ADHD: From Coping Strategies to Knowledge

It's essential to understand the reward mechanisms of our brains

The learning difficulty of someone with ADHD has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence or effort. The truth is that most of the time is spent trying to convince your brain of what it should or shouldn't do.

ADHD affects our capacity to manage time and planning. For us, it's difficult to know how long each task will take and to determine priorities. In practice, when we postpone important tasks, we create an endless list of tasks or start activities that aren't priorities, losing a lot of time on them.

For example, you know when you spend five hours researching a random topic, almost writing a thesis, but the important study review for next week's final exam, or the long report you need to show the director in two days, always gets postponed.

We did not learn to study correctly in school, and those of us with ADHD ended up developing coping strategies that many times worked very well early in our academic lives, but soon became obsolete.

Does it sound familiar to you?

At early stages of our student life, our brains are generally more capable of developing adaptation mechanisms both because our learning capacity is immense and because the content is less complex. However, after some time, we start to have problems remembering new content because the learning habits we created were very shallow.

In fact, people with ADHD often don't learn to acquire knowledge, but to memorize it. This approach can produce outstanding results in certain situations but frequently poses a problem when facing more complex learning dynamics that depend on a tuned combination of objectives, strategies, motivation, concentration, environment, and time.

The neurobiological changes in the brains of people with ADHD are closely related to these coping mechanisms we need to establish in order to reach a fair performance during the school years. One of these changes is related to the lower amount of dopamine produced in the brain's reward system of those with ADHD.

Learning something requires several factors beyond just sitting down and studying, and dopamine plays a role in some of these factors: motivation, attention, memory, and focus.

We need an approach to learning that generates internalization so that we can remember the material months or years later. This is how we transform content into knowledge.

And we need this for everyone, no matter if neurotypical or neurodiverse.

But from my particular point of view as an ADHDer, I would have loved to have had the opportunity to employ my efforts and my talent on effective means to acquire knowledge instead of creating coping strategies to get good grades in school.