Jamon Holmgren talks with guest Chris Ferdinandi about the highs and lows of living with ADHD as a developer. They discuss creative problem-solving, the pros and cons of medication, and how to use ADHD to your advantage in coding and life.
Jamon Holmgren talks with guest Chris Ferdinandi about the highs and lows of living with ADHD as a developer. They discuss creative problem-solving, the pros and cons of medication, and how to use ADHD to your advantage in coding and life.
This episode is brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is an expert React Native consultancy located in the USA. With nearly a decade of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter, core React Native contributors, creators of Ignite and Reactotron, and much, much more), Infinite Red is the best choice for helping you build and deploy your next React Native app.
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Jed Bartausky:
Welcome back to another episode of the Reaction Native Radio Podcast, episode 308 Coding and ADHD with Chris Ferdinandi.
Jamon Holmgren:
Hey everyone, I'm Jamon your friendly CTO of Infinite Red, and today we have a very special guest, Chris Ferdinandi. Chris is a software developer and the host of the ADHDFTW podcast, which you can find at a ADHD for the win.com. Chris, welcome, really happy to have you here. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, absolutely Jamon. Thanks so much having me here today. Yeah, so as you mentioned, I'm a web developer. I have ADHD Professionally, I consult with clients. I teach people front end development, so a lot of course creation workshops, publish several daily newsletters, and really early in my career and not so early in my career, I felt like I couldn't get anything done. I was pretty confident I was going to get fired from my first job because I struggled so much to get stuff done. And since then I've discovered a bunch of systems techniques and strategies that have helped me turn my ADHD into a superpower. Sometimes, not always, sometimes it gets in the way, but every now and then it just really works to my advantage. And so I have recently been spending a lot of time and effort talking more about my ADHD experience because I think it makes me different but not worse, and I meet a lot, lot of other developers. I find that for some reason the development profession seems to attract a lot of folks with ADHD, and a lot of my students have ADHD and a lot of them have internalized some negative feelings about it. So a lot of what I'm trying to do now is help people realize that it can actually be an asset, not a liability
If you know how to channel it. It's not always easy or natural to do.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, this resonates a lot with me and I'm going to go into why in just a second here. Before we get to that, I do want to mention that this episode is sponsored by my company Infinite Red. We are a premier React native consultancy. We are fully remote in the us, a team of 30 plus senior plus React native developers and support staff and have been doing this for nearly a decade now. So if you're looking for React native expertise, hit us up Infinite Red slash React native. And don't forget to mention that you heard about us through the React Native Radio podcast. Okay, so I mentioned this is very special to me and the timing is perfect. It could not have been better timing when we connected on potentially doing this episode, I was in the process of getting evaluated for ADHD myself, and that was an interesting journey and I even wrote about it on my blog on Jamon dev. I was diagnosed with inattentive and we'll talk a little bit more I think, about the types and whatnot. So if I space out and start ignoring you at some point during this episode, Chris, don't worry. It just means you're not being interesting enough. That's all been there.
And I also have, so my wife also has ADHD and unsurprisingly, because it does run in families, we also have two daughters who have ADHD. So this is something that has impacted us quite a bit and I've been doing a lot of research and self-education, but I'm not going to pretend that I know nearly as much as you. And of course, I do want to mention, as far as I know, there are no doctors on this call, so always talk to a medical professional. This is our journeys, this is our journeys and what we've learned. Always go and talk to people who know what they're doing, but we have learned quite a bit and Chris a lot more than I do,
Chris Ferdinandi:
Maybe, maybe not. You mentioned your blog post that you wrote about your kind of journey. I have combined subtype, and again, we can get into this, but so I also have the hyperactivity, but a lot of what you described in your article and your experiences both early childhood and as an adult really resonate with a lot of what I experienced as well. And I do want to mention that everybody's ADHD experience is a little bit different
Jamon Holmgren:
Because
Chris Ferdinandi:
It's a collection of stuff and not everybody has everything. It's a little bit like autism in that regard and that there's kind of spectrum of symptoms that you may or may not have. But yeah, your experience resonated with me a lot and I think you definitely know your stuff. Your article was very detailed. I can tell you hyper-focused on it when you wrote it. Yes,
Jamon Holmgren:
Absolutely.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah. So anyways, I want to say I don't downplay how much because I think you've clearly been in the weeds of it for a little while now that really came through in your writing.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, I appreciate that. Chris, when you talk about what resonated like when you were a kid and stuff, what are you talking about there? What types of things do you think back and associate with ADHD as a kid?
Chris Ferdinandi:
So the thing that I think the biggest hallmark or the biggest difference between your experience and mine is that. And so actually if you don't mind if we could step back for just a second, I wanted to define this for folks who don't have that background with ADHD or they're little curious about it. So the thing with ADHD is that it is really badly named because it's called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And you touch on this in your article, but people with ADHD do not have a deficit of attention. They have difficulty regulating it. It's a type of executive dysfunction. So I almost have an excess of attention and it is sometimes squirreled in 18 different directions, which I think what people stereotypically think of as ADHD, but then there are a lot of times where it is overly focused on just one thing.
Sometimes that one thing is a really important work thing and you get a ton of stuff done other times on this other more interesting thing and it can create some challenges around getting the stuff you want to get done done. And within the ADHD diagnosis, you have three subtypes. Again, you mentioned this in your article, but you have inattentive, which historically in the eighties, nineties would've just been called a DD hyperactive slash impulsive because this type, obviously as the name implies, it's kind of the bouncing off the walls, but not always. Sometimes you may have this subtype, but you tend to just lack the impulse control and you're not what someone might classically describe as hyper. And then there's combined subtype, which is what I have, where you have both of those things. The type you have incidentally, if you read about this, you'll often read that it's more common in women and as a result, women are often underdiagnosed.
