ADHD – A Personal Walkthrough & Guide

The core difference between ADHD-mode gameplay and neurotypical gameplay is something many players aren’t aware of. Most of us get that ADHD impacts our ability to focus, but the true underlying reason for our challenges with attention as well as almost every other challenge associated with ADHD comes from impairment in our executive functioning systems. Many of our greatest struggles end up being perceived by ourselves and others as a simple “skill issue” when, in fact, these struggles are a natural result of the neurological console we play life on. 

So, let’s talk a bit about this whole “executive functioning” thing and see how it actually impacts our playthroughs. 

Working Memory – Running Out of RAM

Working memory (sometimes called “short-term memory”) tends to be impaired in those of us playing life in ADHD-mode. Working memory is one’s ability to keep information in their mind (in the short-term) and then use that information for something. (There’s two different kinds of working memory too, visual and auditory.) Most people with ADHD have measurably less space for their working memory and that means a lot of stuff winds up going in one ear, and then right out the other before we can process or use it.

So, what does this mean for our ADHD playthroughs? Well, for me it means holding a phone number in my head long enough to dial it is a challenge, it means sometimes I can’t remember if my GPS literally just said “turn RIGHT on Smith Street” or “turn LEFT on Smith Street”, it means I can’t remember a number I was looking at half a second ago when I go to write it down somewhere else, it means forgetting what page # the teacher said to turn to in my text book, and it means sometimes I don’t remember where I was going with a sentence halfway through saying it. 

To me, something escaping my working memory feels like trying to hold one of those water wiggler tube toys:

Somehow, in trying to hold onto all of it, I end up retaining nothing. When I try to wrap my mind around the specific thing that I just saw or heard, it ends up slipping right out of my grasp. In an instant, the metaphorical water wiggler thingy is on the floor, and I am entirely unsure what date my friend just suggested for a meet up 12 seconds ago and I have to ask them to repeat it. 

Having limited working memory compared to neurotypical individuals also means that us ADHD-ers tend to get overwhelmed more easily.

I know if I have a lot of things in my head at once that I’m trying to remember I’m probably gonna get overwhelmed very quickly. So, it’s helpful for me to write down any to-dos or other thoughts mental notes I’m I have in mind as soon as they come up. I find just jotting stuff down on a note in my phone so it doesn’t take up my valuable working memory does a lot to make my life easier. 📝

Impulse Control – Lag on Life’s Quick Time Events

In ADHD-brains, what’s known as a “stop signal” is just a fraction of a second slower than in the neurotypical brain. Unfortunately for us, that means we struggle to catch and stop ourselves from saying or doing things that we probably shouldn’t do.

What does this actually look like? Well, it has a lot of impacts, but one example in my life is that I always had a hard time not blurting out answers to questions in class, and even now, it’s still hard sometimes to keep myself from acting on the knee-jerk reaction to make jokes when I feel nervous.

I recall one particularly painful instance of this problem back in high school when we were having sectional, student-run practice at band camp. The other flutists in the group were a little grumpy and worn out which meant the mood was a little uncomfortable and tense and.. as I felt a bit uncomfortable myself, I started blurting out jokes.

Unfortunately, no one was laughing – literally no one. In fact, the only reactions I got were some annoyed glares. I TRIED to stop myself from talking, thinking over and over in my head, “don’t talk, don’t talk, don’t talk”, but the INSTANT an opportunity for a quip came up, I’d start making some kinda lame joke before my brain had even processed that I was speaking. Everyone’s negative reactions only made me feel MORE nervous, and eventually I got so desperate to keep my mouth shut I even tried literally biting my tongue, but it didn’t help. I felt so embarrassed and so so awkward. 🫥

One of the other students even said something harsh to me like, “No one thinks you’re funny; You should just stop” to which I was like “Yeah, I noticed. Trust me! I WANT myself to stop even more than YOU do!” 

