7 "Weird" Habits That Secretly Mean You Have ADHD

Have you ever sat with a list of the things that you hate about yourself? The way you start everything and finish nothing. The way you lose one thing that you actually needed today and it was in your hands three seconds ago. The way you assume deep down your slightly worse version of a normal person and you somehow manage to live to this point without getting caught. But what if every single thing that you hated about yourself is actually a symptom of ADHD. I literally lived with that doubt like for 20 years then I got diagnosed with ADHD and as I learned about the mechanism and research behind ADHD I figured out that every freaking single thing that I hated myself was a literal symptom of ADHD and that changed how I actually see myself and also my self-worth. When you understand it's actually not a personality but it's a symptom and it's actually treatable the weight on your shoulders kind of lifts because the things that you hated about yourself had a name and a Mechanism that helps you to understand this whole time. There are seven major points that I thought that was my personality But was actually a symptom of ADHD. So let's go through them. Okay So the first thing is object permanence out of sight out of mind This is basically forgetting things that exist as long as they are visually in front of you So for example, like I once bought the same pair of jeans seven times same jeans like seven literal freaking times because every single time i forgot that i purchased them recently so i bought the same thing again and again and again and it is so crazy and this shows up in actually everywhere right like duplicate purchases whether that's groceries books jeans or whatever you name it as long as they're visually in front of you like you do not know that they exist and you forget about them and because they were in my wardrobe they just didn't exist in my mind and this actually shows up in relationships as well so whether that's a romantic relationship or a you know just platonic or family whatever that is I really don't miss people because if they're not in front of me, they just don't exist in my mind. Like obviously I know that they exist, but they don't really cross my mind like a regular person. So I don't really miss them as long as I'm like calling them on FaceTime or something, but I just like forget them easily. If they're also not neurodivergent, it's very hard to accept this. And a lot of people think that you just don't care about them or you just don't love them. But it's just that... you know i just forget everything that is not in front of me so it's not really about them it's about me but when i say like this it just sounds toxic so i always blame myself for being a very cold blooded person but in reality it is just something called object permanence and there's actually explanation behind this so russell breakley reframed adhd actually as a working memory issue rather than an attention issue adhd brains hold like three to two items at a same time on their brain where a neurotypical brain can hold from five to seven so when something leaves our visual field the slot gets overwritten almost immediately because of how few slots we have compared to a normal person. So that's basically the reason actually why my house is built around like external memory and not relying on my memory. So I have like labels everywhere around home because I forget where each stuff belongs in my house. So I just have labels so that I don't forget them. And I also have reminders to call people because otherwise I'm just gonna forget that they exist. The second one is all or nothing attitude. There's literally no in between for me. The word balance does not exist in my dictionary, okay? I've been always an extreme person since my childhood and I never enjoyed things moderately. Like there's no slow build hobby for me. I'm either hyper interested in that thing and forget about it in three weeks or I'm not interested in that at all and it also shows up in food as well so if i'm like hyper focused or hyper like interested in that food i would eat that food breakfast lunch and dinner like for maybe a few days and then i get sick of it and i don't eat that food for years and years and years and I actually hate it. It's the same as with work. There's no work-life balance for me personally or even with friendships. When I meet someone new, I'm like hyper-interested in them and I want to learn everything about them. Every single trauma that you have dump on me and I'm really good at this. I'm really good at making people trust me. I mean, because I'm a trustworthy person, okay? Like I genuinely am not going to do anything with that. It's not that I want to use you, it's just that I'm hyper-interested in you. Not necessarily romantically, I just want to know everything about you and You know, like also with work, there's no such thing as work-life balance. If I'm in the work mode, only thing that I do and only thing that I'm interested in is work. I do not care about anything else. And I also like thought I just want balance. I just want more peace. But then I realized I actually thrive in chaos. And when there is no chaos, I'm just bored. This actually reminds me of the flaws of Schopenhauer, where he says like, those desires are met and this is literally what my brain feels like