I think there’s this myth of “the neurotypical”… It’s a generic point on a scale that represents the most significant overlap, not any specific person. I genuinely believe no one is “neurotypical”, rather some tend towards it and others further away. That’s the spectrum. Plus some people might be closer to NT with some things but much further away with others.

For example, I have a pretty good degree of focus, I remember things pretty well, but I struggle to organise my thoughts and can’t bear to touch other people or certain textures. I’m sure everyone is a bit like this. Some people more so, some people less.

And that isn’t to minimise that there are people out there who really struggle to fit into the “best fit” of Neurotypical-aimed social design.

So why the need to create a mythical group of “Neurotypical”? Is it a need to define ourselves in opposition? Is it to make ourselves feel more unique? Is it a perverse form of gatekeeping?

The upshot is, that until we move towards realising that individuals have individual needs and requirements we aren’t going to make substantial progress and describing (and prescribing) otherness only seeks to alienate folk that might otherwise help.

People aren’t neurotypical… Systems are. I think that’s what I meant to say.

ACTIVATE DENTAL PROTOCOL

thank you. we really really need more of this. thank you.

ND is the new introverted.

Only introverts think deeply, get anxious, or enjoy academic pursuits. Do you have a counterexample? Oh, well that person just doesn’t know they’re an introvert, so the pattern still holds!

Same with ND/NT. Nobody is neurotypical according to this definition because everyone has something they struggle with or are quirky about.

I’m not neurotipical, but I’m pretty sure ADHD isn’t in the mix of whatever I have. The situation you described occures to me on a regular basis

Then how do you explain that one Talking Heads song?

For me it is this. When I was married he didn’t understand when I would request reminders to go to the bathroom, shower, eat, do laundry. He laughed. He thought I had dementia.

Nope just adhd with a swiss cheese memory.

Jesus, that’s insane. Either I have 0 habits, or OP is right. Everything I do, I do “manually” , and have to put effort and thought into it.

Thanks for speaking to the other side, because that’s so hard to believe. I don’t know about everyone with ADHD, but it definitely seems to be a common shared experience. The only habits I do completely without thinking are a) putting my seatbelt on in the car, and b) picking my phone up like 100 times a day. Anything bigger, even something like eating, is something I have to will myself to do.

And when I’m trying to form a “habit,” like certain types of note taking or task planning at work, no matter how effective it is and how much I like it, I never manage to do it more than about 3 weeks before my brain just completely shuts off that pathway and it’s like I forget that process exists altogether.

If I don’t put my meds on my nightstand AND have a reminder on my phone, I will forget them most of the time. Daily activity, takes almost no brain power, and it still doesn’t trigger in my head as something I need to do unless I physically see it.

It’s very common among autistic people and neurodivergent people in general, it’s called executive dysfunction. Essentially your brain has trouble both making and initiating plans. Every time I brush my teeth I have to remember to do it (this is not automatic, all my toothbrush stuff is set up as a visual cue any time I’m near the sink), focus on my task as I go to the bathroom so I don’t forget why I went there, remember to take my medicine first so that I don’t have to swallow them after brushing my teeth, floss, and brush.

The last two parts sound very simple (and they are, which is why this is so frustrating for many people), but sometimes I will stand in front of the bathroom sink for 5 or 10 minutes, knowing I need to brush my teeth, WANTING to brush my teeth, but it’s like whatever ‘go juice’ neurotypical people have a limitless supply of is just limited for me. Finally after standing there and psyching myself up I can do it, but it does take legitimate effort to initiate the process even if I follow through on all the parts smoothly. I couldn’t tell you exactly why this happens even though I can obviously recognize that it is happening, I kind of suspect it has to do with wonky sensory integration problems (common in ADHD and autistic people).

I’m not sure if it’s every ADHD person, but I have accidentally quit smoking.

If you can accidentally quit a physically addictive habit, things like brushing your teeth don’t stand a chance.

Trust me, our minds are equally blown by how your brain works. Like, what ? It’s automatic ? How does that even work? For me, automatic is things like clenching my teeth or flinching at a certain type of sound, but I wouldn’t call that a habit. For me, a habit is something I can’t stop the impulse for, like smoking. All daily practical functions are intentional or not at all. Even “routines” are just forcing yourself through the checklist, it’s never automatic. You’re like fucking robots I swear.

