#Studying with adhd
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studying while neurodivergent big post
this post is mainly targeted at people who are at university/college and have a disorder that makes studying challenging (e.g. you experience executive dysfunction, perfectionism, concentration issues).
however. some of these tips might be useful in general, so I'm not going to stop anyone from following my advice even if they're neurotypical
preparing for class
in general: do it. prepare for your classes. it makes it more likely that you're actually going to show up (in my experience)
you don't have to read every single word of every single reading. read the introductions, the abstracts, the sub-headings, and the conclusion. you can go back and read the rest if it feels necessary
take notes while you read. they don't have to be pretty, it's just about keeping your brain engaged with what you're learning
bring all your notebooks into uni with you if possible! this way, there's nothing stopping you from procrastinating studying for one class by studying for another class (which is a fine and good thing to do)
most textbooks are available for free or for cheap in the depths of the internet or in a secondhand bookshop :)
things to keep in mind for being in class
uni is not high school. it's unlikely that a lecturer or tutor is going to get mad at you if you bring something to stim with (as long as it isn't super disruptive)
go to class! even if you haven't done the readings! going to class will give you access to class discussions and a general flow of ideas that will help you with your assignments
skipping class to do an assignment might feel like a good idea, but it's actually a very terrible idea. don't do it. it is not worth it
be honest with your classmates about what you're finding confusing. chances are that they'll either have a cool way to explain it, or they'll be just as confused (in which case, you may have just given them the courage to ask!)
you're allowed to just walk out early if you start to get overwhelmed. people won't judge you or call you out for it. it's okay to leave early
general studying tips
association is the name of the game! pair a certain song, smell, taste, or colour with each class, and be consistent with it. our memories are deeply tied to our senses, and this kind of association will help to remind your brain what class you're doing
don't do what looks pretty or sounds cool, do what works. if you like to listen to your lectures as if they're podcasts while you're doing the dishes... great! if you like to turn facts into puns... awesome! whatever works is good!
count yourself in. if you've been sitting around thinking "I need to do maths" for the past however long, trick your brain by saying out loud "5, 4, 3, 2, 1, MATHS!" and then GO
another cool brain trick is to tell yourself that you're only going to study for 10 minutes, or you're only going to read one chapter. this lowers the barrier to getting started, and will usually help you get into the flow and get at least something done
if body-doubling works for you, then do it! organise a day each week to meet up with a friend and study together! you'll both appreciate it
keep your phone in a different room from your studying gear
get one of those content keeper extensions on your computer, and get your best friend to set the password. this will protect you from the pull of Tumblr when you're meant to be reading about politics in Botswana or whatever
essays
read the question! read it again! highlight the important words in the question! read it out loud! and only THEN figure out how you're going to answer it
you can't edit a blank page. whack some words down. come back to them later. your first go does not have to be perfect
organise your notes by theme, not by which article gave you the idea. this will help you to turn notes into paragraphs with consistent arguments
cite as you go. take note of where you found each of your quotes. it is so much better this way, I promise
your essay plan only needs to make sense to you. lay out your plan however you like. again, it's better to have something on the page than nothing
make your essay writing timeline as if you know that disaster will strike the week of the due date. pretend that the due date is a week before it actually is. give yourself due dates for smaller parts of the assignment. whatever it takes to trick your brain into actually doing it ahead of time!!
use text to speech to catch grammar mistakes! hearing your essay read back out loud to you will make it easier to tell when something sounds wrong or bad or clunky
self-care advice
you won't do well on your exams if you're having several meltdowns a day, so you better be looking after your emotional health!!
eat three meals a day if you can. bring snacks with you everywhere. studying makes you hungry, and your brain needs the fuel. carrying around emergency muesli bars everywhere never hurt anyone
have a big water bottle and also carry it around with you everywhere. when you're studying, it can be easy to forget to keep your fluids up, but having your drink bottle on your desk can be a visual reminder to keep on drinking
STRETCH! stretch in between classes. stretch after taking lots of notes. you do not want to damage your arm muscles from typing/writing too much
don't abandon your hobbies during the semester if it is at all possible. don't sacrifice your weekend knitting or your early morning jog. those are the things that you enjoy, and they are the things that will keep you sane once the stress hits
sleep early, sleep often. all-nighters are not the way
this is kind of all I can think of at the moment! I hope at least something on this big long list is helpful for anyone who is studying at the moment. remember that your grades don't define you, and that you are more than just a student!
