The lighter side of ADHD
Hmm. The one that is irritating AF is getting lost in a thought train or narrative, getting really into in, thinking about something else briefly and then completely forgetting what your train of thought was. And if you do regain it, it’s no longer interesting.
Yeah, with ADHD it's very easy to lose all your thoughts when interrupted even a bit. Our working memory is broken and it sucks. Especially when you have severe ADHD like me.
Whoa, yes. I also hate when I have a sequence of 5-10 thoughts in a few seconds and try to remember the third or fourth thought again because it was something I needed to do..
And the others are just gone for what feels like years until you remember you had to make that important phone call
More like I get to reverse engineer who I am and what my motivations could be, based on what I wake up finding myself doing
I love that description. haha
Thanks I was pretty happy with it, too
It’s called “The Doorway Effect” and it’s something that can effect anyone. The action of passing through a door can affect short term memory causing you to forget what you were doing a moment before. It’s possible that it’s attributed to self preservation in causing you to assess your surroundings on entering a new room.
Not to say it’s not a problem for ADHD, but it’s a more common issue than you’d think.
Most ADHD symptoms are things everyone can relate to, this one included . The difference is most people do some of those things occasionally, while ADHD people tend to do many of those things multiple times a day. For example in my case I have this so-called doorway effect multiple times a day, but I also lose track of what I'm talking about or forget words really often, lose my things all over the place, need to work with alarms and reminders to be remotely close to functional due to severe time blindness, etc.
Also a gentle reminder not to party poop - although you were pretty respectful and didn't downright downplay the symptoms, some people suffering from ADHD tend to get rightfully tired of these comments altogether.
Sometimes it's entertaining (and frustrating) to backtrack my train of thought. I'll think about it for a while and eventually go "Ahhhh! That's why I was thinking about X".
Then I realise that it's not really that interesting and that I was bothering my SO with all this thought process out loud expecting her to (somehow) be interested and share my excitement for finding out whatever I was thinking about.
Am I alone in this?
You're not alone.
But what is the second image?
We will never know... 😞
That's dissociation - is dissociation part of ADHD?
No, it's daydreaming. Simply getting stuck in your thoughts and doing stuff without thinking about what you're doing until you break out from daydreaming.
Edit: I experienced dissociation quite a few times in the past but not even close to the amount of daydreams I had.
It's also lack of working memory
Yeah it happens to me sometimes. But what’s real scary is it happening while driving. I left work one afternoon and felt like I had teleported 30 minutes into the future and ended up at my house. Didn’t remember anything in between. Luckily it’s only happened to me once.
I just looked it up and there seems to be a link between ADHD and dissociation. I don't know how strong this link is though: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/adhd-dissociation#what-is-dissociation
Dissociation and distraction by you inner conversation can look the same from the outside. I always thought that I was dissociating, because the descriptions fiit very nicely. Dissociated state is however a trauma response and the onset somewhat predictable, I lack the trauma part. (unless you subscribe to the theory of complex ptsd and adhd, but the same distinction applies nevertheless. The distracted state remains unpredictable)