I was blown away when I first saw this meme. I had no idea habits were supposed to LITERALLY become automatic. When people would tell me “Do something every day until it becomes a habit” I thought they meant “Do something until you stop forgetting to do it” Not “do something until your body just takes over and autopilots through it and you never have to think about it again”. Now I really understand why productivity advice is so useless. They’re all designed to “hack a habit loop” and I have no habit loop.

It actually kinda pissed me off when I learned what it’s like for neurotypical people. I felt like I’ve been unfairly misled and then judged for being misled.

I am not every ADHD person, but this could have been written by me. I had NO IDEA that you could have something be so ingrained that you don’t think about it. Even if I develop a “routine” of doing something, it is NEVER automatic. I have to put mental effort, even if small, into every task or it won’t get done.

After reading this my definition of habit would be better termed routine. I develop a routine and I try to stick to it. Also I could have a great routine and it lasts for a month or so and then it’s just, I don’t know what else to call it but ‘gone’. It’s gone. That routine is gone.

I thought I was just lazy most of my life because I could never wrap my head around how people just do things without getting overwhelmed by 500 things in their head about it first lmfao. Showering is a good example, I’m sure most people find them relaxing and/or do them on autopilot but to me it feels like an elaborate process

Very few things are true for every person with a given neurodivergence. But this is one of the more (most?) common things that people with ADHD struggle with, some to a lesser, some to a greater extent.

I realized when I was 20 that I can’t form habits. I’ve tried my whole life, but everything I do is an active choice, which makes it difficult to do anything at all long term. Things get boring and repetitive and after a while they aren’t interesting enough for me to get my executive functioning to do them anymore. Most things that I do daily, like brush my teeth, are actually things I do out of fear of the consequences of not doing them.

When I worked as a CS rep and had to log into my phone every time I sat down, it was a conscious effort that required active management, every day, for four years. When I get up in the morning to take care of and feed my pets, it’s an active checklist, and while I have a routine of sorts, different parts get missed often, like turning on my coffee machine, opening windows to cool the house, or even turning lights on. I’ve been on a mission to automate as much as possible in my home because things like my fish die otherwise.

The only time I’ve ever experienced auto-pilot has been while driving. And frankly, that scares the hell out of me because I lose time when that happens and have no idea if I did anything dangerous (I’m reasonably sure not because it’s happened often with others in the car, but the feeling is still there).

Yes. That’s exactly it. And as soon as you try to form a habit with no visible short-term results or gain, and some form of annoyance in its performance (I know of one person who hates how loud teeth brushing is), it is super-hard-mode.

I can daydream through some actions, but it’s rare, and I fuck up whatever I’m doing. This is because I’m splitting my attention and not actually following a habit.

Starting any activity, including brushing my teeth, is always a conscious choice. I cannot “sleepwalk” into the bathroom to start my day.

A story here. I was in a relationship years ago, every morning this person would wake up and slap the button on their alarm. If they woke up before the alarm, or if the alarm failed, they would still reach over and slap the button. It was a habit.

I cannot develop habits like that. But I’m also not tripped up by habits. There’s no “walk down the hall and automatically turn left”.

The only upside to my particular situation is that I’ve never been hyperactive. Attention deficit, but no hyperactivity. It allows me to have at least some discipline in my day. But that has to be planned out and actively adhered to. It’s a constant struggle, but not as bad as some people I’ve known over the years.

Maybe? Once I get started at something, I can zone out and not consciously think about it, but even getting ready for work, is a different adventure every day.

Sometimes I jump up, get ready, and I leave early, and on the other 24 work days of the month, I’m distracted by the laundry that didn’t get in the dryer, trying to find my keys, reading an article that’s much longer than I thought, and my cats.

I know what I need to do and I go through the checklist, but I wouldn’t call any of it automatic.

What would you consider a habit? I’m honestly very curious. I’m trying to think what things could be done with no thoughr. My brain just doesn’t work that way.

Wow. I honestly thought I was just lazy. Thank you for sharing. Everything other than sleep requires energy and effort. I wish I knew before I was in my 40s that I had ADHD!

They’re… Automatic? WTF.

😐

The OP is just using some wildly different definition of habits than everyone uses. No one has a “habit of doing yearly taxes” lol.

It’s really not as extreme as this guy implies. I guarantee you he has habits he’s not mentioning, it’s just that adhd have more of a tendency to forget them because we’ll get distracted by something else. I think about brushing my teeth, yes, but once I get started I day dream through it. I’m diagnosed ADHD and medicated.