#studying tips#studying while neurodivergent#studying with adhd#studying with autism#neurodivergent uni student#studying
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"How to study with AD(H)D" articles be like
- step 1: make a planning
- step 2: study
MY BROTHER IN CHRIST WHERE IS THE PART WHERE YOU TEACH ME HOW TO STUDY
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#adhd#studying with adhd#executive dysfunction#time management#inattentive adhd#adhd inattentive#distracted mind#concentration#focus
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I was thinking of maybe making (or someone else making) a tumblr blog where people with ADHD can submit study tips that work for them. And also a place where people can ask for help and it can be a community thing to help others.
As someone who struggles with studying and has ADHD, I hate the lack of resources and guides on studying with ADHD.
Please please reblog <3
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too many things to do and now you have ADHD paralysis?
Write a numbered list of things you need to do
go to google and type ‘roll a d6’ or any die equal to the amount of tasks you have or use an actual die you have lying around
do the task that the die landed on
reward urself with a lil treat after completing the task. Good job!
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i was having a rough time starting on this assignment today but my ADHD study skills mentor recommended Something Cold (an ice pop, sticking your hand in ice water, etc.) to "shock" the brain into focus if focus isn't happening for you / you feel your brain cooking (apparently it's a technique she started trying with young kids with ADHD in the classroom and it worked surprisingly well?) so i went and just put an ice cube in my mouth and let it melt and ykw maybe it was just a placebo effect but ADHD be damned that boy can start an assignment
anyway life/study hack for my fellow ADHD bitches. ice. give it a try or don't i guess
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ADHD Note Taking
I'm reading an online text book now (while YouTube is playing) and I wanted to do this right now real quick on how I do notes and people can add how they do notes with ADHD or other learning disorders. (Also at least I am doing this when I started this who knows if I'll add this to my drafts)
I write in differnt colored pens. -- I find writing in one color kind of makes everything blend together just like, bleeeeggghh. Writing in different colors separates the points to me and also when I inevitably lose my reading place, I have a general idea where I was.
I also think the routine thing works in here. Some say routine helps ADHD, I disagree, I think routine irritates me. I think of routine like the Doctor from Doctor Who does. It's appalling to me and it makes me want to scream or rip off my arm just so something happens. (You may think that's overdramatic but who are you to judge me, likely neurotypical person!?) I think routine bores my brain and makes it drift off and the different colors helps that.
I write one side of the page, not on both sides -- When you write and you turn the page, it caused the led or ink to smudge on the page and it kind of messes me up and also if you write in ink it bleeds slightly even with gel pens that I use and that also messes me up so I write on the front side of every new page which I know is wasteful but so is writing notes that don't help me.
I always seperate each line of words with those notebook lines -- When I was in elementary school (because I had a motor skills problem) I would be brought out of class to work on my writing and I was taught to write inside the line which is how most people probably do it but I've found if I go to the next line it also makes it blend in together and it like, where am I, there's too much in this one spot. There are hanging hooks of J's and Y's and I slanted my writing a little, so I put one clean space of notebook lines between my writing.
I have something of relevance playing -- I'm studying psychology right now--I want to delve more in the psychology of people for writing and what not and I always knew I understood psychology better because of my ADHD and I had started watching Criminal Minds which is about the FBI's branch called the BAU (Behavorial Anayalsis Unit) where they use psychology and statistics to narrow down who a criminal (like a serial killer) is and understand them and I found I actually understood what they were saying a lot--so I play Criminal Minds while I study. It's relevant and so it keeps me on task--ideally I do episodes I've already seen but sometimes I do new ones. (I'm only season 12)
#ADHD tips#Studying with ADHD#ADHD notebook#ADHD Studying#ADHD#Studying tips#Studying with learning disorders#Learning disorders
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hello fellow mentally ill tumblr users, let´s swipe studying tips!
pretty please cause i will otherwise fail the most important exam of my life at the end of summer and i am slowly going crazy.
i am currently going through depressive episode so on top of adhd i have to manage that and i am barely able to function.
to make it easier for me, i use study bunny bc it makes me motivated (i dont want the bunny to be sad :(((), have stim toy and assign one thing i need to do to one song (so when the song ends, i have the thing done - i learnt this recently and it helps me a lot!). i also weaponize my fucked up mental situation against me so if you have social anxiety like me, i usually go study to library so i can feel like people judge me for not working hard enough and end up studying for four hours.
i cant take adhd medication so that doesnt help either. if any of you have anything that worked for you, please share!
thank you so much!!
#adhd#actually adhd#adhd problems#studyblr#studying tips#depression#bipolar stuff#help#send help#executive dysfunction#studying with adhd#maturita#chaotic academia
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hey sam! i don't want to dump a research question on you, but just in case this is your remit - do you have any apps or browser extensions or similar for adhd and studying? i know about screen tinting and white noise, but if there's anything out there (paid or not) that you recommend, please wax lyrical! i'm collecting a doc of links for study tools beyond pomodoro style apps!