all the time so i just gave up on the world balance and i just ignore everyone that says you have to have balance it's too extreme It's the way that I live. The reason behind this is because ADHD brains actually runs on intensity. The dopamine system rewards novelty, urgency, and a challenge, right? So the boring middle gear just doesn't exist in our brain. It's either all in or nothing. Because the boring middle gear doesn't trigger anything in our brain. And because our brains actually struggle with dopamine, it just doesn't trigger anything. with us. Actually, Russell Barkley includes intensity regulation as one of the executive functions ADHD impairs. The ability to modulate to dial something to 30% instead of 0-100% is the part that's missing in ADHD brains. So if people are telling you that you're too obsessive, you're too extreme, and you should be, you know, you should balance things out, just ignore them because it's not how your brain is wired. And it's not something to be ashamed of. And it's kind of like same with the... The third one, which is can start, can stop. It's again, same like all or nothing attitude. Like for certain tasks, it is extremely hard for me to start. Whereas for some tasks, I just cannot stop doing them. Like for example, there's an email right now in my inbox that's been sitting like for 10 days for no reason. Probably replying it to it is gonna take 60 seconds of my time and I'm aware of it. But I just cannot make myself to do it even if the consequences are high. I've actually got myself into trouble multiple times because of these stupid, stuff. And the other half, interestingly, is the opposite. I'll sit down to do something simple and then eight hours later I found myself like going into a rabbit hole of researching something that is completely irrelevant from the first task that I started. And I didn't even choose that, you know, like it almost feels like somebody is controlling my body and I am just in a... i'm i'm just like sleeping or i'm just like in this hallucination mode and someone is controlling my body and doing stuff that i didn't intend it to do which kind of like sounds crazy but i feel like you're understanding if you also have an adhd and what's actually happening is that halloway and rady in driven to destruction in a book they made a case that adhd is fundamentally about attention dysregulation it's not that we lack attention it's more so that we cannot control where it goes okay the top-down control over what your brain pays attention is just weaker compared to neurotypical people the wheel either just won't turn or locks into the wrong direction so it's not that adg people struggle with attention it's just that it's uncontrollable if that makes sense even though it's trainable just the default mode is just way harder than neurotypical people the fourth one is the adhd tax i actually i've never came across to this world until recently so the adhd tax means that the financial cost of having and ADHD and for me ADHD tax is actually huge and it's one of the reasons why I actually have to be successful because my day-to-day cost of living is so high not because I'm living a luxurious life because I freaking suck at every single thing that adults are supposed to do like for example knowing the tax deadline you know I know the tax deadline but I still feel late every single year and I pay fines for that or for getting flight tickets I literally forgot that I had a flight ticket and I realized that I literally have a flight tomorrow so I had to like rush and pack. like what the hell or you know buying multiple things losing things always paying late fees forgotten subscriptions foods rotting in the fridge or hyper fixation on hobbies and abandoning them and having a lot of around my house because i bought every single thing impulsively for that hobby honestly the umbrella feeling is just like being an adult but failing at it and you have to pay the financial cost of being that way. This is actually highly correlated with the executive function. So working memory plus time blindness plus dopamine regulation all stacked and the brain charges a premium every time it has to do something boring and we end up paying in cash. That's why actually a lot of ADHD people either struggle financially or they become like entrepreneurs and business owners because they're fixated because they know that it just costs a lot of money for them to live a normal life. So again. All or nothing, right? You either become very successful or you struggle with it and you just hit the rock bottom. What helped me personally is basically assuming that I really don't have any functions of executive function and anything that it's supposed to do is not going to happen inside my brain. So systemizing every single freaking thing. So if I need to remember something, I'll just immediately put a reminder on that spot in my calendar with multiple reminders, like a week before that deadline, every single day to remind myself or like subscription audits. every month like having multiple reminders of it and also like trying to delegate stuff and outsourcing stuff and trying to systemize everything essentially but even if i do that it's still probably like way worse than a regular person another one is now or not now i basically have only two frames in my brain which is now or not now Normal people have