ADHD, Addiction and Dopamine
The Rebuild- Week 2
When my psychologist told me she thought I had ADHD, I couldn’t believe it was possible. My idea of people with ADHD was the kids at school who used to stab other kids with pencils and throw their chairs at teachers.
She told me to go home and research ADHD, get a GP to refer me to a psychiatrist and get an examination. The process took longer than I had hoped. As I started to research ADHD, I realised that I was showing plenty of signs that I had the condition.
By the time I got to the psychiatrist, I’d done enough research to believe I almost certainly had ADHD. I wanted to have ADHD so severely. Not because I wanted a label or to take medication, but for the ten years prior, I had been in and out of different health professionals’ practices, trying to figure out what was wrong with me.
I was over it. This would be my last foray into the world of mental health assistance. If this didn’t work, I planned to put up with my problems forever and get on with things. I was regularly misdiagnosed with anxiety and depression. I was put on sedative medication, the exact opposite of what someone with ADHD should be given.
So when I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, the overriding emotion I felt was relief. Finally, after ten years, I had confirmation of what had been plaguing me for so long, which meant maybe, I could start implementing some things that could potentially improve my life.
For the most part, my life has been significantly better since my diagnosis. However, one thing that surprised me was the lack of explanation from health professionals. Although I have done some general, surface-level research about ADHD traits, I still have many questions. What about having ADHD made me physiologically different to a neurotypical person? What behaviours could I implement to reduce the impact these ADHD traits had on my life?
Psychiatrists don’t have the time to sit you down and explain the nuances of ADHD. There’s also a waiting room full of others waiting for their help. It’s hard to find the time to do such a deep dive into something you know so little about, especially as someone with ADHD. We suck at focusing and paying attention. Understanding what you read is also challenging when you’re not used to reading that language. Not a lot of Medical literature is written in lamens terms.
Fortunately, great content on social media and podcasts has helped me make a little more sense of my condition. It’s been a slow learning curve that I don’t believe I’ll ever be finished with. Knowledge is power; the more I learn and understand my condition, the better I’ll tackle life’s challenges.
I’ve wanted to write about this topic for a while now but didn’t feel confident or comfortable in my knowledge of the issues to share anything publicly until now. Still, I want to preface this by saying that the below is my interpretation of things I’ve learned along my journey. While I believe it is accurate, I’m happy to be fact-checked and educated on anything incorrect.
I hope you guys get something out of it.
ADHD and Dopamine
Dopamine is a chemical released in your brain that makes you feel good. Dopamine is responsible for motivation, focus and attention.
As well as loss of the above, lower dopamine levels can lead to depression, schizophrenia and psychosis. Too much dopamine will cause over-stimulation, mainly when concentrated in particular brain parts, leading to excessive competitiveness, aggressive behaviour and poor impulse control.
For a long time, I thought we (people with ADHD) didn’t generate the same amount of dopamine as neurotypical people. It turns out it’s there. We struggle to access it. So we know what it’s like to feel dopamine, but we get less of it than most people or need more stimulation to get the same amount.
This is why people with ADHD are often people you’d think of as adrenaline junkies or risk-takers. People with ADHD are more inclined to pursue more extreme sports. Essentially, for people with ADHD to get the same level of reward as a neurotypical person, the level of risk has to be much higher.
Imagine you were at the local swimming pool with a diving platform. You might jump from the 5-metre platform and feel exhilarated. Someone with ADHD would likely need to jump from the 10-metre platform for a similar reward. For some, that still mightn’t be enough. They might need to throw in a backflip or two.
Alternatively, things we are disinterested in are even less attractive than neurotypical people. Say you have an ADHD and neurotypical kid sitting next to each other in a math class, doing the same work. The ADHD kid will not get the same reward for answering a question correctly as the neurotypical kid. I used this example because I distinctly remember doing my tertiary-level maths homework as a 17-year-old kid in year 12, thinking to myself, “Why do I have to do another 20 of these questions using the same technique? I’ve just done the first five. They’re all the same, fuck this”.
