Symptoms of ADHD - Boredom, Lack of Drive & Motivation Differences
Many people with ADHD have had their desire for an official diagnosis dismissed because there were moments when they were fully alert and highly focused on a specific task. Surely, if they could focus on hobbies and passions, then staying concentrated on homework or at work shouldn't be an issue?
This is a common neurotypical misconception of how motivation works with ADHD.
People with ADHD can be highly productive and work effectively if the task fully aligns with their interests, intrinsic desires, and passions.
However, if it’s not something offering immediate enjoyment, mustering the discipline, willpower, and mental strength required to do it can feel almost impossible.
To refute this misconception and many others, we will do an in-depth dive into the science behind motivation for people with ADHD, covering chronic boredom, when and how neurodivergent people get motivated, and other differences.
The Connection Between ADHD, Chronic Boredom, And Motivation
Have you gone through multiple hobbies you were passionate about before ditching them in less than a month?
Have you changed careers more than five times during your whole adult life?
Have you changed your university degree at least once?
If you’ve answered “yes” on most of them, then there's a high chance you are a dopamine vampire. This is a species that lives in existential fear of chronic boredom.
To stay alive, you hop from one target to another - video games, books, TV shows, hobbies, degrees, and professions. Variety and passion are vital to avoiding the threat of mundane and repetitive routines. If what you are doing is engaging enough, you feel alert, motivated, and immersed, but if it’s boring, you may feel distracted, restless, and irritated.
Okay, boredom is dangerous. Still, can boredom for people with ADHD really be as deadly as the sunlight is for vampires?
In some cases, it can be highly painful to stay hopelessly bored for hours, days, and even weeks at a time. This is because boredom is felt more acutely if you have ADHD.
The sensation of boredom is more intense because people with ADHD face disturbances in the production, distribution, and function of neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine. Due to the disbalance in those key brain chemicals, ADHD brains are under-stimulated, making them more sensitive to periods where there is nothing engaging in sight (1)
Under-stimulation very often leads to cravings for something novel, exciting, and physically, emotionally, or mentally stimulating.
No matter your craving, you need something that speaks to your heart, makes you passionate, and captures your attention. What you are doing must sparkle. You must love the activity, be totally engulfed, and make it your whole world.
Unfortunately, many people believe that doing what you love and being engaged in your career and duties to others is a privilege but not a necessity to go through life. The same group is often very dismissive toward those who complain about boredom.
The typical reply you get is that boredom is normal. You should get used to it. Even if it's annoying or painful, that's just part of life, so you should stop complaining. Much of what you will endure in life has to come through gritted teeth while relying on mental resilience, discipline, and willpower.
This is how neurotypicals may see the world, but that doesn’t mean that their perception should also become the reality of those with ADHD. No matter what neurotypicals say, boredom is felt more strongly by those with ADHD, and its persistence can be very mentally exhausting.
Boredom can feel like a gap you can never quite fill, and even if you can, it won't be for long. A rash you can scratch to calm down a bit, but it will keep itching after a while. It can also feel like your hunger for food is occurring multiple times daily and growing more intense the more you abstain from addressing it. The longer this hunger remains unsatisfied, the more anxious, panicked, or desperate you become for a solution.
The feeling of emptiness becomes worse the more time you spend at the mundane and soul-crushing 9 to 5, on boring and useless university assignments, or without hobbies and creative outlets you are genuinely passionate about.
Of course, boredom alone isn't enough to plunge most people into a depression, but it certainly pushes the brain buttons in a negative direction. Many people with ADHD describe getting into a depressive episode due to boredom. They are not overwhelmed with sadness but engulfed in hopelessly deep boredom that starts as a mild annoyance and grows into perpetual torture.
Boredom is not just an unpleasant feeling you have to infinitely endure with ADHD. Boredom also contributes to rash, irrational, and poorly thought-out decisions. If the brain's default state is not stimulated enough, your actions must adapt to compensate.
How Motivation Works With ADHD
Neurotypical people function differently than those with ADHD when motivation is in question.