But there's part of me that wonders if that's strictly true because I'm hearing about lots and lots of adults who are just now getting diagnosed as adults and it's often with inattentive subtype and often those adults are men. So there's part of me that wonders if it's one of those just medical bias kind of people looking for a particular thing and ignoring another thing. Anyways, we can dive into all that. But long story short, I have combined subtypes. So I was diagnosed as a kid because I was like that kid in class, really hyper disruptive to my fellow students, super high energy. I did well in school mostly because I had my parents on my back all the time. But subjects that I was really into, I would just absolutely crush. And then subjects that I wasn't, I would do relatively poorly in. And I also kind of had this other thing where if I knew a topic really well and I was ahead of other people in that topic, I would then be really bored and start to get disruptive or not want to do homework because I already know this, so why am I doing the same stuff over and over again?
This is boring now. I want something new and challenging. So that was really tough. One of the other things you talked about was the procrastination aspect.
Jamon Holmgren:
Absolutely.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Of things. So I can remember in college, I had this one class I was in where the grade was entirely based on your, and not the lecture showing up for class just didn't count. And I found the lecture really boring. The teacher was literally just reading slides. So I'm like, all right, I can just go do this at home or at my dorm and I can just show up for the exams and not have to do this. Well, I can remember when it was around exam time, I was like, all right, I know this is going to be coming up soon. When is the exam? And it was literally the day before, and I had just completely missed it, and I hadn't been showing up for class. So I was like, there's no way this dude's going to let me. So I had to drop the class because I was going to fail. It just lots of little things like that. I also remember once I had in college, just a college part-time job interview popped by a friend's dorm room. I had 15 minutes until I had to leave and they were watching a movie and then they just started it and then the credits for the movie rolled. And I looked down at my watch and realized that I had missed the interview by an hour and an hour and a half
Because forgotten all about it. I just got sucked in. So it's just lots of little stuff like that. So that was very much my early life experience. I was diagnosed as a kid but never treated because back in the eighties, treatment for ADHD was basically just Ritalin. It was often, and I don't mean they gave it out to too many people, I mean they still hadn't quite figured out the dosing. And so my mom, who was a teacher, had seen a lot of kids who their dose of Ritalin was so high that they were very, zombie isn't the right word, but they just didn't have that spark they had before they started taking medication. And so that even carried with me into adulthood where I was resistant to try medication for a long time because that was my perception of what the ADHD medication experience was like.
Jamon Holmgren:
I want to get into the medication side really deeply because I resonate with that quite a bit. And this has been part of my journey as well, because at first my daughter was prescribed Adderall and I'm like, screw that. I'm not giving her that. No way. This is my 16-year-old daughter. There's, I've learned quite a bit. I want to go back and just say, yes, absolutely. I didn't have the disruptive part, although really maybe I'm giving myself too much credit because what I would do, and it wasn't like disruptive necessarily to the students, but I would argue with teachers, I would argue with teachers, and maybe this is just a personality thing, but I think it had something to do with me being bored and them in class saying something and me seizing on it and being like, that isn't right. And this kind of tendency to lock in on a conversation and want to really argue it to death has been something that's plagued me my whole life.
And I've really worked on it. I've really worked on it to try not to be like that because it's not a good tendency. It really isn't. It can be good in some things. Like my bullheadedness and hyperfocus on stuff was really good for coding. It was amazing because there would be these situations. So I talking about this, my blog article, and I'm sorry, listeners, we keep talking about this blog article that you probably haven't read that you can feel free to go read if you want jamon.dev it's at on my blog. But essentially I would get sucked into programming in Cubase. I would make games and stuff and I would have a problem. Now, I didn't know a single programmer. Well, I knew one programmer. He was an incredibly smart guy who lived in San Francisco long ways from me, and I'd seen him a couple times a year and I thought that's what a programmer was, and no way I could ever be that. But I was making games and I would get really sucked into it, and then I'd have a problem. It's like, how do I make this spaceship shoot at another spaceship in a way where the laser hits it at the right time? I'm learning about leading the target
Jamon Holmgren:
And
Jamon Holmgren:
I'm thinking about the math. How does the math work on this? This is all my brain is working on all day at school. I am not thinking about what the teacher's saying. I'm just thinking about how do I get this bullet to hit this other spaceship? I go home and excitedly try things and stuff that bullheadedness of, I'm going to figure this out. This is going to be something. I'm going to try everything I can. And I did. I eventually figured it out and it was like trigonometry. I'm learning trigonometry as a kid because I'm trying to figure out how to make a space game and I want it to be cool. And so those are the types of things that now procrastination for sure. Time blindness like you talked about where you don't notice the passage of time supposed to be somewhere. Oh shoot. And so I've built all these things into my life, these strategies, these structures, these I used timers when I just noticed myself doing this yesterday I put and I just realized that I didn't do the thing I was supposed to do. I put a timer going. I'm like, okay, I'm putting water in my pool. Luckily I bought a timer that shuts off the water. That's smart.
Yeah, it's like you can only turn it up to two hours and then you have to go back and turn it more if you want more. Because I've just sat there overfilling the pool for two days, sometimes just water spilling out of it, not remembering that I had the hose going, well, the hose is still on, but the timer shut it off probably. But on my watch, I do a Siri timer, but I don't just do the timer because when it goes off, I have no idea what it is. There's a timer for something. I have no idea. So I'll actually name it. Here's a way you can name it too. So little things like that. I'm doing stuff like that all the time. And this has been throughout my life, and I just thought it was my personality. It never crossed my mind that I would have ADHD-ADHD was the kids who did all the other things. It was probably the chrises of the classroom that I was thinking of, but it wasn't me. But that's not true. Yeah, it presents differently.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Absolutely. Yeah, that very stereotypical experience.
