Neurodivergent Space

By: Blair McBride.

I’ve spent countless hours in “doomscrolls”. With a brain already low in dopamine, these doom scrolls are too easy for me to get sucked into. I can be scrolling through my phone and consciously think t about how I know I need to stop and yet my finger can’t stop moving. While doomscrolling might sound like it’s just a bad habit, it’s a major issue for people with ADHD. It robs us of our time to explore our wonderfully creative, intuitive, and compassionate brains. 

But why exactly is the doomscroll worse for people with ADHD? Here are a few reasons: 

• Time Blindness: Living with ADHD means we might not have an internal clock like everyone else. Time can fly by us when we are deeply focused on something. We can under or overestimate how long a project might take. So when we are scrolling, we can be blindsided by this and find ourselves too many hours too deep in our phones. 
• Self-Regulation: Turning towards our phones when we feel dysregulated, overstimulated, or overwhelmed is a quick way to escape the weight of those emotions. Consequently, we end up exasperating these emotional weights. Only to make them heavier than when we first started scrolling. 
• Impulsivity: People with ADHD have impairments in their brains’ communication with other regions. Something called the “Thalamus Gate” controls the response to inhibition; it signals when to stop or start a behavior (Karavalili, 2023). Our gate is broken, so we will struggle more than our neurotypical friends to stop the impulse to scroll. It’s comforting to know science can validate why doom-scrolling is especially hard for us to stop. 

So how do we stop our doom scrolling and take back our time? Put some of these tools in your ADHD toolbox and get that precious time back. 

OneSec: This app aims to make distracting apps less appealing. It adds a shortcut to the phone that makes a screen saver come across the screen before opening an app like Instagram.The screensaver asks you to take a deep breath before you press continue to the app. While it seems so simple. It allows for that thalamus gate a moment to respond to an impulsive scroll and lets you make a conscious choice. 

Host Defense Mushrooms: I have tried countless supplements for my ADHD and out of the dozens I’ve tried, this Paul Stamets mushroom blend has had the most noticeable impact. It has a host of different types of mushrooms that have been linked to improving short-term memory and improved cognition. 

Fidget Ring: Sometimes when we want to doomscroll we are really looking for some tactile stimulation. Having a physical object to exercise our restlessness onto, it can allow the brain to relax and focus on auditory or visual stimuli that need to be focused on. While I prefer the fun kiddie fidget toys like a popper or a spinner; I can’t bring that with me in a business meeting or on a date. These rings are subtle and fashionable but most importantly, functionally fidgety! 

ADHD is not a disorder; it’s just a differently programmed brain. By using tools like these to function in the neurotypical world, we can program ourselves to utilize our unique brains to bring ingenuity and creativity into the world. 

Bibliography:

Karavallil Achuthan, Smitha, et al. “Thalamic functional connectivity and sensorimotor processing in neurodevelopmental disorders.” Frontiers in Neuroscience 17 (2023): 1279909.