Constructive ADHD v1.0

by @visakanv

This is a public draft of a work-in-progress ebook. Feel free to add your comments and notes wherever. If you’ve enjoyed this, you may also enjoy my 1st book FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD, my 2nd book INTROSPECT (this is the better one!). Also check out my substack, Frame Studies, where you can support me by being a paid subscriber– only if you feel like it! You can also subscribe to my youtube channel (I try to respond to all the comments!) and share my stuff with your friends.

You might also be interested in my other WIP drafts: INDEX, Uninstalling Copes, Long Games, Less Unstrategic and High Voltage Living.

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Constructive ADHD v1.0        1

by @visakanv        1

Preamble / Warning        3

Saying what you’re going to do, then doing it        4

Support, don’t suppress        5

Question the assumptions        6

Put the gun down        6

You can’t intimidate ADHD into submission        10

Trickster spirit        11

Mind palace        12

Iron man suit        12

Some random note-taking advice        13

My style        15

Chaingun metaphor        15

It’s probably wise to seek a role that relies on your strengths        16

Go fast and get it all down        17

Useful actionable stuff goes here maybe, and/or a review of everything        18

Being your own manager when you’re a feral adhd monke        18

Note to self /   stuff to expand on        19

Conclusion and further reading and shit        20

Stray notes to myself        20

Resummarizing / overviewing this whole doc        21

I’m a fan of the phrase “constructive ADHD”, more so than say “productive ADHD”, because it makes me think of building things. lego. minecraft. cathedrals. skyscrapers. elaborate, byzantine, complex mindcities. learn to use the machine-gun mind effectively.

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^[a][b][c]

this is *exactly* what the inside of my brain feels like sometimes. "brainfog^[d]" never quite captures the whole picture. there's always something missing. turns out it was the llamas^[e]. Sometimes you can hear them grunting and squealing in the distance.

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Preamble / Warning

I am not a doctor or an expert or anything of the sort.
I am just some guy with some experience and some thoughts.
Blah blah. You get it.

Saying what you’re going to do, then doing it

A newer friend once said something like “I like how Visa says he’s going to do something, then immediately does it.”

This was quite funny for me to hear, because… it’s actually an ADHD coping mechanism^[f][g][h]. if you ask my friends from my teenage days, they’ll tell you that I was extremely unreliable, full of shit, and you simply couldn’t trust anything I said. And they were right! This was true for me both internally and externally. I was a bullshitter by default. I would just say whatever words I needed to make things go away, and then I would forget what I had said. At some point this got me into several tangled webs that led to people getting angry and upset with me. Which was entirely my fault, and I hated myself for it.

This problem took me *years* to fix. And the way I “solved” it wasn’t pretty. My attempted solution was overkill – I tried to impose tyrannical order on my chaotic whirlwind self. I did make some material progress, and I also made myself utterly miserable – which I felt like I deserved, because after all, wasn’t I a lousy person?^[i]

A thing I understand intimately– which people who are still struggling are often surprised to hear, because they tend to assume that I’m a natural– is that when you’re wack, your mechanism for fixing yourself is also wack. It’s like looking for your glasses when you can’t see without your glasses. The most “obvious” things become impossible.

The broad question of “how do you rebuild trust that is lost?” I had to deal with that, internally. After all, I had a long history of betraying my own trust! There’s evidence! So how can I trust myself? I didn’t know. I beat myself up over every failure, then wrapped that in jokes and apathy. ^[j]

I think in retrospect I’m lucky that underneath ALL of that, in the core of cores, I did still have a love for literature and music^[k]. I say earnestly that I’d give my life for musicians. I would. I think that’s the light that saved me – the non-coercive, shining spirit of humanity.

But okay, even if I believe that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, I still have to walk my way out. and the way to do that, when you have zero sense of balance, proprioception, muscle control, blah blah, is to put one foot in front of the other, firmly, and then do it again.

And what that looked like, for me, is announcing, “I’m going to drink a glass of water now,” and then drinking it. Hey, look, I just did 1x thing that I said I was going to do. “I’m going to do 10 pushups now.” Hey, that’s 2x things. And I earned my trust back, 1 step at a time.^[l][m]

This process had all sorts of second-order effects. It’s like how you might “just” wanna play basketball with your friends, then you end up quitting cigarettes, eating healthier, sleeping better, etc, all to boost your game. And then you realize that, actually, living healthy feels great!^[n][o]

Anyway, a cute vestigial remnant of this whole process is that I still announce what I’m about to do before I do it. It’s like a little ritual I have for myself. Every time I do what I say, I build trust in myself, I build self-respect (which I didn’t have until… 25? 27?)