Jamon Holmgren:
And for those who are listening, we will get to how this relates to developers too. This is a podcast named at developers, but I want ask what causes ADHD underlying cause?
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, you're born with it. So I just want to, for clarity's sake, that's probably not what you were asking. It's not like the kind of thing like, oh, you got a vaccine and I have ADHD or something like that.
So they're not a hundred percent sure. But one of the hallmarks of ADHD from a biological perspective is that our brains do not make enough dopamine. And so a lot of the things that you see related to ADHD are often tied into that. So even things like time blindness. So ADHD folks often have a complete inability to perceive time as it actually happens. Sometimes it feels like it goes way faster, sometimes it feels way slower. If you ask someone how long a thing took, folks with ADHD often cannot accurately tell you. And while everybody experiences that to some degree, the whole time flies when you're having fun. It is just an ever present thing for us. And they're even finding that that may actually be related to dopamine and its role in how brains perceive time. So we don't make enough of it. And almost all of the ADHD medications are in some way related to either getting your body to produce more dopamine or keeping the dopamine you do make in your brain longer before it gets intake, whatever the word is there, absorbed by your brain so that it flows around a little bit longer between your receptors. And so that's the under arching thing and it drives a lot of ADHD behaviors.
Jamon Holmgren:
And dopamine gives you pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation. Those are some of the main things. It probably does other things too, but those are some of the main things. And when you think of the underlying, this sort of searching for something to keep our attention type thing that happens or stuff just taking our attention away, it kind of is related to that. And obviously procrastination, there's motivation there. I know for my wife, a big part of her ADHD, and how it presents is on the motivation side and then trying to get started, Hey, I got a bunch of stuff to do. And it, it's tough where now that she's been treated, it's not an issue. And she's been thinking her whole life that she's a failure, she can't get going on stuff. And now it's like, no, I can do it if I have enough dopamine my brain.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, absolutely. I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of, so one of the things I've observed is that web development seems to have a disproportionate number of folks with ADHD in it.
And I am increasingly convinced that coding itself is really pleasurable to the ADHD brain. So if you think about the kinds of things that cause dopamine spikes in an addictive way, like social media, video games, and I don't mean addictive always in the negative sense, gaming isn't inherently negative, but it does have a bit of an addictive aspect to it. And a large part of that is the feedback loop where you do a thing, immediate reaction happens in the environment that makes you happy, you do more of it and coding at least when coding is working, even when it's not working well. But coding in general has a lot of that where you write some code, it either works or it doesn't. You get that immediate feedback loop. If it works, yay, awesome. I'm happy if it doesn't, Ooh, debug mode. Let's go figure out why this isn't working. And that can become its own kind of spiral of problem solving. So it's one of those things where I really truly believe that ADHD and web development go together very well. It can be a really rewarding profession and if your environment is set up for it, it can really play to your ADHD strengths very, very nicely.
Jamon Holmgren:
Okay, you've got my brain going, thinking about, this is a whole nother episode, but open source and how some people are so active in open source and they almost feel like super compelled to do it. And it's like, I bet there's a significant proportion of people who kind of hold up the whole open source world, who are in some respects kind of addicted to it in an ADHD way where it's like they love coding. Open source is awesome because there's no customer really. It's like you just doing what you want because you're not getting paid for it, so who cares?
Well, yeah, that's a whole nother episode. But I was one of those, I don't really do much of open source as much anymore, but I did a ton over the past decade and it was very much a lot of that and wow. And I can see other things too. A lot of developers really love to have perfect TypeScript types and stuff like that and maybe practice things like TDD and whatnot. And these are all, there's objective. You can objectively look at them and these are good things. These are things that do help us as a profession, but also there's that immediate feedback loop and it also helps with the debug. Yeah, I can see this. A lot of pieces are coming and fitting together.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, for sure. And then the other thing too is coding goes well when you have opportunities to focus deeply on things where you get into that flow state. And one of the hallmarks of ADHD is ADHD hyperfocus where you become really, really fixated on a thing and dive super deep into it. And when the stars align and that's going well and it's focused on something you want to be doing, you can almost have superhuman levels of productivity. I can remember in my last job, there was this month where I did six months worth of coding in a four week period, and you can't really keep that up all the time, or you will absolutely burn yourself out. And that's precisely what happened to me. I had a month and a half of just really terrible productivity after that. But yeah, if you think getting into the zone as a programmer is fun, it's even more when you're in hyper focus mode, even more so, you just become incredibly productive.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, I mean when I was starting my business almost 20 years ago, I would work very late because nobody was bothering me and I could get into that flow state and that hyperfocus, and I was incredibly productive during that time making up for sometimes not being very productive during the day. I was jumping from thing to thing. And luckily in my position now that ability to jump from thing to thing is kind of rewarded. I'm not really in a position where productivity is the most important thing. It's more like responsiveness and being in sort of touch with the whole 30 people. So in some ways I've kind of built the company around my ADHD and how it works. But I had a little thought here and maybe you have some ideas on this, Chris, do you think that developers with ADHD actually code differently? The code actually ends up being different. Maybe they have shorter or longer functions. Maybe the types of tools they like to use are different than those who do not have ADHD.
