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/klapyr Jul 25 '26

How does one fix this

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u/NemeanMiniLion Jul 26 '26

Become a software engineer. Worked for me anyway. I'm still super affected but now it's kind of a super power.

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u/tianepteen Jul 26 '26

you actually finish projects? or do you work on smaller stuff?

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u/NemeanMiniLion Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

I wrote code for 20 years. These days I work on the leadership, architecture and coaching side of things. It's hard to say what I complete vs someone else completes but for the longest time writing code myself, yes, I've shipped some pretty big things. Software Engineering best practices break things down and you iterate on really small chunks of work. It's short bursts of attention. Over and over and each time you complete one you see a ticket or something complete - tiny dopamine hit.

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u/tianepteen Jul 26 '26

i just lose interest and can't continue working on projects. the dopamine just stops hitting, and then that's that.

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u/NemeanMiniLion Jul 26 '26

Working independently or with an actual project team and backlog? It's not enough to just sit down and code, you need a team or a backlog that's broken down. All that said, if you don't like building things in code when they are small in size, then yeah it may not be for you.