I study computer science and any time I sit down to code, I just browse or watch Youtube. Anything but do the work. Days and even months have gone by like this where I haven't done even an hour of learning. Its tough because in order to code I need to be in front of a screen but my brain refuses to study and just looks for that dopamine hit. My grades have suffered and I feel like a constant failure.
To clarify this is not an effect of the pandemic but has been happening for the past few years.
Got diagnosed with ADHD and now have a prescription for that tbh. I'd look into adhd a bit more of you haven't cause I thought a lot of the issues I was having were normal or were just me being lazy and that adhd was more like "oh look squirrel!" disorder. In reality it's more like attention regulation disorder - can't make yourself focus on anything no matter how much internal pleading you do. Tbh the r/adhdmeme subreddit is a pretty good starting point for "oh no this is all very relatable". For me I didn't really notice it as a standout problem until a couple years ago but in hindsight it is pretty obvious that it impacted me to some extent most of my life.
Does ADHD randomly pop up in life or is it a chronic condition? For me, this has been a relatively new thing in my academic life. I’ve only noticed it happening since my senior year of high school(I’m in senior year of college rn). Before that, I could focus for hours on end without a hitch. Would you say these are grounds enough to go to a doctor?
It's probably worth it, yeah. And "not being able to focus on stuff" isn't really the crux of adhd either, it's more like "I can't make myself want to focus on this particular assignment, but there's another one for another class that sounded fun so I can focus on that." Like one of my coping strategies forever was "make sure there's something you want to do less than all the other things you need to do, so you can procrastinate on that bad thing by doing the less-bad ones". Having a really hard time keeping track of time, deadlines, etc is also a big one - I have a lot of high school memories of doing all my homework the period before it was due, I could absolutely focus on it then (especially with a deadline looming) but I'd never be able to do it any earlier than that.
For me it definitely got much worse in college, especially as I started having to balance way more adult-responsibility type tasks with school ones.
Woah, I think you just described my school years. Even when I was performing "well" academically , I did have moments where I procrastinated a lot in school like submitting hw/reports/projects close to the deadline or sometimes even after, not being able to study for exams in subjects I found “boring”.
This hit the nail on the head. And it got so much worse in college as I got bogged down in other life stuff. Thus an entire semester would go by before I opened the textbook for any subject and that too just to pass the exams.
I've been going through the r/adhdmeme subreddit and holy shit, why am I in almost every single post. I took an online questionnaire on checking for signs of ADHD and I ticked 14 of the 18 questions as yes. I've been cursing myself for the past 5 years for my laziness and lack of motivation to study, thinking myself a failure for not being able to fulfill my responsibilities to my family by deliberately sabotaging my academic record, desperately searching for a reason to why I became like this but never finding it. I have been absolutely floored since finding out that nope it wasn't a character flaw that was causing me to sabotage myself but instead something I've been saddled with my entire life with no choice. I can't thank you and all the comrades that replied to my post enough. Atleast now I know what's causing all of this and I can take steps to better help myself instead of shooting in the dark and hoping it would work. Thank you once again.
Oh man that's a familiar feeling for sure. Glad I could help get you pointed in the right direction. Best of luck to you comrade, definitely feel free to reach out if you've got other questions (especially about the diagnosis process if you live in the states) :heart-sickle:
I'd also recommend the r/ADHD subreddit as a good compendium of resources and occasional helpful pro tips - it's one of the better subreddits left imo
can you link the questionnaire you took?
There's two I found. First and Second.