Conversely, I have been considered to be neurotypical all of my life, though I do have a lot of other issues (chronic illnesses) so I wouldn’t rule out it being missed because of those ending up taking up all of the “bandwidth” so to speak - and I can think of very few daily habits that I have off the top of my head. Or, they’re cloaked in a way that I don’t “feel” they are habits, I’ll try to explain that a bit better:

Most things that I do, it almost feels like there’s an explicit direct cause -> effect correlation as to why. I suck at remembering to brush my teeth. But showering? I do so because I hate when there is that feeling of my legs running against each other in bed and there’s an almost sticky (?) like feeling.

And I’m reminded of that feeling because unfortunately for me, laying in bed isn’t only a thing I do during bedtime and occasional certain “activities with others” which is when they say is the only time of the day you should be in bed. I’ll get the aforementioned feeling and go “I need to take a shower before I plan to actually sleep”.

Or sleeping doesn’t tend to be a habit that I have in terms of going to bed at a specific time of day/night, I do so because I feel the amount of energy I have is too low for me to do anything more productive in the day (or to regain the energy by having say a meal). Exception of course is if I have an early appointment the next day that I know is going to require me to need some amount of rest for, and even then actually falling asleep is a struggle.

Or speaking of meals, I don’t stick with a explicit “three meals of day” plan - I usually skip breakfast and only have (maybe) lunch and dinner. I’ll just have something to eat when I directly feel hunger and realize I haven’t eaten in X amount of time. I’ll have a couple of light snacks here and there to bridge the gap if I need to. This one though, I feel is more or less related to how my GI condition plays a part in my own internal risk vs reward scenario.

I also don’t necessarily feel what others/my friends might describe as an almost instinctive desire to check social media whenever I wake up - I run the Lemmy instance I’m on so of course I do check to make sure it’s still running, and this morning in particular I didn’t have anything else that needed immediate doing, and came across this post in “All”.

I use reminders on my phone to make sure I take my medications at an appropriate time since my sleep schedule is not consistent enough for me to just always take it when I wake up / before I go to sleep (I’ve been told that some of the ones I’m on work best if you take them at roighly a consistent time).

I work from home and clock in on time because I’m always looking at the time when I know it’s around the corner, but I still have alarms and calendar events set to nudge me as well however.

I do my laundry when I go to take a shower and realize I have fewer choices of clean clothes to pick from, and set a reminder for the next day to do so. Similarly, I order more groceries when I have fewer choices of food to pick from (which thankfully doesn’t involve running loud machines that will wake up others, so I can do that immediately rather than deferring it to the next day).

I charge my phone and my watch when I get a notification that they’re low on batteries, not as part of a going-to-bed-ritual (and this certainly has bitten me on plenty of occasions).

I guess a better way to describe it all is that pretty much everything I do is “reactionary”. I do everything as the need arises, nothing (well, off the top of my head) is really automatic in the same way I see from others. Most of the time I can tell you what prompted me to do something.

I will say that I have what I (along with my psychiatrist and therapist) can only describe as “rolling chronic depression”, but even when it affects me the least, this doesn’t change.

I think the rubric is basically whether or not the behavior is disruptive to your life. Many neurotypical people do those things from time to time, but if it becomes overwhelming and pervasive, and keeps you from functioning effectively, it’s time for an evaluation.

Agreed. 100%.

Sometimes though, when we’re frustrated and dumping that out, it sounds like we are saying that. It’s very easy to ‘us vs. them’ the situation.

Example: “Oh my god! Other people remember that they are boiling water for eggs? I have ADHD and I forget and leave the kitchen to do something else all the time. This suuuucks! It’s not fair for us.” I’m sure that there are some ADHD people who don’t have to work with a technique just to cook eggs (I do. I set timers.), but there you have it.

No, neurotypicals don’t just automatically go exercise. Its a choice they make.

No, neurotypical people have to think about actions before we take them. We aren’t robots. I don’t automatically get up from the couch, make dinner, and then eat it without thinking about it.

We get distracted and forget things, too. I went to the coffee shop the other day and realized I left my wallet at home.

My brother has extreme ADHD, and it’s much harder for him to manage everyday things. He might hyper focus on something and forget to eat all day, etc, but we both have to consciously do tasks just the same.

I was about to ask also shit blinking and breathing

I had to blink.

