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Let's talk about ADHD, Academia, and taking breaks.
Before I get started, I want to be clear about this up front: academia's culture of productivity and constant demand that we measure ourselves by how much we produce is inimical to the existence of folks with ADHD. (1/n)
Before I get started, I want to be clear about this up front: academia's culture of productivity and constant demand that we measure ourselves by how much we produce is inimical to the existence of folks with ADHD. (1/n)
Which is to say that there is significantly more mental labor involved for us to pull forth concepts from our materials, to weave those concepts into something acceptable for academic publication, and to deal with the potential rejection of those ideas than for others. (2/n)
Here, I'm just going to focus on the labor involved in wrestling with our concepts, hammering them into something acceptable for academia. The reason for this is that I have no solutions, no remedies for the capricious nature of Reviewer 2 and the toll it takes on us. (3/n)
Now, even if we are medicated, this labor still exists in my experience. And this labor is taxing, it exhausts us, it wrings us dry because not only to we have to marshal ourselves into studying, we also have to marshal the ideas into a format, a structure that we resist. (4/n)
The effort it takes to do that, even when we hyperfocus, is significant. I say this because, in my experience, all hyperfocus does is direct our attention onto a subject: it does not alleviate the mental strain it takes to do what academia requires of us. (5/n)
Hyperfocus just allows all of that to fade into the background. This is distinct from "tunnel vision," in my experience, as in hyperfocus everything else just fades into the background. To borrow from Merleau-Ponty, it's not just our bodies that trail behind us in action. (6/n)
It is other phenomenal experiences. This is why we lose time or forget to eat when we hyperfocus, it is also why we fail to recognize the mental strain that academic work puts on us even when we're hyperfocusing. This is also why being snapped out of it is so jarring. (7/n)
We are, when snapped out of it, literally thrown back into ourselves which is incredibly disorienting. But that's another topic. In any case, hyperfocus obscures the mental strain of doing academia as we've been taught, which itself is exhausting. (8/n)
And this is where we might want to start: one of the things I've learned having ADHD in philosophy and the academy (do not recommend without support) is that thinking philosophically, doing philosophy, takes a mental toll that will leave us exhausted when we're done. (9/n)
This exhaustion is both physical and mental, which is something that we need to recognize: thinking in the ways that academia demands literally exhausts us from the effort required. There is always a point where we simply "cannot" anymore, and we need to recognize it. (10/n)
Without meds, the exhaustion of doing academia is the exhaustion of first wrangling thoughts in a desired direction, where we struggle to maintain our focus and the direction of our thinking such that we can be "productive," so that they make sense to us. (11/n)
And second, committing those thoughts to a form where they can make sense to others. The former is much easier than latter as our thoughts, while scattered, tend to have a continuity that is apparent to us even as they arise and fly off in different directions. (12/n)
The latter, on the other hand, is a constant struggle. In my experience, the continuity of my own thoughts is not always apparent to others, which is why this part is much, much harder than organizing our thoughts for ourselves. Doing both simultaneously will exhaust us.(13/n)
Now, even with meds, there is still the struggle: the struggle is simply made easier because you have support and an aid in wrangling your thoughts into the structures required by academia. It makes it easier, but doesn't completely eliminate the difficulty. (14/n)
Especially because, again, academia requires us to organize our thoughts in particular ways in order for them to be deemed intelligible, where intelligibility is subject to the unique qualitative controls of a given field or discipline. (15/n)
The same is also true of the things we do prior to organizing our thoughts: e.x. the things we do for research prior to organizing our thoughts in the modes preferred by our fields and our disciplines. Reading, for some of us, is a struggle, much less retention. (16/n)
Now, I frame this in terms of "struggle" and "grapple" because of the difficulty and effort implied: because we have to struggle, not just to "get it," but to retain it and make use of whatever it is, we're often exhausted or frustrated as part of every project. (17/n)
And, due to the productivity culture of academia, we try to force ourselves through this mental and physical exhaustion with injurious results. By this I mean that when we encounter our own limitations, and can't push past them, we become frustrated with ourselves. (18/n)
Frustrated at our own inability to keep up, to keep the same pace as our colleagues and peers, and frustrated that it is so hard for us to do what seems normal to everyone else. Which compounds our exhaustion and leads us into doom spirals or procrastination. (19/n)
This is made worse when we know we can do what is necessary, but are simply too exhausted to do it. So, this is where the intervention comes in: to be in academia with ADHD, we basically have to reject the model of constant productivity imposed upon us. (20/n)
That is, we need to recognize when we've pushed ourselves to the limit and then take the necessary time to recover our energy, physically and mentally. And this is where the break comes in: there are times when we simply cannot work, when we've hit our limits. (21/n)
And we need to sit with those limits and recognize that they are valid for us, even when that validity conflicts with the impositions of academia. That's the hardest part: while academia might give use structure, it's not a structure built for us, or ADHD. (22/n)
Which means we need to make adaptations for ourselves within it. As an example. I took an entire day to recharge after finishing the edits on my book because any engagement with the book or academia would've pushed me beyond my limits in some ways. (23/n)
And the amount of time it takes to recover depends on the difficulty of the task, whether or not you've hyperfocused, and other constraints, but there will always be a need for us to take the time to recover and regather ourselves when working. (24/n)
To that end, I think the main thing that I want to get across is that academia will try to push us beyond our limits: if we don't know our limits, we may unintentionally exceed them to our detriment. Knowing our limits and sitting with them is the best thing we can do. (25/n)
But doing that requires confronting the ways that academia doesn't teach us to recognize those limits and actively treats the signs of our own exhaustion and limitations as signs of inability to "make it," which brings with it a special kind of guilt. (26/n)
A guilt that is grounded in our perceptions of who we should be in academia, and not who we are as persons with ADHD. Which, is where we get to the concept of the break: it's not there so we can keep working in the culture of productivity, not at all. (27/n)
It's there to keep us grounded, to ensure that we remain whole and full persons and not ground under the demands of academia. The break exists to preserve us, not so we can be more productive, but so we can stay human in the meatgrinder of academia. (fin.)
