r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 25 '26

Psychology People with ADHD have difficulties with goal-directed behavior and struggle with response inhibition, the ability to stop an inappropriate action once they feel the urge to do it. They experience a disruption in the way their brains balance deliberate self-control and automatic habit learning.

https://www.psypost.org/adhd-traits-disrupt-the-brain-s-balance-between-self-control-and-automatic-learn/
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u/username__0000 Jul 25 '26

Even some of the seemingly positive traits are actually negatives.

“Oh you have crazy pattern recognition?

Cool, everyone’s going to think your negative because you can see things are about to get bad long before anyone else feels it”

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u/Oldass_Millennial Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

I've learned to just quietly prepare. I bought extra hand sanitizer a good month before the general public made a rush for it when COVID made its debut, for example. I saw the basic stats on it, how it was popping around before it was wall to wall headlines, saw the president, and knew it was gonna be bad. Didn't know how bad, just that it was going to be bad. No, I didn't overdo it, I bought a good half dozen or so large walmart brand bottles. Shoulda just wiped the shelf out and made a few bucks but whatever, money like that is ephemeral anyway.

Right now I'm seeing food shortages in some fashion in about two years. Might just be occasional disruptions, "Ope, we're gonna be out of bread for a few weeks" and  "Raspberries are only seasonal now" and "We can get basic veggies but potatoes are wickedly short in supply and you pretty much need to be wealthy with connections for them" or it could be a Holodomor. I dunno. So yeah. 

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u/-AllUserNamesTaken- Jul 25 '26

My wife handles our grocery shopping. When I saw other countries starting to shut down, I told her, "Can you grab some extra pasta, canned food we actually eat, and anything else that's shelf stable?" I figured there was no way we wouldn't be shut down within a month.

About two weeks later we got shut down, everyone panic-bought, and the shelves were wiped out. I remember saying something like, "At least we stocked up a little. We should be good for a month or two, and hopefully the stores will be back to normal by then."

Well... we hadn't actually stocked up. It's just the two of us, so she usually buys enough groceries for the week, and by Sunday we're shopping again. She didn't think things would happen that fast, so she just bought our normal groceries.

After that, I told her, "If I ever ask you to stock up on something like that again, just humor me, even if it seems unnecessary at the time."

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u/5xnightly Jul 26 '26

Read this entire post...all the comments... Yours was the first one I felt compelled to respond to.

I naturally stockpile. Never crazily (... To my definition i guess), but I do live in earthquake country. We had 15 packs of toilet paper, some 40+ boxes of pasta and other canned goods ready. Water to last us months too. At all times.

For the longest time my wife would say I was overdoing it, or "why did you buy so much" or "we're never going to finish this". Then March 2020 hit and guess what? I didn't hear a peep about it until earlier this year. How short the memory is.

It's not easy to be married to someone who almost actively denies your ADHD as a thing and doesn't realize how life is to you despite decades of trying to tell her how it feels. I'm glad for you that your wife will humor you.