It still actually surprises me a little bit. When something I say will be done, gets done. ^[p]When you’ve spent a lifetime making shit up (it all started with “I will do my homework”), it starts to seem like magic. What I say will happen, happens? It’s like magic. I’m a magician! 😂^[q]

Of course, I still make mistakes. I underestimated how long it would take me to get my ebooks published and updated. But I no longer think “ah, fuck, I’m a fucking bullshitter and nothing I say has any meaning”. I now think, ah, I made a mistake, I must recalibrate & renegotiate.

What I’m finding is that there’s a sort of “economy” to it? For example, even as I write this, my ebooks are currently “in the red” with regards to my projections. But that’s okay – because my youtube videos are coming along beautifully. I’ve been publishing 1 every single day for almost a month. Joy to the world!

I guess this is just to say, if you feel like you don’t trust yourself, I feel you. I know how wrong it sounds when someone says “well, just start believing in yourself,” like b*tch, you have evidence that you’re not to be trusted!!! ^[r]I know^[s]!  The thing is to build the tiny wins.

Support, don’t suppress

My #1 “productivity tip” for fellow weirdos and aliens with ADHD or ADHD-ish minds is – don’t suppress your mind, support it.

At the start of every work session, write down what you intend to do.

At the end, when you have deviated wildly, don’t despair – write down what happened.^[t]

The meandering mind is a feature, not a bug^[u][v][w]. IMO, it’s a sign that you have a stubborn^[x][y][z] curiosity within you that refuses to follow orders. This can be a great thing, actually, once you learn how to work around it. But few have the patience to teach this.

I have a pretty severe case of this myself and I used to subconsciously beat myself up over it. But over the years I’ve learned to see that it takes me to interesting places. Thing is to non-judgementally go along for the ride, and report your findings^[aa][ab][ac].

While it’s true that there are an infinite number of things to get distracted by, it’s also simultaneously true that most things are connected – and it’s all part of the same whole. So write it down. You’ll find patterns.^[ad]

Da Vinci was clearly one of us, by the way. Check out his wonderfully idiosyncratic todo list. He didn’t have Twitter, so he used notebooks. Thousands of pages of notebooks. Write. Your. Shit. Down.

The writing takes extra effort, but it builds you up tremendously. And without it, you’re left scattered, incoherent, lost.

Note-taking is the Iron Man Suit for the meandering mind.^[af]

Question the assumptions

What I've come around to see – from having hundreds of conversations about this – is that people make those assumptions^[ag] based on what they see in any given snapshot moment. you see a kanye west daydreaming in class and you think he's "distracted"

Most people don't spend much time interrogating the lenses through which they are observing reality, and the arbitrary values encoded in the systems which they've inherited. kid can't seem to do his homework, it's almost always assumed to be the kid's fault, never the homework's^[ah]

I know the other side of this, I know every side of this. There are domains in which, even outside of schools, tests, bureaucracy, etc, a lack of dexterity will hurt you. it can hurt in relationships. it can hurt in trying to keep your word, to yourself and people you care about

one way in which I describe this is that ADHD minds are like big, lumbersome chainguns that have a tremendous rate of fire. but they take time to spin up. they jam easily. they are no more or less worthy than any other kind of mind^[ai]

big part of the challenge of having a neurodivergent mind is understanding how it is different, what are the contexts in which it excels, what are the contexts in which it doesn't, how to seek help/assistance for what you're not good at, and so on^[aj]

Put the gun down

Somebody once tweeted, “ADHD is a lot of mentally yelling at yourself to DO something to do ANYTHING while you sit with absolutely no expression on your face, scrolling through your phone or continuing to play a game or whatever as if you have no control over your body.”

With love: in my view, this isn’t ADHD itself, but punitive, coercive self-bullying. It’s likely inherited from the people in your life who didn’t know how to deal with your ADHD.^{[ak][al][am][an][ao][ap]}

This is *mismanagement* of ADHD (it’s not your fault if you don’t know better), not ADHD itself.