If someone with ADHD doesn’t see the point in doing something, we find it almost impossible to conjure up the motivation to do it because the reward is so insignificant. Even if we know it is a good or right thing to do, that is not enough. We can’t do it unless we get that intrinsic sense of reward.
ADHD and Addiction
People with ADHD are on a constant, subconscious search for hits of dopamine. Because we struggle to access our own, we often search for it in other areas. Don’t get me wrong, there are healthy sources of dopamine, such as exercise, but there are far more readily available sources of unhealthy dopamine (which I’ll touch on later).
People with ADHD are more prone to addiction because of the above-mentioned lack of dopamine. We want more of whatever gives us just the slightest skerrick of dopamine. This is why sometimes people with ADHD can be considered obsessive. I started running years ago to lose weight. I thought I might like to run a marathon one day, but I never thought too seriously about it. Fast forward to now, and I’ve run over 100 half marathons, over ten marathons, a 50k run and a 60k run, and I’m currently training for a 100k run in September.
From the outside looking in, I might be obsessed with running. I might be a little bit crazy to want to run such distances. I’m starting to understand that a 10k run doesn’t stimulate me like it once would. Neither does a half marathon and as I get fitter and achieve more in my running, I need to run further or faster to get that same dopamine hit.
I’m not addicted to running. I’m addicted to the dopamine hit that I get from running. It’s the same for other vices, healthy or otherwise. I could drink more alcohol and take more drugs at 33 than 18. This is where I think addiction in ADHD differs from addiction in neurotypical people. Because we are so starved of dopamine, we do not want it to stop when we find a way of getting it. That’s why I was always the last guy at a party, keen to get more drugs and alcohol. I can’t access my dopamine as easily as they can, and right now, I have a bag of powder in my pocket that gives me access to it whenever I want. This is amazing. Why would I want to stop this?
The problem is though, next time, I’ll need more to get that same dopamine hit and more again the time after that. You can see where this is going. I want to share some stats around addiction in ADHD that I believe are heavily influenced by our inability to access the exact amounts of dopamine as neurotypical people.
15% of adults with ADHD have abused or are dependent on alcohol or drugs, nearly three times the rate of adults without ADHD.
ADHD is 5 to 10 times more common among adult alcoholics than people without the condition.
Roughly 5% of the world’s adult population have ADHD, yet among adults being treated for substance and alcohol abuse problems, 25% of them have ADHD.
A study found that at the mean age of 14.9 years old, 40% of children with ADHD had started using alcohol compared to 22% of children without an ADHD diagnosis.
My View Based on Experience
As I read more about ADHD, dopamine and addiction, I feel like I did when the psychologist told me she thought I might have this condition.
In no way am I trying to justify or excuse any of the things I have done in the past, but so often, I would wake up from a night out and think, “Why the fuck did I do that… again?”.
I realise now I was never addicted to alcohol, drugs, food, running or other forms of exercise. I was, and still am, addicted to dopamine. Almost everything I do is because I am chasing a dopamine hit.
The biggest problem with dopamine is that it’s so much easier to find a dopamine hit the lazy way. It’s so sad, but it’s so much easier to get drunk, take drugs, binge on takeaway food, gamble, or watch porn than it is to go to the gym, go for a run, a bushwalk, go out and buy groceries and prepare yourself a meal that tastes good and is suitable for you.
When you add that people with ADHD live in a constant state of minimal access to dopamine, we idle along at a lower level regarding mood and happiness. So when your “normal” is a more melancholy mood than standard, you put yourself in a headspace where you don’t care about where the dopamine comes from. You want it, whatever the quickest and easiest way is.
I think that’s why I have struggled so much throughout my life to stay on top of everything. We’re all floating in a whirlpool, and everyone with ADHD is closer to the centre. The centre of the whirlpool is cheap, unhealthy dopamine sources. Neurotypical people can just tread water out on the edges, and the ADHD people and closer to the centre swim their fucking arses off just to keep on top of things.
