Why Your Environment Effects Your ADHD More Than You Think

You've been told you pivot too fast. This research suggests your timing might be right.

A 2024 Royal Society paper tested how long people stay in a depleting resource before moving to a new one, using a model from ecology called the marginal value theorem. The prediction was that ADHD traits would cause people to leave too soon.

The data found the opposite. ADHD participants left patches closer to the mathematically optimal point and ended up with more total reward. Skye and Robbie break down the bias built into the original prediction and what it means for telling the difference between a smart pivot and flailing.

What We Cover:

• The 2024 study and the foraging game researchers built
• The marginal value theorem and what "optimal" leaving looks like
• Why the prediction assumed ADHD would underperform
• What the actual results showed about exit timing
• How to tell a strategic pivot from impulsive flailing

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So there is this idea that maybe ADHD has a environmental space. And I think we know when we talk about ADHD that we are good in the right environment and bad in the wrong environment. It's one of the reasons why people will sometimes leave school and be like, oh, my ADHD went away. Sometimes it's just the environment that created those symptoms being bad is less. Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. Today I am with my business partner and husband, Robert Waterson, and we're going to be getting into a little paper on the possible genetic differences in ADHD and why they might be somewhat beneficial.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Yeah, we've had a look at the DSM criterion.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

We've pivoted out of doing every single one of those eight episodes about them.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Yeah, we had a look at some of the DSM criterion. We had a brief run through of the history. I think you and Will are going to cover it in more detail. And sort of the main takeaway, the reason I wanted to look at the DSM at the start of this sort of next series, is it shows that the definition of ADHD has changed a lot over time and it's not set in stone. I think that's interesting because we're going to look at a few papers that talk about the genetics of ADHD, the presence of like genes in nomadic tribes. This is an interesting paper that's particularly relevant because we put it out of doing the DSM criterion early to have a look at. It's about when is the best time to move on from a depleting patch or a depleting resource. And it's a good basis for the first sort of strength versus struggle episode we're going to do on ADHD pivoting. Like when is it strategic and when is it just flailing around?

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Yeah. And as somebody who identifies as an endless pivoter, I definitely appreciate and I think was somewhat pushing for that episode because every time I pivoted and it made sense, I was like, we need to do an episode on this. The people need to know that it is okay sometimes and when it is okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Yeah, because we've we've touched on this briefly with the founders for all yeah, novelty bias and like when to sort of the criterion for when it's a good decision to move on or not. And ever since then you're like, yeah, but it's also a strength. Like we should we should talk about this.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

It's so true. I have been I have been going hard. You have your own areas and I have mine.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah, this is the paper for you.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

But before we get into it, if you are somebody who runs a business, you're making between 500K and 2 million in a service-based business, and you think it's time to get your back-end operations sorted, but you'd like someone to do it for you in an ADHD-friendly way, that's what we do. We help with hiring, we help with onboarding, building your SOPs, mapping your business, doing it all in a way that fits your brain so it's easy to see, easy to understand, you feel like you've got that operational layer finally off your back. So click the link down below to book a business build-out conversation with me, and we'll get you sorted. There's a lot of people who will ask me in podcasts, what about this idea of ADHD as a nomad? You know, that we're a we're not a farmer, we're uh something else, a farmer or a hunter or a farmer or something else. And I'm always like, yeah, like I mean, I agree with you, but I haven't looked into it in the book that people are referencing is not an academic book. I'm here for the research, yeah. So I feel like I can never fully go with them the way I want to on that journey. And so now, thanks to this paper, we can. So yeah, this paper is from Royal Society Publishing. It was published itself in 2024. And basically, what this paper looks at is attention deficit linked to proclivity to explore while foraging. And it is worth noting that this paper, when it came out, they did not necessarily expect to find what they found. Because what they were doing was they were getting a representative sample of you people in the US in order to complete a virtual foraging task, and we'll go into details about what that looks like. And they wanted to see whether people who had ADHD symptoms, I have to say symptoms because they did not make sure they were diagnosed by the DSM. They just had a criteria.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