Yelling at people is a horrible strategy for behaviour modification. this is true internally as well. it typically comes from a place of desperation and neediness and it almost always makes things worse rather than better.

if you’re at a point where going about your daily life is the equivalent of having someone screaming in your face, things have gotten pretty dire. It's salvageable but it will take time. you need to rehabilitate your relationship with yourself. You start by putting the gun down.

^[aq]

“DO something do ANYTHING” is a really bad request to ask of anyone, by the way. (Again I say this with love.)

It’s a good sign, actually, because it suggests to me that you can improve your relationship by taking some simple steps to get better at asking yourself for help.

Where ADHD *does* come into the picture: In my experience with myself and dozens of others, ADHD is the slipperiest, most irreverent fucker on Earth 😂 which is to say he/she/they will resist your coercion and bullying TO THE DEATH.

you cannot win this fight. put the gun down.

I repeat: your ADHD is smarter than you, more stubborn than you, and WILL outmaneuver you.

The ADHD guerrillas in your head will outlast the authoritarian govt of your executive function every time, however repressive you get.

You cannot win this fight. Put the gun down.

“No but maybe if I yell harder, hold myself hostage, plead harder, beat myself to within an inch of my life, the strategy that has never worked in my life will suddenly work! I must self-flagellate harder!”

No. It does not work. You cannot win this fight. Put the gun down.

“Okay! Okay! I’ll put the gun down. But now what? Nothing works in this relationship. I can’t be trusted, I am a bad naughty person who just wants to avoid responsibility and hardship, a loser, a piece of shit…”

Breathe. It might not seem like it but all of this is fixable.^[ar]

At this stage in your relationship (with yourself) your claims and beliefs about yourself have all been warped by neediness, anger, frustration, insecurity. They might be superficially correct in some way, but they are noxious, demeaning, dispiriting. We can fix this

you have to declare a trust bankruptcy. a resentment jubilee. recognise that the approach so far has not worked and that you have the equivalent of a psychic injury that needs treatment and rehabilitation. There is no shame in this.

Trust is rebuilt with small baby steps. you have to ask yourself very small, achievable things. ask yourself for a glass of water. go do that. drink. see? you just rebuilt a tiny bit of trust in yourself. That's a win. That's proof that you CAN be trusted. baby steps. baby steps.

You can do it. I believe in you, even if you don’t yet believe in yourself. You have within yourself a strength and power that you don’t even know, that has been forgotten. Dark have been your dreams of late. But I come to you now at the turn of the tide.

I invite you to see the best in yourself.^[as][at]

^{[au][av][aw][ax][ay]}

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You can’t intimidate ADHD into submission

Caveat: all of the following is my personal experience. Your mileage may vary.

ADHD is slippery and resists negative reinforcement. You can’t frighten/intimidate/bully ADHD away. I tried. For years. It doesn’t work. ADHD is very, very, very stubborn. ^[az] And maybe rightfully so. You can’t “contain” it because it will outlast your executive function. ADHD can remain “irrational” longer than your executive function can stay solvent (h/t @rplevy).

This is something people really don’t seem to get so I think it’s worth repeating: the game is rigged. No amount of clever strategizing can really help you outwit an opponent who is stronger, faster, and just better than you on every dimension. I struggled & failed until I accepted this.

There is a lot of work that a person with ADHD can do to make life less miserable. But what I’m trying to convey here is that you can’t install an authoritarian government and expect to control a messy, chaotic, irreverent, independent people. You have to respect their autonomy.^[ba]

I have a good enough relationship with myself now that I can joke about it. But there is a truth here:

 Not all people respond to repression the same way. Some will literally choose death. There is staggering variance here that many people don’t seem to appreciate

If I am a charming and persuasive person, maybe half of it is that I had to charm and persuade others to survive socially, but another half of it is that I have to charm and persuade myself to get me to do *anything*^[bb].^[bc] It’s a tremendous amount of work. It did pay off eventually, but it took a lot of work over a long time.

I am really like this even today, and it has gotten in the way of my life — so much so that I’ve basically designed my entire life around this

I can recognise that it’s unhelpful/costly and try to admonish etc, but ADHD brain does not give a fuck about negative reinforcement^[bd].

I do recognise that there’s a flavor of defeatism in some people’s tweets about their ADHD, and I don’t encourage that. But I understand it. Sometimes it’s a coping mechanism, sometimes it can be something much worse. Which is why I really like the frame “constructive ADHD”.