Chris Ferdinandi:
I don't know if the code itself ends up being different. So the challenge for me with answering this question
Jamon Holmgren:
Is
Chris Ferdinandi:
My whole career I've been really focused on vanilla JavaScript. And a big part of the reason why is that I have found tools like React, no offense to the folks listening here, but I found them really confusing to wrap my head around
Just the learning curve on them. I found particularly steep and I found that a lot of the students that I interact with have those same kind of biases. And I don't know if it's ADHD related or just the kinds of people that are naturally attracted to what I do because of just for reasons, personal preferences, whatever. But what I have found is less around the type of code and more related to the learning process itself. So there are certain types of tutorials or explanations or learning styles that just don't work as well. For a lot of the folks I talked to who have ADHD stuff that is longer form in nature. So a lot of courses out there are 80 hours of tutorial videos. And for a lot of folks with ADHD, that's the opposite of what you want. It's like, oh, that's a lot to get through. I'm going to get bored. Right? Or there are certain tech educators in the space who are very good at it and very engaging and have huge audiences, but their style tends to be very comprehensive. Let me cover everything you need to know about this one topic. And I've found for a lot of my fellow ADHD DERs, what they really want is just enough to get started and then I'll get to a deep dive later.
So maybe less the output and more the inputs that get you there tend to be a little bit different.
Jamon Holmgren:
I wonder if there's a significant portion of my audience here and this podcast who listens to it because we do hit high points and various things about React native because we'll be like, Hey, we're going to look at, I dunno, reanimated for animations and stuff, and we'll just talk about the high level stuff. And then in one 30 minute podcast episode where we're kind of joking and having fun and trying to make it interesting, they get the enough information that their brain kind of knows where to go next and gets them pointed a direction and then they can go. That's very interesting. So I do want to talk about medication and other forms of treatment. Now the first step though, if you think you have ADHD based on some of the things that we've said maybe resonate with you or whatever, you'll probably need to be evaluated. That's number one. You're going to need to have someone actually take a look. And I do know my primary care physician was more than willing to evaluate me, but I didn't actually really want him to, I actually wanted to go to a specialist.
Chris Ferdinandi:
I want to talk about that for a minute. If you don't mind.
Jamon Holmgren:
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, so I'm of a slightly different, well, it depends. So I guess a couple of threads here. The first is my primary care was really difficult about, I had already had a diagnosis as a kid. It somehow did not end up in the medical record that is with my adult medical stuff. And my primary care doctor just flat out refused to evaluate me or do any of that. And she was really of the whole like, oh, Adderall is super addictive. I don't want to go anywhere near this. You need to talk to a psych. And for me, I've had look into getting ADHD medication on my to-do list for three years, and I just finally set up an appointment last week to do it
Because my ADHD means part of that is I hate phone calls. A phone call could take me three minutes to make and I will put it off for weeks, months, years. And so someone might be, oh, you just call a psych, you make an appointment. Not a big deal. But for me that meant go to my insurance provider, look up people who actually do this, make sure I find someone that I think I'm going to get along with or who specializes in ADHD and I'm someone who's ADHD positive. So I don't want to get paired up with a psych that's going to be kind of negative about it and then I need to call, then I need to make the appointment, then I need to show up for the point. It's easily a dozen different steps.
And the thing that finally got me over the hurdle was I found a psych who had a fill out a form and they contact you on their website. I think you mentioned this in your article as well. You had a similar thing. That was literally the thing that did it. It was the best for me. I've talked to friends who have been like, I just talked to my primary care. They asked me a questionnaire and then wrote me a prescription. I was like, that's what I wanted. That would've been, I'm already there. This would be so easy. But the other thing I wanted to mention is obviously if you want medication, talking to a professional is kind of the thing you need to do, but I also don't think there's anything inherently wrong with completing, because if you go to Attitude Magazine, they have a self-assessment you can do. And I think if you want to do that as a first step and you go through that and it says, yeah, you probably have ADHD and then you start learning about ADHD and you're like, these things all feel like me. I don't know that you inherently need to go the next step and get a formal diagnosis
If you're not at the point where you're like, I think I'd like to try medication, A lot of other stuff you can do. I think medication with behavioral stuff is kind of the win-win for a lot of folks, but I don't think you necessarily need to go there to start your learning about ADHD journey, nor do I think it's necessary for everyone all the time depending on where you're at.
Jamon Holmgren:
Absolutely. I didn't jump straight to it either, and I was doing a bunch of research. I liked Healthy Gamer, it's Dr. K on YouTube who's really, what I liked about him was his audience is gamers, so not talking, he is a psychiatrist. He knows his stuff, but he's talking about it in terms that resonated with me. And so that was good. My wife who was going through this journey before me really, even though I would say my ADHD is in some ways more severe in some ways, I guess, than hers. I guess I shouldn't say that, but it felt like maybe more obvious, her therapist had recommended the book, I think it's called How to ADHD. And so she actually, she bought the audio book and then I listened to, I didn't listen to the whole thing. She listened to the whole thing twice and then I listened to half of it and it really resonated. And then she also highly recommends the book How to Keep House while Drowning, which isn't necessarily specifically about ADHD, but I think people with ADHD would be a primary audience for that book. And so I was doing those types of self-research of what even is it and how does it present?
And as I mentioned, my doctor, I think would've been more than happy to evaluate me and prescribe something. One of the problems with my doctor is he's more than happy to evaluate me and prescribe anything, and it makes me a little nervous sometimes because he's a little bit loose with it, kind of the opposite of yours where he's just a little overconfident maybe sometimes. And I've tried to find someone better and haven't found anybody better. So I do tend to lean on specialists more when I think there is something he's good for, if I need something more simple. So I actually found a local ADHD treatment center, and if you're going to be looking for one, you can simply Google ADHD treatment center in your area and see what's out there. Some of them may take your insurance. We're talking US based here.