They did, yeah, they did the screening test. But I think they did also confirm it was true for this sort of smaller subset that had reported that they had been officially diagnosed with ADHD.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Basically, what they did was they recruited a representative US sample to complete a virtual patchy foraging task that was programmed in Javas JavaScript. So they made a foraging game to do this task. And it's worth noting, so they ended up with 457 participants, 232 males, and they wanted to look at like how they were in terms of exploiting versus staying in the patches. And they really went into detail here. You know, you can see exactly what the people could see. I said to Robbie when I was reading that you can tell that this paper did not have a strict word limit.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Because they've given you all the details.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Oh, yeah, like this is how you do it. It even came with try to collect as many berries as you can with an exclamation point at the end of it. So very, very much, uh, very much detailed. And that what they were looking at was would these people, you know, they were supposed to collect as many berries as possible in in eight minutes. So there were four blocks with two minutes each, and they could receive actual money. So you had the base participation compensation of four dollars, but you also received 0.32 cents per berry collected. So you could receive up to three dollars as an additional, and the goal was to obviously make as much money as possible. So yeah, each block lasted for two minutes. They foraged through as many patches as they wished in those two minutes, and different patches took different amounts of time, and we we may go into that. Do want to make a note here though that participants in terms of ADHD, they were completing this is funny, the the official name of the screening scale is called the Optimal Risk Slim DSM 5 ASRS screening scale. So they basically just had six items that they asked people. And if you've listened to the DSM episode that we've just done, you will recognize where these questions came from.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Right, right. And it's a slimmed down version, six questions, because otherwise people don't do the it's an optimal risk slimmed down version, actually, because that's what it's called.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

I don't know why it's called that. It's just funny.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

It looks like a medication.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Yeah, it looks like medication, it looks like a peptide or something. So yeah, it says, How often do you have difficulty concentrating on what people are saying, even when they're speaking to you directly? How often do you leave your seat in meetings when you're supposed to remain seated? How often do you have difficulty unwinding and relaxing when you have time for yourself? When you're in a conversation, how often do you find yourself finishing the sentences of the people you're talking to? That kind of thing. So they they asked six of these different questions, with the response options being never really, sometimes often and very often. And then they went through the, you know, the the results and and compared it. They had a whole machine learning algorithm. But essentially, what you need to know as the listener is that they were not looking for diagnosis of ADHD. Like so many papers, this is based on symptom screening scales.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

I think to be fair, it accomplishes the result though, doesn't it? Like if even if someone's subclinical or whatever, you're still separating the population into the group that resonates more with a subset of the DSM criterion and the group that does that associates less with them.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Yes, but I think often people in in sort of I guess the lay person world, right, you wouldn't consider yourself ADHD really until you had a diagnosis of ADHD. So a lot of people who would be subclinical for ADHD don't even get onto the ADHD themselves because they're like, well, I didn't go see a psychiatrist and get an official diagnosis of ADHD. So therefore I don't have it. So it's more black and white. Whereas this is gonna pick up people who are like, Yeah, I resonate with ADHD, but I haven't like fully got it. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 8:14

I wonder how they picked the slimmed down, because that's obviously basically just the criterion, but like six of them.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Yeah, it feels very similar to the ones we picked as well to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

I would imagine the way they've picked that is that they've taken the the criterion that are most commonly positive. Like if you looked at all the ADHD positive diagnoses, which were the most common indicators that like were yeah, were least often not true.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

The person doing this test, right, they don't necessarily know what the test is for. So they could be one of these people who does this test for foraging, right? They they fill out the form, they do the test, they answer the questions, they get ADHD, and then they leave and they have no idea that they were ever identified as ADHD and put into a paper on ADHD because they themselves have not diagnosed themselves. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. Like that's what I'm trying to say. It's a subset of the population. Whether that subset of the population actually identifies themselves with ADHD is is not checked or considered.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Yeah, that's good though, because there'll be a lot of there'll be a lot of different reasons why people don't associate with that, you know, just ideologically, politically, like there'll be a bunch of biases towards whether or not you think of yourself as ADHD.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

