Diagnosis and medication for ADHD (and anxiety) was a huge benefit to me. Before I would want to do the dishes but not be able to. I’d go to the kitchen and the dishwasher would be full, so before I could do the dishes, I needed to empty the dishwasher, and before I could empty the dishwasher I needed to wash my hands and I’d get overwhelmed, not do dishes, and feel bad about it. I could empty the dishwasher if it’s what I planned on doing ahead of time, and if I started doing dishes I’d keep going stacking up dishes to wash even with the dishwasher full.

The very first day I had medication for ADHD (I’d had anxiety meds for a few weeks) I plowed through washing my hands, putting dishes away, doing dishes, went shopping for various things (I hate shopping), got winter bike pants so I could keep biking in the winter (it was already late November), and then eating dinner I got close to the end of my meal and just stopped because I didn’t want to eat anymore instead of finishing what I was eating because it’s what I was already doing.

Now when I don’t do dishes it’s because I don’t want to, not that I’m overwhelmed by it.

I still have anxiety and indecisiveness and avoidance of projects that are important to me, that somehow have my identity/ego tied up in them, or things like that. But I can do small things for myself now instead of only being able to do things for other people. Like @xmunk said it’s not solved for me, but things are much better.

Between getting treatment for ADHD and another medical condition I’ve lost about 10kg without even trying, I’m sure both treatments have contributed to it.

Besides getting medication, diagnosis is helpful because it’s easier to understand what’s happening. Even though I could tell myself “I know this isn’t normal” when I was overwhelmed or stressed out over seemingly nothing, part of me would be questioning if I wasn’t really just that lazy/inadequate. Now I know what’s going on and I still feel frustrated, and bad, but I’m more kind to myself about it.

I never even would have been able to make an appointment to get treatment if I hadn’t seen tons of ADHD memes on lemmy and realized, oh, maybe that’s not normal. Seeing people describe being on ADHD meds as easy mode and describing the things I struggled with as being hard. I saw something on facebook that said

If being hard on yourself worked, it would have worked by now.

And that really stuck with me. I also got the idea in my head that

I deserve to be able to do things for myself, not just for other people.

I also resolved before going to the appointment for ADHD that no matter what, whether that’s what I had, or I got medication, or if the medication worked, I was going to try to be kind to myself.

But I never would have even been able to make an appointment if another medical condition hadn’t escalated to literally feeling pins and needles and I made a bunch of appointments for other things when I made one for that. I didn’t make it specifically for ADHD, just some general complaint that I had some executive disorder and a description of what was happening.