Obviously there's different things, different countries, but they specialized in diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. So you scheduled an appointment through their app. They actually use a chat app in this case, which was awesome. I love chat, so that was perfect. They chatted me back and I ignored it and they chatted me back and I ignored it. And then they texted me, the lady actually texted me. She's like, Hey, I need you to fill out these forms. And I was like, whoa, okay. That is going above and beyond. That's actually taking an alternate means of communication. Like, Hey, I really need your attention right now, person with ADHD probably. And yeah, then I had to fill out some forms and that was not easy, but I kind of hyper-focused and got through it. I was like, I'm dealing with this. I'm 42 years old. This is ridiculous. I'm going to deal with this.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, the place I went through, they called me, which was great, and they're like, we need you to fill out these forms. I think you mentioned in your article a similar experience with the forms where there was a lot of repeated information. A lot of it either felt unnecessary or was just like, it was just a lot is the best way I can describe it, right? It was like, what is your spouse's name? What do they do for a living? How is that relevant to relevant? Relevant? This just feels like a waste. And then you would get asked that multiple's their contact information. So that part was annoying. I did the forms right away. I knew if I didn't, I would forget them. And
Jamon Holmgren:
Another strategy. Yes.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Well, and they were like, it wasn't like, we'll follow up with you. It was like, if you don't fill them out by this date, we're just going to cancel your appointment.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, they told me the same thing. Yeah, yeah. They're
Chris Ferdinandi:
Like, that feels bad. You better do this. So I'm going to do this now. It took me three years to do this in the first place.
Jamon Holmgren:
I know, right? Yeah.
Chris Ferdinandi:
So yeah, one thing, actually, I don't have medication yet. I have seen the experience that other folks have had with medication, friends, family, and that's a big part of what convinced me to pursue it for myself. I had a friend describe it as, because I have bad eyes, I wear contacts. Usually he's like, when you put on glasses for the first time and suddenly all this stuff that you didn't realize was fuzzy to you comes into focus.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yes.
Chris Ferdinandi:
It's not changing you, it's just making it so you don't have to work quite as hard to see the same stuff that other people see.
Jamon Holmgren:
The glasses thing is really good because I play hockey without my glasses. I have good enough eyesight that I can play hockey goalie without glasses and do okay, I'm fine. But the first time I put on glasses, I was like, holy cow. I'm not straining to see. I just see, I just see. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to squint. I don't have to because I have astigmatism. And so that's a perfect analogy, and that's how I would describe it. Now I'm only a month into it, the medication, and I take two types. I do, there's non stimulant and they're stimulant, and you can certainly try one or the other or neither. And obviously your doctor will help you with that. The non-stimulant, I don't know how it works. I don't know that they know how it works, but it actually helps. The one I'm on guanine actually helps lower blood pressure and I need that, so
Oh, nice. Win it also. Yeah. And it counteracts the stimulant, which raises your blood pressure. So you kind get an interacting thing that is a good thing, kind of keeps it neutral or even a little below. And then they both treat the ADHD. It makes you, it gets a little calmer. And then the stimulant, from what I understand, promotes dopamine. And there's another hormone in there too that is around alertness and whatnot. And most people have heard of Adderall and Ritalin. There's a new one called Vyvanse that is out there and there's extended release and there's short-term release. And short-term is like three to five hours, and extended release could be like 12 hours. So Vyvanse only comes in extended release. So I took it this morning right before this, so I'll be till 8:00 PM I'll have the effects of it probably later. Any medication, it can have side effects. So for example, I didn't sleep quite as, I don't sleep as deeply, and I do wear out Apple watch to bed just to monitor that. I don't quite get as much deep sleep. I still feel fine, but it's just something to keep in mind.
A close friend of mine is also starting this journey, and she said it was being on really a lot of caffeine in some ways to her, but without the anxiety or anything like that. So that was interesting, her first encounter with it. But yeah, it definitely, it just sharpens my focus. It actually makes me feel more calm. It's not like it makes me all amped up unless I'm on too much. I have had some concerns around addiction because I've heard this over the years, many, many years around the potential for abuse and there is abuse, drug abuse in my family. And so I've wanted to be really careful with this. This is an amphetamine that we're talking about here. So yeah, that's been something I've been researching quite a bit too. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Chris Ferdinandi:
Well, yeah, my immediate kind of thinking around this, because my primary said the same thing, it was a big part of why she didn't want to prescribe this to me. And so if you are someone who has ADHD I personally, again caveat not a medical doctor, yada, yada, yada,
But I don't feel like that concern is there the way, because it's not affecting you. It's not like meth or cocaine or something like that. The way it would be for someone who doesn't have ADHD, it's making the dopamine. Your brain doesn't naturally produce. And so many of my friends who are on Adderall or Vyvanse have to set reminders, multiple reminders to remember to take their ADHD medication in the first place that, yeah, it feels like one of those, and I'm not in any way trying to invalidate your concerns. I understand family history and all that. Absolutely. But when I hear medical professionals get weird about ADHD meds for folks who have ADHD, it feels like one of those things where you're punishing the people who need the medication because of the folks who don't end abuse it. And that bothers my inherent sense of fairness.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, that makes sense. I want to mention this, and I think my brother would be fine with me saying this because he's very open about his past and whatnot. So my brother was a heroin addict and thankfully been clean for over a decade now, but he also has ADHD and probably more I would say the combined type, if I had guess, I don't actually know for sure, but he says if anybody should be abusing it, it would be him. After his history being a heroin addict with, he tried everything, meth, everything. And he said, he's not at all compelled to abuse the Adderall he's on. It actually almost reduces the urge to abuse because a lot of it was self-medication. He was medicating this severe ad he had without really knowing it. And so in a way, it was like, now that doesn't mean that there isn't a potential, and obviously Adderall is a controlled substance for a reason because people do abuse it. But what he said was, it's like there's this euphoria if you take a bunch of it all at once, the quick release stuff. And to him he's like, it's not even fun. It's not even fun. It's you get that euphoria, but then you're just jittery and it's not good. So yeah, that would be an extreme example.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Another aspect of ADHD is impulse control, bad decision making. Adderall helps reduce that. I think, again, you mentioned this in your article, but folks who take ADHD medication, more recent studies have shown, have a longer lifespan are at less risk for a whole slew of things. And I'd imagine that's a big part of it. So hearing that you're less likely to abuse or that your brother's experience was that he's less likely to abuse when he's medicated for his ADHD ADHD. Makes perfect sense to me. I don't find that at all