While there are ways to help strengthen and speed up that stop signal in our brains, such as regularly practicing mindfulness, it’s rough having a brain with a laggy, out of sync, stop signal. We end up missing a lot of our internal “quick-time events” and often wind up unable to keep ourselves from back-talking, throwing something against a wall in frustration (broke a Nintendo DS that way as a kid once), or making deeply unappreciated jokes to a group of grumpy peers.

Keeping Track of What You’re Doing – A Brain With No Quest Log

Self-monitoring is an executive function related to keeping track of your own actions. This function is, you guessed it, impaired in most individuals with ADHD. 

Think back to all the times you were were starting to work on something, somehow got off task, had a mini “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”-style “adventure” and before you know it, twelve minutes have passed and you suddenly realize you’ve been reading a fan wiki for the past eight minutes instead of doing your Social Studies homework. Maybe if you were able to notice when you got off task, you could have reigned it in, but a lot of the time, such awareness escapes us.

It’s like your brain doesn’t have an internal ability to track quests and objectives. Where most people get to have their next objective marked on their minimaps, we don’t get any of that and the result is we often get off track without realizing it.

My first job back in high school was working at a Panera Bread. I was put in the position they call “Dining Room” which was basically a way of saying I was the person who took care of everything outside of the “employees only” parts of the establishment. I was responsible for refilling the pots of coffee every hour, running orders to tables, refilling the tea, restocking napkins, clearing tables, cleaning the bathrooms, emptying the trash cans, and vacuuming all of the carpeting and sweeping and mopping all of the tile on the customer side of things. (Truly a glamorous position, I know.)

And with soooo many different fluctuating, on demand, tasks that needed my attention, it was nearly impossible for me to keep track of what I meant to be doing at any given time. It was always especially difficult when I worked the closing shift (which was most of my shifts) because my ADHD medication had entirely worn off by that point and I was trying to juggle way more than I could hold in my head at once. 

For instance, I’d be halfway through emptying out the coffee pots for the night and then remember “Ack wait! I still have to empty the trash cans!” and then immediately run off and start that, only to have a supervisor interrupt and ask me if I had swept the floors yet and then I’d run off and start that, and then partway into doing that I’d see the rest of the coffee pots were still sitting there and rush off to go do that.

Overall, while it took everyone else maybe.. 30-60 minutes to finish closing up their areas of the store each night, it always took me at LEAST an hour and a half, and quite honestly, it was usually more like 2-2.5 hours after we closed before I was done.

Eventually, one of the supervisors (who probably wanted to get home before 11pm,) started making me a list on a piece of paper of everything I had to do for closing. It helped quite a bit when I had that list, and eventually I started making a list myself when I wasn’t given one. Staying on task was still a challenge, but at least now I had more space in my head to think through everything thanks to storing most of what I was tracking on a list. 

My brain may not have had a built-in quest log, but I learned that I could MAKE one!

The Level Up

Working at a cafe franchise didn’t necessarily call for much “focus” like say, doing homework would, and at a glance someone might not realize how ADHD could make the kind of job I had so difficult.

You may have noticed that in addition to the struggles with self-monitoring, my impaired working-memory and impulse control also played quite a bit into the difficulties teenaged me had with this job.

Thankfully, while the development of executive functions is typically delayed in people with ADHD, there’s hope. Firstly, there are ways we can cope with these problems, namely involving externalizing the processes our minds struggle with. And most of these impaired executive functions DO develop eventually, meaning many of these challenges tend to get easier over time as we get older.

(Those teen years were rough, though! It’s hard to manage all those new mechanics when your console somehow only updated the game’s difficulty and NOT your character’s toolset.)

ADHD comes with so many amazing strengths that get overlooked, but it definitely comes with quite a few lesser known weaknesses.

Just remember that it’s entirely normal to have these kinds of challenges for those of us playing life on ADHD-mode, and know that understanding and accepting our challenges is the first step to overcoming them. 💛