>>16863692
hi anon. fellow ADHDer here. I have some similar issues to you and would like to give you some advice:
>I already am medicated.
In my experience not all medication will be effective. For example, stimulants help me focus but tend to still leave me with a sense of distractability, irritability and time blindness. In fact most stimulants I've tried can easily make my ADHD worse because I'll just end up even more prone to hyperfocusing on random bs.
The MOST effective medication I've tried is unfortunately not prescription and requires some searching around to get, but these days I use a lot of supplements and less "mainstream" medications such as bromantane, TAK-653, neboglamine, and right now I'm considering using an MAOI. I'm not suggesting you take anything in particular, but my point is that medication can sometimes be an uphill battle.
>I have recently started employing CBT strategies that do seem to help.
This will by far be your most effective option. A lot of problems associated with ADHD are chemical but also psychological; teaching yourself how to think and giving yourself good frameworks for focus and productivity are essential; I would argue that everything else (medication included) can be almost useless if you don't also fix the psychological aspects of ADHD. For me, meditation helps a lot. I do it every day and if I don't I start to fall apart.
>I do not do any exercise but I plan on making cardio a mainstay in my routine (is this really as effective as I hear for ADHD?)
Cardio is extremely effective for me but don't expect it to cure you. I recommend you use it as a boost to everything else you're doing. Exercise has a lot of positive effects on improving brain function but the sense of motion also gives you the stimulation you probably need to relax. I personally like cardio that involves constant movement for this reason (running is my favorite)

>>16863692
>>16863719
>I do not pay very close attention to my diet, I do not eat fast food or excessive amounts of sugar but that's it.
Consider paying more attention to it. It can be easy for us ADHD folks to eat poorly. Sometimes I'll go the entire day without eating anything and when I do it will be like a bag of chips or something, because my brain decided to hyperfocus on something other than hunger.
Diet can be critical to good brain function; omega-3's and choline are especially important for ADHD.
>My sleep schedule is non-existent but even when it is solid tasks take forever.
Sleep will also play a big role in your function. If you've been sleeping poorly for a long period of time (VERY common with ADHD), it will take a potentially equally long amount of time with good sleep for your cognitive function to improve. I was sleep deprived for years until I got on a good medication (seltorexant) and have finally started to recover. But of course I'm not cured, its just one piece of the puzzle.

>>16863692
If there is no proof or whatsoever any way of reducing a label to something else, e.g. an actual physiological defect in the brain, a label like ADHD is little more than a suitcase term, a completely empty word that doesn't differ much from other terms like; X = the set of all things that are red or round.
Yet, saying Y is X doesn't tell you anything more than Y is X and X is red or round, hence Y must be red or round. And applying this logical structure to labels like ADHD, even if they were so consistently applied, you would find out that a lot of real-life "ADHD" cases don't even fulfill the actual definition.

The same argument applies to all psychological diagnoses, especially fuzzy ones with clear political and economic incentives like depression, autism and anxiety. Massively over-diagnosed, poor disguises of social control, feeding into a multi-billion dollar industry, e.g pharmaceutical industrial complex.

>>16863692
>virtually every task I try to do take me 2x-3x longer than everyone else.
You focus on quality and keeping costs low.
>I just would like some scientifically supported solutions
The problem is not yours, Grasshopper, it is everyone else's. The only thing you need to change is your point of view.
>I already am medicated
Good for you. #MeToo. Sperg meds for me though.
>CBT
CBT rocks. Change your point of view. Break those fucking death spiral loops of mental shame and avoidance. You rock and your stuff rocks.

>>16863692
>I do not do any exercise but I plan on making cardio a mainstay in my routine (is this really as effective as I hear for ADHD?)
It’s basically the number one thing that has helped me, more than medication. Just note two things. First, make it fun, I love running outside but I would have given up a long time ago if I were running on a treadmill. Maybe for you it’ll be climbing or cycling or martial arts or whatever. Second, it might take weeks or months before you get to a level where you enjoy it, and up to that point it’s going to feel like a chore. Do your best to stick at it until it becomes easier, at that point you can start to enjoy it.

>>16864548
Your argument depends on the assumption that if there's no physiological evidence, then the label is just describing a cluster of symptoms. You're conflating our current epistemological limitations with ontological claims.