Jamon Holmgren:
Surprising. Now for my daughter, I think if she wasn't pretty much full grown already, I would have more reservations because the stimulant medication in particular can have an effect on growth rate. So I wouldn't want to artificially affect my kid's growth rate in any way. That just does not sound like a good idea. I'm not like being judgmental toward parents who have made that decision because I'm sure there are factors that are, in this case it, it just felt like waiting until she was 16 and fully grown basically is like, okay, now we can start the medication. And after I did all of the research and everything, we did go that direction. For the younger girls that I have, I have an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old. I don't think I'll do that, not for a while. Even if they need something, there's other options that you can do therapy, the non-stimulant kind of medication, which is much more, I would say gentle and lower side effect and whatnot and other things, the things that you and I, Chris have done our whole life to cope with our ADHD, right?
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah. I will say though, school for me was kind of hard mode. And so I am not in any way trying to dismiss the valid concerns around
Jamon Holmgren:
Medication. I want your perspective.
Chris Ferdinandi:
I am even for younger kids, I am medication positive, I think would be the right way to describe it. I also think that for younger kids, doctors are generally, depending on your pediatrician, a lot more cautious and a lot more like, we're going to check in on this all the time around making sure there's no weight. Loss obviously is a really big one because it is a stimulant and things like that. Mood. Again, if you have things like anxiety, it can make that worse sometimes in certain people. So yeah,
Jamon Holmgren:
I am glad you brought that up because weight loss has been in effect for me of events. And I've struggled with weight since I was probably 22, something like that. Before that I was so active playing basketball and whatnot, that it wasn't hockey and everything. It wasn't really a big deal. But then as I got older and more sedentary, now this is a common thing. It's not like it's ADHD thing, but I kept being very frustrated with myself because I had a hard time with appetite. I would be, I just ate two hours ago. Why is my body telling me I'm hungry? What the heck is going on? And what I've kind of come to realize, at least this is my theory, and it seems to be borne out, is that I have a lack of dopamine. And when I eat, it releases some dopamine. It does. It's like a part of the process, the feeling of pleasure and contentedness and whatnot. And it's also, it's like energy. It's like I'm getting some energy from it. So my brain is like, Hey, I want more energy. I don't have enough right now. I want more dopamine. I don't have enough right now. What's a thing that I can do that will do that? Oh, eat. So go eat, go snack, go get some carbs, get some sugar, get something like that.
And I'm sitting here, okay, I'm six foot, almost 6, 5, 6, 4 and a half. And so I'm a big guy, but also being 260 pounds is way too much. This is hard on everything. Being a big guy already is hard on my heart and everything else. Being 30 pounds overweight is not great either. So it's just been something that, and I'm not the type of person to beat myself up. I really don't. Not I guess a part of my psyche. But that is the one thing that I would probably say I beat myself up about is like, why can't I control my eating? Why can't I do this? And when I got on Vyvanse, it was like it suppresses the appetite because it basically told my brain, you have enough energy, you have enough dopamine, and it's no longer sending out those hungry signals. I'm not feeling hungry. But you have to be careful with that because if you don't eat all day and then it wears off, then you're going to eat everything in the pantry. So
Chris Ferdinandi:
That's fair.
Jamon Holmgren:
I've really, and of course because I have more kind of discipline and whatnot when I'm on it, I'm like, okay, I will eat at noon. I will have a protein rich lunch. I'm going to have a good dinner before it wears off. And then when it wears off, it's not a big deal because I've eaten enough and I can control for that amount of time. I'm not out of control.
Chris Ferdinandi:
One thing that I do want to, if time allows that I do kind of want to stress here is I feel like we've talked a fair bit about challenges medication, how it fixes it, but I am someone who generally feels positive about ADHD. So I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it can create some challenges and it's nice to have tools to help with those. But I am also someone who thinks that ADHD can be used as a benefit and that I personally, I like to work with my ADHD and kind of lean into it rather than trying to fight it or work against it. And so time allowing, I'd like to talk a little bit about what that looks like. Let's do it in a developer
Jamon Holmgren:
Context. Yes, exactly. And I want to weave in there, Chris, the question is ADHD-A superpower because people will talk about it that way, including myself, and I have a love-hate relationship with that. I kind of believe it and I kind of don't.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah. So it's one of those things where every strength has a corresponding weakness and vice versa. And
So the things that there are things about ADHD that absolutely are a challenge, and I do not want to especially, so I think my whole thing is that a lot of the challenges of having ADHD are not so much with the ADHD itself and more that we operate in a world that is social expectations and work expectations are built around the preferences and needs of neurotypical folks, not neurodiverse folks. It's not exclusively that, but a lot of it is that. And so you may have partners or people you care about in your life who are neurotypical and your ADHD things are going to be as hell for those folks sometimes, especially as someone who has combined subtype. I have heard you're a lot my entire life. I'm like social situations. I am often an overexcited puppy that pees all over the floor, metaphorically. And
Jamon Holmgren:
For me, I don't pay attention. So I'll drift off in the middle of a conversation, which is really rude. It's really rude.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, absolutely. And I do that too. And when I'm around fellow ADHD deers, we feed off each other and it's
Jamon Holmgren:
Great.
