Too afraid to clean it.

**Dr. Alok Kanojia** (2:16)
Have you ever kept a plant alive? No. How many amazing ideas do you have on a given day? Between one and 300,000. And how many of them do you execute?
And finally, if you were the star of an action movie where the fate of humanity hinged on your ability to send a thank you card, it would end with? Everybody dead. Perfect score. So what we're going to do is go through each of these things that they describe and talk about how they connect to ADHD.
So the first thing is that he's late. So we know that ADHD has time blindness. Second thing is the questionnaire. Did you fill out the questionnaire? No, I forgot. This is executive function and or disorganization. The water thing, I'm not quite sure about. Do you have water? Are you thirsty? I was kind of confused about that one. You forget to eat or drink. OK, that's helpful. We can talk about that. Thank you, Chad. Bodily signals. Next thing is birthday. This is a big one. OK, so forgot birthday, set reminder. Reminder is old. This is the other interesting thing, right? Like the reminder was from a while ago, but they still haven't turned it off. They've forgotten for seven years. Friends are important to me, and this makes me feel bad. This one is really interesting. We're going to dig into this one some. Adopting new hobbies, impulsivity, and then they have cobwebs, which is lack of follow through, right? So discipline, also executive function. Plant is dead. This, I think, is also impulsivity. This is kind of the same as number five. How many ideas do you have? Hyper association. And then the last thing is this thing where he says, if you had to write a thank you card, otherwise humanity would die, what would happen? And he's like, everyone would die. So we're going to talk about high stakes and how high stakes impedes action. There was an interesting paper. We're going to talk about all these mechanisms, okay? We're going to speed run them. There was an interesting paper that came out maybe about a year and a half to two years ago that did an analysis of ADHD short form content, I think specifically on TikTok and found that something like 90% of it was like wrong in some way. So there's a lot of bad information about ADHD on the internet. I actually think this one is pretty good because each of these things we can describe, we can characterize and describe in a particular way. The first problem with this is that when oftentimes when we see a piece of content like this, we're like, oh yeah, this is me. I have ADHD, this is me. What I don't like about this is the finality of it, right? So this is our experience. And when we hear that a million other people have our experience, what we don't hear is the million people who are able to change it, right? So if you have an ADHD, if you have a 60 second clip about all the problems that ADHD causes, that will way outperform what actually works because that requires depth and nuance, right? This clip, I think, has something like 800,000 views. There's no way that my reaction to it will get that, even though I too have clips in the 800,000 million, whatever, multimillion views. So that's a challenge. So let's start with time blindness. Clinical implications of perception of time and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or review, time perception in children with attention deficit disorder. Why don't you go to bed on time? A daily diary study of the relationship between chronotype, self-control resources, and the phenomenon of bedtime procrastination. There's a lot of papers about this. So I'm going to give you guys a quick overview of this stuff, okay? So what causes time blindness in ADHD and how do we fix it? So the first thing is we have an internal biological clock that measures how long things take. In people with ADHD, that basic capability is impaired, which frustrates the neurotypical people around us a lot because they're like, I told you what time to be here, why are you always late? How long does it take you? It takes you 45 minutes to get here. Why don't you just leave at 5.15 so you can be here by 6? So the reason this is so confusing for them is they will lay it out for you so easily, right? And that makes sense cognitively. The problem is that that theoretical thing does not translate to your frontal lobes to actually plan action. This is kind of like telling someone, okay, how do you not recognize a tree has branches and leaves and flowers? If the flowers are red, that means it's a rose. How do you not understand that this is a rose bush? And it's because you're blind. Like that's that middle step of, oh, this makes sense into my head, which neurotypical people have no idea that there is a process between makes sense in my head, therefore I do it. That fundamental gap has to be translated by your brain and time blindness is a good example of this. There's another really interesting thing about time blindness, which is that, you know how people with ADHD don't know how long something takes, right? So it's hard to plan your day. Why is it hard to plan your day? Well, because I have 15 minutes of, I have to fill out this application. How long will it take? Between 15 minutes and 15 hours. That's why it's hard to plan because you have no idea how long something will take. The other interesting reason why it's hard to plan for your day is because when you do a task, if you have no internal biological clock, your brain gets no data about how long that takes. Does