Trickster spirit

Kids in my DMs with ADHD symptoms are always surprised when I tell them that I don't think they should try to suppress their mind's wild swings. My advice is to develop the practice of taking meticulous notes instead^[be]. It worked for many prolific individuals throughout history.

To have ADHD, in my view, is to be blessed & cursed to be the custodian of a wild trickster spirit who refuses to be tamed, broken, refuses to obey anybody else's directions – including your own. You can't win, IMO, so you might as well accept your fate and go along for the ride^[bf][bg]

Which isn't to say that you don't have to care about your worldly responsibilities. you do. That's the curse part. the trickster doesn't cooperate, or live on your schedule, but you have to clean up their messes. Accepting this can be painful; that's what growing up is. But if you take care of your shit, if you don't get grumpy and upset and grovel, if you don't resent the wild child inside you – then you get to experience the blessing. and the blessing is that they will lead you on the grandest adventures that other people can't even imagine

Don't beat yourself up, don't thrash about – that'll likely make it worse. try to relax. try to believe. you might be different from all your peers, but you are not alone. You are not broken or spoiled. Others have been on this journey before, and they are some of humanity's best.

Mind palace

I’ve basically taught myself to manage my ADHD with notes and threads. My “schedule intelligence” (deadlines, calendars, checklist) is terrible but my recognition and web-jumping is fantastic, so I spent something like a decade using the latter to build an elaborate mind-palace.

Because of threading and recognition, I can almost always pick up where I left off.^{[bh][bi][bj][bk][bl]}

I used to feel guilty and ashamed about the idea of having to rely on a prosthetic, but I’ve since learned to see it as a mecha for the mind, like an iron man suit. ^[bm][bn](next section)

If you’re like me, I recommend keeping meticulous notes of whatever you do when you’re procrastinating. I think of it as “deep-self-directed work”. If you’re going to watch trashy movies, then write down your thoughts after watching each movie. It’ll come in handy in ways you least expect.

To me, the most critical part of becoming “so good they can’t ignore you” (h/t Cal Newport, Steve Martin) is to be “so prolific you don’t recognise yourself”. Once you cross that threshold you can actually look at your own work with a relatively objective, critical eye.

People are sometimes surprised to hear how agnostic and indifferent I am to specific methods, formats, tools. The only thing that really matters to me is a sense of flow and throughput through the entire pipeline.

Getting lost is a feature not a bug, the only real problem is getting jammed.^[bo][bp][bq]

Iron man suit

In Iron Man 2, when asked at a senate(?) hearing to describe the suit, which they are calling a weapons platform, Tony Stark defines it as a prosthetic. It seems funny, but it's also actually true.

I think of the suit (and accompanying AI) as an extension of Tony's mind. He built it to help him survive. It's a protective exoskeleton

A trope that moves me: "you got my back, now I got yours". In the above scene (from Iron Man 3), Tony's gift becomes his burden. I’ve sometimes felt this way about my own mind. I picked this scene as a header pic to remind myself to drag my own mind to a safe space + do the necessary repairs, so that we can flourish.^[br]

Some random note-taking advice

Someone recently asked me for note-taking advice via DM, and I’m still thinking about what I told them because I think I accidentally stumbled upon a simple formulation that makes a lot of sense to me

Start with one notepad file, or one paper journal, whatever. Don’t think about topics, don’t think about how you’re going to sort it, what the sub-folders should be, etc. Just start dumping all your thoughts. Use line breaks, make it “chunky” (as opposed to long paragraphs)

Keep going until you *begin to feel overwhelmed*. Now pause. Your notepad file is now full of many discrete (as opposed to continuous) points, too many for you to remember or make sense of at a glance. Great! Now it’s time to sort.

You now want to look for connections *between* nodes. Resist the urge to impose some sort of top-down grand scheme. Instead, look for related ideas, riffs, “things that go together”. “Siblings”. Here’s an eg of how I’m doing this retroactively on my blog^[bs][bt]

^[bu]

You see what’s happening? Dozens (100s if you nasty like me) of “atoms” start to coalesce into a smaller handful of “molecules”. You no longer need to consider and recall every single thing. You just need to remember the core molecules, and recognize “what goes with what”

The map of connections will actually reveal new insights to you. You’ll notice some molecules are larger or heavier or higher-value than others. I recommend framing each molecule as a sort of “expedition”, or “line of inquiry”. Each becomes a sort of investigation with related clues

I fell into a silly-ish trap a while ago where I went a little crazy and started creating too many blogpost drafts, too many new notes, too many folders - and it became a hell to navigate. In retrospect it becomes clear: only “split” notes when it really makes sense to!!