Man, screen tinting and white noise is already well out ahead of me, Anon :D I never did either of those while studying. I can't deal with screen tinting, but I did eventually start using ASMR videos as white noise when I was in my thirties, when I was working. Lo-fi beat music (often designated FOR studying on youtube!) often helps. Other than that I'm afraid I don't have any tools to link to -- no apps, no programs, no sites. I simply don't use any for learning/studying. I have a lot of tools but they're for managing personal life and very finely-tuned to me, so it's stuff like using google sheets to keep my calendar, and using Tasks to manage my chores. It's not to say you can't or shouldn't use apps and extensions, it's just not something that existed when I was in college and not something I make use of now.
My work, while very focus-intensive and intellectual, and involving synthesizing a lot of data, is also very temporary -- the data arrives in my brain, is put to use, and then goes immediately back out again. I've actually trained myself to have no long-term memory for some things, which is probably a bad thing, but every job I've had since 2008 has involved remembering very specific data for somewhere between five minutes (answering phones, remembering names) and two days (building a profile of a donor).
My study techniques when I was in school were less about environment and more about structure -- how I built my lecture notes and how I transferred them to a method for study.
In class, I found it helpful to take notes on blank paper, unlined, so that I could draw pictures and diagrams and structure my notes in a less linear fashion than lined paper would have encouraged. I should dig some out and take some photos sometime. So I had this artist's 8x11 pad of paper with diagrams and outlines and paragraphs all over the place. (I also tried graph paper but didn't like that, too much visual interference.)
I would start reviewing my notes for the eventual exam pretty soon after taking them -- about a month after any given lecture I'd go back to my notes and start review, which sounds a little insane, but was for me super helpful. I would get a deck of 3x5 cards and start moving what I thought were the vital points from those month-old notes over to the 3x5 cards. I didn't use them as flashcards (except for Latin class), I just put notes on various cards when they seemed to go together, and I'd carry the cards around with me and take them out and read them over. It made them very portable! And it meant that I could study in small chunks across a long stretch of time, which probably was very ADHD-compatible because it meant I saw everything a lot and it became "background noise" in the sense that I retained it.
I did kind of have the classic "gifted child" habit of not studying much because I rarely needed to, and for me that fortunately did carry over into college and grad school. With a few exceptions, I didn't have to study much for my exams, and the index cards covered what I needed. The struggle that I had was writing papers -- the classic ADHD "can't get started, hyperfocus once I do". I did eventually figure out the pattern, and so what I'd do was just block out the weekend before the paper was due (often I set the due dates ahead of the real ones in my calendar) and sit down and do the whole-ass paper across about 18 hours. If I knew the time was blocked out for it ahead of time, then that would propel me into actually getting started, and I'd bang the thing out.
So yeah, a lot of my study techniques for living with ADHD, not that I knew I was, came down to stretching studying way out over several weeks to months, and compressing paper-writing into weekends.
But also like...IDK man, cut yourself a lot of slack, I was studying and writing papers before smartphones existed, before my undergrad campus had wifi. If I wanted to check my email, because I didn't have a computer freshman year, I had to go to the computer lab across campus. It made research harder, of course, but it stripped me of a lot of opportunities to goof off. And because my brain was never trained to expect instant digital gratification, I never had the urge to put my notes down and check my smartphone.
So, maybe there's that, too -- if you find that while studying you get distracted a whole bunch, it may be useful to do some digital "hygiene" -- train yourself to go stretches without checking your phone or your browser, starting small and moving up to five, ten, fifteen, sixty minutes. I can't say that will help everyone or even be possible for everyone, but I think it's something to try.
Readers with ADHD (including self-diagnosis), feel free to chime in with the ADHD-centric study tools you use! I'd like to ask that neurotypical people not share their techniques here, only because people with ADHD tend to get a lot of well-meaning advice that is unfortunately not super applicable to the neurodiverse, which can be really frustrating and depressing. And remember to comment or reblog, as I don't repost asks sent in response to other asks. Thanks everyone!
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Anybody have tips / tools to cope with ADD symptoms, specifically in getting schoolwork done?
I got diagnosed fairly recently and am struggling badly in University - the content is easy but sitting down and doing work feels impossible.
Don't know why I didn't ask Tumblr before. I guess I didn't realize I could actually get people to see my posts?
