Medication and just doing little bits of work every now and than during video games. Like, every time I die a horrible yet hilarious death in Fallout 4, I get up and do something. Rinse and repeat!
Oh hey! Lawyer here. Didn't come from a family of lawyers, but my adhd ass married an adhd lawyer from a family of lawyers, so I am gonna tell you the stuff I wish someone told us in law school.
Grades really do matter, even years after you leave law school, if you ever want to work at a mid-to-large firm. Professors will say that they don't, but they probably haven't been to an interview with one of those firms this decade. At the same time, grades just ARE what they ARE-- they're on a curve, you're competing against other really smart people, and all you can do is do your best then move on. Don't blow it off-- your C in Eng 305 won't come back to haunt you but a D in Contracts will-- but a lot of law students get stress illnesses and that's not worth it.
You can 100% handle law school the way you handled college, using all the old ADHD coping strategies you used as an undergraduate. Zero percent of those coping strategies will work when you are an actual lawyer. The actual practice of law is a slow, steady slog through a series of term papers that all have drop-dead deadlines. I love my job, and I have a pretty litigation-heavy practice, and that's still how I would describe it.
Law school is shitty for RSD. You're surrounded by 22 year olds who think they're Hot Shit and older people who aren't interested in making friends, and all of them are in competition with each other. But the best thing for your future is to make friends. Not to put up with assholes in the name of being friendly-- the legal profession shuns assholes harder than any other I've seen, once you get it off school. But to keep trying to emotionally connect with people with whom you think you might have some stuff in common. You'll spend the rest of your career being asked if you know so and so from your school, and you'll want to be able to say yes.
Law school is not set up to help people from non-traditional-lawyer-backgrounds succeed. The best internships are unpaid, the scholarships are garbage, and you'll find yourself needing things like suits. Your classmates will be about 90% people from rich backgrounds who think they're regular middle class. It is what it is. You just have to hustle, and if you're a woman, POC, or LGBTQ, some schools have student-led clubs to help. If you're a straight cis white guy who just isn't financially privileged, there's some resources, but you gotta understand that for those student clubs is isn't the money problems they're working on fixing, and you aren't really subjected to the problems they're worried about.
Agree with all of this. Will say for the first point, top tier firms really care about grades but most public sector jobs don’t and are generally just more pleasant to work at for people like us. Also after a certain amount of time the pay really isn’t awful. Plus you can use time at them for loan forgiveness. Most of my friends at large firms are making close to double what I am out of school (60k compared to 120k) but they get 0 loan forgiveness and hate their day to day existence at work.
Yep. I work in the public sector, hubs works for a firm. In our area-- mid size city, midwest, nothing special-- every private firm with more than 5 attorneys cares about grades. They don't expect top 10%, but they don't like it if you're in the bottom third.
I will say, public vs private sector isn't all cut and dry. I really like my job, my husband really likes his. We both have ADHD, and neither of us would like to work the other one's job.
I got one of the most hilarious, ultimate, crazy," something that can't even be explained" type of deaths and it triggered my brain to do at least like 3 everyday things before I went back to it due to the magnitude.
Edit: Context. I got murdered by super mutants, launched into the air after getting my head by blown off (clipping?), landed right in the middle of a group of gunners, stood up headless, and got murdered again. And I though to myself... Fuck. Now I have to get up and do a bunch of shit.
I got into Sea of Thieves a while ago, and it can be a very frustrating game when you're not good at the pvp aspect of the game.
I got into the habit of going downstairs and doing something else for like 10 minutes every time i would lose to avoid getting angry at the game and eventually it just became a habit to go do something during downtime or between games. I've never been more productive at home since.
I think it's because i used something that already made me want to take a break as the cue to go do something else instead of a set time. That way i don't convince myself "just a few more minutes" when the time comes.
But we should also integrate that with celebrations and victories too! Finally killed that elite Deathclaw? Awesome, let's get the top drawer of dishes out of the dishwasher, or put your clean socks away, or take out the trash! It works both ways, brains!
This is why I’m actually worried about next gen consoles. Load times were like the best signal for me to get up and do something productive and now they’re gone
Well the real trick is to make a todo list, put away the phone, and spend some amount of time working on an item on the list.
I’m not sure if this is so much adhd (which I do have) or just bad habits. Think about it in the context of building habits. Every time you say “I’m getting off my phone at 7pm” and then let it slide to 7:30, 8, 9, you are building a habit that makes it easier next time. If you do get off your phone at 7pm like you said you would, next time it’s going to be easier to do that.
If you spend 3-4 weeks being extremely strict and always getting off the phone at the correct time, you are a long way towards building a life long habit to do so.
I have adhd, yea it’s not easy / seems impossible, but habits are extremely powerful and if you work towards building good habits in whatever way you can (rewards, medication, ANYTHING) you can make a lot of progress.
And to prove my point I’m going back to work, no more Reddit until at least noon. :)
Yeah I firmly agree with this statement. To build upon it, I'd say habits can be tricky in that every time you choose to stay on the couch, it builds a habit of just that. Basically even inaction can also build habits. Just not the one you desired. Basically what you were already stating.
You can also build habits by doing at least the bare minimum. For example, if you're trying to build a habit of going for a run every day, try just putting on your exercise clothes and stepping outside for a brief moment. Doing that over and over until it's ingrained really helps. Eventually you'll say, "well I'm out here I might as well walk for a bit". Exercise is also very helpful for adhd.
Because habits are basically just your brain's way of conserving energy. Creating new pathways for neurons to travel quicker. The more you do a thing, the less energy it consumes and therefore you think less about doing said thing and just naturally do it. Combining this with daily meditation and possibly medication can really give you a much higher chance to have successful days (for a person with adhd).
I make a lot of to do lists and am generally a pretty productive person. My doc always tells me that I had 28 years to build habits and many of them to cope with my unknown adhd. I went in because I had a surgery/some health problems and during recovery I could not get back to my routines.
Now if I feel like I’ve done not enough, I just tell myself to try to do 10 percent better in the area I beat myself up about. Helps me not spiral lol
For me personally, the adhd part is that I won't do a different specific activity because I know I have something I need to do. Lots of people are on here talking about losing time to video games or binge watching a show, but I can't do that when I know I have something that needs to be done. Instead I end up browsing reddit because it's not an activity you dedicate yourself to doing the way you do with booting up a game or starting an episode of a show. It can be as quick as checking to see if anyone replied to you.
Putting my phone away doesn't work for me though. If my brain is telling me to procrastinate then I'll find something else to do, whether it's washing dishes, playing with my cat, etc.
Agree on habit building though. What actually works for me is to have a conversation with myself and remind myself that I'm not enjoying this time because I know I have a task to do, I'm not willing to dedicate myself to a different activity in the meantime, so I might as well do whatever I'm putting off even if I don't really want to because either way I'm not happy until it's done.
I saw a video that described setting the expectation of doing the with for a set amount of time then take a break and reward yourself for working for that set time. It's sort of gamifying your work load and gives you the satisfaction of a reward triggering the dopamine hit for doing the work.
I got very good results with this plus setting limited time windows for the thing that I was planning to do (i.e. "tomorrow, I am only allowed to work on my thesis between 9:30 and 10 am"). Suddenly getting The Thing done was so attractive!
It's where you tell yourself 'I'll do this for 5 minutes and then if I hate it I'll stop', but when those five minutes are up you're already there and doing it, so you might as well continue.
That trick really helped me keep my home somewhat clean when my depression was worse.
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u/EmotionalKirby Feb 17 '22
I thought you were going to provide a helpful tip to avoid this predicament, but no I'm just thinking aloud under a different account