People often wonder if ADHD is a “real” problem. But this is it right here. Ian is right and something as trivial as boiling an egg can be a challenge.

How you ask?! How can you possibly screw up boiling an egg!?!

Let me explain.. https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1351300744142413824
As a reminder, here is the steps required to boil an egg:

- Put eggs in sauce pan
- Cover eggs with water
- Put on high heat
- Wait until water boils
- Turn down the heat
- Wait x minutes for your perfect egg
- Enjoy perfect egg 🥚

Simple right? Ha! If only..
So.. steps 1 to 3 are very doable once we have found said sauce pan. But now we get to the first obstacle..

- Wait until water boils.

We can’t stare at the water until it boils. Our minds start to wander, our phones come out, we remember this thing we really need to do.. etc.
Now hopefully we stayed close to the kitchen, because a bunch of sizzling will alert us to the fact that the water is spilling over the sauce pan unto the stove. We quickly turn off the heat, quickly counting how many eggs have cracked because of bumping around in the pan..
Luckily we have one intact egg and one with only a tiny fracture that no egg-white has spilled out of.
We quickly estimate how long the water was boiling before we heard it and what the impact is on our cooking time.

And we are immediately confronted with our next problem...
Waiting the x minutes, minus our estimated adjustment. Now any normal person would set the egg timer for this, but there are a few potential issues here. Because the timer isn’t a critical part of boiling an egg, we may not remember at all or may not be able to find it in time...
But let’s fit a moment assume we set the timer, time blindness means we have no concept of passing time, so we could do a quick chore while waiting, realise another chore needs doing and not be anywhere near the timer when it goes off..
Or.. we stay put, but we browse Twitter, find a really cool article that we start reading and get into a state called hyperfocus. It means we get so engrossed in something the outside world is almost completely shut out.

An egg timer may not be enough to snap us out of it.
And that failure will in a lot of people with ADHD trigger something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Meaning we take these failures extremely personal, especially when they are called out by someone else.

“How do you manage to screw up boiling an egg?!”
This is why ADHD is a real problem. Trivial things can be a real challenge.

- Our short term memory is atrocious.
- Our inability to direct attention means our mind is always either wandering or hyper focused.
- We can’t tell the passing of time and - Rejection hurts like hell.
But those things are also what makes us amazing.

We are extremely curious and great at learning things we are interested in with our hyperfocus.
We are very creative and great problem solvers because of our broad interests and our ability to let our mind wander over solutions.
You can follow @evanderkoogh.
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