I I totally agree with you. I just like to bring it up because of the fact that there's so many spaces where that wouldn't come up because they'd be like, you have to be diagnosed if you haven't spent a thousand dollars. The fact that you and I are even having this conversation and I've been diagnosed and you haven't, like some people would be like, well, like he's he might not even have it.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Yeah, I know what you mean. The the threshold for participating in a conversation is sometimes very high.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

And the threshold for participating in academic research around ADHD is surprisingly low.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

Yeah. I think that's more around sort of gatekeeping of identity groups and things, though. That's that's more sort of whether or not people are letting each other Well, it's also to do with medication.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

No one's asking anyone to take medication in this context.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Okay. So yeah, obviously the official diagnosis is primarily for medication, and so it needs to be quite stringent.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Let's jump into what actually they did in the berry task. I have a whole bunch of pictures here. If you have a look at the screen, you can see I have a whole bunch of different pictures of like what it looks like and things like that. But essentially what people were doing was they were, you know, moving their cursor up and down, and like if it was somewhere where travel was short, then they had small amounts of little green bushes, and if it travel was long, then they had a few green bushes and made you wait. And and the idea essentially was to just get a sense of how long people stayed in an area where they were getting rewards versus an area where they weren't getting rewards and when they moved on. And this is obviously a very manufactured environment. This is not really, you know, they talk about it, it's not really.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

I think this is actually being done during COVID.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

Yes. Which they do mention in terms of ADHD, which I thought was quite funny. They were using the marginal value theorem, which is a theorem that has been used widely in economics, in business, in behavioral sciences, computers.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

And more importantly, ecology.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Ecology, yeah. To identify that's the source of it, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Is that it comes from watching animals in nature and their likelihood to move to the next foraging location.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Exactly. And based on that, they have developed this marginal value theorem. It was actually set up initially back in 1976 as one of the cornerstones of ecology, and that looked at a whole bunch of things like travel time between patches, the energy per time spent when traveling, the probability of finding a type of new patch, etc. And that's what they used when they made this game to be able to identify like how long people spent in one place before they moved on.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Yeah, obviously, all those other areas where it's been applied is really relevant when we're extrapolating this results about ADHD and foraging in bushes to sort of pivoting, strategically pivoting versus failing in in a business context. But yeah, it gets its roots in the theory comes from ecology. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Yeah. Because at the end of the day, we're just people foraging for berries.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

That's how we started.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Yeah, that's how that's what Instagram is now.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

I would say the better, the better analogy is actually what we're going to talk about next, which is which is picking like yeah, pivoting the customer that you're that you're providing services to or products to. So it's not just like there's definitely a parallel there for sort of following Instagram trends and things and trying to stay in the sort of attention site guys.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

It's exhausting.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

But I think it's also when it comes down to you know looking at your customer avatar, looking at your clientele, and sort of going, oh, actually, I think this subset is actually where the better sort of that's where the better reward rate per second is. We should go over there and stop wasting time with this berry bush people.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Yes, agreed to all of that. The AHC self-reporting scale foraging, what they actually found was that I thought this was funny, everybody spent more time like in the same patch and didn't move to a new patch than was optimal. So nobody was really approaching the theorem of optimal foraging the way that they wanted or the way that they should. But people who had ADHD were significantly more likely to move on to the next berry bush in this game and to forage than people who didn't have ADHD, and that increased foraging meant that they earned greater rewards. They essentially picked more berries in the game. So basically, being ADHD in this case made it more likely for you to win the game significantly than not being ADHD.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Yeah, they came away with just over 600 berries versus the non-ADHD group with 520. So like quite a significant difference.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

That allowed us to then see, and you know, they were, I would say they were they weren't fully expecting this result, but what that allowed us to see was that there was a s was a benefit to ADHD. And there was even conversations, and they didn't go into it too much here, because this is not a genetics paper, but there were some conversations around okay, well, is this then a genetic difference that has a historical benefit? And if you've ever read all the papers on ADHD hunters versus gatherers, then you'll know that a lot of people do believe that they think that this is the books. Yeah, although we will cover a paper, papers, papers, right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