I day dream so much I’m arguably not present

They weren’t claiming that people had a habit for paying taxes in general but that because nothing else is a habit they lack the energy to do the things that other people already consider draining when they had to spend so much on things that come naturally and in a way for free to others.

I would argue that brushing your teeth certainly seems to be habitual for most people. It’s something they’d do if they went through the bathroom routine in the morning while effectively still asleep. This person is saying that if they don’t effectively stand in the bathroom and look at the brush and decide “I will now brush my teeth.” they won’t do it, where someone else had grabbed the brush while thinking about what they need to get done later in the day.

Depression on the other hand would more likely manifest in a disregard for the necessity of the activity. This person says they do brush their teeth, they want to brush their teeth and they are ready to spend their existing energy on it.

A depressed person often would not be convinced that it matters, nor that they could even make themselves do it if they felt like they had to. Though naturally depression is expressed in many ways, as is any type of neurodivergence. It’s hard to put strong labels on these things. Nonetheless it seems sensible to differentiate on these things as most neurodivergence is simply a set of untypical phenomena and behaviour that have collected up enough to start becoming notable.

A person considered completely normal could suffer from the same but simply manage well enough for it to never stick out. No one is entirely normal.

Yeah the “meat suit” comment makes me think some kind of dysmorphia or something , that’s friggin weird man. Our meat suits are how we experience the universe and they profoundly impact our state of mind and being. To deny it demonstrates a very odd disconnect from reality.

I actually do have a habit of brushing my teeth. It’s part of my morning routine, which I do in the exact same order, every day. But, I’m autistic (I was diagnosed as a teen in the 80s). I’m one of those persons that has a very exact routine, and get really upset when my routine gets interrupted.

But, I do agree with you that some of those symptoms seem more indicative of depression than ADHD.

Yeah this. I don’t automatically do things without thinking.

I like to make a cup of coffee each morning. It’s a habit. I don’t really spend time thinking about whether I’m going to do it first thing each morning because it’s so deeply ingrained - of course I will want to do that tomorrow when I wake up. I’ve performed this ritual so many times that I do know all the steps (although I do occasionally fuck it up).

However, I’m not going through this process like an automaton free of thought - somewhere between the bed and the kitchen there’s still a decision that I’m going to make a coffee. Some mornings I pee before coffee, some mornings it’s after - there are decisions being made.

I think with ADHD people things that end up taking very little thinking energy for non ADHD people, take the same amount of energy if not more, all the time, which is exhausting. I believe it is easy to take that for granted if you’re not having to expend the energy constantly.

Yeah, it feels strange to say something like “I have a habit of locking my door when I come inside, I don’t even think about it, it is totally automatic for me” and then say “I don’t have a habit of going to the gym because I have to consciously make effort to do it.” Like yeah, no shit going to the gym “takes effort” that locking a door doesn’t. That doesn’t make one a habit and not a habit.

There seems to be two usages of habit going on and they’re being conflated. Something as big as exercising cannot become so automatic that you do it without thinking. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a “habit.” Things as easy as buckling a seatbelt or locking a door can become automatic and thoughtless but that isn’t the aspect that makes them habits.

I find it hard to make these criticisms because I don’t want to sound like I’m saying “just get over it” for dealing with ADHD. I have it too. There are tons of things that I’m jealous of neurotypical folks of for being able to do easily. I get the feeling of this post but I can’t help but feel that they have totally misunderstood what people mean by habits. I also still feel like developing good habits might be easier for neurotypical folks, but the idea that they just do something as complex and involved as exercising totally on autopilot rather than deciding to go do it is off. It’s easy to get into this self defeating mindset with ADHD of feeling like you can’t do something. I don’t want people to fall into that trap just because they misunderstand what people mean by the word habit.

I have entirely forgotten glasses of water and plates of food for 6+ hours at a time that are directly next to me. The struggle is real.

Thank you. I appreciate the politeness.

@MystikIncarnate @blueskiesoc but then, as you describe they are self-soothing - are they habits, or are they stims?

So you’re saying if you didn’t have bad habits, you’d have no habits at all. I’ll see myself out.

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I so relate to this. I listen to audiobooks or podcasts all the time because it keeps my brain partially occupied. Forgetting to take meds is a huge issue for me. I’m asthmatic and need to take an inhaler twice a day. I’ve been using an inhaler for 35 years and I still can’t remember regulary. I’m broken.

And at the same time think about that time someone was mean to you 8 years ago