Drinking slows down my brain and reduces the number of threads running in parallel. Sometimes very useful to enable normal-passing interaction in social environments. Or just to be able to focus. Lots of people with ADHD drink to achieve a more single threaded experience.
Edit to add: I don't meant to encourage drinking as a tool for managing ADHD. It works but it's a blunt and dangerous tool. If you're at that point, you'll absolutely love the results you get from the healthier strategies: Understanding yourself; developing a suite of tools that don't involve a slippery slope; and curating your social and physical environment carefully.
This is a very common theme in neuro-divergent communities. Used occasionally it can be great, but if you become dependent on it, it is trouble.
In that sense it reminds me of Alan Watts writings on LSD. Get the message and then go away and work on it, don't get fixated on getting the message. As a transient thing some drugs are neat, but to become dependent on them is a dangerous thing.
Interesting analogy. I feel like I talk and think faster when I'm drunk but am also more focused and can hold less in my mind. I'm wondering if it's because I'm switching into single threaded mode instead of multi-threaded mode, and that single thread is actually faster, but more limited.
Interesting. Ever tried coding when drunk? So far, we’ve got programming languages named after caffeinating drinks, but none named after alcoholic ones.
>Alcohol has played a central role in the creative lives of some of the most famous authors of the last few centuries. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay Alcohol and Poetry that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics, namely William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
No, I'm not sure, but it could go either way. It could very well be that those authors had no other choice than drown their overflowing creativity in alcohol in order to survive / tolerate themselves.
In "Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson", it's made very clear that Hunter did _not_ write while he was sober. An excerpt of his daily schedule -
9:00(pm) starts snorting cocaine seriously
10:00 drops acid
11:00 Chartreuse, cocaine, grass
11:30 cocaine, etc, etc.
12:00 midnight, Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write
The OP was talking about "William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck"... "what about Hunter S. Thompson?" isn't really a good argument. He's not considered a great writer in the grand scheme of things, I think he's better known for being a drug addict.
The idea, since it appears to have been lost on you, is that there's a long history of great writers (like Thompson) using drugs while they created. The Thompson quote is one of many, I think that's the part you may be misunderstanding. Truthfully, I'm surprised that a single Forbes article which quotes a "Michelle Stansbury, PR expert and founder of Little Penguin PR" is enough to have convinced you otherwise.
Untreated or late diagnosed ADHD people are ridiculously overrepresented in drug & alcohol recovery programs. It's honestly chilling and it prevents me from taking this in the probably more lighthearted spirit that was intended.
Current thinking is ADHD is caused (at least in significant part) by a lack of dopamine or an insensitivity to dopamine. They’ve found links between genes that cause dopamine resistance and ADHD.
Many current ADHD medications cause increased levels of dopamine. This is a leading theory on why they work.
Wanna guess what a lot of other drugs, including alcohol, do in your brain?
It’s been amazing since I got diagnosed relatively late in life exactly how many other things suddenly made so much more sense and clicked into place. And amazing how quickly decades old substance abuse habits started to taper off once my brain chemistry was less fucked.
It wasn't meant to be lighthearted at all. It was just meant to be honest. I've been to the depths of the things, and I wish I knew how to help others not go there.
Adhd is a particular personality configuration, mostly being high in Big Five trait Openness and low in Conscientiousness. High openness is correlated with impulsivity
This rings true. I went to a reasonably well known engineering school, so...some selection for ADHD folks. As someone diagnosed with ADHD young, it was frightening to see how many of my fellows were 1) clearly struggling with ADHD, and 2) were destructively self-medicating with alcohol (or worse). And it hasn't stopped. Decades later there's still those folks who are hammered at every social function and a good percentage of them I think "yeah...self medicating the noise in their head". I certainly understand the appeal (I'm no tea-totaller), but long-term, booze is a work-around, not a solution.
The hyperfocus which is a symptom of ADHD helps give the tenacity needed to make progress when faced with frustrating challenges.
In engineering, tenacity is absolutely required to make any progress at all, but there are also seemingly infinite threads to pull on.
If you’re in hyperfocus mode and you’re working on something, you don’t run out of interesting side tracks or ways to keep digging down through the foundations under what you’re working on.
i do know the difference but i think i get your point. you use it as an analogy for context switching. the classic adhd "i can't do anything productive when waiting for something".
Edit to add: I don't meant to encourage drinking as a tool for managing ADHD. It works but it's a blunt and dangerous tool. If you're at that point, you'll absolutely love the results you get from the healthier strategies: Understanding yourself; developing a suite of tools that don't involve a slippery slope; and curating your social and physical environment carefully.