We are gonna cover a 2008 paper though, which I think this one references, which is about yeah, nomadic versus settled population.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

So there is this idea that maybe ADHD has an environmental space. And I think we know when we talk about ADHD that we are very environmentally like we benefit we're we're good in the right environment and bad in the wrong environment. It's one of the reasons why people will sometimes leave school and be like, oh my ADHD went away. Sometimes it's just the environment that created those symptoms being bad is less or dissipated, or you get more support.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

It was the environment highlighting the negative symptoms.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

So if your environment is playing this game, or maybe playing this game in real life and foraging in an optimal way, based on this research, you would be winning at that, which would mean that you'd be like essentially, you know, you wouldn't have as much of an issue.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

No one no one would be trying to diagnose you.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

People might be trying to figure out how you managed to get more berries than them.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Yeah. Sorry, that reminds me of an interview I can't remember who it was with, but an entrepreneur, and the interviewer was like, explain to me how we could reproduce what you've done. And you're just like, I don't, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Yeah, and that was really cool, and that's why I liked this paper because it was nice to it was nice to listen to to have a paper that really did dig into this idea of ADHD as a strength, not just in generalized creativity, although that's really cool as well, but in specific use case as somebody who is an entrepreneur or a business owner, to say that, hey, that idea you had at 3 a.m. that brought in all of that new revenue, that's part of your ADHD. That's a benefit. You are in fact going to a new berry bush to find a solution to your problem at an at a uh closer to optimal rate than people who are not ADHD.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Yeah, I think a way of thinking about it is again, we have this higher propensity to explore for better opportunities versus neurotypicals having a higher propensity to sort of continue to exploit a known or like an existing resource. And in this particular case, obviously you could design scenarios where either of those two proclivities is going to be the better outcome.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

Yes, and they did say that. They were like, there are certain foraging scenarios where it would be better to stay in the same place.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Yeah, you could tweak all the variables. But I and I think, yeah, it is interesting though, that wasn't they didn't think they had done that. They they went into this thinking the ADHD people will we expect them to underperform because they will I think they were expecting everyone's to move on too quickly. What were they expecting? They were expecting the neurotypicals to do better, which means that they were expecting the neurotypicals to be much closer to the MVT optimum in terms of how quickly they would leave once the patch that they were exploiting dropped below the average of what they could find elsewhere.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

They had no faith in us.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah, exactly. They, as usual, the researchers thought that they expected the ADHD participants to forage worse as usual. I believe they used the word reckless at some point.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

To be fair, like every single paper, almost every single paper will just be like, and we found that people with ADHD performed worse across all of these metrics.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Yeah, so I yeah, I think this paper's really interesting because it they set up the environment, and their prediction was, in the environment they set up, that we were going to leave bushes too early, we were gonna be in a good place and sort of impulsively want to explore and leave and go do something else or go to a new place.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Like it's not like they know that's bad and they want to stay.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