#ADD#ADHD#Neurodivergent#Help#add things#adhd things#Adding all the tags I can think of so someone who can help can see#Actually ADD#actually adhd#adhdlife#Neurodivergencies#neurodiversity#Neurodiverse stuff#I feel silly and kinda cringe with all these tags but I think it's necessary#Add feels#Adhdfeels#Neurodiversesquad#Studying with add#Studying with adhd#Neurodiversity in da university
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pulling myself back together (aka literally trying to manipulate/convince/BEGGING my brain that putting off studying anymore is not a good idea and we need to MOVE move)
So, I was supposed to start this a week back but whatever. better late than never, right? 🫠🫠
I was supposed to be done with 1/8 subjects by now but your girl was low-key depressed and didn’t want to get out of bed and didn’t want to shower and didn’t want to deal with the hard stuff, you know? But you can’t be escaping the hard stuff forever and the only person you’re cheating (??) is you and your future self and you do not want to do that to yourself. I’m done doing that to myself and so, this is it. This ends here (with you and me, this ends with us,…my heart 😫😫)
and so, on Thursday morning when I woke up at 11 🥲, I decided I have had enough. Part of the reason why I was depressed was because I was disappointed in myself for not following my routine perfectly (screw you, perfectionism). I would wake up late and then be like what’s the point anyway, the day is ruined, everything is l ruined, I’ll start tomorrow and then it blended into quite a couple of tomorrow’s really swiftly. But the cycle has to break somewhere and I realised and it was NOT breaking with me getting up early. So I decided to start with where I am, with whatever time of the day I have and start working from it.
with a coffee and my iPad, I feel like I can conquer the world so I made myself a cuppa ☕��, pulled my digital planner (designed by @lemonscholar and it is a LIFESAVER. it has everything that I was looking for in a planner, basic and clean with multiple layouts to suit what you prefer and not too over-pomped yet functional, just PERFECT 🤌🏻🤌🏻) and planned ONLY one week of JUST studying. Only studying. No excessive focus on hour long skin care routines or 3 hours of Pilates or yoga or cardio, NOTHING. Focusing on everything helps me get nothing done normally and for the me right now that is struggling just to take a shower and brush my hair, it’s not a good idea. So.
if you’re looking for a sign to not slack anymore, this is it. make yourself a coffee, get your planner out, get your highlighters and colourful pens, put on some good music and GET 👏🏻 ON 👏🏻THE 👏🏻 GRIND
#studyblr#100 days of productivity#studyspo#productivity#study motivation#study buddy#study#studying#student#uniblr#getting my life together#get your life together#getting my shit together#get your shit together#studying with adhd#adhd study tips#adhd studyblr
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Do you have any tips for getting though school as a disabled person? I have adhd and(what I think is) autism. Last year I had lots of trouble with burnout, and I’m looking for any tips I can when my school starts again next month. Also, happy disability pride month!!!
it will depend on what works for you, so it may take a bit of experimentation! don’t be disheartened if something doesn’t work for you — sometimes you just need to try something different or shift gears a little. I’ll just list what works for me, and I hope some of it works for you!
do a masterplan at the beginning of each week and/or on the weekend. work out what you need to do and what you’d like to get done, and refer to it throughout the week
you can also do additional daily to-do lists, which I find to be good for when the weekly one is getting overwhelming. as long as I have some kind of a list, I’m good though!
try to be as consistent as possible. deciding on when you take breaks and when you work (and sticking to that from the beginning of the semester) can really help! particularly with something like maths, which requires almost constant revision
associating certain sensory input with certain subjects can help your brain to get into the flow quicker. that can mean having a genre of music for each subject, a smell, a food, a colour… whatever it is that will remind your brain of what you’re supposed to be doing
put your phone in a different room to you when you’re studying. for me, this meant getting out my old Discman and CDs so that I can listen to music while I study without being anywhere near distraction central
write down any questions you have while you’re reading content for class. once you’ve finished reading, try to Google those questions, and then write down the answer you’ve found. if all else fails, take the question to your teacher (and again. write down what they say)
I hope this helps! like I said, different things work for different people, so it’s okay if none of this works for you. I wish you all the best of luck with your studies!
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u know the results day anxiety is getting bad when you keep feeling your heart in your throat waiting for tmrw :/
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Hi everyone! Last week, I created a poll (x) to see what people thought of having a tumblr blog where people with ADHD can submit study tips that work for them, where people can ask for study tips and where the community can help others. This blog will not be run by professionals or people who are qualified on the subject, but rather people who want to help the community.
Now onto the fun part:
If anyone wants to help run the study support blog, please do get in touch with me so we can start planning it out.
If you just want to follow the blog but have ideas on what we could include, please feel free to send me an ask with your ideas!
I'll try my best to keep you guys updated and let you know when the blog is up and running :)
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I start end of year testing today and completely forgot to study. Wish me luck
#im stupid#i hope i dont fail#my stupid brain#studying with adhd#tests#school#i hate schoooool#standardized testing
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