Chris Ferdinandi:
But when I'm in mixed company or mostly folks who are not, I can be irritating. I'm like that. If you remember finding nemo, I'm like that fish, they're running through their whole I'm water intolerant and this one kid's like, I'm obnoxious. That's me. I'm that kid.
But as a thought exercise, I sometimes like to imagine if we talk to neurotypical folks the way they often talk to us saying things like, oh, you're too worried about boring stuff. You need to learn how to have more fun. Or you're too focused on the future. You need to learn to live in the moment you need both. It's great to live in the moment. It's also great to have folks who think more about the future and plan and aren't quite so impulsive. And so all of this is a long-winded way of saying that I think a lot, but not all of ADHD traits can be beneficial in certain contexts for certain things. So for example, our lack of impulse control naturally can have some detrimental things. It can lead to making really bad decisions and doing awful things with your life. But it also means that we are potentially a little bit more likely to take risks in a positive way.
So if you are someone who's entrepreneurial, it can make you more likely to start a business, more likely to explore things, right? I'm not saying all astronauts have ADHD, right? But the kind of folks who are like, yeah, blast me off to Mars, are much more likely to be risk takers than the general population or like, oh yeah, cool, this unexplored area of the country that no one's been to before. Let's go check that out. Or I want to push the boundaries of what you can do with this cool technology that's neurodiversity in action.
Jamon Holmgren:
I'm just shaking my head. The audience can't see this, but I'm nodding along with you, Chris, because I'm just thinking back to so many situations in my life where I just said yes impulsively to doing things, including things like starting a business when I had a stable job, I had little kids. It was not a good time to start a business. And I did anyway and saying yes to my first conference talk, and I'd never been to a conference before. I was the first talk at a conference when I'd never been to a conference before, stuff like that. But I think part of it also for me has been a learning journey that other people have. They don't have that. I'll just be like, yeah, you should give a talk at the conference. And they'll just be like, holy crap, that sounds super scary. And I'm like, this sounds fun. This sounds interesting. This sounds like it'll keep my attention.
Chris Ferdinandi:
One other thing, just as a strength, so actually I wrote an article over at ADHD, ADHD for the wind.com recently about playing to your strengths. And one of the things I talked about is my time blindness makes agency work that follows a traditional scope, a number of hours, and do them kind of model. I am terrible at that because I can't tell you how long something's going to take. I can't tell you how long it did take, right? It is just it not for me, but my brain's tendency to kind of bounce all over the place, poke at the edges of things and then dive really deep on threads that I unravel makes me really good at creative problem solving. And so if you have novel problems that require creative solutions, and this is going to sound like I'm bragging a little bit, but I crush that kind of work.
That is my sweet spot. And then when you couple that with ADHD Hyperfocus, I can just do some amazing work in that kind of space. And so if you are thinking about rote kind of code, we're a WordPress shop and we only build websites for ice cream shops, and it's basically like we've got this template and we churn it out over and over again. That is just mind numbingly terrible for a lot of folks with ADHD. But if you're like, Hey, we've got this big hairy problem that there's not an off the shelf solution for folks with ADHD can do that kind of work potentially better than the typical peer in their space because you are not as likely to take some zany idea and dismiss it out of hand because, hey, this is interesting. I want to explore it even if it seems like it might not work.
One other thing that has been both a blessing and at sometimes a professional liability for me, that lack of impulse control means that I am much more likely to just say what I'm thinking without that verbal filter. And in certain professional contexts that can lead to things like I have insulted this piece of technology while the person who built it is in the room. And I didn't stop long enough to think, am I insulting someone who's right here with me? And so I've worked really hard on asking like, oh, where did this come from before I open my mouth on it, but it also means that I am the person who is going to always you an honest opinion about something. And I have had managers outright tell me they like to come to me for feedback on things because they know I'm not going to just yes, man them the way other employees might. Right? So if you harness that properly, that can be a really powerful and good thing for you.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, I agree. And I think that if you have employees or team members with ADHD and you recognize who they are instead of just they've been told they've been bad their whole life, they really have, I know this. And if you tell them, look, I understand where you're at. I understand what you struggle with, but I also understand what you're good at and I value those things. You've got an ally for life there. They actually, I've seen this over and over where just having that care and that attention and like, Hey, look you, the things you're good at, we value and we understand the things that you're not good at. It just makes all the difference in the world. I have a question for you though too. Does medication kill that superpower?