For a neurotypical person, there are usually two categories of stimulus that can uniquely make them take action:
1. Importance — This is a task that must be done. For example, you have to do your homework since this will improve your grades and make you a better student over the long term. Importance can also be secondary. You do a task since it is essential for somebody you like, love, respect, feel obligated to, etc.
2. Consequences — This is a task that, if completed, will lead to rewards that are beneficial for you. If not completed, it will lead to punishment that harms your well-being. For example, not doing your quota at work will lead to uncomfortable meetings with management and threats and may even get you fired.
Both reasons for motivation require a person to have a clear perception of their long-term goals and to care about their future welfare enough to sacrifice gratification in the present.
William Dodson, a clinical expert in treating adults with ADHD, proposes that such motivators work on neurotypical people but not those with ADHD (2).
This is because the use of discipline and willpower to keep doing something, even with no immediate reward or change in the environment, is very hard for the ADHD brain. It’s challenging because common ADHD symptoms, like impulsivity, impaired self-control, distractibility, and under-stimulation, all reduce the ability to keep putting in effort with no upcoming results in the near future.
He claims that people with ADHD are much more engaged and motivated to pursue activities that are:
Novel.
Urgent.
Exciting.
Interesting.
Challenging.
Competitive.
Selfless acts and duties.
If you reflect on the times when you felt most motivated, those criteria make a lot of sense: binging 15 YouTube videos on a topic that evokes curiosity, playing video games while competing with friends, or brimming with excitement at reaching a new level, starting a new hobby that feels new and unexplored, writing an essay in school, or university that for once aligned with your passions and areas of interest, etc.
This is why designing your life around activities that bring you intrinsic motivation is the most secure way to minimize action paralysis, procrastination, and other delays.
It's not that rewards and punishments never work for people with ADHD. Rather, rewards and punishments work in very specific circumstances — rewards work when they are interesting, exciting, and novel, and punishments when they are urgent enough that you can not ignore them.
For example, you know you shouldn't leave your essay for the last moment. However, only when it's 2 hours before the deadline, and you feel one step away from dropping your class performance to the ground, will you start doing work on the assignment.
The significance of tasks (rewards and punishments) still exists, but in most cases, they are a secondary priority compared to the stimulation that the activity itself brings. The activity must be personally meaningful to you to engage fully, making intrinsic motivation much more important than external motivation if you have ADHD.
Fluctuation In Motivation Levels
Other than the source of motivation being different, people with ADHD also experience differences in the amount of time they stay infatuated with some activities.
Although everyone experiences ups and downs in their motivation, people with ADHD tend to swing toward the extremes. The ADHD brain is much more prone to periods of intense obsession and hyper-focus on something, like studying, binging content, practicing a hobby, devoting yourself to a romantic partner, or anything else that produces intense stimulation.
Once the addicting cocktail of novelty, excitement, and passion wears off, you are very likely to abandon that pursuit.
One moment, high motivation, bordering on obsession, is the norm. On the other, your motivation crashes completely, and you fall out of love with what had once felt immensely attractive. You wanted something so badly, but once it becomes familiar, integrated into a routine, and a normal part of your everyday life, the appeal begins to wear off or disappear entirely.
Finally, your motivation levels may vary depending on the time. Many people with ADHD self-report as night owls that naturally go to sleep between 12 pm and 2 am and wake up between 10 am and 11 am, making them most productive during the night and incapable of doing much in the morning and early afternoon.
Furthermore, there is a close link between ADHD and circadian rhythm disruptions, meaning you are more likely to experience significant differences in alertness, mental clarity, and motivation at different points in the day (3).
This fluctuation in drive and motivation doesn’t happen in different hours of the day but can also affect entire days. Some days, you feel fully functional and capable of handling everything, while on others, you can barely get out of bed.
Key Takeaways
Being able to fully concentrate, stay alert, and work on a task for a long time doesn't mean you don't have ADHD. It likely means you find the work deeply gratifying and personally meaningful. It's not a contradiction but a feature of the condition, which stems from the tendency to be chronically bored and under-stimulated.