We are the people who need healthy sources of dopamine so badly but also the most susceptible to unhealthy sources.
When I reflect, it’s hard not to get angry that nobody warned me about this. It was just, “Here, take two of these when you wake up and two more three hours later. Talk to me in six months.”
I’m not bitter at my psychiatrist for not warning me. About ADHD people’s susceptibility to addiction, the information is out there. It didn’t take me long to find the stats mentioned above. Sure, it is my responsibility to educate myself about my condition. Still, I think the statistics around people with ADHD and addiction are pretty damning and significant enough to warrant some government-subsidised initiative where adults who get diagnosed with ADHD get the opportunity to speak to a health worker of some description and have these things explained to them.
In the 54 weeks, I have been sober, I have learned that understanding why you are the way you are or why you do what you do can provide so much peace of mind. I honestly believe it’s half the battle. If I had known what I knew now a year ago, those initial stages of sobriety would have been so much easier. I understand that I have to go on my journey and learn things for myself only when ready. Still, if I had this knowledge back then, just the ability to say to myself, “You’re not craving cocaine. What you are craving is dopamine. I promise you if you have a healthy lunch and go for a run, the craving will be satisfied” things would have been a lot different.
Maybe I’m drinking the poison a little bit here and hoping that it hurts a society that I feel at times doesn’t take ADHD as seriously as it should be taken. I am sitting here in my chair, ranting and raving that other people should be doing more to help us ADHD weirdos to understand ourselves a little better and prevent us from getting sucked into the middle of the whirlpool.
But I guess that is why I write this shit. Primarily to help me understand my thoughts, but secondly to help others. Maybe it’s the ADHD community that should be taking advantage of this digital age and sharing all they have learned about themselves and their condition in the hope of helping someone else.
That’s been the purpose of my sharing these blogs this entire time, and I hope that someone today takes something away from this one.
To the neurotypical people out there, if you are involved with someone with ADHD, please try to be gentle with them. Yeah, we’re selfish, unfair, and have double standards, and we were hoping you could do what we want but might refuse to do what you want. We don’t want to be like this. We’re not like this on purpose.
I think what ADHD people crave more than anything is a genuine connection. We think a little differently than most people. We’re probably a little bit awkward, and sometimes what we say mightn’t make much sense, but ADHD people are people, pleasers. We want people to like us. We want to impress people. We want to be accepted. Do you know why? Because when we feel we are appreciated, accepted, loved, and part of a community… WE GET OUR FUCKING DOPAMINE HIT!
So if you have to, think of us as puppies. We’re not always obedient. We might sometimes piss and shit where we are not meant to… maybe? And dog treats are dopamine. We will do almost anything for them, perhaps even shake hands and roll over.
Cheers Wankers.
X.
Bogues Tonnes Up
Each week I will chuck a bit about my journey to my first 100k run at the Sri Chinmoy Canberra Trail 100k for anyone who gives a shit.
Last week I ran a marathon on Sunday morning, fuelled by pure rage due to my failing at The Canberra Marathon the week before.
I don’t want to be running those distances every week. Maybe every fortnight, I’ll try for a longer, long run. So this week, I just went out for a slow three hour with plenty of hills to work on elevation. It was cold and rainy, perfect weather for a long run!
I’ve wanted to do a 100k for a while now, but I also want to raise as much money as possible for Beyond Blue. A fantastic charity that does brilliant work in the mental health space.
If you want to help out and help keep me accountable for this fucking ridiculous goal, CLICK HERE to make a 100% tax-deductible donation.
Every cent counts, and you’ll be comfortable knowing it’s going to a reputable organisation who do fantastic work.
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Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.
Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear
If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, uber eats driver, or me; talk to someone.
Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14
Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222
NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511
Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467
Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78
Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800
Everyone is addicted to dopamine