like past, current and future. So you learn from your past and you prepare for your future. But for me, it does not exist. Okay, I almost feel like I experience time in a different way than other people. And when I talk with my other ADC friends, they actually relate to this a lot where neurotypical people just find it weird. So let me explain. So basically my time perception is messed up. Anything that's like a day from now or a month from now for a normal person will feel different, right? But for me, it just feels the same. it's just not now and i only focus on the things that are now that are happening right now which makes you always on fight or flight mode because you're only caring about the things that are happening right now and you're not really taking care of the future and i think you're learning from the past so you repeat the same mistakes again and again again and you forget deadlines again and again and again every single thing that i have done like literally happened maybe like a few hours before the deadline every single time i would hyper focus finish it right before the deadline and then forget about it again so this is actually exact reason why every single planner or app or method didn't work for me because it just assumes that some tasks that is in near future versus in the very far away future are going to be automatically treated differently in your brain whereas it's not it's not for adhd brains right and also it recommends like using time blocking for example it assumes like a smooth gradient between now and not now. It assumes consistent energy. It assumes I can predict on Monday what energy I'll have on Thursday at 2 p.m. But ADHD brains don't really work that way. So we keep failing at planners and quietly assume the failure is all about us. But what's actually happening is that ADHD brains have what researchers call time horizon dysfunction. Urgency releases dopamine and adrenaline. So the brain only fires up when the deadline crosses into now, not three days from now. So working best under panic is just the same. systems default operating mode for IDHD brains. And it just causes a lot of stress, right? You're always stressful. I'm always stressful. And that is the exact pattern that made me actually build my own system instead of buying other people's system because they just... do not get me. And it's called the Kaizen system and it's actually built specifically for ADHD brains because I built it for myself. One of the biggest difference with Kaizen system is that when you're like inputting a task in Kaizen system, it actually doesn't ask for an hour. Instead, what we categorize tasks is based on their energy and category. I basically sort tasks into four sprints. So I treat my day as four different chunks instead of times. And I categorize tasks and I batch tasks in those four different categories. of time and when I do a task I go from the first chunk. So the time does not exist it just exists as a chunk. So in the first chunk I start my day with the first chunk and I go through all of them and then maybe I eat a lunch and do the second chunk, third chunk and fourth chunk. When I started to actually treat them as a chunk and align those chunks with my specific energy patterns I actually started to achieve way more things and started to be less stressful about what I need to do on 11 a.m. Because my energy fluctuates and my interest fluctuates it's impossible to assume that the same task is going to take the same amount of time next time. So instead of that, we focus on the energy and we focus on the flow. And instead of time blocking that is designed for neurotypical people, we use a system called Sprint. So... I just named it, okay? And I've been using this sprinting system for about two or three years now, and it is probably the only thing that works for me. If you're interested and if you want to learn more about the difference between a time blocking and the sprinting method, I actually have a full dedicated video about it, which you can watch here or here. And if you're interested into my Kaizen system, you can go to my website at rudyohama.com. So if you're either interested in the video or the product itself, you can check the link in the description below. So the another annoying thing is... is starting everything but finishing nothing. So I might like start something right because it pulls my interest but in the middle of it another thing would pull out my interest from there and I would just find myself doing that thing. So for example, I might like start cleaning my room, but then there's like a bookshelf. So I'm cleaning the bookshelf and then I see an interesting book and I start to read it. And then it actually fires up a question in my mind. I'm like, oh, I actually remember this thing from the other book. So I start to read the other book and then I start to think, oh, what actually does the, this author like talks about this, this topic. I'm curious about his opinion. Then I check like his Twitter and I'm like, I actually want to know about his background that I searched about this. And from outside, it just looks like I start everything and finish nothing, but for me it's just like a one complete threat. Every action is actually connected to each other, but for other people it's not. So in another third person eye, it just looks like I started cleaning my