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1174067824412618752 

My style

quick sketch of my personal (ideal) style:

move fast, hit hard, wipe quick and move on to the next thing, but be micro-rigorous in making sure that each new thing quickly considers all past things, and is threaded accordingly.^[bv]

my biggest weakness at the moment is actually "wipe quick" – I sit with half-done things for too long, but the real problem isn't that they're half-done, but that they're not properly threaded^[bw]

properly-threaded half-dones are *fine*. lingering on a half-done for too long is not.

by "properly threaded" I mean contextualized against everything else that I'm doing, plotted on the (multi-thread, lol) map of my body of work. The act of contextualizing a thing – saying what it’s for, what it was trying to do, etc – makes it useful even if it’s incomplete.

Tk eh Idk if i want to include this section^[bx], would have to rewrite it. (original thread)

Chaingun metaphor

“Your brain is like a Ferrari, a race car. You have the power to win races and become a champion. However, you do have one problem. You have bicycle brakes. Your brakes just aren’t strong enough to control the powerful brain you’ve got. So, you can’t slow down or stop when you need to.” – Dr Edward Hallowell, on ADHD

I sometimes think of the ADHD mind as a Gatling gun - it takes a while to warm up, jams easily and is harder to aim, but once you appreciate its idiosyncrasies you can use it effectively^[by]

Shame I can’t put a gif in an ebook (actually, is it possible? – I could spend an entire day on this detour)^[bz][ca], because when you see what a complicated piece of machinery this is, and how “heavy duty” it is, it becomes clear how easily it could jam.

It’s probably wise to seek a role that relies on your strengths

Sometimes when people ask me something like “how do you deal with your ADHD”, they’re really asking something like, “how do you live a normal life despite your ADHD”, but the true answer is “I don’t live a normal life”. I’ve chosen/designed a life around me, not the other way around.

This is a touchy/difficult topic to give advice about^[cb]. Sometimes somebody comes to you asking how can I fix my relationship with my partner, when it’s clear that there’s no salvaging it and that they should exit the relationship as soon as possible. But communicating this can be challenging. You might get a “how dare you”, and so on.

Similarly... I don’t really know how to live a normal life^[cc]. I suppose I sort of did for the 5.5 years that I held down a job, but even then I was kind of borderline weird. Y’know, like how you could kind of tell how Lady Gaga was even before she started going full Gaga.

Go fast and get it all down

IMO, and this is a deliberately provocative frame: cowardice disguises itself as confusion^{[cd][ce][cf][cg][ch][ci]}

children don't sit around think about what to do, they just do what they want

people already know what they want, in their hearts. thinking gets in the way and needs to be suspended^[cj]

a sort of hack for thinkers to suspend thinking without suspending thinking is to go really, really fast and be really, really prolific. write or record (audio/video, whatever). then the truth will come out by accident and you can navigate by that

if you think "oh gosh I can't slow down, my mind goes a million miles a minute", put that mf to work. write down every word, or record yourself speaking. can you write or talk for 8 hours straight? have you done it? do you have a record of it?

you may find that you start sputtering out at the 3 hour mark. what happens after that? you run out! you run dry! no thoughts head empty! Peace! or? you keep going, and you build a massive body of work, which will be full of unexpected value, if you went fast. either way you win.

(generalizing from dozens of DMs over the years)

the problem isn't that your mind goes fast. the problem is that you have your feet on both the gas and the brakes. take your foot off the brakes. your mind is racing because it wants to GO. why not let it?^[ck]

people who feel stupid feel very smart about their self-assessment of "i'm stupid". you fucker! you are smarter than you know, or CAN know. if you go faster than your mind's censorship department can keep up, you will spit wisdom and insight you didn't know you were capable of^[cl]

Start with one notepad file, or one paper journal, whatever. Don’t think about topics, don’t think about how you’re going to sort it, what the sub-folders should be, etc. Just start dumping all your thoughts. Use line breaks, make it “chunky” (as opposed to long paragraph

Useful actionable stuff goes here maybe, and/or a review of everything

Put down the gun^[cm] – it’s very difficult to make progress while you’re being mean/cruel to yourself:

