When you hang around in the ADHD communities on the internet I keep coming across posts about adhd being a superpower and all the myriad positive adhd characteristics. These people usually have adhd themselves and the amount of ✨toxic positivity✨ is palpable. It’s great if you feel like adhd is a positive thing in your life but when looking further into it, the positives people talk about in fact have little to nothing to do with adhd.
What people most often claim as being adhd superpowers are multitasking, creativity, intelligence, hyperfocus and humour. While those are all great things, there is very little evidence that they are linked to having adhd.
What I think people who proclaim adhd as being a superpower don’t understand is that it can be extremely harmful to those who don’t feel like their adhd is a good attribute in their life, but even worse, it proves and gives fuel to the normies and sceptics that adhd is not a disease and people with it don’t need help, understanding or medication.
When it comes to multitasking and adhd, yes sure we can claim that having 10 tabs open at once and jumping from task to task every two minutes is fantastic multitasking skills but I don’t think that is true. It looks like you are very hard working and busy when in fact you just have 20 different tasks unfinished and it’s very hard to complete one fully when you naturally start five new ones at the same time. Adhd effects on the working memory and filtering distractions so most often people with adhd don’t actually work efficiently with multiple tasks because the mind keeps dropping the balls in split second when a new ball arrives from the peripheral vision.
What about ADHD and creativity? You can of course be creative and also have adhd, but the two don’t automatically go hand in hand. Some people just are creative, and some people have adhd, sometimes they are in the same person, sometimes not. I believe the reason we often see people with adhd gravitate toward creative fields is because it’s more spontaneous and interesting, thus providing the much needed dopamine. Being artistic and daydreaming often seems to be used as a great excuse for why you can’t or won’t do normal adulting activities like feeding yourself, paying bills on time and picking your kids up from daycare at the right time. If you take care of your ADHD like you should, there is no reason why you can't pursue creative outlets AND work as a functional member of society.
How about that gifted child with ADHD? There is no link between higher intelligence and adhd, in fact, having adhd can make you score lower on an IQ test just because it requires an extended amount of concentration. Imagine being of low intelligence AND also having adhd which makes it hard to educate yourself, that is some serious disadvantage for your daily life and it doesn’t help if people keep saying "adHd is A sUpeRpoWEr" if you struggle to even read and write. And yes I know IQ tests can only provide some insight to one type of intelligence, but it sure helps in life to have high IQ because you can problem solve when for example you such at basic math because adhd effects the working memory and processing capacity. There is a reason why I didn't struggle much in school even though I had undiagnosed adhd and it's just because I got lucky with the intelligence part in the same genetic lottery that gave me adhd. Thanks mom and dad!
Adhd and humour or being funny, is there a link between the two? Maybe in a way that adhd people can be fun at parties because they are sometimes quite wild, energetic and lack a filter but having those characteristics can also just be their personality. People with adhd can just as well be withdrawn, awkward and shy in social situations, and the hyperactivity is only on the inside. This is one of the reasons especially women have a hard time getting a diagnosed because the hyperactivity component of ADHD is internalised and not outwardly distracting. Being the fun and spontaneous one due to adhd can actually be very harmful to both the person itself and people around them depending on the situation. For example it's fun to suddenly jump into a pool with your clothes on, not much harm in that, but it's no longer fun when the impulsiveness and the inability to think of longterm consequences when you decide to climb on top of a train and get electrocuted to death. (true story and a personal connection)
Having a good sense of humour can also be a coping mechanism, which seems to be quite evident when listening to many of the worlds leading stand-up comedians with traumatic childhoods or so called tough life. Adhd can actually be quite traumatic for some people and dealing with it by using humour can help with coping. Self deprecating humour happens to one of my favourite styles of comedy.
Hyperfocus, the “superpower” that in my opinion is the most controversial of the examples above, and I’m somewhat conflicted on it myself as someone with adhd. What hyper focus is is the ability/obsession to solely focus on something you are interested in that moment. For example you can get the sudden spark to get to know absolutely everything about book binding and wanting to become the master of it. You watch all the YouTube tutorials about it, get materials, geek over the techniques and in a matter of few days you can actually become quite good at it, that is if your dopamine doesn’t run out, which it can do at any minute and you have zero control over it. By the time that happens, you’ve probably ignored all the normal adulting tasks, spend lots of money and left over with clutter.
People with adhd do have tendencies to hyper focus and if, big IF, it’s an appropriate topic and time, it can be absolutely fantastic. The caveat is that you have no control over the subject matter and time, zero, none, nada, zilch. 2am on a Tuesday when you have an important work day starting at 7am, tough luck buttercup, the brain wants to read up on caterpillars for the next foreseeable future. Sleep? We don’t know her. Nutrition? What’s that? The dopamine hungry brain doesn’t give a shit about anything else than caterpillars right now, check back in later.
Hyper focus would be an amazing ability to have IF you could always choose what that interest is and when to start and stop it. From what I understand from the little reading I’ve done into autism, their hyper focus/hyper fixation is more long lasting because the mechanism in the brain is different. Maybe that’s a topic for another day.
As a final point about ADHD Superpowers, what irks me a lot is also the lists of scientists, athletes and celebrities that supposedly have adhd and how it’s implied that their adhd is a good thing. If you look into any of them closer, you’ll find out that yes they happen to be very talented in one area of life, for example playing football, but they have outsourced everything they possible can in order to just focus on that one thing. There is always a mother, partner, manager, personal assistant, driver, chef and/or cleaners involved. I’m not diminishing their great achiviements in their chosen field, not at all, but I would like to point out that those are not linked to adhd. The only good purpose on talking about these highly regarded people in relation to ADHD would be to showcase that it is possible to achieve greatness not BECAUSE of adhd, but IN SPITE OF, if you have the right kind of help, resources and medication to support you.
This is an unfiltered diary of anything and everything related to a personal ADHD journey. In true neurospicy fashion, the entries will shapeshift according to who-the-fuck-knows-what-and-when. Try to keep up.
You and I share this pet peeve - I wrote a post about it a while back on Medium, that will eventually get here to Hive (though it’s also already on substack and Aureal: https://open.substack.com/pub/adhdos/p/the-least-helpful-advice-ive-ever?r=npbi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web ). I don’t think people understand that it’s not that we have a superpower - it’s that it requires superhuman effort to function in this world.