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Comment by kuerbel | Hacker News Reader

I don't take medication even though I'm diagnosed with ADD. I guess there is the procrastination from ADD and the one talked about in the article.

The one from ADD makes me do... nothing. I feel paralyzed somehow. I scream at myself in my mind to finally start the task, I know I have to but my body won't move. It's hard to explain.

Then there is the procrastination as described in the article. I think it makes me do something else instead that I have put off, like cleaning or the sudden urge to finally learn a new programming language / framework. Like, I feel better and worse at the same time! I did something productive, at the cost of what I should have done.

They might overlap, I guess.

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I definitely understand. As I got older, I found myself doing the first type of procrastination (the do nothing type) more and more, and after talking through some things with my psychiatrist we came to the conclusion that it's because that bad feeling you get after the second type of procrastination (the do something else type) started overpowering the good feeling of doing something, so I would end up paralyzed and doing nothing more often.

Now, on the good days I actually do the things I want to do or need to do, but on the days when I procrastinate, I tend to do the type where I do something else. The days where I get completely paralyzed are far less frequent now. Part of it is the medication but another part was learning to control my guilt and anxiety over not doing what I'm "supposed to." This is why I tell people that medication is not a magic solution to your problems, it'll help but you'll still have bad days and it won't work automatically, you still gotta put in the effort to get better, the medicine will just help a bit with that.

I was diagnosed with ADD later in life. I started medication and it helped the first year. After that it went down hill quite fast. The thing is you can laser focus with medication. This means that if you are a procrastinator for the lack of attention, it helps you quite well. But if you are a procrastinator because of emotional walls (difficult, confronting, boring, etc.), it helps you laser focus on your procrastination tasks and you forget about the main task. YouTube, Gaming & P*rnhub and no other worries in the world.

So medication can help with ADD, but those emotions need to be addressed. I stopped mine after 4 years.

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