Take baby steps – it might seem childish, but that itself is a kind of dismissive cruelty. Greatness happens from small beginnings. If taking bigger steps hasn’t worked out so far, go smaller. You can be ferocious and intense about it

Leave notes for your future self – ^[cn]

Thread things

Get good at asking for help

Help people + ask for help in turn^[co]

Being your own manager when you’re a feral adhd monke

Just putting together a doc with shit i’ve learned. Which I suppose is the first point. Point One: put together docs of shit you’ve learned. You might think you don’t need it, but you’ll need it…

What else

Close your tabs. Use one-tab so you can put them all in one place^[cp][cq][cr]

Currently experimenting with trying for more maker/manager distinction, like maker days and manager days, or pomodoros^[cs][ct]

The most important thing is your emotions, your psychology, how you’re feeling, what you care about, what you’re flinching from. Right now as I write this I kind of feel too tired to go through my playlists. Okay, so that’s not the sort of task I should be doing. Let’s… clear up the desktop.

Good reply game between notes. Try not to have orphan notes. Try not to have too many links either. ^[cu][cv][cw]

Do little things that you can celebrate. Momentum is worth it. Small dominos can knock over larger dominos.

Note to self /   stuff to expand on

Want to respond to this tweet about motivation/executive control and medication https://twitter.com/empathy2000/status/1466530296317288448

4 hrs 40, 40 hrs 4

https://twitter.com/ZamiArts/status/1466438670764945408

https://twitter.com/MaximumADHD/status/1407550100679897092 

Gabor mate counterwill: https://twitter.com/hormeze/status/1249750862454390794

Adhd drowsiness https://twitter.com/roryreckons/status/1454697016626352128

link from wayback machine as the original tweet has been deleted https://web.archive.org/web/20211031062947/https://twitter.com/roryreckons/status/1454697016626352128 

Thread about potential: https://twitter.com/The_Weed/status/1534592771792572418

A recurring thing I’ve noted- & this has gotten worse because the illusion of my competence has gotten halo-effect’d – is that people, sometimes my closest friends, get surprised, even shocked, to find out my adhd “hard lines”. There are things I am almost incapable of doing….^[cx]

Conclusion and further reading and shit

Tbc

Learn more about me: visakanv.com

Follow me on twitter @visakanv (DM me what you think!)

Subscribe to my youtube channel: youtube.com/visakanv

Check out my substack: visakanv.substack.com

Buy my first book FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD

Buy my second INTROSPECT (this is the better book, until I update FAN)

Thanks for reading!

Stray notes to myself

Mykola adhd thread https://twitter.com/mykola/status/1666274460935102464 

ADHD free for call? https://twitter.com/caseyjohnston/status/1536441045977735169

free for call pt 2 https://twitter.com/pixelfish/status/1536572858175877121

urge to abandon projects https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1553678532303536128

why do adhd ppl make overly large projects https://twitter.com/danidonovan/status/1553775564477157376

Make your life easier https://twitter.com/imteddybless/status/1613169080940347399 

4 hours https://twitter.com/dreamsofskies/status/1562528339331788803 

Shame https://twitter.com/samdylanfinch/status/1563694311459680256 

ADHD very sensitive child^[cy][cz]

Gabor Mate: Look at the parental relationship, what stresses in the life,

ADHD as BS-protection?

like, in one frame, and i'm not saying this applies to you, but for some people, their ADHD might be protecting them from living a BS life, and then the medication helps them to wear down that defense, so they can be motivated to do dumb BS. and for some people this is desirable!

“something goes wrong and it destroys your ability to accomplish anything else” https://twitter.com/CatieOsaurus/status/1579561996860915713

do it poorly https://web.archive.org/web/20221019100128/https://twitter.com/andreagrimes/status/1580279730737008641 

Jack asks for focus tips https://twitter.com/jappleby/status/1670793410284777473 

James Stuber Threadapalooza Thread 2023: https://twitter.com/uberstuber/status/1736489420466110843

QC ADHD megathread: https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1757634307139707020 

Resummarizing / overviewing this whole doc

1. Tiny Wins: i had become an untrustworthy person to myself, and the way I worked my way out of it was to practice making very small promises and fulfilling them immediately. Baby steps. Emotionally/psychologically the hard part here is accepting that, when you’re down bad, you can’t do big dramatic things to fix it. You have to accept being in the down state for some time. Being honest here will actually reduce the total amount of time in the downstate. There’s just less denial about it.