Properly diagnosed or not, medicated or not, having ADHD while trying to get yourself an education is a little bit of a bitch to deal with. You’d think it wouldn’t be so hard; this is a degree I want to do, I chose to do, I like the subjects, but every reading and assignment and tutorial feels like I’m being dragged underwater. Why? Who knows, but there’s ways around it.
1. Don’t do the readings properly. Staring at lines and lines of letters on a white background makes the brain go blurry, and suddenly you don’t remember how to read, so the content is a complete mystery. The fix? Read the first sentence of every paragraph, and if it doesn’t seem like something utterly crucial, skip it. Only read the ones that seem like really important information, and highlight it so you don’t lose that spot. Or, if you know what kind of thing you need from the reading, do a good old ctrl+f and search key words to find the right parts. You might not get everything possible out of the text, but you’ll get something.
2. Go to lectures, don’t take notes, and don’t pay much attention. Sitting still for long periods of time isn’t easy, especially when you get slapped with a class that’s more than an hour. The great thing about your lectures is that the slides from the class are always uploaded later that day, so there’s no point in taking notes from them, because you’ve got unlimited access anyway. If the lecturer says something not on the slides that seems important, then write that down, but otherwise just sit there and do whatever you do on your computer. Even just being in the room is beneficial. Hell, I’m writing this column in the middle of a lecture right now.
3. Don’t put all of your effort into it. You’re not going to be graded on every single thing you do. Even if you’re getting a grade, it might not be worth all of your effort if it burns you to the ground. Put in as much as you’re happy with getting out, and it doesn’t have to be the highest possible mark. C’s get degrees after all, and at the end of the day, the student with the passing grade will graduate alongside the student with the highest average.
4. Find the short way to do the long things. I’m talking audiobooks on 2x speed to get through the book you were assigned ages ago and still haven’t done, watching a ‘for dummies’ YouTube video instead of reading the text, things like that. Skip a lecture to get a few extra hours of sleep and watch the recording later, or don’t, and just skim through the slides with hope it’s all on there. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.
Some people might say it’s the ‘lazy’ way out of it, but if you struggle, you know just how hard it can be to do the tiniest, simplest task. I’ve been cutting corners where I need to for almost three years, and I have almost straight A’s in my classes at the end of each semester. How? Don’t ask, because I don’t know either, but I know that these little tricks have saved me a lot of burnout and meant I actually handed things in at all. Your brain isn’t your enemy, at least not all the time. Cut it some slack.