room and I freaking left it. I read a bunch of books and I'm now researching about this person. But actually there's a researcher named William Dodson who coined the term interest-based nervous system to describe how ADHD brains run. So the reward signal fires for novelty urgency. and interest so whatever thing that fires one of those things our just brains just goes there instead of what's being done in front of us but the great thing about this is that when you actually understand this interest-based nervous system then you can actually engineer your environment to make things more interesting so that you keep doing that thing that might be the reason why i actually buy a lot of tools a lot of productivity tools to keep the novelty high so that i am still interested and enjoy working which is obviously financially not good It's an ADC tax, but it just keeps me going, right? For example, this custom-made split keyboard. Do I need it? Absolutely not. But this is one of the novelty and interest that's going to bring to my workspace. Hence, it's going to make me more interested into working. But from an outside, I just look like a weirdo that just can't finish things. And the last one is hyperfocus on performance. And in my opinion, this is one of the... hardest ones actually. I've been always a high performer my whole life because I've been extremely obsessed with results and being a high achiever. The reason behind this is because I do not naturally fit into society, what society expects from me, especially as a female, a young female. So any of the interests or any of the patterns that I show or how I behave, how I act, how I function is not necessarily um catered towards what society expects from my position so i do not naturally have a place in this society but there's actually a word in japanese the word basically goes Which basically means if you're a little bit different than other people, you are going to be discriminated. But if you're extremely different and if you're actually a successful, if you're like a genius, then society just accepts you as a person. And when we think about all the historical geniuses, they're all true. They're all weird. But they're only accepted because they show exceptional results. When you think about all the other weirdos, they're not accepted because they're not showing any signs of the things that society wants. So I realized that when I was a very little kid. How different I was. Not enough. I'm like different than other girls but like I'm genuinely not suitable for society. I realize that and I also realize that if I'm unless As long as I'm successful, it's actually acceptable. So a lot of neurodivergent people, I've realized, that have this tendency. They hyper focus on performance and actually achieving things because they want to feel like they belong or they want to sort of like get their place. And this actually kind of like makes you fundamentally lonely and fundamentally separate from other people. Other people do not understand you because by definition ADHD is a minority thing. So a lot of people are not going to get in. A lot of people are not going to understand the things that you do naturally. And it is hard to explain as well because it's a way of functioning. It's not like a preference. You know, I figured if I couldn't fit the shapes I'd expected, I had to be unusually successful to earn my place. So the success was the rent I was paying for being weird or being different. Over the years, I became fine with... people not understanding me because I realized that what I actually need is not necessarily understanding but actually freedom to be exist in a way that I want and this YouTube channel is even like my attempt to do that because I was always been weird I started to put my interest towards online because there are people like me there because a person like me online is more acceptable than in a nine-to-five job or in the corporal world or in a regular daily life. So I became hyper-obsessed on that. Is that a bad thing or is it a good thing? That's for another discussion. But I would say these are the seven things that I thought that are my personality, but actually come in stem from ADHD. I'm actually curious about yours. Let me know in the comments, actually read them, by the way. And if you want to learn why time blocking doesn't work for ADHD people and what you need to do instead, then watch this video next.

🚀 Want to maximize your ADHD brain and stay on top of to-dos + projects?
Meet the Kaizen System I built 👉🏻 https://ruriohama.com
📅 Want to learn why time blocking doesn't work for ADHD? Watch this next 👉 https://youtu.be/WW8M9SbMTeE

⏰ Time Stamps:
0:00 — What if everything you hate about yourself is ADHD? 
0:59 — #1 Object Permanence 
3:18 — #2 All or Nothing
5:54 — #3 Can Start, Can Stop
7:32 — #4 The ADHD Tax 
9:46 — #5 Now or Not Now
13:38 — #6 Starting Everything but Finishing Nothing
15:33 — #7 Hyperfocus on Performance

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⚠️ Important: This content is based on my personal experience and is not intended as medical advice. ADHD affects everyone differently. Please consult a psychiatrist specialized in ADHD for guidance specific to your situation.

#ADHD #ADHDSymptoms #ObjectPermanence #ADHDTax #ExecutiveFunction #ADHDProductivity #KaizenSystem #ADHDinWomen #Neurodivergent #ADHDdiagnosis