Chris Ferdinandi:
I can't answer that for me personally yet because I haven't taken it,
Jamon Holmgren:
But
Chris Ferdinandi:
I have my appointment in a couple weeks. But to be a follow, this was a question I asked a lot of my friends with ADHD who are medicated before jumping into this, and Jim, I'd love to hear your experience with this too, but a lot of what I heard was more that, not that it kills that and more that it helps you direct it in the direction you want when it doesn't want to do that. So one of the things I struggle with now, there was a week where I had some really important stuff to get done, and all I could think about was campers and RVs and researching them. And I am not joking. I had two really important things on my to-do list and five o'clock would roll around and I would be like, man, I spent the whole day researching RVs and I didn't do any of the work I needed to get done. And my friends have told me that it makes it easier for you to take that hyperfocus and just bend it over this way instead of that way. It's not like a silver bullet. It doesn't kill your personality. I suppose it could in too high of a dose.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. Dosage I think matters. Yeah,
Chris Ferdinandi:
Because I've observed that. I used to be a camp counselor, and I can remember one day one of my students who was normally very quiet and subdued, he came back to me with this really witty retort and I was like, oh dude, what's going on? This is cool. I really like this. What's new? And he held up, he had this little medical band bracelet that had his ADHD medication on it, and he told me they had reduced his dose for the summer, and he was a totally different person. So I think he was on too high of a dose. So I've seen that, but it doesn't have to be that way. As you mentioned, dosing I think is very
Jamon Holmgren:
Important. It's super. And also there's different types. Maybe Adderall is not for you, maybe.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, I mean, I've had friends who said it did nothing for them, but Vyvanse worked really well. Or non-stimulant worked way better for them than stimulant. But a lot of what I do professionally with my ADHD for the WIN project is trying to help developers learn what they need or how to set up their life, their environment, their working situation, so that they can go into that hyperfocus around things that benefit them and the kind of life they want to lead better than they currently do now. Because a lot of the way traditional working environments are set up and the way a lot of managers manage teams just does not work for how our brains are set up. And so part of that is if you're comfortable doing so, being honest with your manager or your employer about your needs and your wants, and part of that is just not asking permission and setting up, setting up your work situation in a way that works for
Jamon Holmgren:
You. Well, I will say just my own experience, I know we're way long, the editors are going to hate us, but
Chris Ferdinandi:
Two ADHD folks on one podcast
Jamon Holmgren:
Know not a great idea. I know who decided this was a good idea. My experience so far with medication, and I'm still trying to figure out the dosage perfectly, but people have noticed in a positive way since I went on it that I certainly, I, I'm getting the right things done. I'm cleaning up a lot of loose ends. There's a lot of things where it's like this thing, it's just been sitting on my plate forever. I've known it's been an important thing. I just can't bear to look at it. And then I just did it. I just did. It was done and I moved on and now you can end up, still end up in hyperfocus. Actually, it's been a little easier for me to get into hyperfocus, but I can just direct where it goes, and so it's still sometimes hard for me not to go work on the game that I want to make or whatever. I still need to plan out my day. There still needs to be other things. It's not a silver bullet as you said, but I don't feel like, in fact, I feel like my creativity is at an all time high right now. And Theo, Theo Brown, he told me that he feels that ADHD is a super power and this is his opinion and you may disagree, but he feels like it's a superpower if you've built up a bunch of structures by not being medicated and then you get medicated because then you have those structures and you have the medication and you're kind of in a really good place. You're not just leaning on the medication.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Well, I don't have enough experience with what my whole life has been unmedicated up to this point.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yes. Yeah. And me too. Yeah, well, that's what ADHD ftw.com is all about, and I do encourage people to go sign up. I just signed up for it daily, every weekday. How do you do that? Emails.
Chris Ferdinandi:
That's crazy. Fun story. It's actually easier than not writing daily.
Jamon Holmgren:
Okay.
Chris Ferdinandi:
The reason being that having to do something for me, having to do something once a week is like, oh, this is the thing I need to remember to do. If I do it every day, it becomes a habit. So it's just how I start my day. And so initially it's not a habit. The first week or so I'm like, like, okay, got to remember to do this thing, and then it just becomes kind of this automated part of my day and I don't have to think about it anymore, so I just take 15 or 20 minutes write a thing. It's usually very short. Kind of has to be out of necessity to do it that
Jamon Holmgren:
Often.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah.
Chris Ferdinandi:
I do the same thing over@gomakethings.com, my tech blog for six years now. I've been writing every single That's awesome over there and it's just kind of part of the day.
Jamon Holmgren:
I love it.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah,
Jamon Holmgren:
This is fantastic. I do need to wrap this up again. Absolutely. I apologize for the length of this podcast, but man, I could literally go for another hour. I know I could. We're going to have to do a follow-up at some point. Chris, that would be wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on this podcast.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Jamon. I loved it.
Jamon Holmgren:
It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun and I hope that the audience got something out of it. If you all have questions about this, feel free to reach out to Chris. Chris, what's your socials?
Chris Ferdinandi:
Yeah, so I have all of that. If you go over to ADHD for the wind.com/react native radio, I have a bunch of articles that build on some of the stuff we've talked about as well as all my contact information, email address, social media stuff. I'd love to talk to you about this. If you want to dig deeper into it or you think you might have a ADHD or you have a specific question, feel free to hit me up
Jamon Holmgren:
Or complain about his views on React.
Chris Ferdinandi:
Any of those things are fair game. That too. Yeah. I'm always down, as you know, arguing about tech is a fun part. I'm always down to argue about tech too, so
Jamon Holmgren:
Exactly. I'm trying not to argue as much, so just send compliments to me. I appreciate
Jamon Holmgren:
It.
Jamon Holmgren:
You can find me at Jamon Holmgren. You can also find the show at React native R dio or react native radio.com. Thanks everybody for coming along with us on this journey and we will talk to you next time. See you later.
Jed Bartausky:
As always, thanks to our production team with editor Todd Werth, our assistant editor, this guy Jed Bartausky, our director of communications and episode release coordinator, Justin Huskey and our guest coordinator, Derek Greenberg. Our producer and host is Jamon Holmgren and executive producers and hosts are Robin Heinze and Mazen Chami. Thanks to our sponsor, infinite Red. Check us out at infinite.red/reactnative. A special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe to React Native Radio wherever you get your podcast and leave us a review. We'd love to hear what you think.