They're actually just revealing their bias, which is their neurotypical, and they think staying's the best. And they're wrong. Sometimes leaving is better. Like, basically, there's an ideal time that you should leave the patch. It's when the rate of return in your local whatever you're talking about is below the average that you would find elsewhere. Yeah. So, like, basically, if you're more likely to find lower hanging fruit somewhere else, then leave where you currently are. It would be interesting to know what their reason for assuming ADHD would would perform worse on this is. Because like there's there should actually be, you know, they've got this very detailed theory about, you know, if there's this rate of return on these different bushes, and this is the average rate of return, and this is the time it takes to go from one bush to a new bush, then this is the correct, like they they calculated the optimal, the optimal rate of return and the optimal time to leave for the one-second distance between bushes, the five-second distance between bushes. I think there's obviously something missing from the theory. And they know that in nature, animals, like birds, they all have evolved to find that optimal. Like, or I guess the correct way around to say that is that the animals that had the correct level of impulse to move on to the next bush that matched the environment's actual sort of optimal time to leave, ate more food, did better, and became the dominant sort of genetic strains. It's interesting that they just sort of assume that ADHD is going to forage worse here, where it's like my my perspective would be these things don't exist for no reason. Again, like if ADHD is related to genetics, it's related to specific genes, it's highly heritable, then there's going to be environments where our impulse to leave earlier is the adaptive strategy. And there will also be environments where staying longer is the adaptive strategy. Like I think that prediction really shows the bias towards thinking of ADHD as a deficit, as like something wrong, rather than actually constructing a theory for okay, how do we build an environment where ADHD is adaptive, and how do we build an environment where neurotypical behavior is more adaptive? Because you should be able to predict, actually, based on the environment that you've designed, which of these two strategies is going to be is going to get the higher rate of return.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Given the link between distractable impulsive behavior and atypical activity in norodrenic circuitry, so they assumed that we would be worse at foraging.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

But again, this is just coming from a bias. This is coming from a bias that like they think of this as distractability. I feel like this is the same thing that happens with neuroticism in the personality traits discussion, where it kind of just gets talked about as like negative emotion or procli proclivity for negative emotion. And it's also it's your threat assessment, it's your like disease risk analysis. Like it's it's this incredibly important thing, and it wouldn't just exist for silly reasons. And and I think I'm not saying that's how it's always handled, but I think there's I think sometimes the the way we sort of frame things, verb like we we name it in like a direction, like neuroticism is just this very negative framing for something that you should really be saying. You should be naming these things with like a positive negative dichotomy.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

Yeah. Well that's why this is such an interesting paper, is because they did name their prediction. And to be fair to them, a lot of people do not name their prediction and do something called p-hacking, where they just go through and find something and then they retroactively, you know, say it. But for them specifically, yeah, they did say we predicted that people with ADHD would leave earlier than is optimal and earlier than individuals lacking these characteristics. So they got that right. We did leave earlier than individuals lacking those characteristics.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Accidentally they designed a situation where we came out on top.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Yeah. You don't have to be quite that traumatic, but team ADHD wins. This is a safe space for this conversation, probably, but still.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

No, I think it's good though. I think it's again, I think it kind of shows, I feel like that's what's going on a lot of the time is we're we're talking about context where ADHD is at a disadvantage, like the schooling system, which is like an arbitrary way to or it's designed, we don't have to get into the design of the schooling system, but I think we can all agree that ADHD people aren't thriving in it. And it's a little bit arbitrary. I think you could design a schooling system where ADHD people thrived and neurotypicals struggled.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Yeah, I mean that's the thing. It's all about it's all about the environment, like you said. And I mean, I I agree with you. I mean, if we come back to the business idea, the business framing for this, it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people who's you know, who have experienced a CEO build an entire world around them, then act as if the CEO CEO is somehow defective because they are they want to make adjustments, they want to pivot, they want to do this and that, when that was exactly how we got here, you know. And it's a balance of the thing.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

I think we've mentioned this before, but you where you end up creating a peep peeve out of the negative downside of a trait that is the reason you matched for them in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Yeah, yeah. And it can go both ways. Like there's you know, I've also seen ADHD founders who do not appreciate the amazing operational work that their more neurotypical team is doing for them. But yeah, anytime people don't appreciate or understand the benefits of it. And and this is just another example of of that, is you know, with this paper.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Yeah, I think it's I think it's also worth noting, like the con the authors were based on these results, were sort of like, well, there are other situations where this wouldn't be the case. Like we would have been right in different environments, basically. There are like we could definitely design environments. There are we we I think they know from previous studies that there are other environments where it does turn out to be worse off, but they that's not the yeah, to our benefit, that's not the situation that they designed. And I think it's I just think we don't get that in the other papers. There are other papers where they've gone, look, ADHD wasn't good in this situation. And they don't at that point say, Oh, but we could, you know, it's worth mentioning this is this is context dependent, and we could they tend to add a little kicker of like, and also it's bad for all of these other reasons, and then it's just like worse health outcomes with this, worse that, where you know, just like they just it's like no, this is I I think the context-dependent things really a really important point. They're using it here to sort of say, well, it wouldn't always be a good thing. It's like, yes, and it wouldn't always be a bad thing in most of these other cases either.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