that kind of make sense? When I sit down to do something, a neurotypical person is like, I sat down around this time, oh, how long did that take? It'll take you about half an hour. How long were you in line at the DMV? I was in line for about half an hour. You have an internal biological clock that is measuring things. When it measures how long something it takes subconsciously and without your knowledge, you can also plan because now your brain knows, oh, go to the DMV. That is a 30 minute errand. That is missing in ADHD. A big part of what we teach in Dr. K's guide to ADHD and doing stuff, about doing stuff, is what are the tools that you can use to overcome that. As a simple example, people with ADHD, their sensory input is very, very robust. If you see something, if you hear something, you get distracted, you start paying attention to it. What you see and what you hear sinks in, which is why the utilization of an organized planner or something where you measure your time in some way, I like measure things. I'm working on, I started at this time on this day, and I worked for this many minutes. And I just happened to have what games I chose not to play, which was Monster Hunter Stories and Warhammer and Unicorn Overlord recently. So literally externally measuring things, writing things down will help your brain. Second thing, the questionnaire. Did you forget to do the questionnaire? So neurotypical people can remember to do things. Now remembering to do something is actually really strange if you think about it. This is one of the weirdest things in the brain, is remembering things. I'll give you all an example. I'm on my way home from work and I'm about to take the exit off the highway to return to my home. When I remember, I need to pick up some milk. So I'm like, oh, I was about to take the exit. I don't take the exit. I move one more exit down the highway and then I go pick up the milk. I want you all to think about how weird that is. I forgot something and then I remembered. Do I control the remembering? Absolutely not. My brain, I forgot. My brain, my brain remembers and my brain floats up to the surface of my conscious thinking that I did, I need to do this thing. So a neurotypical person takes this for granted. The fact that you can remember is bizarre. To remember means that you forgot. And if you forgot, you don't control whether you remember or not, right? That is the experience of remembering. Oh, sometimes I remember and sometimes I forget. 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. And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation. How does experience shape us as human beings? How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ? And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So what we know about people with ADHD is that their executive function and their inability to remember things makes it so that organization becomes really important. And particularly sensory input becomes really important. I will never remember where I put my keys. So I always put them in the same place. I know where the keys belong, but I won't remember where they are. Which brings us to another really interesting thing about ADHD, which is that a lot of the problems with ADHD, the reason we don't solve them is because we try to use a neurotypical strategy. And a neurotypical strategy won't work, right? So if we're blind, we can't navigate with sight, we need a stick. But if you have a stick, you can manage. So this is where, like with ADHD, this is where you won't remember where you put it. That's why there must be one place where it goes. I love this phrase. Don't put it down, put it away. Put it where it belongs. So what I found working with patients, and this is gonna be a big theme that we're gonna focus on, is half the problems that you have are way easier to solve than you realize if you do them in a particular way. Now, building up the habit to do them in that way is not simple, but it's way easier. So like a big problem with ADHD is preventing certain steps of this process, which is really where the problem lies. So if I always put things where they belong, I will never lose them, right? Which a neurotypical person can afford to be lazy. We cannot. And if you really think about it, how hard is it to, in my case, you know, in our house, we have a nice little key rack thing right by the door, and that's where the keys go. And what's infuriating to me is, since I lose my keys a lot, I always put my keys in the same place. My wife does not have ADHD. She does not put her keys where they belong all the time, ever. So then what happens is she misplaces her copy of the key, and then she takes my copy of the key. And then I go to drive the car and I can't find my keys. But now she's lost two sets of keys because my keys are reliably in one spot and her keys are who the hell knows where. So then I end up looking for keys anyway. And then what I have to do, and by the way, this is really interesting, I'm curious about this. If you have ADHD, are you better at finding the things that your partner misplaces than what you misplace? I would bet money that the answer to that question is true. Yes, for y'all too. Now I figured out where to find the keys that she misplaces because there's a pattern or order to them. Whereas when I misplace them, it's absolute chaos. This is where if you forget to do questionnaires, if you forget to do things, you need to create a system where you are prompted in a sensory way.