>>16864731
>You're conflating our current epistemological limitations with ontological claims.
The ones attributing something that amounts to a phenomenological event to a physical identity are the ones committing the conflation. My argument doesn't prove the impossibility of such an attribution, but the fact that such an attribution, in absense of actual evidence, is logically unsound and most likely ideologically motivated.

Considering that the ADHD label, even from a phenomenological point of view, doesn't seem to describe a coherent entity, any concerns around epistemological limitations are betrayed by one's own clinging to a useless label.

I feel the same, I am a med student and overall I am a very capable student, like always been on top, but something changed amd I lost all my capacity to focus, endless studying just to realise nothing was memorised, constantly feel tired and not a single drop of motivation, all my life I was the best with the minimum effort, now, i stand at a very bitter mediocrity

>>16864548
ADHD is correlated with differences in brain physiology and genetic differences in neurological regulation

>>16863692
Non-medicated ADHDfag here.
Do not only cardio, but weight training as well; it releases testosterone which improves ADHD symptoms (higher androgen levels are correlated with reductions in ADHD symptoms, which is coincidentally also why women are worse at coping with ADHD).
In terms of medications, all of them suck except for amphetamines, Vyvanse is the best of them. Try not to use them if you can, because they will suck the life and soul out of you.
Don't bother with CBT, try to find actual issues in your life and past traumas that you're dwelling on. Think about how you can restructure your identity to move past these obstacles and become a more whole person.
Consider fasting, it can sometimes give you the survival drive that pushes you to get things done.

>>16864905
Correlations are meaningless in determining cause in individual cases. If your ADHD cohort hypothetically consists of 3 % downies, trisomic defects will be found correlated with ADHD because Down's prevalence in normal populations is below 0.1 %, yet it tells you nothing about the other 97 % in the ADHD cohort.

Psychologists should really get a grip on their logical fallacies because it shows we're dealing here with a pseudoscience.

>>16863692
bad diet, parasites, and toxins cause adhd. its curable.

>>16863692

I have ADHD, here's my experiences. Other than medication very few things seem to help. I've changed my life around, going from unhealthy and sedate to exercising every day and eating well. While I wholeheartedly recommend this for a slew of other benefits, I never found it impacted my ability to work at all which I guess is sorta disappointing. I'm still prone to variation in output, I think it has to do with allergies, but it's very diffuse and I've never been able to correlate it with pollen warnings etc. Hard to say if this has anything to do with ADHD or not.

A few things I find to help concentrate is to offload my working memory. I do this by having lots of square paper and many monitors (my vocation is programming, I design circuits)

>>16864548
It's correct that ADHD isn't a disease in the same way tuberculosis, downs or parkinsons is, but it's still a useful label for us who suffer from the symptoms which fits the bill of having a deficiency of attention and hyperactivity compared to the baseline. Medication helps me do the things I love (which involve sitting in a chair designing complex components and coming up with testing strategies for these) so it's not just that I should be climbing in trees or whatever

>>16865894
Then say you have moderate attention and hyperactivity issues. People engage in the same fallicious strategy of nominalism to justify the autism label, not realizing that a label that combines the quirky with the mentally retarded might be incoherent or useless. And anyway, labels like ADHD are suggestive in the sense of biasing people into thinking of attention issues as a singulary biological disease. It's basically a psychological trick used by pharmaceutical companies to promote drug treatment.

>>16865894
And anyway, the posts here read like ChatGPT slop.
>Medication helps me do the things I love
It's not a medication, it's a drug. It adresses no actual medical need.
>but it's still a useful label for us
The binary dichotomy, them vs. us. promotes identitarian thinking. Because there's no ADHD, there cannot be an "ADHD group" or at least no such group that can move beyond a statutory exemplication of a set of all people having received a diagnosis X at some point.
>so it's not just that I should be climbing in trees or whatever
Many sociologists rightly consider the invention of ADHD to be the way an actually tightly controlled "free market" economy deals with kids who disengage from their work. It's not much different from the similarly problematic undercurrent in the way depression is defined that "being happy" is a moral or political imperative or the undercurrent seen in autism that developmental and mental health consists of approximating some statistical ideal as much as possible.

In essence, once you see the ideological load in such diagnoses (and not just there), you see that the modern-day Western world isn't any more or less ideologically charged and hence divorced from reality than the Papal states or Hitler's Germany.