And this is the tricky part of ADHD. This is the tricky part of having and discussing something that is in the DSM, which is why it was so good that we talked about it, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Disorders, because its very existence in the DSM puts it as a disorder, as a problem. The whole point of the DSM is that it is affecting your life negatively. If it affects your life positively, it doesn't even count as being in the DSM, which is why it's I think it's funny when people use questionnaires like this, because those questionnaires don't really take that into account. And that's why I like to sort of reference that this is just coming from a questionnaire, because if somebody said, Well Could you go back to the criterion? Yeah, yeah. So the criterion are do you have difficulty concentrating? Do you leave your seat in meetings? Do you have difficulty unwinding and relaxing? Do you finish the sentences of other people? Do you put things off to the last minute? And do you depend on others to keep your life in order?

SPEAKER_01 26:15

These are all these are still negatively framed. That's what I'm saying, is like all the language around this is negatively framed.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Yes, it's all negatively framed. I will agree with you on that.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Like that's just bias.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

But I mean, I depend on others to keep my life in order, and that's an amazing thing.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Everyone depends on others to keep their life in order.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

I thank God for those people.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

So okay, like of those, which of them are actually worded neutrally?

SPEAKER_00 26:36

I mean, yeah, none of them.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

The whole thing is defined as a disorder from the start. All the criterion are like negatively phrased. It just feels like we're in desperate need of someone to come along and go, like, hang on, what are we actually talking about? Like, what's the underlying thing that we're talking about here?

SPEAKER_00 26:50

Hmm, do you want to do that? Time for Robbie to go get his PhD.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Yeah, we haven't entered our research area yet, but we'll get there.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Well, we started it. Like hundreds of episodes of research recaps later. Like, we haven't really started that research here.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

I mean, to feel concentrating even if they're speaking to you directly. Like, if you did have to positively frame that, it's it is tricky. It's like, how often are you thinking about something way more interesting when someone's talking your air off and being bored?

SPEAKER_00 27:18

And this is the thing ADHD, strong strengths, strong weaknesses, right? It's a spiky profile, and the the key is to identify what are the strengths and leverage those and then mitigate the weaknesses. Like that is generally 99 times out of a hundred when I'm talking to clients, this that is what we're doing. I mean, I've had a client recently who is feeling way better about himself and his and his work and and he's getting things done and he's getting systems built up. I've had someone else who's got the same thing, and it's really just understanding that. And I often say, you know, I'm like, I could go into the research behind behind why, and this is the research behind why, but uh I recommend you just pivot under these circumstances. So yeah. That's great. I mean, I think it's a great paper. I mean it is a really good paper. Yeah, I'm just I'm ultimately I'm not even like to be fair, I can't think how you would word those differently. Yes, yeah. Ultimate we can talk about why people should be more boss about ADHD, but I think maybe wording them neutrally isn't the goal.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

I think maybe these are great questions for highlighting the struggles that we have. I think you could also have probably a DSM worth of like a an 18 criterion list of questions that were positively framed that also identified the same traits in reverse. I think to be fair, that is kind of what I'm planning on doing next, is we got a request to look at ADHD strengths. I'm thinking it's kind of gonna look a little bit more like, well, we know what the struggles are. Can we think about what is the what is the potential adaptation, adaptive version of this struggle in the same way that, you know, in the same way that you might like a partner for the extroversion and then be frustrated when they don't have introverted traits, and you might like a partner who's introverted and then be frustrated at the sort of Yeah, and that's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

We're we're we're complicated beings, we do well in certain environments, we don't do well in other environments. And this paper is really cool because it indicates another area where people with ADHD do better. And that's awesome. I have another strength to add to the strengths pile, which is cool. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review. It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good. We couldn't do it without you.